A&P or Bust

I hope that's a nerdy (referring to me) smiley face with glasses! Just wondering if "word" is your short-hand note for catching a thought stream.

Coming from an attempted-Zen background I've been used to more of a no models, no explanations, all experiences are makyo, just focus on your assigned practice until you reach kensho, but don't think about kesho. (An approach I can live with and imagine makes perfect sense within its context.) Relating practice to a detailed model and real-time identification of stages seems a little arduously busy to me, but I hated noting for the same reason when first taught it at IMS a long time ago and missed out on a chance to dive into what has, thru trial and error, proved to be the most effective practice I've tried. Didn't want to miss out on using a technique just because I don't appreciate it yet. But I can relate to Kenneth's saying that he found experience was mostly a chaotic jumble before 1st path. Is equanimity a highly concentrated state? If you're just pretty quiet and calm, interested and feel like you can sit all day, could that be a low-equanimity? (Yikes, I know this is bad, but I'm otherwise being pretty ascetic, avoiding popular media, music, movies, news & so on, so I guess this is my entertainment craving slipping out 8^}
edit: Just read up on Equanimity. Feel confident my practice has not yet claimed that territory in any sense worth thinking/talking about. But the fact that other yogis are achieving that in daily life practice is highly motivating. Gratitude for their efforts.

am sitting 1 hr. Noted physical sensations and hearing or memory of sounds and sounds. Then feelings and mental images. Overall pulsing was return-point for 1st 1/2. Then mostly following mental images, intentions and sense of knowing things.

One thing about participating in online practice journaling is it's an opportunity to fail to escape that desperate, squirmy drive to be someone. It can feel like serving up a plate from an inexhaustible supply of thriving maggots.

But even if partly driven by the competitive fear of being an also-ran, extra hours of semi-neurotic sitting might be like the maggot infested stick that stirs the fire. When I got to work today an habitual anxiety driven image-emotion lump felt noticably like a burden to pick up rather than just an unexamined part of me. So, tried to keep letting it go and stay with the faint but noticable light feeling of not carrying it. By the end of the day uncertainty about my job status was really itching for a big show, so attempted to head it off with an hour of walking meditation. Job anxiety has become a little too boring and easy for me to take on so the clever maggots squrimed instead about the status of my yogi/meditator career. Tried fast noting, noting centered from the heart, from the abdomen, mentally yelling the noting. Rarely noted more than 15 seconds consecutively, totalling maybe 5 to 8 mins of out of the hour.

"Tried fast noting, noting centered from the heart, from the abdomen, mentally yelling the noting. Rarely noted more than 15 seconds consecutively, totalling maybe 5 to 8 mins of out of the hour."-mpavoreal

You don't have to note fast, MP. You just have to note at a comfortable, sustainable pace that engages your mind completely. By engaging your mind completely in the investigation and the noting, you have no processing power left over for suffering. It's important to do it as continuously as possible throughout the sitting.

If you work really hard for a few seconds and then rest for awhile, you are behaving like the hare. But it is the tortoise who always wins this race.

Constancy, not heroics. You're doing great. Keep going.

Kenneth

Thanks for the feedback, Kenneth! Got your note just before morning sit so sat down wondering what is constancy? Noticed there was a lot of noticing available. Noted the idea of making a resolution to note continuously, the intent to make the resolution, and noted sensations involved while making the resolution. The rest of the sit took off on its own with me often just trying to run diagnostics to see if I was really being mindful. Kind of like there was general mindfulness so noting particulars was not so much the point this time. Rather the question of what is knowing all this? had a lot of traction centered initially in the forehead though my focus was on the question not where it wanted to center. Sometimes the throat, chest or tension points in the body. What knows this? Could see how the energetic loosenings on Saturday were continuing from where that left off with the jaw loosening to a new extent that time. Found myself in a new place I didn't know about where the spine and skull meet. Actually for decades this was a place of tension and aversion that I associated with hypoglycemia attacks. Never realized that it is also a center of awareness. That was interesting but tried to make sure that the focus was with the questioning What is this. Not sure how much my efforts to keep things on track had to do with this sitting. Suddenly I had the sense to look at my clock. Amazingly it was an hour and 5 mins. Didn't argue, this sitting felt like a gift.

am sitting 1 hr Resolved to start right off noting as continuously as possible. After 5 or 10 mins seemed to have skipped past the usual 1st 1/2 hour of settling in. While noting, objects had a smooth, buttery, kind of pleasurably melting feel to them. That's happened a couple of other times recently. Additionally, objects decomposed to details more readily than usual. Mindfulness was relatively continual and pleasant but it didn't seem like an acutely absorbing sitting, it didn't zip by surprisingly fast the way it sometimes does lately.

am sitting 1hr. Resolved to note consistently from start to finish. Unusually fidgety for 1st 10 mins, then settled in. Noticed how I "focus on sensations" by forming some image then looking at that as an overlay on the sensations. This usually makes me uneasy or disatisfied, probably because I'm confused about what's really going on and the mindfulness of sensation is generally out of synch with either the sensation or my idea of it. A couple of times recently it struck me that physical sensations are already in the mind, which has immediate access to them. Why would consciousness of sensations require a subsequent looking process to conceptualize and stare at something which it already knows directly is there. Then I found that, yep, there is a non-visual feeling of sensation, right in place. Then the conceptual and visual activity is seen as a distinct group of sensations that don't need to be interpreted as referring to the non-visual. I'm picking this clumsily apart as if I think it's not clear, when it may be an issue only for people who are particularly fixated in visual mode. Anyway this more direct experience of physical sensations drew me in to them and enjoyed a calm and pleasant focus on noting the sensations. I think this was becoming something of a concentration and I forgot to note how pleasant they were. Toward the end something about the concentration that always gets my attention became more palpable today, but I still couldn't grasp exactly what it was. Kind of like I was close to throwing a rheostat switch all the way to the click -- as if maybe then I'd have something of a concentration lock or something. But maybe the activity of wondering about it would cause it to slip back again? Whatever that is, it's been coming up some lately. All morning before work I felt unusually settled in my body, quiet, calm and emotionally authentic. Gradually diminished as the work day went on.

am sitting, 1 hr. Started with noting physical sensations of pulses and continued with that as the return point while including sounds, mental images,and tried to remember to include feeling tone, but have been slacking on that recently. Spent 20 or 30 mins playing with self-image sensations, trying to decompose them into details that seem to always include mental images, retinal activity and physical sensations. (I think I wasn't catching the thought component so much this time.) I guess that glossy, cartoonish self-feeling on certain sensations must depend on being unexamined. Because when investigating the detailed parts, the feeling of self would briefly diminish or go away, before popping back up again with the next self-image sensation. Have played variations of this game at different times. This time continuity and detail were fair, but context or sense of spaciousness seemed relatively weak. So, found myself feeling too drawn into the "looking" feeling of investigation and trying to relax back into body sensations to find the mode of passive-seeing again. I wasn't catching my intention much today either. In retrospect seems unbalanced toward getting somewhere. Gave it an honest try. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to practice.

About 2 hours total of shorter sittings, when time permitted. At the beginning of each sit it felt quiet, centered and alert. a promising beginning. The rest of the sitting would be mostly pulling myself from trains of thought. Active mindfulness was even harder, could hardly maintain it at all. Often felt like I wanted to sit and be quiet and go in, even now after midnight. But whenever I try it, continuity of attention is very short today.

Last post. New practice journal here: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/4054368/-