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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

You overcome forgetting by catching distractions before they cause you to forget. To do this, you first need to extend the periods of attention to the breath so you can look introspectively at the mind and see what’s happening. Extended periods of stable attention are achieved using the technique of following the breath from Stage Two. However, in this Stage, you’ll look at the breath sensations in much greater detail, and will learn the related technique of connecting. The other key to overcoming forgetting is cultivating introspective awareness. This allows you to see the distractions that are about to make you forget the breath. The practices of labeling and checking in will develop this ability.

As you progress through the Stages, you will follow the breath with ever closer attention in pursuit of ever more detail. In Stage Two, this meant identifying the beginning and end of both the in- and out-breaths, as well as the pauses separating the two. Your first goal in Stage Three, if you haven’t reached it already, is to discern each of these with equal clarity.

Once you can perceive all major points in the breath cycle clearly and vividly, you need a bigger challenge. Next, you’ll practice recognizing the individual sensations that make up each in- and out-breath. First, carefully observe the sensations between the beginning and end of the in-breath until you can recognize three or four distinct sensations every time. Continue to observe the rest of the breath cycle just as clearly as before. When you can consistently recognize several sensations with every in-breath, do the same with the out-breath. Your intention will be to follow the breath with vividness and clarity, and to be aware of very fine details. If you miss the mark, don’t worry. You always have the next breath to work with.

Even as you engage more closely with the breath, it’s very important to also maintain extrospective awareness. This may not be easy. When you focus closely, the mind naturally tends to drop awareness of bodily sensations and external stimuli. Don’t let this happen, because you’ll become more vulnerable to both forgetting and drowsiness. Furthermore, emphasizing both attention and peripheral awareness at the same time increases the total power of consciousness. (See First Interlude.) More conscious power is the key to making progress in later Stages. Finally, when you allow for the full range and content of awareness, there’s great potential for Insight, even at these early Stages. You’re not only observing the breath, but watching and learning from the activity of your mind as a whole.

As you follow the entire breath cycle, begin connecting by observing the two pauses closely, and notice which is longer and which is shorter. Next, compare the in- and out-breaths to each other. Are they the same length, or is one longer than the other? When you can compare the lengths clearly, expand the task to include relative changes over time.

When you find the mind agitated and there are more distractions, ask yourself: Is the breath longer or shorter, deeper or shallower, finer or coarser than when the mind is calm? What about the length or depth of the breath during a spell of drowsiness? Do states of agitation, distraction, concentration, and dullness affect the out-breath more or in a different way than they do the in-breath? Do they affect the pause before the in-breath more or less than they affect the pause before the out-breath?

In Stage Two, I said it can be helpful to use mental self-talk when following the breath. By now, you’ve noticed that a lot of the mental activity takes the form of inner dialogue. Like a sports commentator discussing the plays in a game, mental talk becomes a way to follow the movement of attention and gauge the quality of awareness. Yet, you may have also noticed that self-talk can cause problems. It’s slippery like quicksilver, flowing from investigating the breath to some other associated topic, then on to another. Suddenly you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of mind-wandering! Therefore, even though occasional self-talk is fine, it’s best at this Stage to start cutting back on verbal commentary and to appreciate the peaceful silence surrounding the breath. You’ll discover you can still follow what’s happening, and that you’re able to think about the meditation object nonverbally.

With introspective awareness, you’re aware of what’s happening in your mind as you continue to focus attention closely on the breath. You’ll train and strengthen your capacity for introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in.

To strengthen introspective awareness, use labeling to practice identifying the distraction in the very moment you realize you’re no longer on the breath. For example, if you catch yourself thinking about your next meal or something that happened yesterday, give the distraction a neutral label such as “thinking,” “planning,” or “remembering.” Simple, neutral labels are less likely to cause further distractions by getting you caught up in the labeling. If there was a series of thoughts, only label the most recent one.

Often, the last thing you were thinking about when you woke up from mind-wandering wasn’t what initially took you away from the breath. However, as mind-wandering happens less often, the distraction you identify and label in that moment will be the same one that caused you to forget. Eventually, the practice of labeling will strengthen your introspective awareness enough so you can consistently identify which distractions are most likely to steal your attention in the first place.

