1. The Four Stages of Meditation
When you meditate, you seem to be doing almost nothing. Afterwards you inexplicably feel better, but do you actually know what happened on that little inner journey?
If you analyse the process and understand what you’re doing, you’re bound to do it better in time. Awareness improves the function of anything you do. For this reason, the meditation traditions of Buddhism, Yoga and Christianity try to map out both the stages of a single meditation, and also the way the process develops over time.
Although the traditions all agree that there are stages, they can’t agree on what they are. This is hardly surprising, since they are not all aiming for the same thing. Attaining nirvana is not the same as knowing God. You and I may be seeking something different again – better health, self-understanding and happiness, for example.
In this book, I describe meditation using a four-stage format that is flexible enough to accomodate most purposes. The four stages are:
1. Relaxation
(The physical relaxation of the breath and the body)
2. Stillness
(A calm, focused mind)
3. Awareness
(A clear, conscious and observant quality of mind)
4. Insight
(The understanding that comes from awareness)
Each stage lays the foundation for the following stage. For example, a relaxed body is the essential support for a calm, focused mind, which in turn supports awareness, and so on. The more thoroughly you establish the early stages, the more the later ones naturally bear fruit.
While each new stage builds on the former, it doesn’t leave it behind. You don’t go from relaxation to mental stillness and cease being relaxed. Similarly, awareness (stage 3) should contain the stillness of stage 2, without any loss of quality.
As a general rule of thumb, it takes 5-8 minutes to relax the body to the point of sleep (stage 1). The mind usually requires another 5 minutes or so to work through the sleepiness and distractions, and gradually become still (stage 2).
At this point, the mind becomes more aware, in the sense that you can notice the passing thoughts, sensations and emotions with detachment and objectivity (stage 3). Those flashes of understanding that we call ‘insight’ (stage 4) can occur at any point but they are more likely as the meditation progresses.
Most meditators understand the first one or two stages fairly well, but little more. They still get some of the benefits of the later stages, but in a haphazard and unreliable way. I will now explain these stages in more detail.
STAGE 1: RELAXATION
Because physical relaxation is so important, I divide it into two parts – Relax the Breath and Relax the Body – each of which has several chapters devoted to it. The breath is relatively easy to relax, since we can consciously control it. It takes longer to loosen up the more entrenched, unconscious tensions in the body.
Your body, with its instinctive knowledge of what is healthy and unhealthy for you, gives you your core sense of self. By focusing on your body, you also become more attuned to that interplay of subtle, pervasive sensations within you that tells you who you are. This ‘gut-feeling’ of being at home in your body, and knowing whether you are fully relaxed or not, is the basis for all the later stages of meditation.
The benefits of being able to de-stress and relax when you want to are so colossal that even if you just perfected Stage 1, you would be well rewarded for your efforts. However, even to relax thoroughly, you still need some degree of mental stillness and self-awareness as well. You can’t avoid stages 2 and 3 completely.
STAGE 2: STILLNESS AND FOCUS
When you are tense, your mind moves far too rapidly. When you relax, your mind definitely slows down, but it is now more likely to wander aimlessly or lapse into sleepiness.
Stage 2 is about making your mind relatively calm and still. You do this by consciously focusing on some sensation in the body: the breath, the pulse, a pain, or even the feeling of the body as a whole. When you are well focused and you know it, you’ll find your mind feels quite still and clear. This tranquil, centred, yet alert feeling is quite different from sleepiness. This is what skilled meditators aim for.
If you so wish, and if you have the right circumstances, you can pursue this mental stillness into a deeper, trance-like tranquility that many traditions regard as the ultimate goal. They describe this state as becoming one with God, or Pure Consciousness, and it certainly has that aura about it.
Glorious as it is, tranquility is still ephemeral and limited. It’s just one experience amongst many others. Althought we all need as much tranquility as we can get, we shouldn’t get our hopes fixated on this experience alone. Meditation can be much more useful than this.
