The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness

by Culadasa (John Yates)

Even though the breath has many benefits, the methods presented in the Ten Stages can also be used with a visualized object, a mantra, or in loving-kindness practices. All the same principles can be employed in conjunction with the noting technique of the Mahasi-style vipassanā method, the breath concentration and body-scanning techniques of the U Ba Khin/Goenka vipassanā method, or the uniquely systematic vipassanā of Shinzen Young. In each of these, you face the same problems of mind-wandering, distraction, and dullness, which the techniques here are designed to address. That said, not every meditation object leads to the final Stages as surely as do the sensations of the breath.

First, close your eyes and spend a few moments becoming fully present. Take in everything presented to the senses. With your eyes closed, you’ll find the two main sensory stimuli are sounds and sensations originating on or in the body. Open your peripheral awareness fully. Next, allow your attention to tune in to and range freely among any of the sounds, bodily sensations, smells, or thoughts you may experience. Within this holistic panorama, the one limitation you place on movements of attention is to remain in the present, here and now.

Once you have become fully present with every kind of sensory stimulus, limit your attention to bodily sensations.

As you sit quietly observing the body, your attention will naturally gravitate toward the sensations of movement produced by breathing, since little else changes while sitting quietly.

Now direct your attention to the sensations produced by the air moving in and out of your nostrils. Locate where those sensations are clearest—just inside the nostrils, at the tip of the nose, on the upper lip, or wherever else. The area may be as small as a pencil eraser or up to two inches across. Also, the location of sensations may not be quite the same for the in- and out-breaths.

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. 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.

Sit down, close your eyes, and go through the Six-Point Preparation for Meditation: Motivation, Goals, Expectations, Diligence, Distractions, and Posture. Then, do the Four-Step Transition, gradually restricting the natural movements of your attention as you move from one step to the next. The transition needs to be gentle and gradual. Emphasize relaxation, peacefulness, and pleasure, rather than willpower and effort. When you reach step four and you’re focusing on the breath at the nose, stabilize your attention by counting five or ten breaths without interruption. When you’re finished counting, keep attending to the sensations of the breath at the nose.

The most effective way to overcome both procrastination and reluctance and resistance to practicing is to just do it. Nothing works as quickly or effectively as diligence. The simple act of consistently sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation object, day after day, is the essential first step from which everything else in the Ten Stages flows.

Once you start practicing regularly, you will be surprised by how quickly meditation becomes easier and more gratifying.

As you progress to the higher Stages, you won’t just deliberately cultivate joy. It will eventually become your default state of mind.

This is fine at first, but I strongly recommend at least one daily forty-five-minute sit as a minimum. This will provide a solid basis for your practice. As you advance through the Stages and gain more skill, your meditations will become more interesting and enjoyable. You will eventually have no problem extending forty-five minutes into an hour and practicing more than once a day if you choose. It’s always best to work up gradually rather than do too much at first and become discouraged.

You wouldn’t be reading this right now if you weren’t somehow inspired to explore meditation. Keep yourself inspired, and find new sources of encouragement.

Look into local meditation and dharma groups, or start your own. As the Buddha once told his disciple Ananda, “Noble friends and companions are the whole of the holy life.”4 When you feel you’re ready to try more intensive practice, attend an organized retreat.

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. This Stage is the most difficult to master, but it can be done in a few weeks. By following the basic instructions and cultivating the right attitude, you will develop joyful effort and diligence and establish a regular daily practice. The time and effort put into mastering this Stage will pay off far beyond anything you can imagine.

ALL THE mental skills needed in meditation are innate abilities we can selectively choose to cultivate.

Traditional meditation literature identifies five specific hindrances to overcome before we can make real progress, and understanding them will prove invaluable. In daily life, these so-called hindrances actually serve necessary and useful purposes. Once you’re familiar with them and how they work, it becomes obvious that neither suppression nor self-punishment will help you surmount such established and often helpful conditioning.

We can trace almost every problem in meditation to one or more of five innate and universal psychological predispositions, known as the Five Hindrances: Worldly Desire, Aversion, Laziness and Lethargy, Agitation Due to Worry and Remorse, and Doubt. They’re called hindrances because they hinder efforts at meditating, and create all kinds of problems in daily life as well. Therefore, as countless meditation manuals recognize, learning about them at the start is crucial.

Second, you will cultivate five Meditation Factors:1 Directed Attention, Sustained Attention, Meditative Joy, Pleasure/Happiness, and Unification of Mind.

Worldly Desire (sometimes called Sense Desire) is when we pursue, delight in, and cling to the pleasures of material existence.