The second part of cultivating introspective awareness involves checking in using introspective attention. Instead of waiting for introspective awareness to arise spontaneously, as you’ve done until now, you intentionally turn your attention inward to see what’s happening in the mind.

Yes, checking in disrupts your focus on the breath, but when you pause to reflect on everything happening in your mind, attention needs to shift. At this Stage, this is not only completely okay, it’s actually the key to cultivating introspective awareness.

Checking in not only strengthens introspective awareness, but also allows you to correct for gross distraction before it causes forgetting. It’s like you’re intentionally shifting your attention to take a “snapshot” of the mind’s current activity to see if some distraction is about to make you forget. When you notice a gross distraction, tighten up attention on the breath to prevent forgetting. It may also help to take a moment to label the distraction before returning to the breath.

Always check in very gently and briefly, turning your attention inward to evaluate how much scattering was just occurring. Is gross distraction present? If so, you know you were about to forget the breath. When you recognize a gross distraction before it completely captures your attention, return your attention to the breath and sharpen up your focus. That will keep you from forgetting. Sometimes, just identifying a gross distraction as a gross distraction is enough to make it dissipate. If it doesn’t, engage with the breath as fully as you can until it does. If it keeps returning, just keep repeating this simple process.

Train yourself to check in regularly with introspective attention. To start, try every half-dozen breaths or so—but don’t start counting them.

As we start sitting longer, pain and other unpleasant sensations such as numbness, tingling, and itching appear. Our bodies aren’t used to staying still. When we’re fairly stationary in daily life, we still move and fidget. Even when sleeping, we constantly change positions to stay comfortable. The good news is it gets easier to sit still over time. The better news is that eventually you won’t have any physical discomfort at all. In fact, sitting still becomes so deliciously pleasant that it takes an act of will to move. But getting accustomed to true stillness takes time and practice.

We’ll discuss meditating with pain and discomfort more in Stage Four, when they’re even more distracting. For now, just remember that by meditating on these harmless sources of pain, we gain Insight into the nature of desire and aversion by watching how resistance and impatience create suffering. As you progress, you will discover a profound truth: in life, as in meditation, physical pain is unavoidable, but suffering of every kind is entirely optional.

Once you start to have longer periods of stable attention, you will face the problem of drowsiness and falling asleep. Why does dullness arise right when our concentration starts to improve? The first reason is that when we meditate, we intentionally turn the mind inward. But we’ve been conditioned our entire life to associate turning inward with going to sleep. The second is that as we succeed in taming the mind and calming its normal state of relative agitation, the overall energy level drops.

Dullness in meditation comes in many different degrees, ranging from strong dullness such as drowsiness to subtler forms like feeling a bit “spaced out.” Drowsiness often makes an appearance at this Stage. As with distraction, dullness is another form of scattered attention. But while distraction scatters attention to other objects of awareness, dullness scatters attention to a void in which nothing is perceived at all.

In meditation, drowsiness usually leads to brief moments of sleep. Within a few seconds of falling asleep, postural muscles relax and your head nods or your body starts to fall. Then you wake up with a sudden jerk as muscle reflexes pull you upright—the so-called “Zen lurch.”

If you closely observe what happens, you’ll notice that coming out of drowsiness is distinctly unpleasant. You would probably prefer to stay there. However, by resisting the urge and returning to the practice, you’ll usually experience a comfortable state where you can still follow the breath, though without the same intensity or vividness or clarity as before. This is called subtle dullness. It eventually leads to strong dullness, in which attention still clings to the breath, but the focus is weak and diffuse, and the sensations vaguely perceived.

Here are a few “antidotes,” roughly in order of strength from mild to strongest, for rousing the mind from dullness:

Another way to keep the mind energized is through intention. Holding a strong conscious intention to clearly perceive the breath sensations while also sustaining peripheral awareness will keep the mind energized.

You have mastered Stage Three when forgetting and mind-wandering no longer occur, and the breath stays continually in conscious awareness. This is a whole new pattern of behavior for your mind. The mind still roams, but it’s “tethered” to the meditation object, never getting too far away; the unconscious mental processes that sustain attention never entirely let go of the meditation object.

