TMI: Summary of practices by Stage

and some tips

Index
INDEX ....................................................................................................................................................1

LET’S START WITH TWO TIPS..................................................................................................................3

STAGE ONE: ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE.................................................................................................3

HOW TO DO A VERY BASIC MEDITATION .............................................................................................................3

Posture ................................................................................................................................................3
Intention..............................................................................................................................................3
Breath .................................................................................................................................................3
SIX POINT PREPARATION FOR MEDITATION........................................................................................................4
A GRADUAL FOUR-STEP TRANSITION TO THE MEDITATION OBJECT ........................................................................4
COUNTING AS A METHOD TO STABILIZE ATTENTION ............................................................................................4

SECOND INTERLUDE: THE HINDRANCES AND PROBLEMS.......................................................................4

THE FIVE HINDRANCES (WIKIPEDIA DEFINITIONS): ..............................................................................................4

THE SEVEN PROBLEMS:..................................................................................................................................5

STAGE TWO: INTERRUPTED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING MIND-WANDERING .................................5

FOLLOWING THE BREATH ................................................................................................................................5

STAGE THREE: EXTENDED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING FORGETTING...............................................5

TO STRENGTHEN EXTROSPECTIVE AWARENESS ....................................................................................................5

 FOLLOWING THE BREATH ......................................................................................................................5
 CONNECTING......................................................................................................................................6
TO STRENGTHEN INTROSPECTIVE AWARENESS .....................................................................................................6
 LABELING...........................................................................................................................................6
 CHECKING IN ......................................................................................................................................6
PAIN AND DISCOMFORT .................................................................................................................................6
DULLNESS AND DROWSINESS...........................................................................................................................7

STAGE FOUR: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING GROSS DISTRACTION AND STRONG
DULLNESS ..............................................................................................................................................7

PURIFICATION OF THE MIND ............................................................................................................................7

STAGE FIVE: OVERCOMING SUBTLE DULLNESS AND INCREASING MINDFULNESS ..................................7

INCREASING MINDFULNESS WITH BODY SCANNING ...............................................................................................8

STAGE SIX: SUBDUING SUBTLE DISTRACTION ........................................................................................9

CONSCIOUS INTENTION ..................................................................................................................................9

BODY SCAN AS A TOOL TO ACHIEVE EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION ON THE BREATH ...............................................................9
PACIFYING THE MIND (IGNORE MENTAL OBJECTS)................................................................................................9
USING MEDITATIVE ABSORPTION TO ENHANCE YOUR MEDITATION SKILLS (WHOLE-BODY JHANA) ..................................9

SIXTH INTERLUDE...................................................................................................................................9

STAGE SEVEN: EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION AND UNIFYING THE MIND .......................................................10

EFFORTLESSNESS ........................................................................................................................................10
CLOSE FOLLOWING (DETAILS ON HOW ONE OF THE INSIGHTS HAPPEN)...................................................................10
PLEASURE JHANA PRACTICE ...........................................................................................................................11

STAGE EIGHT: MENTAL PLIANCY AND PACIFYING THE SENSES .............................................................11

PRACTICES FOR EXPERIMENTING WITH ATTENTION ............................................................................................11

Momentary concentration ................................................................................................................11
Meditating on arising and passing away ..........................................................................................11
PRACTICES TO ENHANCE METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS......................................................................................12
Choiceless attention..........................................................................................................................12
Meditating on dependent arising .....................................................................................................12
PRACTICES TO HELP ACHIEVE PHYSICAL PLIANCY AND MEDITATIVE JOY ....................................................................13
Finding the Still Point and Realizing the Witness ..............................................................................13
The Luminous Jhanas ........................................................................................................................13

STAGE NINE: MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PLIANCY AND CALMING THE INTENSITY OF MEDITATIVE JOY ...13

MEDITATING ON THE MIND ..........................................................................................................................13

STAGE TEN: TRANQUILITY AND EQUANIMITY ......................................................................................14

JHANAS................................................................................................................................................14

GENERAL INFO ...........................................................................................................................................14

HOW TO NAVIGATE THE JHANAS ....................................................................................................................14
CHEATSHEET OF THE MATERIAL JHANAS ...........................................................................................................16
Whole-body jhanas ...........................................................................................................................16
Pleasure jhanas .................................................................................................................................17
Luminous jhanas ...............................................................................................................................18
Let’s start with two tips
It’s normal to be a perfectionist and try to master each Stage before moving on.
But truth is that it’s best to practice based on your current situation, and
adjust your practice based on what you feel now, guided by your intuition.

