This is usually one of the easiest and shortest Stages. Have fun!

There are two objectives in Stage 5: overcome stable subtle dullness and develop a new skill in the movement and manipulation of the spotlight of attention.

The book emphasizes stable subtle dullness as a trap, and it is a trap, but it’s easily avoided. If you have been following the earlier advice in this companion about “trying to maintain the sharpest quality of sensation you can of breath at the nose”, you have essentially already been doing the Stage 5 dullness practice. If you are prone to dullness, you pretty much pay attention to sharpness in order to even finish Stage 4. In any event, in this Stage you will likely experience stable subtle dullness – a pleasant, kind of free-floating awareness with no sharpness of detail – once or twice but quickly recognize it for what it is; and then realize that if you keep trying to maintain sharpness of sensation there’s no reason and no way to get trapped in stable subtle dullness.

A noteworthy developing skill, is that you should be getting some part of the basic breath following process to be automatic. You had the beginnings of this in Stage 4 but might not have even recognized it. In Stage 5, this ability develops to the point where it can recognize subtle dullness and intervene. The book suggests that subtle dullness is automatically corrected for in Stage 5, but I don’t think this actually happens until Stage 6.

It is one of the themes of TMI is that you are slowly training a lower-level – subconscious – facility for tracking the breath. By the end of Stage 6 this ability is automatic but conscious, and by the end of Stage 7 it is automatic with no conscious intervention.

The other activity in Stage 5 is “body scanning”, which is mostly just fun, although I depart from the book’s instructions. The book has you looking all over the body for “sensations of the breath”, even in unlikely places like your big toe. Here I instead tend to recommend something closer to a traditional body scan, in which you move the “spotlight of attention” all over the body and just look for any sensation whatsoever. I also ask students to play with the size of the spotlight – narrowing it and widening it during a scan until you can look at the sensation over any area of the body, large or small.

Highly bodily aware people tend to find this practice quite enjoyable; people who live in their minds tend to find this more on the tedious side. In any event, you should do this. It sounds like a goofy skill to develop, but I assure you it is not. It vastly increases the connection between the body and conscious awareness, which you will need later. It is also closer to the traditional vipassana practices, which tend to be the path that triggers an Awakening.