Because attention no longer shifts automatically to objects of desire and aversion, you can purposely hold your attention on an emotionally neutral object like the breath for extended periods of time. The ability to continuously sustain attention on the meditation object is remarkable, so take satisfaction in your accomplishment. You can now do something that most people can’t—something you may not have thought you were even capable of. Congratulations, you have reached the First Milestone Achievement and the real beginning of skilled meditation!

THE PRACTICE of mindfulness leads to both psychological healing and profound spiritual insights. To understand how, we first need to look at the role of the mind in the formation of personality.

Unconscious conditioning is like a collection of invisible programs. These programs were set in motion, often long ago, by conscious experiences. Our reaction to those experiences—our thoughts, emotions, speech, and actions—may have been appropriate at the time. The problem is they have become programmed patterns, submerged in the unconscious, that don’t change. They lie dormant until they’re triggered by something in the present. When that happens, we often get so focused on the triggering event and our own emotions that these unconscious programs don’t take in any new information about the current situation. That’s why they don’t change.

Mindfully acknowledging our emotions and taking responsibility for our reactions lets us recognize more options, choose wiser responses, and take control of our behavior. Awareness in the present moment allows us to slow down and change our behavior, but it doesn’t make any permanent changes.

How does this magic work? When attention isn’t so totally captured by the intensity of the moment that awareness fades, we’re able to observe ourselves more closely and consistently.

However, the magic of mindfulness doesn’t end with the event itself. Consciousness can continue to pick up on and communicate the consequences of the event and their effects on our mental state long afterward.2 So, the duration of mindfulness is important, as is consistency. The more consistently we can apply mindfulness to similar situations in the future, the more its magic can change our conditioning.

The reprogramming that occurs in meditation also transforms the way we think, feel, and act in more radical and broadly effective ways. That’s because the unconscious conditioning that emerges is of a more fundamental nature, driving a wide range of reactive behaviors that would otherwise require many different triggering events. Conditioning of such a fundamental nature usually remains deeply hidden, but can surface in the stillness of meditation. Therefore, the application of mindfulness in meditation can rapidly accomplish much more than ever could be by the piecemeal process of confronting conditioning in daily life.

Most of us have a large “backlog” of imprints from emotionally charged or traumatic events that don’t fit in with the person we’ve become.

Each person’s conditioned behavior—the way he or she typically acts and reacts—is absolutely unique. In fact, what we call “personality” is precisely this set of behaviors. And while having personality is a wonderful thing, most people have personality traits that aren’t particularly useful. Some traits are simply harmful. But with mindfulness, we can purify that deep conditioning and change our personality for the better.

Unquestionably, the most valuable effect of mindfulness is its ability to radically reprogram our deepest misconceptions about the nature of reality, and about who and what we are.

In particular, the thoughts, feelings, and memories we associate with a sense of self are seen more objectively, revealing themselves to be constantly changing, impersonal, and often contradictory processes occurring in different parts of the mind. These are Insight experiences. When mindfulness allows them to sink in on an experiential level, it profoundly reprograms our intuitive view of reality, transforming a person in a wonderful way. If we believe we’re separate selves who need certain external things to be happy, we’ll spontaneously act out of that territorial feeling, causing harm to ourself and others. As paradoxical as it may seem, the craving to avoid suffering and pursue pleasure is the actual cause of suffering.

As your mind grows calmer and more stable in this Stage, you will experience a deep purification. Stored unconscious residues from the past well up to the surface and are released. The result is a profound healing. You don’t have to do anything to help things along. This purification is a natural process of the mind. Simply allow it to unfold organically.

There is a common misconception that stilling the mind means getting rid of thoughts and blocking out all distractions. Often, students try to suppress these by focusing more intensely on the meditation object. This may seem like a reasonable strategy. Yet brute force never works for long in meditation. You simply can’t force the mind to do something it doesn’t want to. Also, since you have increased your mindfulness throughout the preceding Stages, you’re more conscious than ever of all the background mental activity, which also makes suppression impossible.

Also, you may completely lose peripheral awareness, making you even more vulnerable to distractions and dullness. The lesson is, don’t try to strong-arm your mind into a state of calm. Relax. Let it happen on its own.

At this point in your practice, stilling the mind means reducing the constant movement of attention between the breath and gross distractions. The key to doing this is directing and sustaining attention. However, to succeed, you’ll also need strong peripheral awareness, so you can notice potential distractions before they actually capture your attention.

