Andy's practice thread

Practice has been slightly aversive lately. Some frustration with the lack of excitement and not really knowing what to do next, which leads to tension, which leads to more aversion. This evening I sat for two hours, and just let things be, allowed myself not to make a problem out of any of it. By the end of the sit I'd managed to do this, and ended up in mid-Equanimity rather than low (where I've been hanging out for much of the last week). Finished the sit with a sense of calm and spaciousness.

Things to watch out for:
- Craving spaceousness/calm
- Craving the "next thing" / Path
- Aversion towards noting/tension and fear of falling back
- Frustration with the above
- Wandering mind and tension as things that "shouldn't be there" in Eq. This is particularly pernicious - as if I can ignore those things and pretend to be in High Eq! Beth has rightly advised me to pay attention to whatever I am avoiding.

Chugging on.

"Things to watch out for:
- Craving spaceousness/calm
- Craving the "next thing" / Path
- Aversion towards noting/tension and fear of falling back
- Frustration with the above
- Wandering mind and tension as things that "shouldn't be there" in Eq. This is particularly pernicious - as if I can ignore those things and pretend to be in High Eq! Beth has rightly advised me to pay attention to whatever I am avoiding.

Chugging on."

Excellent pointers. Thanks for sharing that.

A bit dull this morning - not enough sleep.

Trying to work out how to allow things to happen by staying "upstream" from suffering in the Witness mode, as Kenneth suggests here: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/4803250/Witnessing . I think I'm getting the hang of it, but sometimes it feels that in disembedding from the tension and aversion, I'm embedding instead in the more pleasant and subtle sensations of spaceousness and calm in the head area. Need to make sure that these subtler and more pleasant sensations are seen and objectified too.

Equanimity hasn't exactly felt very close recently. This seems to be a pattern with me - I get up to Equanimity, and really feel like I'm on the edge of something, and then I slip back into tension, dullness, aversion and wandering mind. I though that this time I might have finally cracked the DN and emerged on the other side, because my experience of Equanimity was so positive, so spaceous, so freeing. And yet now I can barely remember how that felt. All of a sudden I don't want to to sit and I want my sits to end. I'm still managing two hours a day - on Day 61 on my continuous run - but it feels like losy practice.

That said, I did get a very small taste of Eq at the end of my second sit today, when I focused again on what I was "adding" to the situation - tension turned to heaviness (from something held, to something felt) and the mind became slightly more spaceous. But it ain't what it used to be.

So Beth recommended that I work a little less hard in my practice, pointing me towards Adyashanti's idea of 'true meditation': www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=writings_inner&writingid=12

I did a few sits like this, doing nothing at all except sitting there, allowing the mind to wander all it liked. It helped me to let go of some striving, and at certain points during this mental free-for-all the mind did settle on a centred "presentness", completely of its own accord, just for a few moments before spiralling off again. Anyway, Beth suggested I try and take some of this attitude into my noting practice.

One of my dharma buddies who leads my local insight meditation group came up with a good way of approaching it. During a guided meditation he suggested we ask ourselves questions such as "How do I know that I am breathing? What does it feel like to have a head?" Encorporating this into my practice has been helpful. I ask "What does it feel like to breathe?" whenever I get lost in shamatha practice and "What's going on right now?" whenever I get lost in vipassana practice. Somehow posing it as a question allows the answers to arise, without any grasping or searching for them. Like the act of listening in Kenneth's Mahamudra noting - also hinted at by Adyashanti - it creates a space for things to arise, without the need to do anything.

Other things: trying to look at pain directly and calmly. Trying to note reactions to wandering mind. Trying (again!) to maintain noting throughout the day. Trying to pay attention to transitions onto and off the cushion.

All good then, but not a great deal to report. Now on day 75 of the continuous run - the last three months being the most practice I have ever done in my life.