It’s normal to wander around several stages even during the same single
session. Especially if there is awareness of the goal of each stage to have a
clear objective.

My personal favorite rule of thumb: if I’m aware of all my senses (I’m seeing
the back of my eyelids or something, I’m hearing, and I’m feeling at least part of
my body) then my meditation is being useful. If you can’t manage to pay
attention to all your senses and you keep ignoring a sense completely, don’t
worry (I’ve been there…). But make sure you are relaxed and doing stuff
properly.

Stage One: Establishing a practice

How to do a very basic meditation
Posture
Anything is right as long as you are comfortable and have your back
straight.

Having your eyes open is ok, but it’s a bit harder (especially considering
that you are meant to stay rather still). Blink naturally. By the way,
personally, I have lots of visual hallucinations with eyes open (darkness,
lights, etc.), everything is normal.

Intention
Practice diligently during your meditation session.

Breath
 Bring your attention to the sensations of the breath in your
nostrils. Alternatively, you can put your attention in a zone of
your abdomen and follow the rise and fall of the breath. Choose
what you prefer, but don’t change around often.
  Attention is best as a zone (maybe the size of a fist, maybe
smaller, maybe bigger), but not too small like the size of a coin.
 Don’t control your breath, don’t “breathe manually” (If you
can’t manage to breathe naturally, ask for tips. You can try having
your attention in your hands and follow your breath in peripheral
awareness until you learn.)
 Try to keep your attention as stable and still as possible on
your meditation object (that is, in your nostrils or abdomen).

Six Point Preparation for Meditation

These are tips about motivation and posture. They are done before meditating.

A Gradual Four-Step Transition to the Meditation Object

This is a transition into meditating, some people find it easier to skip this and
start counting directly.

 Step one: focus on the present (sensations over thoughts)

 Step two: focus on bodily sensations
 Step three: focus on bodily sensations related to the breath
 Step four: focus on sensations of the breath at the nose

Counting as a Method to Stabilize Attention

Intend to count ten breaths and then stop counting and return to the usual
meditation. If you miss a breath, then it’s advised to start over.

For a beginner, if you are kind of aware of both the in-breath and the out-breath,
then you can successfully count one breath.

It might be useful to do: in-breath, count, out-breath.

Second Interlude: The Hindrances and Problems

The Five Hindrances (Wikipedia definitions):
 Worldly Desire: the particular type of wanting that seeks for happiness
through the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and physical feeling.
  Aversion: all kinds of thought related to wanting to reject, feelings of
hostility, resentment, hatred and bitterness.
 Laziness and Lethargy: heaviness of body and dullness of mind which
drag one down into disabling inertia and thick depression.
 Agitation due to Worry and Remorse: the inability to calm the mind.
 Doubt: lack of conviction or trust.

The Seven Problems:

You probably remember them. They are mind-wandering, monkey-mind, etc.

Stage Two: Interrupted attention and overcoming mind-

wandering
Following the breath
This practice is intended to keep your mind’s interest.

Try to identify the beginning of the in-breath and its end. Do the same with the
out-breath.

Once you feel comfortable doing this, you can also identify the pauses or the
middle of the in-breath and out-breath, and so on. Just make sure that you don’t
wander around thinking what to do during your session, keep it simple.

Stage Three: Extended attention and overcoming

forgetting
To strengthen extrospective awareness
 Following the breath
(Same as stage 2)
This practice is intended to keep your mind’s interest.
Try to identify the beginning of the in-breath and its end. Do the same
with the out-breath.
 Once you feel comfortable doing this, you can also identify the pauses or
the middle of the in-breath and out-breath, and so on. Just make sure
that you don’t wander around thinking what to do during your session,
keep it simple.

