Omni's practice log

The past year I've been mostly practicing Shinzen Young's techniques, noticing and noting "touch, sight, sound, feel, image, talk, relax, light, silence, peace, blank, quiet, ..." at least half an hour a day. I've noticed a gradual improvement in my concentration, clarity and equanimity during daily life. After reading Daniel Ingram's book I wondered if I was making any progress along the stages of insight, because I don't think I've had any experiences similar to what Daniel writes about.

Today I've practiced for the first time following the Basic Meditation Instructions on the Kenneth Folk Dharma website ( kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/Basi...itation+Instructions ). Here's how it went:
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For about an hour I noticed the sensations in my belly as I was breathing, thinking "rrriissssiiing" on each in-breath and "faaaaallliiinggg" on each out-breath. When breathing in I felt expansion, slight tension around the navel / above the hips / at the lower back but I didn't label them. When breathing out I felt the belly contract and relax. All these sensations were constantly changing, becoming more intense, less intense, subtly shifting place ...

At first I had some trouble concentrating. There were moments where thoughts & dream images took over, but I estimate these never lasted more than half a minute. I had to redirect my attention to the belly all the time though. I was also sleepy and could feel my posture collapsing a lot, which I corrected without paying attention to it for too long. There were tensions/tinglings in my hips, legs and back because of sitting cross-legged, but I didn't use those as meditation objects.
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This practice feels much more like 'pure' concentration practice than I'm used to. The focus is more narrow (just the belly) and as usual this brings more sleepiness to my practice.

I should add that I'm not only noting/noticing TSSFIT/RLSPBQ during that (half an) hour of formal practice a day. I'm doing it as much as possible every minute of the day. This seems to be going better (more automatic) the past month.

Hectic day, but at last I managed to sit for 40 mins after having trouble with our 2yr old who refused to go to bed. Counted the breath for a while and then let my attention freely float around where it wanted to. (choiceless awareness?) Noticed a mental image (our daughter) which invoked an emotional sensation in my chest, a tingling flowing towards my throat. The contours of this 'emo field' changed, the tingling changed to less intense tiny pressures. My attention went to sounds, warmth and touch of my hands, aftertaste of dinner in my mouth, mild pressure on my legs, relaxed sensations in face and overall body...

Around the middle of the practice I worked a bit with mentally asking myself "Who am I?" and noticing the sense of "I". This only worked for some mins, then I went back to choiceless awareness.

After a while I noticed the 'emo field' in chest and throat had vanished. I saw and heard some hypnagogery without wandering off into dreamland and for the last 10 mins of the practice I stayed with an itch on my right cheek, noticing the stinging epicenter, the pressure around it, the epicenter pulsing until it vanished, reappeared, melted into the overall pressure ...

Feeling very calm now.

I sat for an hour. Practice was quite frustrating. I kept doubting:
- use concrete labeling (itch, pain, warmth ...) or abstract labeling (touch, sight, sound, feel, image, talk)?
- followed the breath at the belly, but couldn't detect the sensations of breathing out there, so I switched to the sensations at the nose, then noticed that the labels "rising / falling" made no sense there, so I switched to "breathing in / breathing out"
- then I noticed that the "stretched" mental labels (breeeeeeathiiiing iiinnn ...) kept me from noticing the sensations themselves
- finally switched to the technique I've become used to: noting "touch, sight, sound, feel, image, talk ..." (Shinzen Young style) but this was far from the nicely balanced "choiceless awareness" without mental labels that I enjoyed yesterday. Today whenever I dropped the mental labels and tried just noticing, sleepiness took over immediately.

Seems like I couldn't find nice balances this time: noting/noticing, concentrating/investigating.
I guess this is what happens when you don't sleep well at night and try out different meditation styles at day. So for the future I decided to stick with the abstract labels that I'm used to, and when focusing on the breath, observing what goes on in the nose in stead of the belly. These things feel more natural to me.

I sat for an hour. Unlike yesterday practice was very fulfilling.

I started by counting the breath for a while. (3 rounds of 10) Then I switched to the labels IN and OUT. In stead of stretching them (IIINNNN / OOOUUUT) I quickly repeated them for the duration of each breath (IN IN IN, OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT). This wasn't always in sync with the actual noticing of the sensations that made up the breaths, but it sure helped me to stay focused and actually notice a lot of detail.

I enjoyed the silky softness of the airflows. I noticed increasing coolness & dryness in nose and throat with each in-breath & increasing warmth & moist with each out-breath.

