Jigme Sengye's practice journal.

On Sunday night, I sat for 58 minutes. I was a bit drowsy when starting.

Sensation: I had some confusion as to how to note some things. I experience three different energy sensations, slow downward flowing sensations mostly from the head to the belly, fast vibratory sensations and a slow turning sensation that envelops the whole body or particular spots and doesn't feel vibratory at all. I noted these as flow, vibration and turning. Some mental chatter comes up.

Vedana: Difficulty noting the tone of physical sensations, except for minor lower back pain very little of it is distinctly one way or another. I paused the noting to pay closer attention to the sensations and ended up noting the bulk of sensation with indistinct tone as neutral.

Mind states: I was occasionally grasping for labels to note with. How do you label perception of physical sensations? I used "feeling".

Thoughts: Confusion! A lot of this was hard to distinguish from the previous category, I was grasping for labels.

All together in 3rd person perspective (Symphony): Most of what was there to note was physical sensations, stuff I was hearing from outside & a bit of my reaction to it & some planning thoughts & antsiness about duration of sitting.

I did another round of body sensation noting before stopping due to a midly aching right hip.

When I do concentration meditation, I can start when I'm drowsy and get a hit of mental energy after a few minutes of concentrating. This effect isn't present in the vipassana.

I've been doing a somewhat concentration-oriented qiqong sitting daily meditation since August of 2007. I'd also done other mostly Buddhist meditation practices for several years before that, but not on a daily basis. I felt my practice wasn't really going anywhere, though I was continuing daily practice for the simple enjoyment of meditation. I went to a 3 week Mahasi retreat in November, during which I mostly concentrated on noting physical sensations. Due to some problems I was having with my perception of my earlier practice conflicting with the noting of rising and falling of the abdomen, I stopped practicing vipassana when I got back home and went back to concentration practice. I spoke with Kenneth for an hour on Saturday and he very patiently guided me through a practice that involves separately noting physical sensations, feeling tone, mind states, thoughts and then all together. The practice is essentially what's described in the interview here: www.buddhistgeeks.com/2010/03/the-yogi-t...vestigating-reality/

This morning I sat for about 20 minutes and did a quick run through the 5 exercises. Body sensation and vedana were clear, the rest I did hurriedly as my alarm went off and not very well, with the same confusion as last night.

Tonight I sat for an hour. Physical sensations were clear, vedana was subtle, some unpleasant tone was clear and again some isn't clearly in any one of the three states. The sensations were ache in the lower back from slouching (unpleasant), qi flow (either mildly pleasant to neutral, can't tell), sitting sensations (neutral). Mind sates: I was confused, looking for what to note and then began to distinguish mind states. I was unusually drowsy (I noted this as a mind state). Thoughts: Having a hard time finding things to note, caught myself drifting into dreams a few times, drifted into memories, noted that as remembering, imaging, noted the searching for thoughts as investigation thoughts. Symphony: This ended up being mostly noting physical sensations. I repeated the exercises. Mind states made more sense, I noted hearing, seeing (minor closed eye random visual patterns), confusion investigation. While practicing I'm still not 100% clear on the difference betwee mind states & thoughts. Noting thoughts was still confusing. In symphony mode I forgot to note vedana (both times), and still ended up mostly noting physical sensations.

Hi jigmesengye,

Nice report. I'm looking forward to watching this develop over time. If you can, try to get in at least a brief entry here each day. When you and I talk again this weekend, we can clear up any questions you might have about the technique. I think a lot of it will clear up on its own as you become more familiar with the specific practices and gradually dis-embed from your experience.

Keep up the good work!

Kenneth

Hey man, keep posting...

Thanks Kenneth!

This morning I sat for 40 minutes, but didn't get a chance to write anything down afterward.

Tonight I sat for 55 minutes, starting at 8 PM to avoid the previous drowsiness. I was a bit distracted by thoughts during the body sensation phase. Next, vedana was easy to note, and there was lots of it at some points requiring faster noting to "hit" the sensations. In both cases it was mostly a mix of vibratory sensations (same types as before, more of the fast moving kind), shoulder tension & pressure from lower-back compression and the movements to relieve them. Mind states made sense, I was able to note them. I had to look for thoughts. The material I noticed to note was sparse in this phase. The symphony phase had lots to note. It was still mostly physical sensations, I did note vedana this time, though the noting process felt a bit awkward as there were two things at once to note, the physical sensation and the reaction to it. There was also some awkwardness in how to note thoughts in the 3rd person. This wasn't a problem with the noticing of the thoughts, but rather just the verbal formulation of that style of noting. I did a quick second round. My sitting was also interrupted for a few seconds at the 43 minute mark by getting antsy and getting up and checking the time, though I got back down and continued sitting.