 Connecting
This practice is about keeping your interest too. In my opinion, it’s not as
useful as following the breath though.
The idea is to compare the different parts of the breath. For example you
can compare the length of the pauses, then you can compare the length
of the in-breath and the out-breath. You can compare the way you
breathe now with your breath at the start of the session, etc.
At stage 4 or 5, you can start to compare your breath with your state of
mind. In which states of mind do you breath deeper?

To strengthen introspective awareness

 Labeling
When you find out you are distracted, give the distraction a simple label
like “thinking”, “planning” or “remembering”. It’s not recommended to
label everything, it’s advised to label only the distractions.

 Checking in
Every 6 breaths or so, you can use introspective attention. The objective
is to accelerate the development of introspective awareness.

Using introspective attention means checking what’s going on in your

mind. Yes, introspective attention feels very empty (you can’t feel
happiness or first-world hunger with your attention). But this will
strengthen your introspective awareness. This includes the super
important metacognitive introspective awareness, which will allow you to
see your state of mind.

Pain and discomfort

A popular tip is making the discomfort or pain the focus of your attention. But
just getting comfortable sounds more enjoyable to me : )
Dullness and drowsiness
They feel like a lack of vividness or clarity.

Methods to counter it, by strength:

 Take a few deep forceful breaths.

 Tense all your muscles, then relax. Repeat a few times.
 Meditate standing-up.
 Meditate while walking.
 Stop meditating temporarily and deal with the dullness.

Stage Four: Continuous attention and overcoming

gross distraction and strong dullness
At this Stage, you should keep working on checking-in to strengthen
introspective awareness. This will help to counter gross distractions and gross
dullness.

Purification of the mind

This is the most common stage for the purification of the mind. Based on my
experience, if you wouldn’t mind that a coworker or classmate found out
everything about you, then maybe you won’t even notice the purification of the
mind happened.

I didn’t feel comfortable about my life, this process was intense. Anyway, I felt
better after it.

Stage Five: Overcoming subtle dullness and increasing

mindfulness
Try to focus on the sensations instead of the concepts.
Increasing mindfulness with body scanning
If you have your attention on your nostrils, change to your abdomen for a while.
You’ll leave your breath in peripheral awareness, and the nostrils are just too
subtle for peripheral awareness.

From now on, you leave the abdomen on your peripheral awareness (try not to
ignore it, unless it’s necessary).

Then you scan your body with your attention. This is an example that doesn’t
stick to the book but follows the same principles.

Put your attention on the fingers of your feet and look for sensations
there.

Then put your attention on the bottom of your feet.

Then on the top of your feet.

Then on your whole feet.

Then on your lower leg.

Then on your thighs.

Then on your complete legs.

Then on your lower back. Your upper back.

(You have your attention on your abdomen, so let’s skip it)

Then your chest. Then your fingers, one finger at a time.

Your whole hands. From elbows to the hands. Then your whole arms
and shoulders.

Then your chin. Your lips and tongue. Your nostrils. Ears. Eyes.
Forehead. Head.

Your entire upper body. Your entire lower body. Your entire body.

Two tips:

Alternate little zones of attention (like fingers) with big zones of attention (like
your whole arms). This trains your attention.
You can look for heat, solidity, movement and space (“earth (solidity and
resistance), water (cohesion and fluidity), fire (heat and cold), wind (movement
and change), and space”).

Stage Six: Subduing subtle distraction

Goal: To subdue subtle distractions and develop metacognitive introspective
awareness.

Conscious intention
Hold the intention to observe all the fine details of the meditation object. At the
same time, hold the intention to ignore everything else.

Body scan as a tool to achieve exclusive attention on the

breath
Use the body scan only as a tool to achieve exclusive attention on your breath.
That is, you aren’t meant to do full body scans unless it’s necessary, as soon as
you can put your attention on your entire body, you can return to the breath.

