Checkbox
Your Thoughts

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About

Checkbox Your Thoughts is a concentration practice made for the Western mind: concrete, countable, and a little bit playful. You have one object, a blank box, and one job: notice when your mind leaves it.

How a sitting works

1. Rest your attention on the empty box, and on the feeling of each breath.
2. Each time a thought pulls you away, tap the screen once. Don't fight it and don't follow it. Just count it.
3. At your limit (four or five thoughts) the box nudges you. Stop, and draw a check in it with your finger. Slowly. Feel the ink.
4. Your round is written into a line at the top, one dash per thought, and a fresh box draws itself. Begin again.
5. When you are done, press and hold "hold to end" at the bottom of the screen. (A quick tap there still counts as a thought.)

Quietly, the app also logs the time between your thoughts and the length of the whole sitting. The stretches between thoughts are the real training data.

Rating a sitting

Continuity is how unbroken your focus on the box was, from 0 to 100%. Completeness is how undivided your attention felt: the whole mind on the box while feeling every breath, nothing left over. Undivided attention is close to what people mean by being awake to the present. When the mind simply stays anchored in the body, it is said to be pacified.

The map: the Elephant Path

Contemplative traditions describe concentration as a path of stages, pictured as a monk leading an elephant, with a monkey of distraction that slowly falls behind. This app is inspired by that map as presented in Daniel P. Brown's Pointing Out the Great Way. The full map goes further than what is here; Checkbox Your Thoughts focuses on the first nine stages, summarized below in brief.

In the beginning you are training a muscle: the muscle of reorienting attention, bringing it back to the object again and again. Every tap is a rep.

1. Stabilizing the mind. Learn to place attention on the object on purpose, and to notice that you have wandered.
2. Continuous stabilizing. Attention stays a little longer, and you catch wandering sooner.
3. Habitual stabilizing. You lose the object less often and return faster. Dullness and drifting become visible.
4. Near stabilizing. Long stretches without forgetting the object; dullness and scattering lose ground.
5. Habituation. The restless monkey no longer leads. Effort softens and sitting starts to feel good.
6. Pacifying. Pulls from the senses quiet down and attention is steady.
7. Thorough pacifying. The mind rests with little effort; subtle disturbances rarely arise.
8. Becoming one-pointed. Attention is nearly unbroken and takes almost no effort.
9. Entering samadhi. Mind and object are unified; concentration is stable and effortless.

Illustrated stage-by-stage infographics are coming in a later version.

Checkbox Your Thoughts is an independent app. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the author or publisher mentioned above, and it is not a substitute for a teacher or for medical or mental health care.