Andy's practice thread

Just a quick note to say that I'm off on retreat for 10 days from tomorrow. It's a Goenka one, so new territory for me. I haven't had the inclination or the right schedule to make a good run up to this one, like I did for the Mahasi retreat earlier in the year. But based on recent sits, I reckon I am at Re-observation/Equanimity (what Path I have no idea, 2nd would make some sense because I feel Re-observation begins as soon as I sit, rather than needing me to climb through nyanas, but I'm clueless really). I'm trying to look at the retreat as an opportunity to practice rather than some sort of huge deal. Part of me is looking forward to it, and another part of me would rather be doing something else.

Wish me luck and I'll see you on the other side.

Retreat update: I think it was probably the best practice I've ever done. No major intellectual freak outs (ususally I get upset over bits of dogma that I just can't stomach and then freak out that I've joined a cult. Clearly I'm maturing somewhat ) and some really solid practice. At least 10 hours of formal sitting a day, with as much noting, mindful walking, mindful eating, Qigong and mindful exercise as I could stomach in between. I can't say I noted all day long - I still find it exhausting to do so - but certainly more than I have in the past.

It took me a while to settle, because (as above) my practice has been patchy of late. The first two-three days of ananpana meditation were a bit distracted as a result, but I really hit the ground running when we started doing body scanning and took to it quickly. I worked hard on filling in the 'blank' areas of my body where sensations were either not felt or felt hazily, such as my belly, ears and the top and back of the head, and I managed to get very granular and distinct with areas familiar to me such as my hands, back and feet, top the point of being able to distinguish the toes without moving.

I succeeded in getting the "free flow" that Goenka talks about - where you move your attention like a scanner, feeling subtle vibrations in a small area as the scan line proceeds. This was especially easy on the arms, back and lower legs at times. I also experienced a few occasions where everything seemed to dissolve (strangely though, on the inside, rather than the surface) and pleasant vibrations rushed through the body from head to foot, spraying out of the area between the shoulder blades where I have felt all the tension recently. [cont...]

On the evening of the 9th day, I experienced a free flow of sensations throughout the body for about three or four minutes, whooshing around inside a very thin shell of skin.

But the real upshot of the retreat was learning much more about equanimity. In addition to these moments of free flow, there were times when the whole body felt chunky, lumpy, groaning in pain - mainly in the knees, calves, feet and back. From the 5th day onwards Goenka asks you to sit for three one-hour sits a day without opening your arms, legs or eyes. I failed on the first three, and then forced myself through the fourth. And from then on, I managed to do all but two of them, sometimes with intense pain longing for the chanting to start signalling that there were only 5 minutes left, and at other times, in fact most times towards the end of the sit, I would be sitting there engaged with the scanning, only to get a jump when Goenka gurgled 'Aniccaaaaa!' over the tanoy. On the 5th day I - and everyone else - would be in the dhamma hall lobby stretching and flexing before each of these sits as if in puja to the god of painless knees and straight relaxed backs. But you soon realise that the more time you spend fussing over your sitting set up or worrying about which muscle you've stretched the more aversive you're likely to be. Really getting through the hour depending on remaining calm and curious, patient and determined, not thinking about the time or how many rounds of body scanning you'd done, politely refusing to listen to pain until you got to that part of the body and interrogating it once you got there, to reveal a mass of heat, prickles and pulsing. Dissecting pain is a really cool experience, and I've tried to keep up this determination not to move in my hour-long sits at home.

[cont...]

So I now know how to cultivate equanimity, which leads to more equanimity. In fact, the times when I was most happy and contented during meditation weren't the moments of whooshing vibrations, but rather the times when I was just doggedly doing vipassana with a curious smile.

Other things: I found myself remembering lots of trivial but long-forgotten details from childhood. I marvelled at the ability of the mind to send itself into a tailspin of papancha when there is such little input from outside (I entertained ideas about my roommate being some sort of psycho who would burn the place down and two other yogis confessed they (separately) suspected the staff of adding something to the water!).

I still feel somewhere between the aversion and horribleness of the Dark Night and Equanimity. Pain is there, disgust is there, fear is there, sadness is there, anxiety is there, but so is the ability to hold them all with more patience and grace. I'm now back to sitting two hours a day at home, and am determined to keep it up. I do Goenka body scanning in the morning and outloud noting in the evening, with 10-15 minutes of anapana at the start. I know I'm not supposed to mix practices (or at least, so says Goenka) but I really got into body scanning and it held my attention on retreat like nothing else so I'm going to keep at it for a while and see whether I find it more useful than noting. I suspect noting will win - it just works better off retreat.