Pacifying the mind (ignore mental objects)

“Intentionally ignoring mental objects trains the mind-system as a whole to
ignore them automatically whenever they appear in consciousness. Also, when
they’ve been consistently ignored and for long enough, the thinking/emotional
mind no longer presents these potential distractions as continuously or
vigorously.”

Using meditative absorption to enhance your meditation skills

(whole-body jhana)
You put your attention on your whole body and stay like that (you can get there
by doing a body scan first).

There is an appendix about jhanas in TMI and a personal one in this summary.

Sixth Interlude
This interlude talks about pacifying the senses (lights, buzzing in your ears,
etc.), it also talks about piti (tics, shaking, heat, etc.).
Insight experiences mainly start here. Those are the real objective of
meditation. TMI is the best way to reach Insight, but Insight itself is discussed
very lightly. Books like Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea might come in handy if
you wish to deepen your knowledge.

Stage Seven: Exclusive attention and unifying the mind

Effortlessness
Every now and then check if you can stay meditating without effort. This is the
goal of this Stage. Effortlessness means that you no longer need micro-
intentions, you just do almost nothing and the meditation keeps going by itself.

Close following (details on how one of the Insights happen)

“you want to identify even more thoroughly the many distinct sensations that
constitute the ‘breath at the nostrils’”

“As you focus in more and more, you might discern half a dozen or (many) more
different sensations for each in- and out-breath”

“As you continue to examine these sensations quite closely, your perception
shifts and you’ll start experiencing the breath as jerky or pulsing, rather than
smooth and continuous. The ‘jerks’ typically come at about one or two pulses
per second”

“you’ll experience what feels more like a series of still frames, occurring at about
10 per second”

“If you’re lucky perception will shift one more time. The still frames will dissolve,
becoming something too rapid for the mind to clearly discern. You’ll then
experience the breath sensations as the rapid flickering on and off of separate
moments of consciousness, or simply as vibrations”

“When this happens, there’s nothing the mind can recognize or hold on to, so it
naturally recoils from the experience”

“This is an Insight experience”

“’Things’ don’t actually exist. ‘Process’ is all there is”

Pleasure jhana practice
“When you have achieved this level of access concentration, without shifting
your attention from the breath, explore peripheral awareness to find a pleasant
sensation”

“Once you’ve found a distinctive pleasant sensation, shift your attention to it”

“Focus your attention in particular on the quality of pleasantness, rather than the
sensation that gives rise to the pleasantness”

“Let the pleasantness intensify. Sometimes, though, it will fade away. In that
case, allow your attention to return to the breath”

“The pleasantness will grow incrementally stronger (…) until it (…) has
expanded to consume all your available conscious ‘bandwidth’”

There is an appendix about jhanas in TMI and a personal one in this summary.

Stage Eight: Mental pliancy and pacifying the senses

Practices for Experimenting with Attention
Momentary concentration
Without losing exclusive attention or metacognitive introspective awareness:

 Look for a sensation in peripheral awareness. Set your attention to it.

Then naturally return to the breath.
 Or, if you are prepared, look for a mental object. And change your
attention to it. Then naturally return to the breath.
 You can also try using alternating attention. That is, having your breath
and a sound (or whatever) on attention at the same time (alternating
quickly actually).

Meditating on arising and passing away

“For example, if the object is an ongoing sound, you will find it actually consists
of a series of separate sounds arising and passing away one after another”

“If it’s an emotion or mental state, you’ll notice that it’s actually made of a series
of closely related but different mental states, arising and passing in waves”
“If someone sneezes, as the sound disappears, it may be immediately followed
by an image of a person sneezing. When that image passes, it might be
replaced by a thought about catching a cold. You can make any of these
objects your focus of attention. Because of mental pliancy, whenever the causal
sequence comes to an end, your attention will always return to the breath,
instead of being captured by something new”

It’s normal to enter into flow states. “Although jhana-like, this flow state is not
jhana. The main differences are that you have complete intentional control in
every moment, which you don’t have in jhana, and the objects of attention are
constantly changing”

