Aleksander Hansen

Body

1. You do not need to sit or lay down in any special posture. There are only two conditions for posture: 1—it must be stable; 2—you must not fall asleep. Either close your eyes or leave them slightly open;
2. When observing breathing, do not try to control it;
3. When observing the body, scan body parts or observe the whole body;
4. When relaxing the body, you can make small adjustments to your posture.

Feelings

1. When evoking joy, think or observe something joyful, for example, the fact that you are alive;
2. When evoking gratitude, think whom and for what are you grateful;
3. When evoking unpleasant feeling, think about something painful, irritating, provoking, hurtful, depressing. Do not name the feeling;
4. When embracing oneself, imagine that someone who loves you embraces you or that the universe itself embraces you tenderly. Imagine, that you are the most lovable and loved child in the universe.

Thoughts, Impulses, Concentration

1. When observing thinking, do not cling to any particular thought; just observe the fact that there is thinking active in the mind. Thinking includes words and images. If you get carried away by your thought, just observe that you got carried away, that is no problem;
2. When observing impulses, observe impulses that are pulling or pushing you towards or from something in the planes of the thinking, speech, or action, for example: body itching, some urgent thing to be done you suddenly remembered, or some proliferating worry;
3. When focusing the mind, focus it on some constant sound, body sensation, body part, or anything else real or imagined. The goal is to sustain deep, continuous laser focus on it, although without straining;
4. When releasing the mind, let go of the weight of the previous focus and let the mind drift. Sometimes, one can start seeing very realistic visions in this stage. If they appear, do not cling to them, do not try to control them, nor think they are something special. This part is usually a transition into Insight Meditation.

Contemplations

1. When contemplating the impermanence, contemplate any phenomena in the mind, body, or the world;
2. Do not do “letting go” as an action, that is not possible. Only observe it happening if it happens, but if not, that is also OK;
3. By contemplating the transformative nature of everything, you can try to contemplate the whole world or some particular phenomena, like birth and death, appearance and disappearance of anything, like cloud, flower, tree, animal, water, feeling, thought, anything… Observe if and where it begins or ends, try to grasp the true boundaries and whether they exist;
4. By contemplating “no-self” nature, contemplate oneself through the lenses of previously contemplated impermanence and transformative nature of everything. Take no word as truth. Investigate. Again, and again.