In a sit earlier today: really horrible feelings of disgust emerging at the end of the anapana section. Like my body was crowded with tiny bits of junk, a wall of rubbish before my eyes. I used to have hallucinations about this kind of thing when I got a fever as a child: always the same kind of baroque pile up of filfth and trash, horribly complicated, with barely a space to breathe. It soon cleared, and I held it with patience, but it shows I'm not out of the woods yet.

P.S. The big question coming out of the retreat is about visualisation and vipassana. I've put it all in another thread, and would be grateful for any responses, big or small. kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/48...sation+and+Vipassana

After a few days of combining Goenka sweeping with out-loud noting, I've settled back into the latter fulltime now. It just makes more sense outside of retreat and also seems to be the technique that has most helped me - and countless others in this community - make progress, so I'm sticking with it.

Beth Folk reckons I'm in high equanimity at the moment, with path imminent (quite which one we're not sure). When I sit, everything feels very spacious, easeful, peaceful and quiet, with a few knots of what I'm calling anxiety (as it seems to combine a nameless aversion with a nameless craving) arising here and there, chewing away for a few minutes and then fading or morphing into something else. It feels very residual, and is almost entirely felt in the body - as a spiky, prickly tension between the shoulders, or a feeling in the belly that is halfway between hunger and mild nausea. They aren't causing me much grief, and if I fall off the knife edge of equanimity for a few moments, I'm soon back on again. Really enjoying practice, although I must admit that equanimity can be quite boring! So noting that too, noting everything, calmly, happily.

The spaceousness and stillness is the polar opposite of the baroque filfth I mentioned above, and such a relief, even if all the constituents - the tension, pain etc are still there in one form or other.

I think I'm experiencing three different levels of practice at the moment:

1. Distraction, mild pain, mild aversion, minor fidgeting, lots of mental imagery and mental talk, but with enough patience and calmness to see me through the hour without moving or changing position. Small knots of anxiety/craving/aversion in the spine, neck and belly. Perception feels clogged with lumpy sensations, noting fast to try and catch them all.

2. Pleasant sensations - particularly joyful/blissful bursts of energy - that dissipate or anaesthetise the pain and make me feel great, lots of spontaneous (silent!) outbursts of gratitude, metta, "laughter", joy etc. Low levels of distracting mental imagery/talk. Easy to watch "seen" sensations - colours and shapes behind the eyelids, coming and going, with more joyful energy as they move and shift. Easy to sit for an hour, even to the point of being surprised when the bell rings. Happy about the pleasant sensations, but not craving them, and the unpleasant ones are still there in the background.

3. Sensations are pleasant and unpleasant, but neither really claims my attention exclusively. Lots of noting of "allowing" everything to happen. Barely any mental imagery or mental talk, just a feeling of spaceousness and bigness. Pleasant and unpleasant sensations hit me like air gun pellets bouncing off an elephant: no big deal, everything is just fine and dandy. Feeling of contentment, okayness, stillness, silence (even though there may be sounds), acceptance, and sometimes a non-aversive boredom - perhaps call it a recognition of ordinariness. Lots of room to see all the sensations, a feeling of space between them all, noting slows down. No problem sitting for an hour, although very mild craving for something to break/shift/progress/change towards the end.

Sometimes it shifts up through these three, from 1 - 3, sometimes I get stuck in one (usually the first).

Seems like Beth is right on the money about your practice--doesn't this sound like textbook High Equanimity? You're being really diligent with the noting, even catching subtle stuff like small knots of anxiety at the spine. Great report. Thanks!

Beth says my only enemy at the moment is complacency, and I discovered this morning what that really means. In Equanimity, everything is okay, to the point of being boring, and the mind starts wandering. Concentration becomes poor and I slip down from High to Low Equanimity, and become more aversive.

I feel like I need to really up the concentration at this point, and so might either spend more time on shamatha during my sits, or squeeze in some extra concentration practice elsewhere.

Over three weeks of at least two hours a day, including the Goenka retreat.

Uh oh. Looks like the pain and aversion is coming back. This is tricky territory, because I really really don't want to go back into the Dark Night, and yet by being aversive, it'll make it more likely. Anyone got any tips for this kind of thing?

On my sliding scale above, my sits today were like 1, but lumpier, more painful and more distracted, with some nausea, fear and misery. It's starting to look a lot like Reobservation again, although I did find that I was able to pull up out of it by interrogating the sensations that I was complaining about - for example, noting the tingling, pressure, heat that make up tension, rather than just saying "tension" in an annoyed manner. So some moments of clarity and space, but it does look like the dukkha nyanas are calling me back

Okay, so it looks like it's under control now. Or rather - I've relinquished control and stopped interfering and everything is much easier when I do that.