Practices to Enhance Metacognitive Awareness

Choiceless attention
“The practice of choiceless attention involves allowing attention to move freely
in pursuit of the objects that arrive with the strongest intention to become
objects of attention”

“Most important, however, is the strong, continuous metacognitive quality of

awareness present as the objects of attention constantly change”

Meditating on dependent arising

“In this meditation, you follow mental events as they occur in sequence.
Specifically, consciousness of a sensation or thought (contact), is followed by
an affective response (feeling), leading to desire or aversion (craving), then to
the arising of an intention to act (‘becoming’), and finally to the action itself
(‘birth’)”

“Let’s say your ears are producing a buzzing sound. You can direct your
attention toward that auditory sensation and observe the associated feeling of
displeasure that arises. Then, you notice that a desire for the sound to go away
arises in response to the unpleasantness. But because you’re sitting in
meditation, the only option for escape is to direct attention elsewhere, so you
observe that an intention to redirect arises”
Practices to help achieve physical pliancy and meditative joy
Finding the Still Point and Realizing the Witness
“Allow your attention to dwell on the difference between your mind’s inner
stillness and the teeming activity in your body and the world. Inevitably, you
start to notice that the mind really isn’t that quiet after all, except when
compared to everything outside of it. At the same time, you’ll become aware of
an even greater stillness at the core of your moment-to-moment experience.
This is called the Still Point. Find that Still Point, and make its stillness the focus
of your attention. Relegate everything else to peripheral awareness”

The Luminous Jhanas

This are the jhanas that are started by having attention or awareness on the
inner light.

There is an appendix about jhanas in TMI and a personal one in this summary.

Stage Nine: Mental and physical pliancy and calming

the intensity of meditative joy
Meditating on the Mind
“Essentially, you’re fusing attention and awareness. To achieve this, you
expand your scope of attention until it includes everything in your field of
conscious awareness, both extrospective and introspective.”

“Expand your scope of attention gradually at first. (…) Make sure that
everything within that scope is perceived with equal clarity before moving
ahead.”

Awareness should be mostly metacognitive. Attention and awareness should

fuse together.

“As you observe the mind with great clarity, you start distinguishing between
two fundamental states of consciousness. The first is where the mind is active.
Specific sensations and mental objects are being projected into the field of
conscious awareness by unconscious sub-minds. The other is a state of
comparative rest, where no cognizable objects are present, and the space-like
field of conscious awareness lies still and empty. Your objective is to investigate
the nature of the mind by comparing the active and resting/receptive states.”

Stage Ten: Tranquility and Equanimity

There are not new practices at this Stage, you are in perfect shape to do the
practices mentioned previously.

Jhanas
General info
The key to jhanas is love, happiness, joy. If you feel unconditional love towards
everyone there is a nice chance that you’ll be able to practice jhanas.

At first jhanas are very light, so there will be thoughts and peripheral
awareness. Actually, it’s usually possible to talk while in your deepest jhana.

Hard/deep jhanas are slightly different:

There is no intentional control anymore, things unfold naturally and skillfully.

There will be no thoughts or peripheral awareness (just inner light, inner sound,
and if appropriate space/consciousness/emptiness/etc).

How to navigate the jhanas

The first jhana comes by itself by Stage 7 or 8. There is pleasant sensations or
straight up intense pleasure without a cause. It’s an intense experience.

Usually pleasure will start on the hands or face, and as practice gets
accumulated, it will spread out to the entire body.

The first jhana is characterized by attention on the pleasure and by joy.

Then second jhana can be accessed by letting the pleasure fall into
awareness. Instead of a small zone of intense pleasure, there is an open
awareness of intense pleasure. This is still accompanied by joy.

As time goes by, joy naturally gets unsatisfying and is replaced by a calm
happiness and softer pleasure and energy sensations. This is third jhana.

Finally, the happiness and pleasure will get unsatisfying and the fourth jhana
will arise. It is characterized by equanimity (neutrality, stability, composure,
etc.), by a “pleasure” that feels quite neutral and hard to describe, and by wide
and distorted sensations of space.

