Insight Meditation 14

CAUTION: Development of skill in this technique involves intentionally triggering unpleasant feeling tone, in this way meditation can become very real. Be cautious and only do this with guidance from a skilled teacher and/or appropriate training in softening, samadhi and insight.

The MIDL Method of Lengthening the Out-Breath is the training of calming the intellectual functions of the mind by relaxing the effort that underlies them. You cultivate this skill by slowly releasing an out-breath through your nose and abandoning mental effort with that out-breath. 

The experience of this could be summarised as using the relaxation of your out-breath to relax the frontal lobes of your brain. Once understood, this method is used during seated meditation to calm the meditative hindrances and to abandon and decondition unskillful thought process in daily life such as defensive or obsessive thinking.

Meditation Instructions:

1. Take your meditation posture.
2. Ground awareness within the experience of your body as it sits.
3. Take a slow breath in through your nose, let a slow breath out and observe any feeling of mental relaxation/release.
4. Allow the breath to draw in, then as it goes back out slightly lengthen that out-breath, slow it down. 
5. Notice the increased relaxation effect.
6. Keep repeating this process and learn what it means to relax all mental participation with any thoughts that are present.

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Application During Meditation:

1. Take your meditation posture.
2. Ground awareness within the experience of your body as it sits.
3. Caution: Bring a difficult memory to mind and observe within your body, breathing and mind. Observe any tension with your mind, the response within your body and the acceleration of the thinking process.
4. Notice its unpleasantness, sense of unease (vedana) as a flavour or taste of the physical response.
5. Take a few slow breaths out through your nose and relax all mental participation with any thoughts that are present.
6. Repeat this process, learn to observe the physical response to the difficult memory (kaya) as a reflection of your mind (citta). Learn to separate out the feeling tone (vedana) and observe what happens when you soften your relationship towards the underlying vedana.

• Observe the effect that slowing the out-breath through the nose has on the mind.
• Observe the effect that slowing the out-breath through the nose has on thinking.
• Observe how thinking dissolves with this mindful non-participation. 

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Tip: Start to apply this method in your seated meditation.

• Whenever your attention wanders off to thinking, acknowledge it, ground awareness within your body and then take one slow breath out through your nose to bring about mindful non-participation.

• When beginning mindfulness of breathing slowly breathe out through your nose, then relax and wait for the breath to come in by itself, autonomously. 

• In daily life observe habitual thinking patterns and let a slow breath out through your nose to mentally relax and withdraw your participation in them.

You are ready to progress to Insight 15: Relaxing the Eyelids when:

• You understand the relationship between your letting a slow breath out through your nose and the experience of relaxation of effort & calming within your mind.

• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
• Insight Timer App: Guided Meditation.