Levels of Practice

The book I'm reading about meditation outlines several levels of practice:  arriving, observation, opening and being. At the level of arriving, you are basically spending your time confronting the five "hindrances" desire, aversion, sloth, restlessness and doubt. Basically these are elemental emotions that stand in the way of a clear awareness and perception.  The book also refers to them as "energies".  Once you begin to become accustomed to working with these emotions, then you reach the second level of practice, observation.  You are a little bit more detached and able to witness whatever you are experiencing without coloring the experience with thoughts of labeling or judgment.  You are really beginning to develop your powers of observation.  Once you have developed these skills, you can use them to go deeper.  You enter the third level, that of opening.  In this level you begin to listen to your heart and it's emotions. It can be fairly painful.  You become familiar with your emotional states and thought patterns, uncovering layers of understanding.  Once you intimately understand the laws that govern the processes of the body and mind, you move into the last level, being.  You become deeply connected to a process of flowing change, the river of time.  Everything is impermanent, things arise in your awareness and then they are gone, like bubbles in a brook.  Everything in your experience does this. Once you realize this, you can let go of trying to grasp things that will only disappear, which leads to suffering.  Those are the basic stages and elements of meditation.