Although I've been doggedly doing my 2 hours of meditation every day, without fail for the best part of three months, I haven't always approached my practice with the right attitude. Sometimes it's just a case of sitting there for the hour, because it's something I have to do. If my practice is lousy, well, it doesn't matter: I've done my allotted time for the day, and there's always some future sitting which will be more attentive and equanimous and less restless and aversive. There's a certain freedom that comes from this, and it means I'm not approaching each sit with a whole heap of expectations and cravings. But the real downside is that I never attribute much value to the present sit. And as the old saying goes, nothing ever happens except in the present moment.

This morning I tried to work up some motivation, without allowing myself to be overwhelmed with striving or craving. I reminded myself that this sit would be neither better nor worse than any other sit for reaching Path and doing something to benefit myself and other sentient beings. I resolved to allow myself to feel the breathe, and to allow myself to experience sensations, thoughts, moods, and so on, without attachment and aversion. I also resolved not to move or look at the timer for the entire hour: after my last retreat all my sits were undisturbed, but I've become more impatient in recent weeks.

The resolution seemed to make a big difference as I experienced higher equanimity than I have done for a good while, with plenty of very pleasant, expansive moments. I found that if I concentrated on just allowing sensations, sounds, thoughts etc to present themselves to me, rather than busying myself by looking for them, equanimity, calm, happiness and joy soon followed. This is all Meditation 101, but the further I go the more I need that Beginner's Mind. [... cont...]

[...cont...] This approach is only a very subtle shift from what I habitually do that it's hardly worth mentioning, but it really makes a big difference. Slower noting helps enormously, as does allowing myself to really get in touch with whatever is going on - feeling the warmth or the pressure, hearing the sound, recognising the imaging thought, feeling the pain and aversion, feeling the joy - before I stamp a note on it. I recognise there's a danger here that in trying to feel these things more deeply that I could end up solidifying sensations and manipulating my experience - especially if I try and prolong thoughts - but I think I've seen the trap and managed to avoid it.

In short, then, resolutions are good, slowing down is good and treating every meditation session as precious and sufficient is hugely important. A pinch of ritualism/spiritual materialism goes a long way here: anything that reminds me of the value of each sit before I start, whether saying a prayer, lighting a candle, reading a passage from a dharma book or whatever, is worth doing.

Had my lesson with Beth last night, and she offered some good pointers as always. The most important piece of advice was that I should start paying attention to what she called "benevolent thoughts", that is, all the thoughts about practice, the worrying over technique, the evaluation - basically everything which hides "outside" of practice because it is ostensibly *about* practice. I tried it this morning and was amazed how much was there, particularly at the start of the sit, when I'm climbing up the nyanas to reach my cutting edge. Almost all thought was to do with practice - anxieties about doing it right, about different techniques and so on. With all this duly noted, wandering mind pretty much disappeared, and although it was sometimes quite upsetting to discover all the places where 'selfing' was hiding, it felt like I was at the top of my game. Towards the end of the sit, wandering mind occurred without anxiety, and these were noted but without too much worrying over technique.

I encountered the energetic movements that I associate with the nyanas for the first time in a long while today. Perhaps because I was more attentive than usual to what was happening at the beginning of the sit.

An interesting sit just now, trying to find the blindspots in my practice, noting the thoughts were self is lurking. A few moments of completely calm centredness, left once the these 'benevolent thoughts' - the technique thoughts, the guiding thoughts, the evaluating thoughts - were noted. These moments are not cessations, so there is obviously still something there that I'm missing. Next time will try to note something. Spaceousness or pause, perhaps.

All very calm. Very little anxiety and aversion that wasn't noted. Some wandering mind, but noted too and generally held in a gentle manner. Surprised when the hour was up, which is a sign that I'm higher up the equanimity scale.

As mentioned above, Beth has got me looking for all the thoughts which are about meditation and which I am liable to ignore or indulge in because they are deemed to be "outside" of practice. When I find one, and note "guidng thought" or "technique thought" or "worrying about technique" or "anxiety" or even just "making a problem", it disappears immediately, only to be replaced by another worry or anxiety about technique, this time referring to precisely the technique of finding technique thoughts! I note this one, and it disappears, gets replaced by another and so on, one new worry inside another like a Russian doll, getting subtler each time. At some point these anxieties, which of necessity get noted fairly rapidly, just dissolve into wave of tingles, which blend fear, panic, anxiety, joy and calm all together. It's like free fall, and I try my best to note it. It feels like Fear nyana, but without the B-movie images and so on. It's more like I'm panicking about the idea of letting go of the self. After this process happens, things generally return to normal, and I continue noting as before.

