This question came up in the Online 10-day Retreat Nov 3, 2020, guided by Delson Armstrong. Day 0 was part of a daily 30-minute discussion on the suttas, the Dhamma talk and reflections.
(Slightly edited to improve readability)
Sometimes you five R, which means that you don’t have to Repeat. So long as you are staying with your object of meditation (OoM), so long as your attention, your awareness, is on it, you don’t have to Repeat. 6R’s are only used whenever you see that the mind was distracted. If you find that there are thoughts in the background of your mind, while you have your awareness on the OoM, you don’t have to 6R those. They will go away on their own, because they have no attention that will feed them. But whenever your attention is no longer on your object, you 6R. It’s always the same steps, and it’s a flow as you said. It happens in about three, four seconds at the most. As soon as you Recognized you were distracted, you don’t have to verbalize in your head ‘Oh, I Recognize’. You already know that you got distracted. Knowing that you were distracted, that’s recognition, that’s Recognizing. In putting your attention to the Relax of the 6R process, you have Released your attention from the distraction, and put your attention now on Relaxing the tension in the mind and in the body.
Now you’ve already done the first two Right Efforts, which is the preventing and the abandoning. And now bringing up the wholesome state, you come to your Smile and you come back to the Feeling, Metta (Loving-kindness), Karuna (Compassion), whatever it is. It’s always the same steps in the progression, but the Repeat is only whenever you get distracted again.
