Stages of Meditation for Beginners
Stages
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Stage 1: Initial: Learning to notice your breathing sensations. Learning the art of maintaining unbroken continuous awareness of your one breath from beginning to end. (It is like connecting two dots, which are the beginning and the end.) When you can easily repeat the unbroken continuous awareness, you complete the stage 1.
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Stage 2: Breath and Body: Becoming familiar with your breath and body.
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Stage 3: Mind: get to know your mind.
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Stage 4: Deepening: Seeing patterns and causes.
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Stage 5: Insight: Starting to realize your own contradictions, e.g. the things that you try to eliminate in your meditation are your own creations. Gaining insight about yourself, your life and others. Also start to realize what you do not know. Experiencing interconnectedness and deep gratitude. Starting to learn lessons from your meditation and daily living.
Progress
As you move from the initial stages to later stage, you breathing experience becomes richer, clearer, deeper. As you further move to later stages, not just know your breathing, the the phenomena, but start to see the cause. Eventually you will see insight beyond your beliefs and knowledge.
In early stage, you are only aware of only what you know. In later stage, you are aware of both what you know and what you do not know. For example, in stage 5, you may start to realize what you do not know about your breath.
In the early stages, mental chatter often hinder the practice. You start to benefit from mental chatter in later stages. Mental chatter will be less frequent in the later stage. (As you make progress, you will realize that you are creating your mental chatter. This realization will lead you to create less mental chatter.)
Your time spent on being on volition increases as you progress from the early to later stage. (In other words, your time spent on being on autopilot decreases as you progress. In early stage, you are learning to be rather than doing. From mid stage, you are learning to be on volition rather than on autopilot.)
In early stage, you either engage in a mental activity or just watch it. In later stage, you can do both.
In early stage, you may feel meditation is unnatural. In later stage, you start to notice it is your innate capacity.
As you move from the initial stages to later stage, you start to gain the second kind of knowledge, knowledge of self.
As you move toward the later stages, gratitude toward others and the world arises naturally in you.
Breath attention span indicates progress in the early stages of meditation. In later stage, deepening insight indicates progress.
Measuring Progress
You can measure your attention span or insight to monitor progress of your meditation. Attention span indicates progress if you are in early stages of meditation. Deepening of insight is the indicator of progress in later stages of meditation.