Meditation: The 4 Primary Skills (3/4)

By Paul Cavel

Part 1: Making Your Body Conscious

Part 2: Expanding Your Awareness

Part 3: Creating a Stream of Consciousness

As established in Part 2, presence and awareness are prerequisites for letting go.

Directing Your Focus

Focus guides your presence and awareness to a particular subject or task of your choice. You could think of the lens of a camera which, as you adjust the aperture, the focus shifts from the flower in the foreground to the mountain in the background. When the mind is floating or dissociating, you will not be able to create any significant or sustainable change; conversely, when your mind is present, aware and focused, you can. Over time and with diligent practice, your focus can transform from a hard, laser-like type to a soft, relaxed kind of focus.

Generally, the Western approach to focusing the mind is hard: you are actively trying to make something happen by applying force of will. This approach is often accompanied by the idea of pushing everything else away in order to focus on the single subject of your attention. This hardness generates tension, which takes energy to maintain.

The Water Method applies the focus differently. You simply guide your mind to the subject while letting go of all others. The softer you become, the more relaxed the mind and body can become. You must train your mind to rest in this space as it will otherwise easily fixate on and follow any thoughts that come up. When this happens — and indeed, it will happen as the mind loves to journey — simply and softly guide your mind back to the subject on which you wish to focus. This aspect of continuously refocusing the mind is what enables concentration.

How to Concentrate

Concentration is the means by which your focus can stay on point and remain continuous. The degree to which you can concentrate determines the results you will gain from your meditation practice or any undertaking in life. Concentration by force of will can only be achieved in short bursts since it creates strain that inevitably causes stress under which the concentration breaks. The softer the approach, the better the results. Yet if your focus is not sufficiently developed, then you will drift in and out — good ole spacing out! In order to generate a stream of continuous concentration (one of the early definitions of meditation), you must develop focus; focus requires awareness; awareness requires presence. Each aspect is built upon the previous and opens the door to the next.

Cyclical Learning

All Taoist energy arts adhere to a cyclical learning progression as the driver of personal growth. You cannot fully and completely develop one aspect of meditation — in body, qi or mind — without the others being developed in tandem. You begin with presence practices and train them to a certain degree, not to the point of perfection (which is not possible anyway), but until you can clearly identify some level of progress. Next, you continue around the circle to awareness practices, then to developing your focus and finally to your ability to concentrate.

When you revisit presence practices, your ability to be aware, to focus and to concentrate have also grown, and can amplify and deepen your ability to become present. Naturally, it is impossible to completely separate the four primary skills as they are intrinsically linked. By engaging or paying attention to one aspect, you will automatically engage all others to some degree.

All effective Taoist Meditation and energy arts practice requires you to work around the circle, time and time again, slowly sinking deeper into the depths of your mind and your being with each revolution. Yes, this means that even the most advanced practitioners repeatedly return to the beginning; although it is more like a spiral because you can never really return to the exact same position from which you began. The process fundamentally changes your position. The depth you achieve is not governed by the practices themselves, but rather your patience and stamina from the circular nature of training regularly over time.

Sign up for any online or in-person course and receive access to my Taoist Breathing & Meditation online course — 23 guided practices on whole-body breathing and Outer Dissolving available to stream 24/7.

In Part 4 we’ll consider how and why postural alignments and breathing are incorporated into meditation to bring about the experience of wu wei ... coming soon!