How strong is your concentration in meditation right now?

Like physical muscles, your attention muscles atrophy unless they get repeatedly exercised.

Even as your practice may progress to anchor-less forms of meditation, like open awareness or glimpse practices, it's helpful to return to attentional training often.

Again, the reason here is that as soon as you forget that you are meditating and slip into unconscious thought patterns, then you've ceased to be mindful during that time. It could be for several minutes before you realize that you’re thinking about trimming your toenails instead of meditating.

So training the ability to stay zoned in on a single object and have the metacognitive power to recognize when you've been captured by thought is essential.

Here's a brief 5-stage roadmap for progress in training your attention:

Stage 1: Directed Attention - You're able to focus on a chosen object. In other words, you can consciously direct your attention wherever you want it to go, if only for some small amount of time.

Stage 2: Resurgent Attention - You're able to quickly recover from distractions. So instead of being lost in thought for a few minutes, you might recognize it after 15 or 30 seconds and return to the object of meditation.

Stage 3: Close Attention - Although you may have other distractions or thoughts, the object of meditation is never completely forgotten. Background chatter and noise continue, for example, but you're aware of the breath in the background the whole time.

Stage 4: Continuous Attention - You can maintain concentration on a single object for extended periods of time.

Stage 5: Single-pointed Attention - You're completely enraptured by the object of meditation to the exclusion of all else; attention to the object becomes effortless, and you no longer feel like a separate subject viewing the object of attention, as all that exists in your awareness is the object itself. This might feel like you are actually merging with the object, and from here you can easily enter the states of meditative ecstasy (jhanas).

Which stage are you at now?

Now, this map brings the temptation to start to judge your practice or grow frustrated, thinking you ought to be at a certain stage. The stages here are just to help you understand your mind and practice better, and are by no means the sole objective of meditation training.

Stage 5 can take hours of consistent daily training or even a silent retreat environment, but we can still train and aspire for these impressive levels of concentration in a more bite-sized practice. And even having the abilities of Stage 2, being able to recover your attention quickly, can make for much quicker progress in other areas of practice. In fact, I'm quite certain Stage 2 would put you in the top 1% of strongest attention muscles in the developed world, and is not an easy feat in the modern world without extensive practice.

P.S. — If you’re serious about starting or deepening your meditation practice, check out the FitMind meditation app.