Between 3 & 4

[Rob LaMorgeseMember]

By my estimation I am still in stage 3. Forgetting is mostly gone; a handful of instances in an hour long sit. However, these are borderline instances. Times where the breath might still be lightly in peripheral awareness but could perhaps have dropped out all together. Because awareness is so low (if still there) I believe I need to keep working with stage 3 techniques before moving on. However….

I have begun to have fairly regular instances where intense fear and anxiety come up spontaneously while sitting. They are not associated with any memory or image. It’s just the emotion. This tends to happen when the breath becomes shallow, sometimes so imperceptible that I switch from the sensations of the nose to the abdomen. Once the fear hits it sometimes morphs into a panic that I can’t breathe, even though my breath is actually easy and free.

This caused me to take a look at the stage 4 material in The Mind Illuminated. It seems like what I’ve experienced might be part of that process of emotional material coming to the surface. (I have also lately found bouts of strong dullness that could correspond to stage 4 too.)

I still believe that attention-awareness requires that I work with the breath from a stage 3 level. But some of these other issues arising seem to require stage 4 techniques. Is it ok to mix and match? For example, is it ok to still work with the breath with stage 3 techniques, but utilize stage 4 techniques to be with the strong emotions and work with the strong dullness?

Thanks,

Rob

[Ted LemonMember]

What you are describing now sounds like a combination of dullness and gross distraction, which are actually the things you work on in stage 4. So you might want to try doing the stage 4 practices and see if that helps. It really sounds like you’re mostly out of stage 3. It’s really easy to confuse distraction and forgetting; the difference is that with distraction, you never entirely lose the breath as an object of attention–it just goes into the background.

I don’t know if the fear you are experiencing is a stage 4 purification, but it can’t hurt to try the techniques described in the book for dealing with that. I found that I had various issues with the breath when I was making the transition from stage 3 to stage 4, and it could just be that, but what you are describing sounds more intense. Even if it’s not a purification per se, the practice you do when a purification comes up is really the same practice you do to just stop being distracted by breath phenomena.

[Rob LaMorgeseMember]

Thanks for your thoughts, Ted. They are much appreciated.

I’ll try moving forward with stage 4 and see how that goes.

[Rob LaMorgeseMember]

I feel profoundly stuck lately. I have been consistent with daily practice, usually 45-60 mins sits. There are occasional days where I do shorter sits due to time constraints.
I sit at 6am, so I’ve adjusted bed time earlier to ensure I’m getting enough rest.

In the past, when I forgot the breath it would feel like a waking up moment; that my attention would snap back to the breath and I’d realize I’d forgotten. But now when I notice the breath isn’t the center of attention it feels more like a sliding over of attention. There is no ah-ha waking up. So I’ve taken this to mean that I’m experiencing gross distraction and not forgetting. (Perhaps that’s not the case.)

A few months back I was using Stage 3 techniques, including using check ins. At that time I would have a few instances of forgetting at most in an hour sit. I got to the point where those forgetting moments went away (or so I think) and I moved on to using Stage 4 techniques.

The last month or so I have experienced an increasing amount of mental activity during sits. When I come back to the breath, it still feels like my attention slid over to a distraction. I do not feel like it’s an attentional wake up moment but more of a gentle noticing. But the frequency of gross distraction has grown quite a bit. It feels like there’s even more mental activity than when I first started sitting. There are even times when I feel like I’ve hit a gross distraction (with breath still in background somewhere in attention) but then I experience a mind-wandering with the gross distraction.

To work with this I’ve tried several things: smiling and trying to cultivate joy when I come back to the breath, going back to using check ins, increasing area of attention to whole body like one does for monkey mind. However nothing seems to be clicking. In fact, the sub-mind activity has increased even more. And now when I smile the physical movement feels like a huge attentional shift, making it difficult for me to appreciate the moment.

Pretty sure I’ve got some amount of striving going on that’s hindering my ability to be with the present in my sits now. But I feel lost at this point and am not sure which antidotes I should be using. Any ideas would be appreciated. (Sorry for the long post.)