Thanks for the encouragement Clayton.

Posting journal entries can compete a bit with sleep, but I did write yesterday's down despite not posting it:

Wednesday, April 7

Sat for 30 minutes in the morning, but didn't take notes after.

Night, sat for 58 minutes.
I was drowsy, especially towards the end. I did the exercises twice. I realized in mind states that it's easy to note the mind state of paying attention to seeing (closed eye), hearing and being in the mind state of feeling physical sensation (assuming that I'm supposed to do that in this exercise, I'm not entirely certain). It is much harder to find purely mental states (such as the emotional ones when one is not feeling emotional) other than investigation, imaging and mental verbalization. Again these are the ones where it is hard to distinguish from the thought category. Also, for what I suspect I'm missing in the mind states I'm not entirely sure what to look for. As for thoughts, I'd catch them and note them a few seconds after they had passed. Symphony: I kept on forgetting that I was doing this exercise in 3rd person & kept on instead just doing regular noting due to drowsiness.

This morning I sat for 19 minutes.

Tonight I sat for 49 minutes. I was surprisingly drowsy and was distracted as a result. This only occurs while I sit and not before or after. Physical sensations: lots of turning sensations, buzzing vibrations in the belly and pressure at certain points on the head. Also, the usual slumping and stretching back of the lower back. Vedana: the preceding energy sensations felt pleasant to neutral, the non-energetic sensations (back slumping and stretching, should tension & release, expansion & contraction of ribcage during breathing and some itching) felt unpleasant. The tones of these sensations were all mild. As with yesterday,in the mind state phase I noticed that I keep on noticing the same completely obvious states of paying attention to sensation (hearing, seeing, feeling physical sensation), plus investigation & that I must be missing something. I also noted the drowsiness. Either at this point or right after early during noting thoughts I realized I'm not noting emotions because I'm not noticeably having any. I had a brief emotional reaction to that & noted it. I forgot to do the symphony mode, restarted with sensation & then briefly did vedana & then remembered to do the symphony mode, this time with a voice recorder. It was an interesting experience, which also woke me up a little. I finished with mind states, but was too drowsy to continue until the alarm.

Kenneth corrected me on how to do the exercises on Saturday. I didn't write anything down about my practice over the weekend. I did a 30 minute sitting this morning and 56 minutes tonight. I found plenty to note in the physical sensation phase, and was able to note a lot more pleasant sensations by paying some attention to the breath, along with everything else, while noting vedana. My previous meditation practice involved ignoring the breath, so it changed things considerably to add that set of sensations back in, though there's still some resistance to not excluding the breath. Last week I was previously paying attention to sensations that were peripheral to the breath (like the sensation of tension and release in the ribcage), but not the breath itself. Also, the sensation of itching was particularly interesting in both of these exercises. Kenneth had mentioned it as the "kiss of concentration", which is exactly what I found it to be. It was very easy to note it continously until it disappeared or changed, though this also seemed to bring up other itching sensations elsewhere. It's also turning out to be one of the easier things to note in daily life. In the first round of noting mind states, there was again less that I noticed to note, but then when I repeated the 5 exercises and got to mind states I noticed that I was ignoring calm and mistaking it for the absence of a mind state. The word calm isn't on the list in point 3 on Kenneth's "How to Get Enlightened" article, but it seemed to fit the bulk of what I was experiencing better than happiness or joy, while seeming like a similar type of thing. There was also some joy and worry. The bystander exercise was again dominated by physical sensations. I noticed a tendency to occasionally forget the point of this exercise while doing it and turn "see how it sees" or "see how it feels" into an automatic habitual formula and fall back into normal noting.

"The word calm isn't on the list in point 3 on Kenneth's "How to Get Enlightened" article, but it seemed to fit the bulk of what I was experiencing better than happiness or joy, while seeming like a similar type of thing."-jigmesengye

Good point! I just added "calm" to the How to Get Enlightened essay, along with some other words to aid in noting.

