jgroove's practice journal

60 minutes kasina this morning, followed by 60 minutes noting aloud this afternoon. Will do 30 more minutes of noting tonight at the group sitting.

60 minutes noting this morning

'seeing, neutral' (green-blue or reddish pixels, blackness); 'hearing, neutral' or 'pleasant' (hiss of iPod-timer radio, chirping birds outside, coming and going of vehicles, internal sounds); 'hearing-appreciation-pleasant' followed by 'visual thought' (as w' chirping birds)

'amusement' (in response to obsessive, recurring thoughts), 'frustration/weariness' (in response to same). 'warmth-softness-pleasant' (contact with cushion, shirt on skin).

'imagining thought-neutral,' or 'remembering imagining thought-neutral' (as when the thought is recalled or noticed after it has already passed). 'Pressure' (third-eye, forehead, center of head, contact w' cushion, hands on legs/legs on hands). 'Tingling-falling-asleep-unpleasant' (as hip, legs, etc., fall asleep). Pain-aversion-unpleasant (as limb pain increases). 'Intending to look/investigate.' 'Looking/investigating'; 'Peace/silence-pleasant'.
'Quivering; rocking-swaying'; anticipation; 'wanting, wanting-unpleasant' (session to be over, timer to ring, etc.)

Lips touching lips--neutral; feeling of hair on head, softness-pleasant; sweating/clammy-unpleasant; 'tension/nervousness/anxiety-unpleasant' (in chest, abdomen). sadness. uncertainty (about whether something is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral); hardness (bones in body; buckwheat-hull cushion); itching-wanting to scratch-unpleasant;

Reminders: 'What is happening in THIS moment?' 'No important sensations' (when I catch myself focusing overmuch on the pleasant or subtle stuff)

Maybe noticing some smaller, more detailed sensations (feeling of eyeballs or hair, glasses on face, texture of leg hair under palms when wearing shorts). Over and out...

Resolved to note aloud once per second to the best of my ability for one hour.
Very attentive sit. Really kept the noting going and would spot drifting off very quickly after it happened, with notes like "daydreaming," "fantasizing" or "imagining." The resolution really seemed to help this morning.

Sat a four-hour retreat on Sunday with our little group in Atlanta. Did 30 minutes of candle-flame practice yesterday. Trying to keep the kettle boiling despite all the work and family stuff. Over and out...

"I got the sense of being continually and severely disconnected from the body most of the time. You'd think that taking the body as an object would reveal its solidity and realness, but instead the opposite seemed to happen--trying to be in the body as much as possible seemed to lead to absorption-like states, vibratory phenomena, etc."

Hi Joel,
I just saw this and very much agree! I've been reading Reggie Ray's book "Touching Enlightenment: Finding realization in the body" and it chimes with much of what you've written here.

I've found my body to be a complete suprise: hardness where I thought there'd be movement, and yet ripples and quivers and pulses and tingles in amongst all of the solidity. I've got to the point where I just want to dissolve

Great thread. I've only just started reading properly.

Andy

Hi Andy.
That sounds like an interesting book. I'll try to check it out at some point. What's interesting, and a little frustrating, is how quickly I forget this revelation. I've gone right back to the my-head-is-the-centerpoint-of-my-own-being-and-also-the-entire-universe thing!
There just seems to be this natural resistance to keeping the attention below the shoulders in a sustained way. Thanks for reminding me of the value of this!
Best regards,
Joel

A man after my own heart! Or should I say, head?

I know exactly how you feel...

60 min., noting aloud
a gut-it-out session. Lots of unpleasant physical sensation, sleepiness, restlessness, weariness, boredom and aversion to same. Falling asleep, daydreaming, etc.
Resolution at beginning of sit--to note aloud once-per-second to the best of my ability--helped get me through it.

60 minutes noting aloud this morning.
I've sat about an hour a day each week, w' a bit more practice yesterday.

I'm impressed how you keep all this up with the family and kids and everything, good job!

Is there anything written up about the "wheel" thing you referred to?

Hi Eric.
I do my best to keep the stove on at least "low" but I'll admit that I pretty frequently let the kettle cool off all the way. Didn't sit at all yesterday, for example. Something I need to work on.
Regarding The Wheel, I don't think instructions for this technique are given on the site. I could be wrong.
The basic idea is to drop the noting once you get into the more subtle territory--strobing, pulsing, etc.--and start paying attention to the subtle end of the spectrum.

One KFD yogi described it as "a combination of noting, 'whole body wave' awareness, and specific exploration of eye posture and the visual field, with the aim of getting you to a sweet spot where then you investigate the ends of sensations via the strobing in the visual field.' "

Kenneth pointed out that it is isn't that you're "doing it 'right' when things are refined and subtle and doing it 'wrong' when things are gross. ... practice is never linear. It is more of a wheel or a spiral. So calling the technique 'the wheel' helps people gain confidence that when things are gross, they are inevitably going to get subtle at some point and there is no need to rush or panic. And when you are grooving on the subtlety and things begin to get gross again, you can completely surrender to the grossness, absolutely confident that you are not losing anything; subtle leads to gross leads to subtle leads to gross leads to subtle. Around and around it goes."

I've mostly been sticking to the once-per-second, noting aloud, just for the keeping-me-honest value of it. I can get drifty pretty fast!
Talk to you later...
EDIT: Also, check out Nadav's straightfoward, phenomenological reports. He gives a good description of doing The Wheel in his most recent post...

Had the house to myself yesterday. Sat from about 10 to 1:40 and again for another hour late in the afternoon; once more in the evening for about 20 minutes.

Okay, I'm still going to give you props for the long sits at home, though. I think I'm building up momentum towards that.

The assemblage of weeds that is my front yard also likes these long sits! My neighbors, not so much!

