Records of a Reclus

Oh wow, a self-censoring website. I'm surprised I hadn't noticed this before.

My apologies.

YES YES!

Awesome stuff Ian!

"Very pleasant, but I also feel stuck, which brings up frustration and worry to note, but noting doesn't seem to remove the feeling of stuckness (even noting stucknes).
"

Hey Ian,
Small point, the purpose of noting is not to change your experience, but to allow you to see it. When you can see enough of it, you will begin to understand, not just in an intellectual way, but in your very body that your experience isn't you. Even after waking up, you might still have all the anxiety and pain, but it won't be a problem for *you*.
Awesome work, keep it up!

Thanks guys!

Owen, thats a good reminder for me. I find, so far, that noting really does seem to change things for me, not in the they go away and don't come back, but that when i note a sensation, my awareness pulls away from it and goes to another sensation. Jumpyjumpyjumpjump, like I'm Mario or something. there is a sense of movement on some other level than the physical. But with this stuckness, it just kind of sat there. Perhaps its an embeddness on some level or something else, but as you say, once I begin to understand it it'll move just as well as much as another other non-me, impermanent sensation.

Ian,

Would you have been able to note rising and falling (i.e. were you having difficulty finding something to note) or was it just blanking out? Were you maybe getting absorbed to a point where it was hard to note (a la Nick in the Jhanic arc video)?

P.S.
What owen said.

"Thanks guys!

Owen, thats a good reminder for me. I find, so far, that noting really does seem to change things for me, not in the they go away and don't come back, but that when i note a sensation, my awareness pulls away from it and goes to another sensation. Jumpyjumpyjumpjump, like I'm Mario or something. there is a sense of movement on some other level than the physical. But with this stuckness, it just kind of sat there. Perhaps its an embeddness on some level or something else, but as you say, once I begin to understand it it'll move just as well as much as another other non-me, impermanent sensation. "

It might be that you haven't yet penetrated the object. I will sometimes get that with a really painful sensation, like a cramp in my hip from sitting too long, or some unexamined emotional material. But if I can ramp up my noting and really get in there and observe, I notice that the sensations that make up the pain are composed of smaller packets of sensation that have discreet beginnings and endings. Also, the jumpyjump might be that you are in one of the dukkha nanas, which are inherently unstable. What's the predominant feeling tone during the rapid jumping?

@ Mu: Yeah, I could note other things just fine, but that stuckness stuck around...

@ Owen: I will try that, ramping up the noting, if the stuckness comes back. I find it easy to pick apart pain like that, eventually I kind of can "taste" it and it comes apart and faded. But this has a smooth feeling to it, like there's nowhere to get a note in. I think more attention is needed. Wish I had a retreat scheduled soon...

The rapid jumping is pretty much what I've come to think of as noting. Its like, once I note something, my attention heads off to something else. There's been prominent feelings of both bliss and dis-ease while doing this. I will continue to investigate.

Ian,

What you are describing sounds like how I used to do noting (jumping around looking for things to note). It was like making an inventory of all the sensations that were accessible in my mind/body at the time. Now I try to keep a wide attention that allows a lot of things to be present but I am staying with and noting the most predominant sensation until something else becomes more predominant. Kenneth said I wasn't penetrating the object and had me focus specifically on doing that. He had me keep an eye out for pulses especially and to stay with one with a particular focus on the ending of the pulse (did it fade out or stop suddenly).

Thanks Mu, I'll have to keep that distinction in mind. I don't necessarily feel like I'm jumping around, more that the most prominent sensation keeps switching, as if I'm being shown many things. But I suspect that's just a kind of rational explanation of it. I think I might be taking inventory without even quite being aware of it. In any case, I have a meeting with Kenneth scheduled for Sept 11, so we'll see. : )

Today's sit involved a lot of body tension, occasionally getting stuck in thoughts, and then a heavy sleepiness hit. Not much to report, but I'll keep at it.