The endings of the out-breaths were accompanied with a clear sense of "oxygen-thirst", followed by the "oxygen-thirst-clenching" of breathing in, which was very pleasant. At a point I wanted to examen that oxygen-thirst closer, so for a couple of times I kept my lungs empty for a long time to notice increase in warmth and tingling in head and throat. Then I let the breathing run naturally again.

I could also clearly notice my heartbeat in the throat subtly affecting the breathing, especially when breathing out. Sometimes the mental labels (especially OUT OUT OUT) synched with the sensations of the heartbeat.

There were thoughts trying to take over now and then, but they were so obvious that I could refocus on the breath very quickly. (Usually my thoughts are more sneaky and they space me out for longer before I notice what has happened.)

I kept my eyes open the whole time to avoid sleepiness. This helped a lot. The outside world (sounds and sights) got very unnoticable during practice, until it seemed to disappear completely.

This is probably the first time I could stay concentrated on the breath for such a long time. Practice was very fulfilling and calming today.

Omni, are you picking up any effects from the breathing on the visual field? I notice that especially on the pauses between breaths the pulse is detectable visually.

Hi Mumuwu, No I haven't noticed anything visual. I'll pay attention to it next time and let you know.

Not much time for my log today. I had a Skype session with Kenneth today. I got confused with the different timezones, so my schedule for the afternoon had to change and just a couple of mintues after the session our visitors arrived. Therefore no time to log until now.

The session was interesting. I learned more about how Kenneth approaches meditation, which is more challenging than I'm used to. A different labeling style which maxes out cognitive reserves ... I noted lots of things like 'pressure, hearing, imaging thought, see how it hears, remembering thought, tension unpleasant, warmth pleasant, ..." and finally something quite new for me: "strobing, eyes flickering, ..."

Very interesting, just too bad I couldn't keep practicing when the Skype session ended. I'll try to pick up tomorrow where I left off today.

Attended a 4 hour phone-retreat with Shinzen Young today. The theme was contemplating sound. He had us noticing sounds (from TV, radio, ...) and/or our reactions to them. I first noticed the sounds of the environment and my feeling/imaging/selftalk thoughts, noticed joy, irritation, impatience, relaxation, ...

To my surprise there were at a given point quite intense feelings of reliving an intense crush, which I must have had as a teenager but it was almost purely emotional/somatic without any distinct imaging or selftalk thoughts. This lasted a couple of minutes: feelings of nervous bubbly energy gushing from stomach to throat. Then this subsided. Later on a similar thing happened, but this time the emotions were sadness without a noticable reason: somatic feelings of stinging, warmth, wetness and coolness of tears, itches in face, ...

Then we focused on restful states in body and blank visual field (eyes closed). Then I listened to the sounds of a recorded laughing meditation I found a while ago. Unsurprisingly this evoked a lot of pleasant body-, emotion- and thought reactions.

I wasn't meditating the entire 4 hours, because I had lots of questions to ask, which fortunately got answered too.

The past week I had lots of new information from different experienced meditators. They all talk about similar things but from their own perspective. All this stuff has been going around in my head on endless repeat, in different combinations the past days ... This usually results in meditations filled with doubt (see log from 20100811). Today I decided to give myself a break and trust my intuition more during practice and this led me to really pay attention to something Nikolai pointed me out (thanks Nik and Cartago! ).

I practiced for an hour. I started out sitting noticing touch, sight, sound, feel, image, talk (Shinzen Young style), but gradually changed to noticing warmth, pressure, imaging thought, tingling, remembering thought, embarresment, doubting thought, tension, relaxation, joy, smiling, hearing, ... (Kenneth Folk style).

I was quite sleepy at some point, and I remembered something Kenneth wrote on an other practice log: the importance of noting aloud. So I switched from mental labeling, to whispered, to noting out loud. This helped, but I decided to get up and do some walking meditation to really avoid the spacing out.

I noticed lots of remembering thought, mainly about all the stuff I learned lately and suddenly remembered Nikolai's advice of disembedding from whatever takes center stage. This really struck a chord and I stopped labeling altogether, went back to sitting (eyes open) and detecting what I was clinging to. Most of these were thoughts, feelings, ... but I could easily disembed from them, usually by "listening to the sound of the thoughts" in stead of getting involved in their meaning.
This felt so right!

"The past week I had lots of new information from different experienced meditators. They all talk about similar things but from their own perspective. All this stuff has been going around in my head on endless repeat, in different combinations the past days ... This usually results in meditations filled with doubt (see log from 20100811). Today I decided to give myself a break and trust my intuition more during practice and this led me to really pay attention to something Nikolai pointed me out (thanks Nik and Cartago! ).