Keep up the excellent practice!

Kenneth

Thanks again.

Yesterday, I sat for 40 minutes last night and 30 or so minutes in the morning. The night's sit was an exercise in drowsiness. I did pay attention to breathing sensations in the body sensation phase and by the time I moved on to vedana phase got into very pleasant breathing sensations that led to a strong burst of joy that lasted for a minutes. I also continued noting other sensations during these two physical phases, including the unpleasant ones. There wasn't much in terms of neutral sensations during the vedana phase, though the mildly pleasant vibration sensations were borderline neutral. The mental energy from this joy did not carry on into the mind state phase as I stopped paying attention to the breath. By the thought phase I was struggling to stay awake and stopped.

I took a break from work and went for a 20 or 30 minute walk while doing the bystander exercise. It seemed to work just as well as when sitting, if not better, since I was more alert. The bulk of what I noted were still physical sensations, mostly pressure from walking and the sensation of the wind and itching. There was constantly material to note from the first three categories, and less so in terms of thought, though I caught a few.

Last night's sitting was again an exercise in drowsiness, which made me get lost in content a bit. Same with this morning.

Tonight, I sat earlier and was far more alert. For vedana, it's always easy to notice unpleasant sensation (lower back slump, tension in the shoulders and ribcage) and noticing vibration is midly pleasant, and breathing ranges from pleasant to very pleasant. It occurred to me that I wasn't noticing neutral because it wasn't standing out. I noted the sensations I had no reaction to and usually don't notice (like the feeling of my forearms and part of my back and non-numb parts of the legs) as neutral. I recorded the symphony exercise, but forgot to do it as a bystander. All the same, it made me much more alert. Some things like breathing, the pressure sensation from coughing are obviously hard to note out loud and it does tend to slow down the pace of noting. I also found that I'm feeling less of the sensation that is being noted as an increased share of mental presence goes into the noting process itself. I redid the body sensation phase and then realized I'd forgotten the bystander and then went back to the bystander symphony. There was a lot to note, as I was noting about twice a second (or so it felt). While the bulk of what was there to note were physical sensations and vedana, I also noted a base of calm (or detachment), with restlessness, agitation, joy (to a lesser extent and somewhat tied to breath sensations) on top of it, along with imaging and planning thoughts. The thoughts and mind states don't jump out at me like the physical sensations do, they have to be actively noticed. They aren't as obvious.

Great report, jigmesengye! Thanks for posting.

Kenneth

(continued)

I realize this reads like reaching the early parts of the Arising and Passing away, but a few things give me doubts. There were no unitive feelings or strongs raptures (I've had those before at home while doing a concentration practice, but not from vipassana), the fact that I feel the exact same qi-like vibratory sensations all day anyway in normal circumstances from previous qigong practice and the absence of clear symptoms of the 1st ñana. The sayadaws kept on telling me about how I was on the verge of experiencing the symptoms of Mind and Body or starting to see a lot more sensations to note, I kept on concentrating more and kept on not getting it. I also felt all of the same things at a Goenka retreat 5 years ago, when I had no concentration when attempting to meditate. I assumed at the time that it was all just physical (including the blissful energy sensations). I have also never had a blinking out of reality while meditating that I associate with the A&P (I did get that once a long time ago, but I hadn't started a meditative practice yet at that point.) All this was months ago. All I get now that resembles anything on the maps is the occasional spontaneous restlessness at work and at the end of a session of sitting and vibratory sensations anytime I feel like paying attention to them (and frequently when I don't) that get amplified a lot the moment I sit in a meditative posture. I could attribute these to 3C and A&P, but I still have my doubts. At Kenneth's suggestion I've gone back to the Mahasi rising and falling noting exercise for half of each sitting to see where I'm at.

My practice slipped this weekend, I did 30 or so minute sits on both days.

I did a 40-something minute sit on Monday night. I started with Mahasi-style following the rising and falling of the abdomen. I've had major problems with this in the past, but none of that manifested yet. The rising and falling sensations were mostly clear and easy to note. I also noted other things (the usual physical sensation, vedana, mind states, thoughts) in the gap between rising and falling movements or as those sensations became more pronounced than the sensation of rising and falling. Possibly because of this the tendency of repetitive noting of the same two words to become hypnotic didn't happen. I went back to the familiar 5 part first gear exercise afterwards. The usual vibratory sensations were there but less pronounced.

