Dharma Treasure Community

Hi Sam,

The usual reason why people feel dullness with the body scan is because awareness has faded. As a result, the breath sensations will appear hazy, or absent, or divorced from the overall proprioceptive experience of your body, or they will start to mix with other non-breath sensations such as pleasure.

The reason this is happening is just as you thought: you lack sufficient conscious power to attend to the whole body while remaining mindfully aware. In Stages 5-7, a lack of conscious power reveals itself most readily in the whole-body breath practice due to all the cognitive resources it takes to notice such refined sensations over a huge area while staying mindfully aware. You don’t see this deficit as much working with, for instance, the pleasure sensations of Stage Seven jhana because pleasure sensations in these Stages tend to be grosser than the breath sensations, meaning they are easier to detect. Also, they are more compelling to focus on because they feel good, meaning they are easier to follow. Likewise, the Stage Five body scan is easier than the Stage Six breath body scan because in Stage Five, you’re looking for all sensations — pressure, heat, and so forth. These are generally easier to detect, and taken together, far more numerous than the breath.

So, while you may have the stability of attention corresponding to Stage Seven, your mindful awareness lags behind.

The key is to further emphasize and refine your metacognitive awareness of 1.) mental objects, 2.) movements of attention, and 3.) overall state of mind. Make sure a significant portion of your consciousness is allocated to awareness — more consciousness than you’re currently devoting to it, I suspect. Thus, try “standing” a little farther back from your meditation object. Hold the intention to remain continuously metacognitively aware while you work with as large an area of the body as you can successfully manage without awareness fading and consequent dullness. Don’t proceed to a larger attentional area until you can successfully stay with the current scope in a mindful way. Then, add another portion of the body to your current scope and work with that until you’re completely clear and mindful working with that larger scope — and so forth, until you’re taking in the whole body. This is just like weightlifting, and it requires similar time and patience to see “gains” in your overall conscious power.

If you don’t possess the requisite mindful awareness, your attention may stay stable, but you will remain prone to dullness during mentally taxing meditations, including during many of the insight techniques found in the adept Stages.

I hope that helps! Please let me know if there’s anything I need to clarify.

Yours in the Dharma,

Jeremy — Dharma Treasure Teacher