Mind illuminated: Stage 1

Question 1

Shamana

Answer 1

Stage One: The meditator begins to chase the running elephant, holding a goad in one hand and a rope in the other. These represent the vigilant, alert mindfulness (rope), and strong intention (goad) that will eventually be used to tame the elephant (the mind). The elephant is being led by a running monkey (scattering of attention).

The elephant is all black, meaning the mind is dominated by the Five Hindrances and the Seven Problems.

The monkey is all black, meaning attention scatters because there is little intentional control over its movements.

The flame indicates the effort required to move from Stage One to Stage Two.

Question 2

Goals

Answer 2

To learn how to enter meditation gradually

To establish a regular practice

Question 3

The basic practice

Answer 3

1. Six Pointed Preparation
2. Four stage transition
3. Counting the breath
4. Sit

Question 4

Six Pointed Preparation

Answer 4

1. Motivation
2. Goals
3. Expectations
4. Diligence
5. Distractions
6. Posture

Question 5

Preparation: Motivation

Answer 5

Review your purpose for meditation. Be honest! Don’t judge your reasons. Be aware and accept them. Example: I want more peace of mind.

Question 6

Preparation: Goals

Answer 6

Decide what you hope to work on in this session. Set a reasonable goal for where you are in the Stages. Keep it simple. Keep it small. Example: not to get annoyed when my mind wanders.

Goals for stage one: To establish a practice and to practice diligently with joyful effort, and without judgment.

Question 7

Preparation: Expectations

Answer 7

Bring to mind the dangers of expectations and be gentle with yourself. Find enjoyment in every meditation, no matter what happens. There is no such thing as a “bad” meditation.

Question 8

Preparation: Diligence

Answer 8

Resolve to practice diligently for the entire session. Recall that the best way to overcome resistance is by simply continuing to practice, without judging yourself.

Question 9

Preparation: Distractions

Answer 9

Perform a quick inventory of things in your life that might come up to distract you. Acknowledge these thoughts and emotions and resolve to set them aside if they do arise. You may not be wholly successful, but at least you have planted a seed: the intention not to let them dominate your mind.

Question 10

Preparation: Posture

Answer 10

Review your posture and get comfortable. Attend to your supports, your head, neck, back, shoulders, lips, eyes, and breath. Relax and enjoy yourself. All the activity of meditation is in the mind, so the proper state for the body is like a lump of soft clay—solid and stable, but completely pliant. This will keep physical distractions to a minimum.

Question 11

Meditation Posture

Answer 11

1. Adjust any supports you use to help you sit comfortably.
2. Your head, neck, and back should be aligned, leaning neither forward nor backward nor to the side.
3. Your shoulders should be even and your hands level with each other so your muscles are balanced.
4. Your lips should be closed, your teeth slightly apart, and your tongue against the roof of your mouth, with the tip against the back of your upper teeth.
5. Start with your eyes closed and angled slightly downward, as though you were reading a book. This creates the least tension in your forehead and face. If you prefer, leave your eyes slightly open, with your gaze directed at the floor in front of you. Your eyes will move during meditation, but when you notice they’ve shifted, return them to where they were.
6. With your lips closed, breathe through your nose in a natural way. It shouldn’t feel controlled or forced.
7. Relax and enjoy yourself. Scan your body for any tension and let it go. All the activity of meditation is in the mind, so the body should be like a lump of soft clay—solid and stable, but completely pliant. This helps keep physical distractions to a minimum. (For more on how to sit, see “The Right Posture” later in this chapter.)

Question 12

What is diligence?

Answer 12

Diligence means engaging wholeheartedly in the practice rather than spending your time on the cushion planning or daydreaming. You will be tempted to think about things that are more interesting or “important” than the meditation object—problems to be solved, projects to plan, and fantasies to entertain. So commit not to indulge in these tempting distractions.

Question 13

Why should you not judge the quality of your practice?