When tension arises, I have a tendency to go into it, to zoom in and try to untie it. This is, of course, aversive. So I recognise and note the aversion, note the trying, note the complaining and come back to a more zoomed out overview of the body, opening the awareness rather than homing in on the unpleasant sensation, and relaxing whatever additional tension was caused by the aversion. Instantly, the initial tension seems smaller and more manageable, and yet not pushed away or resisted, just allowed to be there. I'm trying to maintain an attitude of accepting whatever comes, without contorting my body in protest. I have this sense of sitting still, sitting upright, sitting calmly, sitting like a mountain as they say, and this seems to help maintain equanimity.

This morning it started out lumpy and distracted, but by doing the above I again pulled up into the clarity and spaceousness of equanimity. But it isn't going to be as easy as I thought!

"But it isn't going to be as easy as I thought!"

The phrase I put in quotes seems interesting to me.
What do you mean by that?

"What do you mean by that?
"

I guess this is what I'm getting at. Plowing through the Dark Night, particularly Reobservation, was tough work. Equanimity feels a bit like "phew, I made it across! Now let's get out of here", as if all I needed to do was chill out and wait for the door to open to take me to the next level. But Equanimity, I now realise, isn't just a passive state - it requires effort and hard work like every other stage, even though it is fundamentally about release and calm abiding.

In fact, I realise now that I had in mind one of Daniel Ingram's analogies which you quoted ages ago at the DhO:

"Imagine that you are standing up to your waist in a pond and the ripples are calming down after a big storm, and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep your hand on the surface of the water so that the back of your hand stays dry and the palm stays in the water, regardless of how the ripples go. If you slack off, you miss a lot and the back of your hand gets wet, and if you try too hard, you create more ripples and the back of your hand gets wet, so the trick is to just stay on it, whatever it is, however attention moves, however things present, just on it, clearly and as continuously as possible, without trying to stabilize things particularly, or make them any special way, except just to stay the heck on it, just on it, no more and no less, second after second, realizing that you will likely have many periods of either spacing out or trying too hard, but that's ok, and how we figure the thing out."

www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discu...390738CD591B40768726

I found it by searching KFD and the DhO for "equanimity" over Christmas

Yeah. I see your point.
Equanimity, especially when I find my baseline is getting established at that insight, makes me think 'ahh.. this is fun. negativities aren't even that bad! I can just note them and they dont do any harm. even falling back to the dark night is ok! waahoo!'
but when Dark Night comes back, they become a problem again, almost magically.

I've been changing practices here and there to play around a bit. I've done some cereal-bowl-kasina concentration practice and some Mahamudra noting, both of which feel like they are helping me stabilise my awareness in Equanimity when I come to do noting practice.

I just sat for an hour, and although there was definite pain and tension my mind felt clear, pure, expansive and very content. I love meditating at the moment. I feel like I can keep sitting beyond the allotted time (and will do as soon as I get the house to myself). I feel I have something that's actually worth sharing with other beings when I dedicate the merit at the end of my sit.

This week I am going to make a very strong effort to maintain noting throughout the day. Starting with posting this entry.

Noting: "intending to click 'Post'...."

Nice work. I'm watching this thread for inspiration!

""Equanimity, I now realise, isn't just a passive state - it requires effort and hard work like every other stage, even though it is fundamentally about release and calm abiding."

"When tension arises, I have a tendency to go into it, to zoom in and try to untie it. This is, of course, aversive."

"

This is great stuff.

I think Equanimity might be the trickiest stage because it isn't clear what to do. Ultimately, it really is just noting/noticing what is going on and the releasing and calmness happens on it's own. Really, it's the same as the rest of the path where just "bringing awareness to what is" is all that is needed. It just that the later Equanimity sensations are less in-your-face and so require a paradoxical mix of "more attention with less effort".

Thanks JLaurelC

betawave - I hear you on the "more attention with less effort". The tricky thing is getting the former to increase and the latter to decline at the same rate. I just had a pretty distracted sit (although still largely equanimous) because I'd let the effort decrease too far. I can see how you could get stuck in this nyana for a while. That said, it's not a bad place to be, and my enthusiasm for practice is high, so I'm happy just being patient for now.