Actually, thinking about it a little more, I also have a hard time differentiating between staying with the most prominent sensation and grasping to a certain sensation a sticking to it. There's a middle way there, I'm sure. The buddha's advice to the lute player (not too tight, not too loose) comes to mind here....

Sat for half an hour this morning, tried to hold back any sense of taking inventory and just seeing what came up. I believe I may have gone through the first four jhanas, though in a really soft way (started with kind of electric feeling on the skin, then a happy feeling, then kind of disoriented, then peaceful). Then I came back down, backwards, and noticed a few dukkha nanas on the way down. I'm not putting this past being scripted, so I don't want to take it too seriously, but this is the first time I've noticed my experience matching up with the jhannic arc.

Afterwards, I expected to feel tired, as I've been having a tendency to after about a half hour of sitting lately, but I didn't. There was more a weird sense of disorientation or dreaminess, combined with a very solid sense of clear awareness. After sitting in this for a while I laid down and continued noting as I fell back asleep. I had several dreams, very realistic feeling, where I was also laid out on the couch (as I was in "real" life). The solid sense of awareness (maybe witnessing? I'm not sure) carried through into the dreams. Waking up at last, there was only a feeling of "oh, NOW I'm awake." No sense of panic, a real feeling of knowing exactly what was going on. Very interesting.

Ian, sounds really cool. I get those weird sleeps when I lie down and am dwelling as the witness. It's like I keep waking/dreaming and not knowing what is up and it's sort of disorienting but also pleasant. I also go up and down the arc when dwelling as the witness and allowing the jhanas to present themselves.

Yeah, that's a good description of it right there. Disorienting, but overall really pleasant. I was more surprised at the fact that the disorientation was enjoyable.

Went to the RSR class with Kenneth last night and had a guided tour of the first 4 jhannas. Ended up in a state where my sense of selfawareness felt incredibly expanded, as if it included everything that was going on around me. I've reached this before, but it's not been as stable. I'm not sure how long it lasted, as the 90 minute class ended up feeling more like 20~30 minutes, but it was very pleasant. Felt myself fall back out it as the class was ending and went home feeling very relaxed and open. There was a very "one with everything" feeling present, but also a pretty strong sense of the body's presence as body (though not really as "me")

The method used was to close the eyes and take the stability of the visual field as concentration object. This worked very well for me last night, but I had little success doing it at home this morning. My brain felt quite tired and so I did more of a rest-in-my-natural-state thing. Overall, it was a rather unsatisfying sit.

Then I can to work and read this article about the ground zero muslim center, the vietnam war, and some other stuff. I got these waves of bliss, normally I'd call them "chills" that swept through my body, and I started crying. I usually have a hard time crying but it came out very easily this time. It felt really great. The waves spread out from my right side, in three or four pulses, sweeping both up and down, further with each pulse, until they met on the left side on the last pulse. The article's a short one, available here: karenzach.com/2010/i-am-like-you/

Later, I dropped my awareness down into my abdomen and felt a kind of need-to-let-go. It's hard to describe, but there's a sense of something wanting to release there, that somehow I'm holding onto. I've got a half day sit scheduled at the zen center on Saturday. Hoping for a chance to really dive into this.

30 minutes in the stairwell. Felt a lot of stress and frustration, trying to get the visual field technique to work. Gave up, surrendered, started noting and immediately felt more comfortable. I know forcing things is counter productive, but there is still the question of putting a technique into practice. I noticed at first I kept get caught up in thoughts, so I did a little exclusive noting focus on thoughts, which seemed to help. Did a few body sensations, then the visual field technique settled in and I kind of went back and forth between noting and taking the visual field as an object of concentration.

Then I came into some sense of real stability, open, kind of oneness, the noting and the concentration dropped away, and I just sat in wide open awareness. It was very pleasant. Energy moved down into the abdomen and there was a sensation of rushing. Then back to the open focus feeling, I rested in that. A one point there was a feeling of a kind of a sudden pop, definitely not a cessation or anything, but kind of subtle clicking into place. Then the alarm went off and I settled back into "normal Ian mode" feeling very calm and collected.

