#130 Stable awareness OR trance?

     Many strive to focus attention on one object eg the breath, to stabilize awareness. Such forced mental effort goes hand-in-hand with forced physical effort, "breaking through barriers" of pain. Stable one-pointed awareness can indeed be achieved by some using this marine-style effort. However, those of us who have (some variant of) attention-deficit, and or low pain threshold, and all of us when we have a lot going on in our lives, are not marine material.

     Hallmarks of stabilized awareness include the end of "self-talk" (the obvious loud stuff at least) and sitting with complete comfort (even for prolonged periods). Both of these are major reliefs, so there's subtle euphoria, and the tendency to think "I've got it!" It's nice, but actually only a small, early step, in the lifelong journey of mindfulness.

     The stabilized awareness one cultivates with mindfulness meditation, is not lost by moving physically, looking around, etc. If doing these things ends the state ("breaks the spell"), it was only self-hypnosis - a good hypnotist can help get you there in 10 minutes.

     We are trying to become progressively more mindful - awake! This is not a quick fix, but slow, thorough, stable, transformational learning. We can achieve this through skillful mindfulness practice that is unforced, but continuous throughout our waking hours.

Photo: MABurney   www.dpreview.com