Today I smash my personal record for continuously sitting for at least 2 hours a day. In Spring 2011 I managed 32 days in a row, part of which was a 10 day retreat. After my sit this evening, my current stretch will hit 33 days

A great practice, off the cushion for me, is to try and see no-self in real time,
the way I do it is to directly tackle the sensations of the self in the face, the tongue in the roof of the mouth, the eyes-perspective, etc.
This works especially well if you are in the equanimity-nyana.
Can you try it and tell me what you find? (While just going about your business)
It creates a lot of peace for me..

Still going on 2 hours a day Up to 38 days now, and feeling chuffed with myself. And then of course, Beth goes and asks me whether I could push it up to three!

Some observations:
- As per Yadid's suggestion, I tried to find the sensations of self, and the best I can come up with on the physical level is the additional tension (aversion) that accompanies genuine tension in the body. I "see" self in it, I recognise it as adding and interfering and I immediately release it. I find this is a really good thing to do off the cushion, and in fact, Kenneth says something similar in the last two paragraphs of this page: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/3rd+...t+Tolle,+and+the+PCE

- I can be ridiculously happy - or rather, contented - even as pain is going on. I am so cool with pain and tension right now. Nick quoted something on the Hamilton Project blog the other day about treating tension like an injured bird that will fly away eventually. The metaphor is even more effective if you imagine that the bird is too cold to fly away and needs to be held gently in your hands to warm up. Of course, if you get impatient and squeeze too tight you'll hurt it and it won't be able to fly away. This has helped me a great deal.

- My concentration has weakened. My attention wanders a bit more than normal. I think this is because of Equanimity is - in a good way - quite ordinary, and there is little drama to hold the mind. But the upshot is that I don't get frustrated or disappointed when I notice my mind is wandering. I am very much okay with it, even as I bring it back.

I did a mini-retreat while my other half was out yesterday, doing 5.5 hours of formal practice (walking or sitting) and watched Sister Khema's video on Dependent Origination. Felt wonderfully happy all day, so the equanimity is still high, even if concentration doesn't feel particularly sharp. I seem to have lots of appreciation for fairly normal things. Lots of mental chatter. Sometimes it feels like I'm not really participating in the practice at all. I'm not sure if that is progress or not. The panoramic awareness has also weakened slightly.

Today the tension in my shoulders seemed to flare up again, and I've struggled to remain equanimous with it. Trying to note in every moment I get on my own and not doing a mentally involving task (such as reading).

"Lots of mental chatter. Sometimes it feels like I'm not really participating in the practice at all. I'm not sure if that is progress or not. The panoramic awareness has also weakened slightly.

Today the tension in my shoulders seemed to flare up again, and I've struggled to remain equanimous with it. Trying to note in every moment I get on my own and not doing a mentally involving task (such as reading)."

You totally just summed up my practice lately. It actually helps to hear someone feeling the same way, I just couldn't put it into words like you just did. It sounds like progress to me though. That realization that 'you' arent participating in the practice, i think is a sign of great progress.

Better this morning. Sharper concentration during shamatha (breath counting) and a gentle resolve to stay with unpleasant sensations. Panoramic view and spaceousness returned, as did joy, calmness, patience. My performance in Equanimity really depends on how I react to body sensations, and even the slightest meandering into aversion causes a pain snowball. Gentleness, kindness, patience and curiosity is what I'm trying to cultivate now.

I can't work out if the reappearance of tension is something new or not. A week ago I was noting like this: "pressure, coolness, space, peace, calm, gratitude, imaging thought, space, happiness, contentment, seeing, seeing, spaceousness, hearing". Now it's more like this: "tension, prickling, hearing, tingling, movement, warmth, anxiety, tension, aversion, release, calm, prickling, flickering". The calm is still there, and I'm not longing for the sit to be over, but the panoramic view has largely gone. It did surface towards the end of my sit this morning, but only after deliberately slowing down. If last week was spaceous, smooth and silent, this week is prickly, buzzy and talky. Most likely it's a drift back toward Re-observation, getting stuck in a loop of tension-aversion with one particular knot in my shoulders.

Still going. 50 days now of 2 hours a day.

Practice varies more to do with external factors at the moment. Last weekend it was very spacious and calm, because I essentially had a dharma weekend: going to sitting group, meeting other Londoners from the DhO, participating in the Buddhist Geeks discussion with Daniel Ingram. This week it has felt very distracted and rushed, because I'm back to spending two days a week away from home for work, which has me practicing in unfamiliar settings and squeezed in between other things. Yesterday my entire sit was swamped by worries about work, which gets confused with the other kinds of suffering that I encounter in practice, so it's hard to see what's really going on.