I practiced for an hour. I started out sitting noticing touch, sight, sound, feel, image, talk (Shinzen Young style), but gradually changed to noticing warmth, pressure, imaging thought, tingling, remembering thought, embarresment, doubting thought, tension, relaxation, joy, smiling, hearing, ... (Kenneth Folk style).

I was quite sleepy at some point, and I remembered something Kenneth wrote on an other practice log: the importance of noting aloud. So I switched from mental labeling, to whispered, to noting out loud. This helped, but I decided to get up and do some walking meditation to really avoid the spacing out.

I noticed lots of remembering thought, mainly about all the stuff I learned lately and suddenly remembered Nikolai's advice of disembedding from whatever takes center stage. This really struck a chord and I stopped labeling altogether, went back to sitting (eyes open) and detecting what I was clinging to. Most of these were thoughts, feelings, ... but I could easily disembed from them, usually by "listening to the sound of the thoughts" in stead of getting involved in their meaning.
This felt so right!
"

Hi Omni. Sounds like a great example of skillfully adapting to the demands of the moment. I love the advice to disembed from whatever we seem to be clinging to. A corollary to that, seems to me, might be to look at resistance in the same way as well. Thanks!

"Hi Omni. Sounds like a great example of skillfully adapting to the demands of the moment. I love the advice to disembed from whatever we seem to be clinging to. A corollary to that, seems to me, might be to look at resistance in the same way as well. Thanks!"

That's right "disembedding from whatever takes center stage" is a more complete way of putting it (contains clinging, resistance ...). I've kept observing this center stage as much as possible during daily life since yesterday and must say it's really powerful.

"That's right "disembedding from whatever takes center stage" is a more complete way of putting it (contains clinging, resistance ...). I've kept observing this center stage as much as possible during daily life since yesterday and must say it's really powerful."

Yeah, it seems like a very interesting point of focus. For example, looking at what's been center-stage for me lately: kicking myself over lack of progress on weight loss, my enslavement to coffee, my need to step up the exercise, etc. This is all valid stuff--my temperament is definitely closer to laziness than being an over-striver--but when I pay attention to what is center-stage here, what do I find? A lot of unrecognized, self-inflicted suffering-as-the-result-of-embeddedness. This doesn't mean I can't try to do better with diet and exercise, but it sure would help if I could engage in this action without being embedded in it and half-aware, if that, of the aggressive, project-mentality quality of the whole thing. Hmmm....

"Yeah, it seems like a very interesting point of focus. For example, looking at what's been center-stage for me lately: kicking myself over lack of progress on weight loss, my enslavement to coffee, my need to step up the exercise, etc. This is all valid stuff--my temperament is definitely closer to laziness than being an over-striver--but when I pay attention to what is center-stage here, what do I find? A lot of unrecognized, self-inflicted suffering-as-the-result-of-embeddedness. This doesn't mean I can't try to do better with diet and exercise, but it sure would help if I could engage in this action without being embedded in it and half-aware, if that, of the aggressive, project-mentality quality of the whole thing. Hmmm...."

I think that's where patience and perseverance come into play. And trusting the process. I believe the more you are conscious of something, the less it has you in its power. Don't beat yourself up, but time and time again, try to replace your "bad" habits with new "good" habits is what I'd say.

I sat for an hour with open eyes, labeling out loud. My ability to pay attention was mostly good, but there were quite some moments of sleepiness and being scattered as well.

I noted out loud: pressure, tension, sleepiness, heaviness (eyelids), remembering thought, planning thought, music thought, irritation, etc... When I wasn't sleepy the noting tended to speed up quite a bit until I found that it almost went on autopilot, which resulted in doubt whether I was actually experiencing the things I was saying, or if I was, if I was paying enough attention to it.

I experimented with slowing down the noting and even repeating the labels to stay with the actual sensations that I was noting. This seemed to help.

Lately I seem to be less scattered and lost in thought than I used to be before I started to meditate (I was quite a daydreamer). While I used to get frustrated that I simply kept forgetting to be mindful during the day, I notice that I'm noti(ci)ng my daily experiences quite a lot the past months. This feels like a good development.

But like today, when riding my bike to the trainstation, I found myself labeling quite fast again, noticing what happened (hearing the traffic, feeling the coolness of the wind on my skin, feeling the warmth of my torso in my coat, tension and relaxation of my muscles etc ...), but there was also a vague almost unnoticable stream of thoughts going on at the same time. The noticing seemed to be too superficial to really penetrate the experiences, which left me partly lost in thought anyway.

This seems like the next step I should practice on. Any help concerning this is greatly appreciated.