There are two steps to learning to overcome gross distractions. The first involves dealing with gross distraction that is already present. Simply continue the practice you learned in Stage Three to prevent forgetting: recognize when a gross distraction is present, let go of it, and re-engage with the breath. The second step is a refinement of the first that prevents gross distraction from occurring in the first place. Recognize when a subtle distraction has the potential to become a gross distraction before it happens. Then tighten up your focus on the breath so the subtle distraction doesn’t draw you away. Finally, engage with the breath more completely to keep it and all other distractions at bay. In both steps, you use introspective awareness to detect distractions. Then you work with directed attention to make the breath your primary focus, and with sustained attention to keep it the primary focus of attention. Let’s take a closer look at this process.

Introspective attention can only produce a conceptual snapshot of what was just happening, a kind of delay or echo, whereas introspective awareness is capable of continuously monitoring the mind. This is a rather subtle point. Take some time to think about it, since it has important consequences.

Your new goal is to monitor the mind and detect distractions more efficiently, so that you don’t interrupt attention. You achieve this by developing an intentional, vigilant, and continuous introspective awareness that alerts you to gross distractions while you remain focused on the breath. In other words, you want your attention to the breath to be a stable anchor as you keep watch over the entire ocean of the mind with introspective awareness.

What does this vigilant introspective awareness feel like? Well, you’re already somewhat familiar with it. In Stage Three, when you returned to the breath after a moment of introspective attention, you may have noticed that the quality of your awareness seemed sharper and clearer for a while. During that time, introspective awareness and attention were more balanced. If you didn’t notice, try it now. Take a minute to focus on your breath and stabilize your attention. Then, introspectively check in on the state of your mind. After a moment, return your attention to the breath. Notice how introspective awareness continues while attention remains on the breath. This is precisely the kind of introspective awareness you need to make stronger, and extend until it’s always there.

By using the breath as an anchor while you mindfully observe the mind, you’re “watching the mind while the mind watches the breath.” This is metacognitive introspective awareness, and will come to full fruition by Stage Eight. Learning to sustain introspective awareness is extremely important for accomplishing the overall goals of meditation.

Our natural tendency is to abruptly yank ourselves back to the breath. However, that will actually slow you down in the long run, so let go gently and easily instead. Any annoyance or self-judgment you may feel is just something you have to let go of. By affirming your successes, you will make quicker progress.

However, not all subtle distractions pose the same challenge to stable attention. There are two types that are especially troublesome, so you should learn to recognize them. First are the noticeably attractive subtle distractions. These draw your attention away because they hold some special allure or interest. For instance, you may be hungry and find yourself thinking about your next meal, or you may have a problem at work that keeps nagging at you. The second type of distraction doesn’t exert the same kind of pull. Instead, your attention ends up being diverted because of the manner in which the distraction arises: it sneaks in gradually, eventually displacing your focus. Once again, you need to rely on vigilant and continuous introspective awareness to distinguish these more troublesome subtle distractions from the rest. When you notice them, you can ward them off by sharpening up your attention to the breath.

At this Stage, there are three kinds of subtle distractions that often become persistent gross distractions: pain and physical discomfort; interesting, attractive, and seemingly important insights; and emotionally charged memories, thoughts, and “visionary” experiences. Having to grapple with these overwhelmingly powerful distractions can undo all the satisfaction you felt at finally being able to pay continuous attention to the breath.

You’ve already learned the basic strategy for dealing with pain: ignore unpleasant sensations as long as possible, make them your meditation object if they persist, and move mindfully only when absolutely necessary.

Meditation teacher Shinzen Young puts this into a mathematical formula: the amount of Suffering (S) you experience is equal to the actual Pain (P) times the mind’s Resistance (R) to the pain. So, S = P × R. If you stop resisting completely, then R equals zero.

Unavoidable physical discomfort is also an opportunity to discover the true nature of pain. You will eventually learn to distinguish between physical discomfort as a sensation, and the mind’s unnecessary reaction to it, which is suffering. In the words of the Buddha, “When the uninstructed worldling experiences a painful feeling, he feels two things—a bodily one and a mental one. . . . When the instructed noble disciple experiences a painful feeling, he feels one thing—a bodily one, and not a mental one.”1 Pain disappears completely in the later Stages.