HI Mark,
You're welcome. Thank you also for your practice and for contributing here. It's another complementary aspect of community learning and meditation.
Satipatthana seems to include mindfulness off the cussion e.g. noting of body position.
Yes, awareness of how the mind is establishing itself and on what bases mind can come into being happens all the time, but the cushion is like a simple lab to see "What is mind? What's it doing? What am I? What am I doing?" and then starting to know "What's worth doing and why?"
The relation between satipatthana, anapanasati, vipassana is still confusing!Here is a crack at putting my understanding on "paper" : Anapanasati is a technique within satipatthana which develops samatha and vipassana. Different meditation styles develop samatha and vipassana in different ways. Vipassana meditation stresses vipassana. Noting is a technique within vipassana.
Yes, I agree: ānapānasāti is a technique of developing equanimous concentration step-by-step: training to attend a single object with joy and comfortable until finally the mind may be satisfied with an affectless calm state of attention.
And yes, different meditation technics work with different mental states. Some people have a good deal of distress and distraction and so breathing meditation biologically works to develop meditation as a pleasant feel practice. Some people deal with trauma and need mettā meditation. Some people are perhaps "high-brow" so they may need a practice that at first gratifies their intellect and need for attainment/advancement. Some people are very facts oriented and so noting Mahasi-style is very good for just-the-facts.
And is "noting a technique within vipassana"? I would say that noting is a concentration practice; it is asking the mind to stay with one activity, even if that activity is distraction: the object of attention is following the mind without labeling the mind as "distracted". This can be a very compassionate practice if one is berating oneself for "being distracted". Here we can tell them mind, "Perfect! Move as much as you want. We're noting."
So attention to breathing and attention to noting are two ways to see what the mind is up to and how often it is inclined to move around and to make things up, including strong feeings.
Once we get familiar with how the mind is moving and if we do it in a friendly, accepting way, we can become less reactive to the mind.
Once we see that we are becoming less reactive to the mind's movements, we see the mind is moving a bit less.
This is like the pull
reflect reflex in a dog: pull hard on the leash, dog will pull back. Stand still and eventually the dog will stop pulling. So we try not to pull against the mind, but just watch it-- this is what we do when we take our minds "for a walk" by noting or breathing meditation: we're practicing letting the mind show us what it's up to and we're letting it de-escalate itself by merely watching it.
Then the mind naturally takes up "What am I?", "What is this?" with a natural curiosity, without being threatening or de-railed by its own arisings.
All practices will benefit from daily conduct that leaves a person without worry and remorse (high bar); so this is why a meditation practice that is reliable is also said to be beholden to ethicial discipline and efforts to build on ethical discipline.
So how's it going?