Omni, you could be accessing layers of mind that are unstable. Cause and effect for example really can get the old noggin going. If thoughts are predominant note them. Also watching for the next thought to come is often effective in stopping the flow of thought at least temporarily (and is a good way to watch how they begin and things like that).

Sounding good!

I sat for an hour with open eyes, labeling out loud. Our youngest daughter (2 months) was laying in front of me, sometimes sleeping, sometimes looking around, sometimes complaining about losing her pacifier ... so I noticed things like: seeing, hearing, remembering thought, joy, smiling, spacing out, sleepiness, pressure, irritation, movement, ache, itch, ...

Again I had to watch out that the labeling didn't get automatic and superficial (mantra like). So I had to slow down and repeat labels now and then to penetrate the sensations better.

"Omni, you could be accessing layers of mind that are unstable. Cause and effect for example really can get the old noggin going. If thoughts are predominant note them. Also watching for the next thought to come is often effective in stopping the flow of thought at least temporarily (and is a good way to watch how they begin and things like that).

Sounding good!"

Hey mumuwu, thanks for pointing that out!

- Formal practice -
Sat for 45 minutes. Noted out loud with open eyes: warmth, softness, pricking, pressure, irritation, impatience, music thought, planning thought, remembering thought, sleepiness, heaviness, lots of itching...

I repeatedly focused on itches, staying with them to see what happened. I noticed they slowly diminished in intensity, with some upflares now and then, sometimes the itchy feeling disappeared and felt more like a cool spot on the skin, then it felt like itch again, the contours changed a bit, the intensity diminished further until it felt more like a soft pressure, until this disappeared as well.

It happened often that when I focused on an itch, other itches showed up in different places, more intense, making it more challenging to stay with the initial subtler itch. The itches caused planning & imaging thoughts (wanting to scratch), irritation, impatience, the latter two felt like fast and intense tingling energy bursts from chest to throat ...

- Informal practice -
The superficial noting I reported the past days seems to change into more detailed noticing when I pay more attention to "what takes center stage". Today I went shopping with my wife and daughters. I noted the center stage as much as possible, there was lots of joyous energy and love when interacting with our oldest (2yrs), but also irritation, planning thought, embarresment when she made a scene at a shop. I could clearly see where my automatic reactions wanted to lead me (imaging thought, planning thought) but managed to stay outwardly calm and feel the difficult emotions fade away, flare up again, fade away until all was more neutral again.

Awesome! You are progressing awesomely! Go Omni!

"Awesome! You are progressing awesomely! Go Omni! "

Thanks Nikolai!

I second the motion! Love to hear more of the off-the-cushion reports as well. It's so easy to just report the on-the-cushion stuff ...

"I second the motion! Love to hear more of the off-the-cushion reports as well. It's so easy to just report the on-the-cushion stuff ..."

I'll do my best.

I sat for an hour with open eyes, noting out loud. The quarterly chimes on my computer helped me divide the sit into 4 parts ( is.gd/ep1gQ )

For 15 minutes I focused on the breath. But I got nowhere compared to 20100812. Oh well. Practice fluctuates I guess, and I seem to be sensitive to warmth, sleep deprivation (babies will do that to you) and having eaten just before meditation. Then I tried to remain mindful while drinking two glasses of water (read that it helps to feel less sleepy) and moved to a cooler room.

For 15 minutes I did some Shinzen Young style noting, Focusing on ordinary states (Touch, Sight, Sound, Feel, Image, Talk). This helped, although there still was some sleepiness, eyes shutting, short dream images, but never for too long.

For 15 minutes I did some Kenneth Folk style noting: pressure, coolness, frustration, impatience, unsatisfactoriness, heaviness (eyelids), tension, imaging thought, smiling, lots of itches again to stay with.

For the last 15 minutes I dropped the labeling but kept noticing what took center stage in my awareness. Again there was sleepiness, frustration, impatience, restlesness, surrendering, itches that changed size, shape and intensity before disappearing. Some flickering in the visual field. Eyes having a will of their own. Focusing on the sensations of the eyes helped here.

The entire session my attention shifted from subjective (auditory, visual thinking, hypnagogery...) to objective (sights, sounds, physical sensations). Moving towards the subjective it seemed like the 'outside world' disappeared for a while and reappeared before I really spaced out. That was quite interesting. There was a general feeling of restlesness, frustration, impatience. Whenever I noted these I tried to see how I knew I was feeling this: what was going on in the body (fluttering, tingling gushes from chest to throat to face, warmth) and mind (self-talk, imagery)?