The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness

This sequence is so important it’s worth committing to memory—the untrained mind produces distractions that lead to forgetting, which results in mind-wandering

In meditation, we work with both attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness, the two main practice objectives of meditation.

Strong peripheral awareness helps tone down the self-centered tendencies of attention, making perception more objective. But when peripheral awareness fades, the way we perceive things becomes self-centered and distorted.

You simply cannot develop mindfulness without stable attention. Until you have at least a moderate degree of stability, “mindfulness practice” will consist mostly of mind-wandering, physical discomfort, drowsiness, and frustration.

Awakening is an accident, but continued practice will make you accident-prone.

A helpful phrase to remember when dealing with distractions of any kind is, let it come, let it be, let it go.

Being fully present means being aware of it, but not engaging in its content.

The simple act of consistently sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation object, day after day, is the essential first step from which everything else in the Ten Stages flows.

Once you have moved through the four steps and attention is restricted to the breath at the nose, start silently counting each breath.

The rule is never more than ten, never less than five.