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

by Culadasa (John Yates)

Obstacles: The intensity of meditative joy can perturb the mind, becoming a distraction and disrupting your practice.

Method: Becoming familiar with meditative joy through continued practice until the excitement fades, replaced...

Mastery: Consistently evoking mental and physical pliancy, accompanied by profound tr...

STAGE TEN: TRANQUILITY AND EQUANIMITY

MILESTONE FOUR: PERSISTENCE OF THE MENTAL QUALITIES OF AN ADEPT

CULTIVATING THE RIGHT ATTITUDE AND SETTING CLEAR INTENTIONS

STAGE ONE: Put all your effort into forming and holding a conscious intention to sit down and meditate for a set period every day, and to practice diligently for the duration of the sit. 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, instead of chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, work on strengthening your motivation and intentions.

STAGE TWO: 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. Then, intend to engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In time, the simple actions flowing from these three intentions will become mental habits. Periods of mind-wandering will become shorter, periods of attention to the breath will grow longer, and you’ll have achieved your goal.

STAGE THREE: 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 ...

STAGES FOUR THROUGH SIX: Set and hold the intention to be vigilant so that introspective awareness becomes continuous, and notice and immediately correct for dullness and distraction. These intentions will mature into the highly developed skills of stable attention and mindfulness. You overcome every type of dullness and distraction, achi...

STAGE SEVEN: Everything becomes even simpler. With the conscious intention to continuously guard against dullness and distraction, the mind becomes completely accustomed to ef...

STAGES EIGHT THROUGH TEN: Your intention is simply to keep practicing, using skills that are now completely effortless. In Stage Eight, effortlessly sustained exclusive attention produces mental and physical pliancy, pleasure, and joy. In Stage Nine, simply abiding in the state of meditative joy causes profound tranquility and equanimity to arise. In Stage Ten, just by continuing to practice regularly, the profound joy and happiness, tranquility...

FIRST INTERLUDE Conscious Experience and the Objectives of Meditation

model of Conscious Experience.

A MODEL OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

Consciousness1 consists of whatever we’re experiencing in the moment.

Attention and Peripheral Awareness

Conscious experience takes two different forms, attention and peripheral awareness.

Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our c...

At the same time, however, we can be more generally aware of thin...

The way attention and peripheral awareness work together is a lot like the relationship between visual focus and peripheral vision.

It’s important to realize attention and peripheral awareness are two different ways of “knowing” the world.

Attention singles out some small part of the content of the field of conscious awareness from the rest in order to analyze and interpret it.

On the other hand, peripheral awareness is more holistic, open, and inclusive, and provides the overall context for conscious experience.

It has more to do with the relationships of objects to one anoth...

In meditation, we work with both attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness, the two main practice objectives of meditation.

JUMP-STARTING YOUR PRACTICE

Posture

Whether you sit in a chair or on a cushion on the floor, make yourself as comfortable as possible with your back straight.

Get your back, neck, and head in alignment, front-to-back...

I recommend closed eyes to start with, but you can keep them ...

Relax

While maintaining a straight back, release any tension in the body.

Relax your mind. Take some moments to appreciate the fact that you’re gifting yourself with time away from all the usu...

Intention and Breath

Resolve to practice diligently for the entire meditation session no matter how it goes.

Breathe through your nose as naturally as possible without trying to...

Bring your attention to the sensations associated with the breath in and around your nostrils or upper lip. Another option is to center your attention on the sensations associated with breathing in the abdomen. See which of these is the easiest for you to focus on and then stick w...

Allow your attention to stay centered on your meditation object while your peripheral awareness remains relaxed and open to anything that arises (e.g., sounds in the environment, physical s...

Try to keep your attention centered on the meditation object. Inevitably, your mind will get distracted and drift away. As soon as you recognize this has happened, take a moment to appreciate the fact that you have remembered your intention to meditate, and give your mind an imaginary “pat on the back.” The tendency is to judge yourself and feel disappointed for having lost your focus, but doing so is counterproductive. Mind-wandering is natural, so it’s not important that you lost your focus. Remembering and returning your focus to the...

Now gently re-center your attention on the me...

Repeat step 3 until the meditation session is over, and remember, the only bad meditation sessi...

THE FIRST OBJECTIVE OF MEDITATION: STABLE ATTENTION

Stable attention is the ability to intentionally direct and sustain the focus of attention, as well as to control the scope of attention.

Spontaneous Movements of Attention

To develop intentionally directed, stable attention, you must first have a clear understanding of its opposite, spontaneous movements of attention.

Attention moves spontaneously in three different ways: scanning, getting cap...

Scanning is when our focus moves from object to object, searching the outer world or the contents of our ...

Getting captured happens when an object, like a thought, bodily sensation, or some external stimulus, su...

The third type of spontaneous movement, alternating attention, is a subtler kind of scattered attention only apparent to an experienced meditator.