Welcome!

Welcome, David! I wondered where you'd disappeared to. Glad to have you back in the conversation.

Boy, I'm relieved to hear that the story continued-- you seemed a welcome sane voice on KFD, and I had a vague memory of last comments involving chronic pain...

"Roomy"

Hello, I'm Mark. I used to keep a journal on KFD. I had the good fortune to start working with Chris several months ago, and I'm thinking I'll start a journal here.

I'll try to outline my practice bio, since it's pretty long: Minister's son. 1st A&P at 15. It was Very Christian. 2nd A&P around 1971, MDA. Converted to Zen and became a believer with an obligation to meditate. It took about 5 years before I caught on that sitting was connected to what was happening in my body. Slow learner.

Driven by fear of adult life and Buddhist hells, and hoping for Buddhist salvation and some social success, I went to a lot of retreats. But in actual practice, meditation turned out to be a way to engage this formidable tangle of physical, mental and social knots, dissociation and delayed development. In a nutshell .

After a few more years struggling with on-and-off practice, an inner sweetness starting showing up that contradicted my lack of self worth. I think by that time I had worked up some of the strata of delayed development and started to reach the strata of developmental enlightenment. I wanted to go to retreats again in the worst way, but was bootstrapping a career and family life and could barely fit any in. I did keep up a dedicated daily practice of an hour every morning for 10 years. I think if I hadn't done that I would have required meds to keep up a responsible life.

Around 3 years ago, my practice had been floundering until I had another A&P at a metta retreat, then discovered KFD. My practice felt alive for a couple of years until I noticed that my journal had been saying the same thing over and over for months while everyone else was blazing thru the paths. When Chris generously took me on as a student I lost some of my interest in maps and more interested in just where my practice would go. Sounds like a good segue to a practice journal.

Hi Mark. Enjoy! (Seriously.)

Hi Mark! I hope you this is a good forum for you. How is your practice now?

Thanks! I was afraid to post hear because of the high level of practice. But I figured it will hold my practice to a higher standard. And the Buddha said that successful practice requires good company. So thanks, I really appreciate it.

Ona, the combination of Enjoy and Seriously piques my interest.

David, I'll start a practice journal and and describe it there.

Mark Peacock wrote: Ona, the combination of Enjoy and Seriously piques my interest.

"Enjoy" was largely in response to your slightly woeful biography. Something that's been immensely helpful to me is to remember to cultivate a sense of joy and wonder towards the practice itself. Be it slow, fast, up, down, painful, blissful - what an amazing thing the mind is doing! How strange and curious all these experiences. Whatever will happen next? How cool!

It can be really easy to get into a "I will struggle through this miserable practice if it kills me" attitude, especially when things are not pleasant or blissy. Remembering to have fun (weird fun perhaps!) with it is a very useful attitude. Pragmatically it helps prevent getting overly caught up in aversion or self-pity when things aren't smooth sailing.

And I agree with Chris - you have plenty of experience under your belt. Sometimes a deep breath and a fresh determination is all that's needed.

Thank you, Chris. Whenever you have said something like that, it mostly goes in one ear and out the other. I think because I haven't had the high level experiences people describe, and because meditation hasn't transformed my psychological and especially social functioning the way I hoped. (And affirmation teflon.) But the next time I sit, I'll try deliberatley affirming my practice like you suggest and see if I can celebrate!

Ona, thanks. First day here and I've got enough practice advice to keep me busy for days!

Hello all,

As an intro to myself, here is a little bio about me and my journey...

Brought up and living in the UK - so apologies in advance for my UK spelling!
Prior to studying Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism via the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) I had studied Spiritual Healing via a non-denominational governing body called 'National Federation of Spiritual Healers', and decided a 'formal' meditation practice might be helpful so joined the local Buddhist (NKT) meditation class.

Felt the Buddhist philosophy reflected much of what I had already come to believe but also gave me new insights - which I was delighted about!

After a couple of long retreats (6 months+ in 2000 + 2001), I messed up at the end of the second one (samatha retreat) - by pushing so hard I ended up with an energy imbalance and also by breaking a vow (the latter being the most terrible according to the ruckus that ensued!). Long-story-short that was the end of my affiliation with the NKT (just at the point when I was finally ready to say "I'm a Buddhist" haha).

The chakra imbalance, and a hefty amount of resentment at how things were handled by my teacher, meant I didn't meditate much for about 8 years.

In 2012 I tried to get back to doing some serious samatha practice but although it went well I found I was a bit lost and started looking online for help and knowledge. I found Kenneth Folks Dharma, am now reading MCTB, and although I'm still trying to decipher their process/maps/etc. I can see there is a whole lot more to samatha practice than I had been taught previously.

Found this forum (via a topic by Chris at KFD's forum), and can see some of the people I had noticed as being particularly clued-up on the KFD forum are here.

It is nice to see people here from various traditions, including magick traditions, and the breadth of knowledge across disciplines is impressive (and potentially useful, I feel).

That will do for now, and I hope this goes well and you get to know more about me - and me, you - during our discussions.

Colin

Hi Colin - welcome.

It may well be a very common thing to have a rupture with an intensive spiritual practice followed by a long break before rediscovering things in a fresh way - been there myself and I know friends who've done the same.

Cheers, Ona

Hi Colin, very interesting practice bio, thanks for sharing. Wow, two 6 month retreats!

fyi, y'all-- today I am "welcome, guest" and my password is an "invalid token"...

addendum: this is only if I follow the path via the 'recent topics' tab-- my usual route; if I backtrack through DR topics, and go to the members-only section, I'm already logged in, and those topics appear. very strange...

yeah, russell and I have had intermitten strange log-in moments.

Hello all,

I found myself perusing this site and saw chris' invitation, so i applied for membership. Thanks for the acceptance. I've been travellng in thailand with mywifefor the past month on a late honeymoon. Just came back from spending the day with a bunch of rescued majestic elephants. Some may know me from kfd or the dho or the hamilton project blog. I'm currently at a place i find hard not to get poetic about, and as my poetry skills are limited to limericks and rhyming odes to things, i dont talk about it anymore, one because i dont know what to say, and two, it keeps changing, and i can use the word 'sublter' only so many times before it seems silly. A practice seems nonexistent, as the mind is triggered to pay closer attention by random things (like currently with bloated stomach from too many antibitoics in my system). These days there seems much more interest in concepts and experience of chi, meridians, sen lines as i've dedicated the past year to learning tcm and shiatsu and just recently did an intensive thai yoga massage course for 12 days in the tradition of asokananda, a german fellow who would dissapear into the hill jungles of northern thailand and practice mahasi noting nonstop for months at a time. Vipassana and metta were key factors in learning to give such a treatment. This seems to have triggered more interest in such a direction. There is a lot more happening in life that i lack words to describe, but this is where i am in a very small nutshell.

Thanks again for the acceptance,

Nikolai (nick)

Hi Nick - nice to have you join in. The honeymoon sounds like it was a pleasant adventure. Cheers, Ona