[Jon KropMember]

Hi Moln1,

Like Blake, I’m a student of Culadasa’s and in his teacher training (although Blake has finished his training and I’m still partway through). I could be wrong, but you sound a little bit like me — analytical, motivated to apply the meditation instructions and mental models with extreme precision. This can be a good thing, but it can also get in the way.

I want to share a tweak that helped me a lot when I found myself getting preoccupied with the attention/awareness distinction and frustrated with trying to maintain distinct intentions regarding attention and awareness, as you seem to be now. It was inspired by advice that Culadasa gave me while I was on retreat: stop trying to juggle multiple intentions — I’ll do THIS with attention, and at the same time I’ll do THAT with peripheral awareness. Instead, just hold the single intention to stabilize on the breath. As long as you have the background understanding that there’s no need to clamp down on objects in the periphery — and it sounds like you get that — I think it’ll work fine. My guess is you’ll find that peripheral awareness naturally flowers and plays its appropriate role of alerting you to distractions. See, stabilizing your attention on the breath requires you to use both attention AND awareness, but that doesn’t mean you need to deliberately cultivate two separate, rigid intentions, one for attention and one for awareness. Just hold the one intention to achieve stability, and your mind will figure out how to use its various faculties to bring that about, especially since you have some intellectual understanding of attention and awareness.

Like I said, this is based on advice from Culadasa, but it does seem to contradict certain passages in the book. Personally, I think the simpler, non-compound intentions work better without sacrificing the power of Culadasa’s methods, at least in pre-adept stages. But your mileage may vary.

[Author]

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