Yesterday morning I say for 50-something minutes and then again for about 54 minutes last night. I again did the rising and falling for the first half of the period. I found that every time I got into drowsy dullness in the night session I could increase the speed of the noting to remain present. I also recorded parts of the bystander. I found it's mostly the saying the noting out loud that hightens my moment to moment concentration in this part. I stopped recording after 9 minutes and continued noting the bystander out loud. This is another effective strategy for my spells of drowsiness.

This post is more for context rather than a record of my recent practice. On Saturday Kenneth asked me where I thought I was on the maps. This threw me. I halfway suspected I had gotten to 3 characteristics and maybe possibly early A&P on a 3 week retreat in November. I had gotten unusual feelings of guilt I couldn't shake for a few days (possibly cause and effect), followed by intense leg pain that I could break up into pulsing (and still very painful) patterns of vibrations that eventually mostly went away (possibly 3C), followed by unusual restlessness with restless-feeling vibrations (again 3C), followed by amplified sensations of mostly pleasant and neutral vibrations and weird complicated uncomfortable vibratory feelings associated with the rising and falling and a confused sense of the physical sensation of rising and falling (I'd lose it among vibratory echoes of the movements, and had to put my hand on my abdomen to clearly feel it).

I'm generally noting when walking from place to place as long as I'm not at home or at the office. I did around an hour of this altogether yesterday. I'm doing the bystander exercise (I've added the note see how it walks at Kenneth's suggestion). I'm not using the "see how it feels" formula when I note the sensation of walking itself, which I do by noting pressure on the soles of the feet with each step. I get to note each step that way as long as I'm not noting something else at that specific moment. This exercise is getting noticeably easier every day. I've also been noting during a kung fu class I do three times a week. I can note consistently for the first hour of the class and it helps that the class starts with 10 minutes of meditation anyway (I'm just doing vipassana during that time). It also helps that the most of the moves are extremely repetitive. While I've been using noting vocabulary tailored to the moves (turning, kicking, striking, turning back, right strike, left strike...) I've found that the mental state I've ended up in has been fairly similar to what I get from the more focused parts of sitting, but without the creeping impatience vibe I get about the duration of sitting. Other activities like working at my computer and talking to people suffer from noting, the quality of my moves during the slower parts of the kung fu class seems to dramatically benefit from it. As with talking, I can't note well while doing the faster moving, more intricate sequences of movements, though it's possible to keep the same mental presence to some lesser extent, just without the noting. Apart from the moves themselves, at least last night, I did end up noting some of the same things as I usually note during the physical sensation part of the 1st Gear exercises, such as itching, pressure, tension, tension release and vibration.

Last night's session of sitting was an exercise in fighting drowsiness. I sat for about 45 minutes. I started with noting rising and falling of the abdomen. I briefly tried noting out loud, but this doesn't seem to work for anything breath-related (for purely practical reasons, I can't comfortably say "rising" at the same time as I'm inhaling). I did the 5 1st Gear exercises, but it was basically a fight with drowsiness (which I noted a great deal during mind states and noted as dreaming, imaging, etc... during the exercise on thoughts). Noting lots of impatience, I gave up before the alarm I'd set at an hour, tried to sleep, failed to do so and then sat again for some short period of time, maybe 20 minutes.

This morning I sat for 27 minutes and focused entirely on rising on falling and was able to follow almost all rising and falling sensations, and caught and noted most of the times when I was distracted from it by some sensation or thought.

I just sat earlier than usual tonight (from 8:22 to 9:19) for 57 minutes. I did the 5 1st Gear exercises first. This time I had thoughts interrupting my concentration at first, and then still some drowsiness. I wasn't coming up with much to note during mind states and thoughts as I was getting drowsy at that point. In the bystander exercise, I opened my eyes and counted out loud. The difference in alertness with eyes open was dramatic. At the end of the bystander my mind latched onto the breath and got a bit of light rapturous bliss from that which made me just focus on the breath for a few minutes. I then moved on to noting rising and falling. I had closed my eyes again by this point as I had a calm breath meditation high keeping me alert. That wore off as I started focusing on rising and falling, but after a few minutes of following rising and falling the focus deepened again into a form of hypnotic calm "high" mood from the rising and falling. The effect from the rising and falling felt like a deeper focus than just from the breath. I was also noticing upward vibratory pulses to the mid-eyebrow point that were rapidly increasing in frequency. Both of these effects wore off and I started getting leg pain in the right thigh (more sore than sharp pain) accompanied by lukewarm heat. There was a bit of a light pulse to it that was obvious when I changed my posture and stopped meditating. I started getting impatient in the last few minutes and stopped. The leg pain is in the exact same place as I was feeling sharp torturous pain for a large part of the retreat I went to. If any of that was 3 Characteristics, then so was this. My concentration and the vibratory effects were stronger before I started feeling pain, so I'd speculate that maybe, possibly I was in some really preliminary version of the A&P. I'm not sure and would welcome any other assessment of my practice at the moment.

