STAGE ONE: ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE

This Stage is about developing a consistent and diligent meditation practice. Being consistent means setting a clear daily schedule for when you’re going to meditate, and sticking to it except when there are circumstances beyond your control. Diligence means engaging wholeheartedly in the practice rather than spending your time on the cushion planning or daydreaming.

• • Goals: Develop a regular meditation practice.
  • Mastery: Never missing a daily practice session and rarely planning or procrastinating during meditation.

STAGE TWO: INTERRUPTED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING MINDWANDERING

Stage Two involves the simple practice of keeping your attention on the breath. This is easier said than done. You will discover that attention is easily captured by a distraction, making you forget that you’re supposed to be paying attention to the breath. Forgetting quickly leads to mind-wandering, which can last a few seconds, several minutes, or the entire meditation session. This sequence is so important it’s worth committing to memory— the untrained mind produces distractions that lead to forgetting, which results in mind-wandering. In Stage Two, you only work with the last event —mind-wandering.

• • Goals: Shorten the periods of mind-wandering and extend the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object.
  • Skills: Reinforcing spontaneous introspective awareness and learning to sustain attention on the meditation object. Spontaneous introspective awareness is the “aha” moment when you suddenly realize there’s a disconnect between what you wanted to do (watch the breath) and what you’re actually doing (thinking about something else). Appreciating this moment causes it to happen faster and faster, so the periods of mindwandering get shorter and shorter.
  • Mastery: You can sustain attention on the meditation object for minutes, while most periods of mind-wandering last only a few seconds. Meditation object can be the center of attention or in peripheral awareness, it doesn’t matter.

STAGE THREE: EXTENDED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING FORGETTING

Stages Two and Three are similar, but mind-wandering gets shorter and shorter until it stops altogether. The biggest challenge during this Stage is forgetting, but sleepiness often becomes a problem as well.

• • Goals: Overcome forgetting and falling asleep.
  • Skills: Use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to extend the periods of uninterrupted attention, and become familiar with how forgetting happens. Cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in. These techniques allow you to catch distractions before they lead to forgetting.
  • Mastery: Rarely forgetting the breath or falling asleep.

MILESTONE ONE: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION TO THE MEDITATION OBJECT

The first Milestone is continuous attention to the meditation object, which you achieve at the end of Stage three. Before this, you’re a beginner—a person who meditates, rather than a skilled meditator. When you reach this Milestone, you’re no longer a novice, prone to forgetting, mind-wandering, or dozing off. By mastering Stages One through three, you have acquired the basic, first-level skills on the way to stable attention. You can now do something that no ordinary, untrained person can. You will build on this initial skill set over the course of the next three Stages to become a truly skilled meditator.

STAGE FOUR: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING GROSS DISTRACTION AND STRONG DULLNESS

You can stay focused on the breath more or less continuously, but attention still shifts rapidly back and forth between the breath and various distractions. Whenever a distraction becomes the primary focus of your attention, it pushes the meditation object into the background. This is called gross distraction. But when the mind grows calm, there tends to be another problem, strong dullness. To deal with both of these challenges, you develop continuous introspective awareness to alert you to their presence.

• • Goal: Overcome gross distraction and strong dullness.
  • Skills: Developing continuous introspective awareness allows you to make corrections before subtle distractions become gross distractions, and before subtle dullness becomes strong dullness. Learning to work with pain. Purifying the mind of past trauma and unwholesome conditioning.
  • Mastery: Gross distractions no longer push the breath into the background, and breath sensations don’t fade or become distorted due to strong dullness.

STAGE FIVE: OVERCOMING SUBTLE DULLNESS AND INCREASING MINDFULNESS

You have overcome gross distractions and strong dullness, but there is a tendency to slip into stable subtle dullness. This makes the breath sensations less vivid and causes peripheral awareness to fade. Unrecognized, subtle dullness can lead you to overestimate your abilities and move on to the next Stage prematurely, which leads to concentration with dullness. You will experience only a shallow facsimile of the later Stages, and your practice will come to a dead end. To overcome subtle dullness, you must sharpen your faculties of attention and awareness.

• • Goal: To overcome subtle dullness and increase the power of mindfulness.
  • Obstacles: Subtle dullness is difficult to recognize, creates an illusion of stable attention, and is seductively pleasant.
  • Skills: Cultivating even stronger and more continuous introspective awareness to detect and correct for subtle dullness. Learning a new bodyscanning technique to help you increase the power of your mindfulness.
  • Mastery: You can sustain or even increase the power of your mindfulness during each meditation session.

STAGE SIX: SUBDUING SUBTLE DISTRACTION

Attention is fairly stable but still alternates between the meditation object and subtle distractions in the background. You’re now ready to bring your faculty of attention to a whole new level where subtle distractions fall away completely. You will achieve exclusive attention to the meditation object, also called single-pointed attention.

• • Goal: To subdue subtle distractions and develop metacognitive introspective awareness.
  • Obstacles: The tendency for attention to alternate to the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and other mental objects in peripheral awareness.
  • Skills: Defining your scope of attention more precisely than before, and ignoring everything outside that scope until subtle distractions fade away. Developing a much more refined and selective awareness of the mind itself, called metacognitive introspective awareness. You will also use a method called “experiencing the whole body with the breath” to further subdue potential distractions.
  • Mastery: Subtle distractions have almost entirely disappeared, and you have unwavering exclusive attention together with vivid mindfulness.