STAGE 3: AWARENESS
Once you are able to calm the mind, you can direct your attention wherever you want it to go, without being sidetracked. Your mind then becomes a tool for self-understanding. With just a slight shift in emphasis, your mind can be both tranquil and fully aware.
Awareness is that part of the mind that observes what the mind does. It is a kind of meta-mind: you are aware and you know it. Awareness is that function that oversees what is happening in consciousness from moment to moment, as it happens. To be aware means to be able to see any particular thought, sensation or emotion objectively, ‘just as it is’. We can call awareness the ‘observer mind’ or the ‘watcher’, so long as we realise we are describing a function rather than an actual identity within us.
‘Pure’ awareness is sometimes described as a ‘mirror-like’ mind that sees good and bad with equal indifference, thereby responding to nothing at all. Some spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and Stoicism, regard this detachment and equanimity towards whatever life brings as the ultimate goal. Personally, I think this is taking a good idea to a pathological extreme. It violates the golden rule of ‘moderation in all things’.
In fact, a healthy mind is never completely passive or emotionally neutral, and nor should it be. It has an obligation to care for our wellbeing, so it is always making subtle judgements such as: ‘This is good. This is bad. Ignore that. Check this out’ and so on. When the mind is calm and clear, it makes good, conscious judgements rather than impulsive ones or none at all. This is true both in meditation and in everyday life. Awareness – that calm, clear, observant quality of mind that we all need more of – in fact has a subtle dynamic function that we call insight.
STAGE 4: INSIGHT
No matter how deep your meditation is, you are still likely to notice that succession of thoughts, sensations and feelings that we call ‘the stream of consciousness’. In particular, you will notice things that are troubling you (what I call ‘the negatives’) and things that are good for you (what I call ‘the positives’).
When we are trying to relax the body and mind (stages 1 and 2), we usually pay as little attention as possible to that background mental activity. When you are calm, however, you can choose to briefly focus on any thought or sensation or emotion, to get to know it better. We call this activity ‘insight’, which literally means to see into the essence of something.
Insight tends to disarm the negatives and strengthen the positives. For example when you focus on a pain or tension, it commonly starts to loosen up immediately. When you consciously notice a habitual thought, it becomes so much easier to see it in context or discard it. When you consciously recognise your emotional state (instead blindly reacting to it), you can usually turn down its volume, even if it doesn’t disappear completely.
In other words, whenever you see a particular pain or emotion or a troublesome thought ‘just as it is’, you effectively disarm it. The unconscious tension and excessive emotionality around it usually falls away. Awareness alone, without actually ‘doing’ anything, ‘weakens the negatives’, just by seeing them clearly.
Conversely, awareness also ‘strengthens the positives’. You notice the beautiful and healthy thoughts, sensations and feelings as they arise, many of which are very subtle. These are the ‘positives’ in the stream of consciousness. If you deliberately focus on any one of these, you set up a body-mind feedback loop which invariably makes them stronger.
One further aspect of insight is inspiration. This is when the lights go on and the answers appear – those ‘Aha!’ or ‘Yes, of course!’ moments. Insights can be big or small. You suddenly remember that person’s name, for example. Or you hear the voice of God. The process is the same in both cases. When the mind is relatively clear, whatever you need to know will naturally emerge.
Inspiration is a spontaneous, lateral kind of thought that seems to come from outside your conscious mind. It emerges from the depths of your whole body rather than just your head. While you can’t make it happen, you can lay the right conditions for it.
In summary, meditation is about relaxation, stillness, awareness and insight. Relaxation lays the foundation for a still, tranquil mind. This enables you to notice the thoughts, sensations and feelings of the moment objectively, just as they are. This ‘pure’ awareness invariably leads to insight, or ‘dynamic’ awareness, which weakens the negatives and strengthens the positives. This in turn creates the conditions for inspired thought. By now you have come a very long way from simply relaxing the body.
