Meditation Resources – Concentration Path
Meditation Resources – Concentration Path
Congratulations on establishing a daily meditation practice!
These first steps were actually the hardest on the journey. Now that you've learned a basic meditation technique and are developing a daily meditation habit, we can begin with the fun stuff!
Key Skills
Here's an overview of what we will be doing:
- Learning a new walking meditation technique
- Reducing and eliminating mind-wandering, forgetting and gross distractions
- Lenghtening the duration of sits up to 40 minutes
- Reducing and eliminating falling asleep and strong dullness
- Learning"mindful review" to bring the benefits of meditation into daily life
The following resources will help you strenghten your practice until you have continuous attention to the meditation object.
Our preliminary goal will now be to reduce the length of mind-wandering and to extend the periods of attention. To do this, we will practice following the breath.
This guided meditation will walk you through the technique of following the breath as taught in The Mind Illuminated.
Connecting the breaths is an additional technique that will help further strengthen stability of attention.
This guided meditation will walk you through the technique of connecting the breaths as taught in The Mind Illuminated.
To keep progressing swiftly through more advanced stages and reap even greater benefits, we will now increase our daily meditation practice to 40 minutes.
To keep moving forward, we need to develop introspective awareness : the capacity to observe the state of our mind. To cultivate introspective awareness, we will practice checking in and labeling.
We now explore the two main obstacles we’ll inevitably run into when meditation: agitation and dullness. By learning to apply the right antidotes to these obstacles, our meditation will become more enjoyable and fruitful.
Mastery
You will have reached the Skilled Meditator stage when:
- You meditate daily for at least 40 minutes
- You've learned and regularly practice walking meditation and mindful review
- You're confident in your ability to deal with gross distractions and strong dullness
- Most of your sits are characterized by continuous attention to the meditation object.