60 minutes, noting aloud
resolution at beginning to note once per second for entirety of hour
whenever I noticed that I'd drifted off, I'd ask the question "what is here?'
seemed to notice spaciousness, peace, contentment a bit more
some sleepiness/dreaming
some kind of near- or quasi-strobing, like a suggestion of the possibility of strobing.
this would be followed by "anticipation," "wanting increase," "aversion to wanting," etc.

noticing a pattern: a physical sensation arises and is then swamped by mental reactions to it that are about wanting it to either increase or decrease, or are related to a curiousity or interest in the sensation that seems tainted by some kind of an agenda

Kenneth notes that the material jhanas are physical in nature [EDIT: he said all jhanas have physical and mental components, but the physical are more dominant in the material jhanas]. If I start to notice pleasant vibrations on the skin and then incline the mind torward those vibrations as an object, the whole situation quickly seems to get swamped by mental stuff--the wanting for an increase, the aversion to the wanting, the wanting of the wanting to go away, etc. This happens especially if the sensation in question starts to increase as a result of being taken as an object. As soon as there's any evidence of that, the mental stuff rushes in.
It's kind of a mess and seems to be related to lack of concentration. Obviously, the solution is to just keep noting this stuff in the moment.

Started the sit with breath-counting, 1 to 10, 10 to 1 (x3).
Was able to do the three reps without losing track.
Began noting aloud, once-per-second
Noted the usual gross-level phenomena'”seeing, hearing, feeling, pressure, warmth, coolness, burning, itching, softness, touching, tasting, aching, smelling and so on'”and the associated feeling tones. Investigated mind states more in this sit and was able note and disembed from more of them: contentment, peacefulness, appreciation, amusement, anticipation, wanting, wanting-wanting-to-go-away-in-order-to-get-something, bargaining, sadness, anger, curiosity, weariness, listening, investigating, hoping.
'remembering that visual thought,' i.e. the disembedding was from the remembering of the thought rather than the thought itself, which had already passed.
Reporting thought/future thought, hearing (audio component of an imagined scene), seeing (visual component of an imagined scene), combinations like 'imagining thought-sadness-unpleasant' or 'looking for strobing, wanting/anticipation, aversion/shame-unpleasant.'
Or 'aching in back-unpleasant, wanting to straighten back, intending to straighten, straightening.'
Sense of the boundaries of the body faded during this sit'”bed-spin kind of phenomena; quivering, brightness. Various pains in body coexisted with peacefulness, contentment, and seemed no bother at all amid this absorbed, spacious quality. Did some visual field samatha. Brightness and suggestion of strobing but no pronounced, obvious strobing. Lots of rocking and swaying of the body. Still confused about how to find the pulse that makes this happen, or what to do when this is happening. Do you still the body and watch the energy? Do you just try to relax and surrender and let the swaying/rocking do what it will?
[cont.]

[cont. from above]
Sick of being a dark night yogi--feel like I'm carving out the same groove over and over. Will get hopeful after a sit like this, but then it all starts all over again w' the comparatively more miserable territory. Rinse and repeat.

"Still confused about how to find the pulse that makes this happen, or what to do when this is happening. Do you still the body and watch the energy? Do you just try to relax and surrender and let the swaying/rocking do what it will?
[cont.]"

Why don't you try sticking to one technique and make sure not to deviate from it for the entire sitting? It seems like you were doing nicely with the 4 foundations practice and then got lost in doing visual samatha, looking for strobing, trying to figure out what to do.

Just note, don't do anything else or try to influence things at all.

Hi mumuwu.
I've been doing noting-aloud-only for an hour a day for months now, disallowing anything other than out-loud noting. Recently, Kenneth suggested that I try to do the visual-field samatha thing, investigate strobing and so forth. But I do take your point--I'm definitely trying to make somethng happen, move things along to somwhere other than where they are right now, by dropping the noting and looking into the more subtle stuff. Probably some striving associated with all of that. "striving, striving"

Got you. A lot of people seem to be getting some mileage from the "I wonder what my next thought will be" sort of practice in 4th.

Once that subtle strobing (and it can be rather subtle) shows up in equanimity, watching it the way you would watch the breath sort of allows me to sync up with it in some weird way which tends to bring about a fruition. Almost like becoming absorbed into the strobing I guess (bringing awareness to impermanence).

You are doing great.

Yeah, I have to say, I've been expecting something more like a strobe machine/disco ball combo!
I'm very susceptible to the "don't think of a monkey" kind of thing. Good advice to just watch and keep disembedding, w'out an agenda. Letting impatience creep in here would be counterproductive...

Joel,

it's been seeming to me over the last months that you've -- by sheer force of determination and applying yourself (gutting out hours of noting aloud, all day sittings), that you've lifted your practice to a whole new level of intensity.

Considering how little free time you have to work with, what you're doing has really been inspiring to me. This has to be getting you somewhere!

Hi kacchapa.
I think you're right--some kind of progress is happening. At times, I see this. Anyway, it's worth remembering that this is not about what I think about it. Some days I'll be frustrated. Some days inspired. I'm definitely going to keep working at it. But the encouragement helps. Thanks!

60 minutes, noting aloud ...

Cool, jg!
Keep on going, ever moving!!

60 min. noting aloud
very tempted to skip the sit this morning--stayed up too late and got up too early
drifted off into dreamlike, hypnogogic territory very frequently during the sit
it was interesting how the mind would keep noting until the strangeness of what was coming out of my mouth would jar me awake. I'd hear notes like "semicolon" [?], "seeing--wet road with trees," "seeing--shiny brass objects." etc.
This was a clear example of the kind of sit that, were I not noting aloud, would have been a space-out fest for sure. noted both the sleepiness and the aversion to it.