[Ted LemonMember]

What you are describing is very familiar to me. It sounds like you’ve learned to do a better job of avoiding progressive subtle dullness and gross dullness. The effect of this is to increase the energy of the mind, and increasing the energy of the mind gives distractions fertile ground to spring up in.

This is, however, not a bad outcome, because you wanted to do something about progressive subtle dullness and gross dullness. It’s just the next step in the process of weeding the garden. So now you need to increase your introspective awareness. Expanding the scope of awareness is a good start, but you also need to work on turning it inward.

Essentially what you are trying to do is upload the introspective attention you have already used in stage three into your awareness, so that it becomes a continuous process that your awareness does without you having to move your attention off the object. I don’t know how to tell you how to do this–there’s some explanation in the book that I’ve found helpful, but it’s really something that you have to feel your way through. The other thing I would suggest is to make sure that your intention includes a decided intention not to follow the distraction: one of the things that appears at least for me to weaken my ability to use introspective awareness to stop gross distraction is simply that when my IA registers the distraction, it doesn’t always do anything about it, because the distraction seems “useful.”

It might help to read over the moments of consciousness interlude and start thinking about intending moments of consciousness versus non-intending moments of consciousness. I don’t know if your perception of striving is the same as mine, but for me, I can tell that I’m striving because some part of my body will be tense, and also because it feels like my mind is tense. I’ve found that it’s possible to chase the attention around the breath indefinitely without getting tense if your remedy is not to put your mind on the breath, but rather to renew the intention to keep the mind on the breath. When I can maintain an awareness of whether I feel tense, while maintaining a somewhat continuous renewal of the intention to keep the attention on the breath, it feels like I can remain diligent without the effects of striving.

Full disclosure: I’ve been wrestling with the same issues you have. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel I’m done with stage four once or twice for a week or two at a time. Right now it feels like that’s imminent again. But obviously there’s some process I haven’t entirely internalized the way I’ve managed to internalize not forgetting. There was never any deciding point where not forgetting happened either, though–I just noticed at some point that forgetting had stopped happening. So I’m hopeful that the same will be true for the transition from stage four to stage five.

[Rob LaMorgeseMember]

Ted,

Thanks for the reply. At your suggestion, I went back to the book and looked things over. The section dealing with cultivating introspective awareness did help. Particularly this passage:

“It’s like standing back a bit from the meditation object— just enough to keep the breath at the center of your attention while you take in everything else happening in the mind.”

I tried that out this morning and things were a bit different than they have been. Will have to keep experimenting with the balance between being far enough back from the breath without being too far.

The book is very clear with instruction, however, it is also very dense with information. Re-reading the same material at different times (depending on what I’m experiencing) has yielded new directions in the past. Thanks for reminding me to go back again in this instance.

Rob

[Ted LemonMember]

I have the same problem–Culadasa explains the practice in a way that makes it seem so simple that I often don’t go back and re-read the book for months at a time. I’m glad you were able to get some help out of that passage–that’s one of the very passages I was referring to when I sent my response earlier.

If you get a chance to do a retreat at some point, I recommend bringing the book and reading it in some of your resting periods. I’ve gotten tremendous benefit from reading it in retreat, because things happen much faster there, and so you get to apply a larger swath of the series of practices described in the book all at once.

[Rob LaMorgeseMember]

Just wanted to report something that I find interesting. I recently changed my intention for the 2nd stage of the preliminaries. Before it was something along the lines of: work with what comes up or cultivate introspective awareness. It popped into mind recently to rephrase it to be “Make friends with gross distractions.”

My sits changed. Before there was a feeling of trying to wield awareness as a sentry, on guard. Now it feels like my awareness is looking out for a friend, a familiar face, across a room. This has changed the quality and quantity of recognition quite a bit. I can sort of wave to my friends the thoughts from a distance, they wave back, and mostly move on.

This is the first time for me experiencing how changing the specific phrasing of intention can alter the whole process.

[Ted LemonMember]

Wow. That is very cool. Thanks for sharing it with us!

[Author]

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