You’re in a safe, quiet place. You’ve set your mood by remembering a nice hike you had where you were eating lunch next to a waterfall. You close your eyes, and very gently, turn your attention to the sensations of your breath at the nose.

In Stage 2, what will happen is that within a few seconds, your attention will move off the breath to something else – a noise, a thought about what you are going eat later today, an assignment you haven’t completed. This is forgetting, where the meditation object (your breath), disappears completely from your awareness.

Your job in Stage 2 is to notice when that has happened, and gently bring your attention to the breath. No judgement, no bearing down, no trying to hold attention on the breath against all invaders. When you notice that your attention on the breath is gone, think to yourself, “Yay! I noticed” and pat yourself on the head. You are training your brain to notice when it forgets. You are not trying to achieve a “clear mind”.

TMI refers to the period after forgetting as “mind wandering”. When this happens – and it is the major feature of this stage – you will not even know that you were meditating. At some point, however, you will remember, and that is the purpose of this Stage.

An alien thing you must try to do, and that was very difficult for me, is to keep peripheral awareness up during the meditation. Awareness is the total of sights, sounds, smells, thoughts in the theater of your mind. Attention is the “brightly lit” part of awareness. For people with strong powers of attention, they’ve usually come into this practice with attention being the center of their experience and no peripheral awareness at all. You’ve trained yourself to pay attention to your task, and everything else – the sights and sounds of the room or environment you are in are gone. Your awareness has collapsed to be just the part in attention.

TMI is quite different. You have to put your attention on something (the breath), while still being aware of the sounds and sensations of the environment. You might not be able to do this at first – I couldn’t. You start developing this ability by occasionally widening your awareness from the breath (where it has collapsed to be the same as attention) and “checking in” with the environment to make sure it’s still there. You are trying to keep you awareness open and wide independent of your attention.

Stage 2 is is just doing the forgetting/noticing/put-your attention-back-on-breath thing, while keeping peripheral awareness open as best as you can, in an slightly amused, non-judgemental way. A zillion times. The startling thing is how fast your brain can learn how to do this.