As focus is set in the distorted sensations of space, sometimes the sensations

feel very wide and start pushing the common notions of space, until it finally
breaks and a huge space appears in front. This is the fifth jhana, the jhana of
infinite space. Now the focus should be on slowly expanding the space until it
feels unlimited and all encompassing.

Alternatively, instead of focusing on the distorted sensations of space, you can

feel the space around you and try to expand it in a simple way until you get the
same sensation of the space getting way too wide. It’s better to keep it simple,
either push the space towards the front, or push them towards both sides at the
same time like extending your arms. They key is to get a sensation of
expansion and space, until it breaks and the huge space appears.

The sixth jhana, the jhana of infinite consciousness, is accessed by focusing

on the awareness of the space, the sensations of being conscious of the space.
Then it’s noticed that awareness or consciousness of the space is limitless and
it replaces the sensation of limitless space. This limitless consciousness or
awareness is the characteristic of sixth jhana.

The seventh jhana, the jhana of no-thingness, happens very naturally. It’s a
feeling of a very big emptiness or void. It’s not as big as the sensations of the
fifth or sixth jhana. It feels like you are at night in your kitchen, and it’s so dark
that you don’t see anything, but you can feel that there is no furniture or
appliances, it’s completely empty. This feeling of big emptiness is the seventh
jhana. The first few times it might be somewhat scary, but bear in mind that it’s
awesome progress and it’s completely safe, just like your home is.

Finally in the eighth jhana, the jhana of neither perception nor non-perception,
there is a hard to describe feeling that might start small but will eventually
encompass everything. It feels like you are perceiving and not perceiving at the
same time. But don’t worry, after the fifth jhana the next ones follow quite
naturally.

Cheatsheet of the material jhanas

Whole-body jhanas
1st jhana

Attention in the body.

Awareness of the body (including sensations associated with piti).

Awareness of joy and happiness/pleasure.

2nd jhana

Attention in the body, but in the background.

Awareness of the body (including sensations associated with piti).

Awareness of joy and happiness/pleasure, but in the foreground.

3rd jhana

Attention in the body, but in the background.

Awareness of the body (physical sensations associated with piti/joy are

displaced).

Awareness of happiness/pleasure, but in the foreground. They displace joy (the

mental state).

4th jhana

Attention to the meditation object may cease in the fourth jhana, or it may
continue to have a faint presence in consciousness.
Awareness of the body (physical sensations associated with piti/joy are
displaced).

There might be awareness of "pleasure" but it feels neutral. "Pleasure", if there

is any, feels kind of neutral and hard to describe.

You let go of happiness, so only equanimity remains.

Pleasure jhanas
1st jhana

Attention in pleasure.

(Optional) Awareness of energetic sensations (associated with piti).

Awareness of joy and happiness.

2nd jhana

Attention, nothing.

Awareness of pleasure.

(Optional) Awareness of energetic sensations (associated with piti).

Awareness of joy and happiness.

3rd jhana

Attention, nothing.

Awareness of pleasure. Physical sensations associated with piti/joy are

displaced.

Awareness of happiness. It displaces joy (the mental state).

4th jhana

Attention, nothing.

There might be awareness of "pleasure" but it feels neutral. "Pleasure", if there

is any, feels kind of neutral and hard to describe.

You let go of happiness, so only equanimity remains.

Luminous jhanas
1st jhana

Attention in inner light and inner sound.

Awareness of joy and happiness.

2nd jhana

Attention, nothing.

Awareness of inner light and inner sound.

Awareness of joy and happiness.

3rd jhana

Attention, nothing.

Awareness of inner light and inner sound.

Awareness of pleasure. Physical sensations associated with piti/joy are

displaced.

Awareness of happiness (calm). It displaces joy (the mental state, a bit too
active).

4th jhana

Attention, nothing.

Awareness of inner light and inner sound.

There might be awareness of "pleasure" but it feels neutral. "Pleasure", if there

is any, feels kind of neutral and hard to describe.

You let go of happiness, so only equanimity remains.