I've had this bad dry cough since Friday that's been irritating my throat. On Sunday night when I followed rising and falling I got a high off of the breath that kept on making me take deeper and deeper breaths, which would increasingly irritate my throat, making the coughing worse. Despite cough suppressant, the coughing's been keeping me awake for a few extra hours all week (except last night), so I've cut out my morning sittings and have been doing the four foundations of mindfulness exercise exclusively, for about 45 minutes to an hour per night.

Last night I sat for an hour. I followed the rising and falling for the first time since Sunday night. I started out with a lot of thoughts. I'm now able to notice them quickly enough (and in a sufficiently reflexive way) to note them, but that isn't part of this is exercise. About 20 minutes I remembered to resolve to attain the highest ñana I had access to. This had a tangible effect on my concentration immediately. About halfway through the sitting I got into an increasingly concentrated state. It just happened rather than me continuously applying willpower to come back to and stick with the object. At one point I noticed this vibratory sensation in the abdomen that was following the rising and falling in a line, I paused my breathing and it went up and down about four or five times with the previous rythm of my breathing. Immediately after as I resumed following rising and falling, I felt that my concentration went up a notch and stayed very focused for a few minutes. The concentration lost steam after a few minutes and went back down.

I sat for half an hour this morning. I didn't notice the same immediate effect from the resolution, but still got into a concentrated state from following the rising and falling. I'd mentioned to Kenneth that I was noting other sensations during the gap during the rising and falling and he'd asked me if I was sure if there was a gap (or words to that effect). This morning I spent some time paying attention to the beginning and end of each movement and the accompanying breath. I really did perceive a gap between each rising and falling, between which there's a build-up in tension (that takes a varrying amount of time) leading up to the need to breath again. I'm curious, what do other people perceive?

One other thing that happened spontaneously this week is that on Tuesday night the vibratory energy started going up my back, along the spine just below the surface of the skin. It's a gentle buzzing vibration that goes up the back and then down the front of the body, forming a circuit that has a circular churning buzzing feeling to it. I've felt it in all sittings since then and I can notice it's there any time I'm not paying attention to a narrow focus like the rising and falling of the abdomen. Previously (and for the past two years) this particular vibratory sensation has just been going down the front of the body.

I just sat for a bit over an hour and followed the rising and falling. It felt like an hour of doing samatha. It's been 30 minutes since I ended that sitting and I've still got the same cool refreshing calm focused state going. This isn't the breath meditation "high" I got on Sunday. It's more refined and entirely calm. The sitting was a set of shifts into and out of focused mental states, noticing that I was paying less attention to the physical area I was focusing on and coming back to it repeatedly and in increasing detail. I continually tried stay away from manipulating the breath and just staying with the physical sensation in a particular spot above the belly as it moved up and down.There was neutral to mildly pleasant churning buzzing vibratory sensation in the belly and I noticed similar but focused vibrations at the point on the center of the chest next to where the heart is right at the end of the sitting. There's also a pulsing pressure (seems timed to the heart beat) on a circle that has the point between the eyebrows as its center that's been present since a bit before the end of the sitting. The usual vibrations going down the front were there, but not the new ones going up the back. There was also a bit of leg fatigue or tension at the end, though not numbness. I usually get numb legs after about half an hour. I got up to check the time after 56 minutes, sat back down after realizing I still wanted to meditate and was still in the same focused frame of mind and sat a while longer. There was some drowsiness during the session, but it would just weaken my focus or distract me from the object, not make me doze off. It wasn't the sort of fight against drowsiness I have when sitting late and doing the 4 foundations of mindfulness.