Stages of Meditation for Beginners

Stages

• Stage 1: Initial: beginning your practice. It may take about 10 hours to get familiar with your breath.

• Stage 2: Familiarized Breath: You are familiar with your breath and can maintain unbroken continuous awareness of your breath from beginning to end.

• Stage 3: Familiarized Body and Mind: get to know your body and mind.

• Stage 4: Deepening: Seeing patterns and causes.

• Stage 5: Insight: Starting to realize your own ignorance and contradictions such as believing you know what you do not know. Gaining insight about yourself, your life and others. Experiencing interconnectednessa and deep gratitude. Starting to learn lessons from your meditation and daily living.

Note

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.

You are overwhelmed by mental chatter in the early 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 and eventually benefit from mental chatter in the later stages.

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.