One interesting thing I'd not noticed before happened afterwords. My foot was asleep, so I uncrossed my legs and sat. I felt the blood flow back in and sensation returned very quickly. But the pins-and-needles didn't kick in right away, so I decided to run down stairs until they did. I made it from the 12th floor to the 9th before I had to stop for the prickles to go away. I usually don't have such easy awareness of the body, not without turning my attention to it.

4 hour sit on Saturday was over too quickly, but I noticed an irritability when I left. Like, "I just want to get back on the cushion!" A disdain for "ordinary" things. I don't like when I get like this, so I just try to keep watching it and not acting on it too much. Trying to mix practice in with daily life has really helped in this regard, as it keeps the "sacred" safely within the environs of the "mundane". : )

However, last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I felt a strong need to sit. I finished getting ready for bed and then sat down on my cushion. Concentration built as soon as I turned to the breath and bliss waves followed soon after. I could feel the waves through almost until the end, but lost my awareness of them just as they felt like they were beginning to fade. I mainly just focused on staying present and keeping my concentration up by paying attention to the stability of the visual field with my eyes closed. I felt like there was an incomplete connection, with energy trying to jump across the gap but not being able to make it. After a while the feelings stopped and I went to bed, trying to keep up a basic level of mindfullness/Witnessing.

I wonder if one was the result of the other...?

Been a long time since I've posted here. My formal on-the-cushion daily practice has kind of dropped away, and since that was my basis of having something to report, I haven't been able to find a discrete block of "this is what happened" to report. Since my practice is somewhat of an ongoing thing, the changes happen throughout the day, and it feels wrong (as in, I don't like the thought of it) to post on here "Oh, I just felt a wave a bliss!" or "Oh, I seem to just be a big vast empty space" or "oh, I have a headache (and probably just need a cup of coffee)". It all seems so transient and changing that any report feels like it wouldn't do it justice.

I'm also not keeping to any consistant practice either, just sort of a free floating on-going attention to things, with more attention paid to the bits that cause suffering. What I'm doing feels right in the moment, but again, changes so often any report would not be an accurate picture.

However, all this "ground the emotional charge in the body" 3rd gear stuff that's been posted lately is really exciting to me. I've noticed, when working with the lava lamp pointer, that the main "blob" from which the "proto-blobs" break off seems to have its own sort of distortions and unbalances to it. In not-metaphoric terms, I find when I turn my attention to the body as a whole, the sensation of "body" has hard spots, tense spots, "empty" spots, and most importantly, painful spots. My article here talks about those kinds of things: bit.ly/aTEVHj

(cont)

Keeping the attention grounded in the body as a constant thing is making these spots of "suffering" more apparent. So, riffing on the lava-lamp, I've been trying to bring that pain-that-is-already-present into awareness simultaneously with the awareness of the body and the environment around the body.

I'm not necessarily saying this is the case, but the way it feels to me is as if there is some ongoing chronic negative emotional charge resting in my body and that linking that up, through awareness, with the living sensation of my body and the world, I can slowly start to suck the negative charge out of the chronic pain. I've been doing this pretty regularly with the chronic pain in my right shoulder/neck/head area (mentioned in my article) and I am now beginning to feel a pulse move through it, somewhat reminiscent of the pulsing evident in the visual field when I get my concentration up (see Mumuwu's journal for that starting at post 275 here: bit.ly/cxtSpE )

I am going to keep this up and see if I have any luck clearing out this pain through awareness. One key thing I have to keep reminding myself is that I am not to DO anything. Just keep the awareness in the pain, ground it in the body so as not to identify with it, and let the energy slowly leak out on its own. Any attempt on my part to "help" the process seems to stop the draining effect and strengthen my identification with the pain. This seems like something that will be worth reporting on, so I'll keep you all posted if there's any changes.