Answer 13

judging the quality of your practice can lead to doubt, giving rise to procrastination and resistance

Question 14

If you feel you are failing at establishing a practice, instead of chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, what should you do instead?

Answer 14

When your intentions are clear and strong, the appropriate actions naturally follow, and you’ll find yourself regularly sitting down to meditate. If this doesn’t happen, rather than chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, work on strengthening your motivation and intentions instead.

Question 15

What is a meditation object?

Answer 15

A meditation object is something you intentionally choose to be the focus of your attention during meditation.

Question 16

Why is the breath the ideal meditation object?

Answer 16

1. It is always with you
2. It allows you to be a passive observer
3. Cultivate powerful attention, as the
   sensations of the breath change over time,
   becoming more subtle and less distinct, deepening
   concentration
4. Cultivates insight into the nature of impermanence,
   as the breath is constantly changing.
5. Cultivates deeper states of meditation (Jhana). The
   breath constantly repeats itself, over and over in the
   same pattern, making it suitable as a fixed (i.e.,
   relatively unchanging) meditation object for entering
   states of meditative absorption.

Question 17

When focusing on the breath as a meditation object, what exactly are we focusing on?

Answer 17

Not the breath itself, but the sensations it produces

Whenever we refer to the “breath” as the meditation object, we actually mean the sensations produced by breathing, not some visualization or idea of the breath going in and out. When I direct you to observe the “breath” in the chest or abdomen, I mean the sensations of movement, pressure, and touch occurring there as you breathe in and out. When I say the “breath at the nose,” I mean the sensations of temperature, pressure, and air moving on the skin anywhere around the tip of the nose, the rim, inside the nostrils, or on the upper lip just below the nostrils.

Question 18

Why focus on the tip of the nose and not the abdomen?

Answer 18

Some suggest using the sensations of rising and falling at the abdomen instead. Beginners often find the large movements of the abdomen easier to follow at first. But when the breath becomes very shallow, the coarser sensitivity at the abdomen can make it harder to detect the breath sensations. I recommend the nose because the nerve endings there are much more sensitive.

Question 19

Four-Step Transition

Answer 19

To transition gently from the free-ranging attention of daily life to focus on the breath at the nose.

Step One—Environment: Establish an open, relaxed awareness and attention, letting in everything, but give priority to sensations over thoughts.

Step Two - Body: Focus on bodily sensations but continue to be aware of everything else.

Step Three - Breath: Focus on sensations related to the breath but continue to be aware of everything else.

Step Four: Focus on sensations of the breath at the nose, but continue to be aware of everything else.

Question 20

What is important to remember when practicing the Four-Step transition technique?

Answer 20

To maintain peripheral awareness, and to use it as an opportunity to become aware of the differences between attention and awareness.

Question 21

How to deal with distractions?

Answer 21

Mental activity is to be expected.

Being fully present means being aware of it, but not engaging in its content. Disregard any thought that is not about the present

Let it come, let it be, let it go

Don’t try to suppress it, just let it come into peripheral awareness. Don’t engage the distraction or focus attention on it, simply disregard it and let it be in the background. Then, let it go away by itself. This is a passive process. There is nothing to “do” but allow these objects to arise and pass away on their own, moment by moment. When you find your attention has been captured by a thought, just come back to the present.

Question 22

During the four-step transitioning, what is meant by restricting the scope of attention, from one stage to the next?

Answer 22

The scope of attention is everything that is including in your focus awareness.

When you restrict the scope of your attention, you simply let everything else slip into the background of peripheral awareness. Nothing should be suppressed or excluded from your field of conscious awareness. Just let sounds, smells, and thoughts keep circulating in the background but don’t focus on them. Let them come, let them be, and let them go in peripheral awareness while you restrict all movements of attention to a smaller area.

Question 23

Why should you not try to exclude things from your awareness, during the early stages of practice?

Answer 23

Cultivating stable attention will continue all the way through Stage Six. Developing exclusive attention is the final event in the process and won’t happen before Stage Six, so don’t even concern yourself with it in the early stages.