In Buddhism, these are sometimes referred to as the “eight worldly dharmas.” Here’s an easy formula to help you remember them: gain-loss, pleasure-pain, fame-obscurity, and praise-blame.

Aversion (sometimes called ill will) is a negative mental state involving resistance. Its most extreme form is hatred, with the intent to harm or destroy, but any compulsion to get rid of or avoid unpleasantness, no matter how subtle, is Aversion.

Laziness mostly appears as procrastination. Its counterpart, Lethargy, is a tendency toward inactivity, rest, and ultimately sleep. Both involve a lack of energy. Each causes different problems, but together, they form a powerful hindrance. When we lack motivation, Laziness and Lethargy arise and keep us from making enough effort.

There are two antidotes for Laziness and Lethargy. The first is to motivate yourself by thinking about future rewards. This means weighing the costs against the benefits in a rational and intelligent way, rather than just trusting your emotions.

The second antidote is to just do it. This means that you plunge in despite resistance, and then engage with the task fully. This works well against laziness because the power of laziness lies in procrastination.

We feel this kind of Agitation when we’re conflicted about the past or concerned about the future. This Agitation can take the form of Remorse for past unwise, unwholesome, or immoral activities, or for something we neglected to do. We may also have Agitation Due to Remorse when fretting about the possible consequences. For example, you may feel remorse about an affair, either because of the pain your spouse would feel if he or she found out, or because of your own guilty conscience. The other form this Agitation can take is Worry.

The best antidote to this kind of agitation is to take up the practice of virtue.5 When we behave virtuously, we don’t create further causes for Remorse or Worry. But what is virtue? I don’t mean morality in the sense of adhering to an external standard demanded by a deity or other authority. Nor do I mean ethics, as in following a system of rules that prescribe the best way to act. Both moral principles and ethical codes can be followed blindly without necessarily having to resolve your own bad mental habits. Rather, virtue is the practice of inner purification, which results in good behavior.

Doubt is healthy and valuable when it motivates us to question, investigate, and try things for ourselves. It keeps us from blindly accepting what others say or what seems true, and from being misled and taken advantage of. As a survival strategy, it keeps us from wasting our time and resources. Doubt begins as an unconscious mental process that focuses on negative results and negative possible outcomes. Once the mind decides a situation should be examined more closely, the emotion of Doubt becomes part of conscious experience. If the feeling of Doubt is strong enough, it compels us either to reevaluate an activity, or to abandon it altogether. The purpose of Doubt is simply to challenge the strength of our motivation, inviting us to test our current activities and intentions with reason and logic. Doubt becomes a hindrance if, instead of reevaluating the situation rationally, we respond only to the emotional uncertainty it creates.

Some doubt they have the necessary self-discipline, but if you can exercise regularly or go to work or school, you can establish a practice. The key factor isn’t discipline, but rather motivation and habits. If you find yourself questioning whether you have enough discipline to meditate, instead re-examine your motivation. Without motivation, discipline won’t help much. Making meditation a habit is also critical.

When you achieve Stage Ten, these hindrances are completely overcome, absent from both meditation and daily life. And as long as you can regularly reach śamatha in your practice—or if you achieve sufficient Insight—they will not return.

The goal for Stage Two is to shorten the periods of mind-wandering and extend the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object. Willpower can’t prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering, while gently but firmly redirecting attention back to the breath.

Stage Two marks the beginning of the process of training the mind as you try to stay focused on the breath. It takes work to calm the mind, but you will work smart, not hard, using finesse, patience, and positive reinforcement.

You’ve mastered this Stage when episodes of mind-wandering are brief, while your attention to the breath lasts much longer.

The combined problems of forgetting and mind-wandering will dominate your meditation sessions in Stage Two. Forgetting means we forget the meditation object, as well as our intention to focus on the breath. Mind-wandering is what happens after we’ve forgotten what we were doing: the mind will wander from thought to thought, often for a long time, before we “wake up” to what is happening. At the root of these problems are the various types of spontaneous movements of attention described in the Overview. We place our attention on the breath, but the mind produces distractions.

So, while forgetting and mind-wandering might be obstacles in meditation, they’re a normal and necessary part of everyday life, letting us use our limited conscious resources more efficiently.

When attention is accompanied by greater awareness, we have strong mindfulness, meaning we can refocus and stabilize our attention wherever and whenever it’s needed.

A critical moment occurs during mind-wandering when you suddenly realize you’re no longer observing the breath: you abruptly “wake up” to the fact that you weren’t doing what you had intended. It’s like suddenly remembering a phone call you forgot to make or an unmailed check—the thought just pops into your head, as if from nowhere.