MILESTONE TWO: SUSTAINED EXCLUSIVE FOCUS OF ATTENTION

With mastery of Stages Four through Six, your attention no longer alternates back and forth from the breath to distractions in the background. You can focus on the meditation object to the exclusion of everything else, and your scope of attention is also stable. Dullness has completely disappeared, and mindfulness takes the form of a powerful metacognitive introspective awareness. That is, you’re now aware of your state of mind in every moment, even as you focus on the breath. You have accomplished the two major objectives of meditative training: stable attention and powerful mindfulness. With these abilities you’re now a skilled meditator, and have achieved the second Milestone.

STAGE SEVEN: EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION AND UNIFYING THE MIND

You can now investigate any object with however broad or narrow a focus you choose. But you have to stay vigilant and make a continuous effort to keep subtle distractions and subtle dullness at bay.

• • Goal: Effortlessly sustained exclusive attention and powerful mindfulness.
  • Obstacles: Distractions and dullness will return if you stop exerting effort. You must keep sustaining effort until exclusive attention and mindfulness become automatic, then effort will no longer be necessary. Boredom, restlessness, and doubt tend to arise during this time. Also, bizarre sensations and involuntary body movements can distract you from your practice. Knowing when to drop all effort is the next obstacle. But making effort has become a habit, so it’s hard to stop.
  • Methods: Practicing patiently and diligently will bring you to the threshold of effortlessness. It will get you past all the boredom and doubt, as well as the bizarre sensations and movements. Purposely relaxing your effort from time to time will let you know when effort and vigilance are no longer necessary. Then you can work on letting go of the need to be in control. Various Insight and jhāna practices add variety at this Stage.
  • Mastery: You can drop all effort, and the mind still maintains an unprecedented degree of stability and clarity.

MILESTONE THREE: EFFORTLESS STABILITY OF ATTENTION

The third Milestone is marked by effortlessly sustained exclusive attention together with powerful mindfulness. This state is called mental pliancy, and occurs because of the complete pacification of the discriminating mind, meaning mental chatter and discursive analysis have stopped. Different parts of the mind are no longer so resistant or preoccupied with other things, and diverse mental processes begin to coalesce around a single purpose. This unification of mind means that, rather than struggling against itself, the mind functions more as a coherent, harmonious whole. You have completed the transition from being a skilled meditator to an adept meditator.

STAGE EIGHT: MENTAL PLIANCY AND PACIFYING THE SENSES

With mental pliancy, you can effortlessly sustain exclusive attention and mindfulness, but physical pain and discomfort still limit how long you can sit. The bizarre sensations and involuntary movements that began in Stage Seven not only continue, but may intensify. With continuing unification of mind and complete pacification of the senses, physical pliancy arises, and these problems disappear. Pacifying the senses doesn’t imply going into some trance. It just means that the five physical senses, as well as the mind sense, temporarily grow quiet while you meditate.

• • Goal: Complete pacification of the senses and the full arising of meditative joy.
  • Obstacles: The primary challenge is not to be distracted or distressed by the variety of extraordinary experiences during this Stage: unusual, and often unpleasant, sensations, involuntary movements, feelings of strong energy currents in the body, and intense joy. Simply let them be.
  • Method: Practicing effortless attention and introspective awareness will naturally lead to continued unification, pacification of the senses, and the arising of meditative joy. Jhāna and other Insight practices are very productive as part of this process.
  • Mastery: When the eyes perceive only an inner light, the ears perceive only an inner sound, the body is suffused with a sense of pleasure and comfort, and your mental state is one of intense joy. With this mental and physical pliancy, you can sit for hours without dullness, distraction, or physical discomfort.

STAGE NINE: MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PLIANCY AND CALMING THE INTENSITY OF MEDITATIVE JOY

With mental and physical pliancy comes meditative joy, a unique state of mind that brings great happiness and physical pleasure.

• • Goal: The maturation of meditative joy, producing tranquility and equanimity.
  • 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 by tranquility and equanimity.
  • Mastery: Consistently evoking mental and physical pliancy, accompanied by profound tranquility and equanimity.

STAGE TEN: TRANQUILITY AND EQUANIMITY

You enter Stage Ten with all the qualities of śamatha: effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity. At first these qualities immediately fade after the meditation has ended. But as you continue to practice, they persist longer and longer between meditation sessions. Eventually they become the normal condition of the mind. Because the characteristics of śamatha never disappear entirely, whenever you sit on the cushion, you quickly regain a fully developed meditative state. You have mastered Stage Ten when the qualities of śamatha persist for many hours after you rise from the cushion. Once Stage Ten is mastered, the mind is described as unsurpassable.

The goal beyond Stage Ten is to use the power of śamatha for the continued deepening of Insight, and to progress to the highest level of complete Awakening.

MILESTONE FOUR: PERSISTENCE OF THE MENTAL QUALITIES OF AN ADEPT

When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities you experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions, so your daily life is imbued with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity. This is the fourth and final Milestone and marks the culmination of an adept meditator’s training.