Trying to focus “single-pointedly” or exclusively, will only cause the mind to wander more.

For now, your aim is just to tame the constant movements of attention, while at the same time trying to maintain peripheral awareness of things in the background.

In other words, you want to develop stable attention with mindfulness

Question 24

During the four-phase transition, when should you attempt to move from one phase to the next?

Answer 24

When your attention begins to stabilize. When your attention begins to wander, return to the previous stage until your attention stabilizes again.

Question 25

Counting the breath

Answer 25

Stabilizes attention

Your goal will be to follow the sensations continuously for ten consecutive breaths. When your attention slips or you lose track of the count, which will happen frequently at first, just start over again at one. For now, consider your attention continuous if you’ve missed neither an inhale nor an exhale, nor lost count of your breaths.

Just as with Pavlov’s dogs, the mind becomes conditioned over time to counting as a sign to start meditating, and it will automatically calm down. Regardless of whether you’re a beginner or an advanced meditator,

Question 26

During stage one, can I think to myself while practicing meditation?

Answer 26

During stage one, you’re not trying for nonverbal or nonconceptual observation at this point. You can talk to yourself and think about the breath as much as you like while observing it, as long as you don’t completely lose awareness of the actual sensations, or lose track of the count.

But disregard thoughts that are not directly about the present activity

Question 27

While counting the breath, where does a breath cycle start?

Answer 27

Interestingly, what you consider the start and end of a breath cycle matters. We automatically tend to regard the beginning as the inhale and the pause after the exhale as the end. However, if you’re thinking about the breath in that way, then that pause becomes the perfect opportunity for your thoughts to wander off, since the mind naturally tends to shift focus when it has completed a task. Instead, try this: consider the beginning of the out-breath as the start of the cycle. That way, the pause occurs in the middle of your cycle, and is less likely to trip you up. This may seem like a small detail, but it often makes a difference. Another approach is to silently say the number during the pause at the end of the out-breath. This “fills the gap” and helps keep the mind on task.

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Question 28

What should I do when my mind has wondered?

Answer 28

if your mind wanders for a long time (several minutes or more), once you become aware of it, don’t immediately return to the breath at the nose. Rather, go back to step two and briefly focus on bodily sensations, then to step three and focus on breath sensations in general, and then start counting breaths at the nose.

Question 29

What are the 4 main obstacles to establishing a practice?

Answer 29

1. not having enough time to meditate
2. procrastinating instead of sitting down to practice
3. reluctance and resistance to actually doing the
   practice
4. Doubt about your abilities.

Question 30

Overcoming Obstacles: Time and Procrastination

Answer 30

Nobody learns to meditate in their “spare” time.

Prioritize meditation and create time, then stick to it.

Question 31

Overcoming Obstacles: Resistance

Answer 31

The keys to overcoming reluctance and resistance are inspiration and motivation. When you first start practicing, you’ll need to get your inspiration from somewhere else. However, once you start making progress, your own success provides motivation.

Question 32

Overcoming Obstacles: Doubt

Answer 32

the basic antidote is simple: diligence, trust, and perseverance, which requires inspiration and motivation.

Question 33

When have you mastered stage one?

Answer 33

You have mastered Stage One when you never miss a daily practice session except when absolutely unavoidable, and when you rarely if ever procrastinate on the cushion by thinking and planning or doing something besides meditating.

Question 34

How to avoid the pitfalls of “expectations”?

Answer 34

By identifying and then setting aside your expectations.

Expectations produce striving

Unmet Expectations can lead you to believe that you are bad at meditating. When in reality there is no such thing as a bad meditation session.

“A good meditation is one you did; the only bad meditation is one you didn’t do.”

So let go of expectations and generate an attitude of faith, trust, and confidence: faith in the method, trust that the results will come with continued practice, and confidence in your own ability. Joyful effort and diligence are the right attitudes.

Rather than striving, focus on the positive, pleasant elements of each session, joyfully repeating the same simple tasks as many times as needed to achieve the goal.