Our natural tendency is to quickly return to the breath, often forcefully and with self-judgment. This reaction is typical of our approach to everyday tasks. We rush to get back on track. During meditation, however, if you return to the breath as soon as you realize you’ve lost it, you’ll miss a key opportunity for training the mind.

Awakening to the present is an important opportunity to understand and appreciate how your mind works. You’ve just had a minor epiphany, an “aha!” moment of realizing there’s a disconnect between what you’re doing (thinking about something else) and what you intended to do (watch the breath). But this wasn’t something you did. Nor can you voluntarily make it happen. The process that discovered this disconnect isn’t under your conscious control. It happens unconsciously, but when the “findings” become conscious, you have an “aha!” moment of introspective awareness.

Simply take a moment to enjoy and appreciate “waking up” from mind-wandering. Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them. Conscious intention and affirmation powerfully influence our unconscious processes. By valuing this moment, you’re training the mind through positive reinforcement to wake you up more quickly in the future. Also, avoid becoming annoyed or self-critical about mind-wandering. It doesn’t matter that your mind wandered. What’s important is that you realized it.

Once you’ve redirected attention, you want to increase the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object. A technique that helps is called following the breath. This is a series of tasks, like a game, to help you actively engage with, take interest in, and fully investigate the breath, countering the natural tendency for attention to shift. To begin, try identifying the exact moment the in-breath starts and the exact moment it ends. Likewise, try noticing the exact moment the out-breath begins and ends.

The instructions for this Stage are simple. You sit down, finish the Preparation for Practice, make the gradual transition to the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nose, and count ten breaths. Hold the intention to follow and sustain attention on the breath sensations at the nose. Very soon, however, you’ll find yourself forgetting the breath and mind-wandering, sometimes for seconds and sometimes for many minutes. Eventually, you’ll abruptly “wake up” to the fact that, even though you intended to watch the breath, you’ve been thinking about something else. Feel happy and pleased about this “aha!” moment of introspective awareness. Then, gently direct attention back to the breath. To engage more fully with the meditation object, practice following the breath. As long as you appreciate the moment of “waking up” to mind-wandering, diligently return attention to the object, and fully engage with it, you’re on the right track. If you sit through the entire session without getting discouraged and if you keep returning to the breath when your mind wanders, consider your meditation a total success.

You’ll probably be surprised at how quickly your powers of perception sharpen up. This is the first change you’ll experience as your mind starts growing stronger. Later, as you become more mindful, you’ll no longer need the mental words, images, and games, and in fact they become obstacles. So, let them fall away naturally when they’re no longer useful. This may not happen completely until well into Stage Four, or even the start of Stage Five. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to use these techniques as long as they help.

Stages One through Four aim at gaining more stability of attention. Beginning meditators often try to stabilize attention by focusing intensely on the breath and pushing everything else out of awareness. Don’t do this. Don’t try to limit peripheral awareness. Instead, to cultivate mindfulness, do just the opposite—allow sounds, sensations, thoughts, and feelings to continue in the background. Be careful of the tendency to become so closely focused on the breath that peripheral awareness collapses. If that happens, you’ll forget the breath more easily. But if you maintain peripheral awareness, you’ll eventually learn to notice potential distractions when they arise, and attention is less likely to be captured.

Always recall that success comes through repetition with a relaxed attitude, rather than from effortful striving.

Here’s a formula you should commit to memory to make joy and relaxation a natural part of your practice: relax and look for the joy; observe; let it come, let it be, and let it go. Recite it every time you sit, especially when you catch yourself thinking meditation is difficult.

You have mastered this Stage when you can consistently maintain your focus on the meditation object for minutes, while mind-wandering lasts only seconds.

The goal for Stage Three is to overcome forgetting and falling asleep. Set your intention to invoke introspective attention frequently, before you’ve forgotten the breath or fallen asleep, and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness. Also, intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible. These three intentions and the actions they produce are simply elaborations of those from Stage Two. Once they become habits, you’ll rarely forget the breath.

You begin Stage Three with longer periods of sustained attention to the breath. The mind still wanders sometimes, but not for as long. Just keep practicing what you learned in Stage Two, and mind-wandering will eventually stop completely.

The main goal for this Stage is to overcome forgetting. To do this, you’ll use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to actively engage with the meditation object and extend periods of uninterrupted attention; and you’ll cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in.

There are two distinct types of distractions—subtle and gross. The difference between the two is the amount of time attention is on the distraction versus the breath. When less time is spent on the distraction, and the meditation object remains the primary focus of attention, it’s called a subtle distraction. These subtle distractions, along with peripheral awareness, are what make up the “background” of conscious experience. However, if one of these distractions takes center stage, occupying your attention for most of the time, and causing the meditation object to slip into the background, it becomes a gross distraction.