I've been listening to Adyashanti's talks on his Basic Teachings (three videos, all available to stream for free here: bit.ly/CWdFA ) and working out how his approach might apply to my practice. In the second talk, he explains how meditation should be about letting things be just as they are. Well, that's what noting is supposed to be about, although god knows I'm liable to use it rather like a stick to bash my experience with, rather than as a space to let it all play out. I sat for an hour after listening to the talk, and watched whether and when I was really letting things be as they are. This is what I noticed:
- Tension in the body initially feels like resistance, and therefore something that needs to be released. But really the resistance isn't IN the tension so much as TO it. I observe tension, make a problem out of it, push against it, wriggle around it, try to get it to release. Just by very gently noticing the resistance to the tension, allows the tension itself to gently relax and become a collection of warm feelings, pressure and stretching rather one Big Problem.
- It's impossible for things NOT to be as they are. Everything is okay. Even resistance. Even aversion. Even meandering worrying thoughts. They have nothing to do with me anyway. I can't possibly be doing this wrong, at a very deep level.

It becomes very hard to describe how this approach helps, but I think I'm getting the hang of it (if there was even something to get). Very equanimous sit today.

Andy, isn't this approach really just letting go? I think those of us that come from a vipassana orientation often have trouble with practices like this and Shikantaza. We've spend thousands of hours investigating and then have some trouble when asked not to "do" anything, just be.

Thoughts?

Yeah, precisely. For me it's full circle, because I started off in Zen where there is little to no instruction. Finding the pragmatic dharma scene was such a boon for me because it was so technical and easy to wrap my mind around. Effort was no longer the enemy, but rather a vital part of the path. Working hard and pushing yourself was a good thing, not a kind of spiritual craving. Anyway, I loved it. Coming back to the letting go approach certainly is a challenge for me!

Interesting sit this evening. Real sense of ease and effortless in shamatha, although no absorption to speak of, and then lots of fast flickering, pulsing, vibrating towards the end of the vipassana sit. Silent noting arising naturally between outloud noting. Sometimes easing off completely and I just watch it all flicker. Tried to see whether there was anything left that wasn't flickering - focused on tension in the back, that started to flicker and pulse. Mental images were flickering, as if I could see a whole array of images mutating and changing moment by moment. What's left? I tried to direct attention towards the sense of self, the watcher and so on, but I didn't want to overdo the effort. The sit was pretty easeful, didn't really want to get up at the end.

Day 90 of +2 hrs a day and counting.

Definitely back in some tricksy Dark Night stuff alas. Meditation over the last week has been aversive, distracted and painful. Lots of fidgeting and checking the timer.

Last night I made an effort to sit with aversion, rather than look at the clock. It seems that spaciousness us always there if I pay attention to it rather than getting locked in to aversion. Found some real calm and contentment running parallel to aversion and tension.

Great lesson with Beth just now. Slowly starting to get a sense of what it means to know that I have very little to do with what happens in my meditation practice, and just to trust in the unfolding process of awakening.

We did a wonderful series of meditation techniques, starting with normal out-loud noting for five minutes or so, then switching to Mahamudra noting for another five, then to doing nothing at all, just abiding calmly, and then finally the last five were back to noting. It was great to ease into the calm abiding through Mahamudra: the spirit of "listening" just carries through. And then coming back to normal noting at the end made me realise just how much struggle I'm liable to inject into the practice. Noting after calm abiding had a very different flavour to my normal approach.

Very equanimous, joyful, spacious and calm. Lots of gratitude and contentment, even in the middle of pain and distraction. All good. Nothing to do. Nothing to go wrong. Relax and trust the process.

100 days today!

Technique is starting to feel really unnecessary. Noting is too unwieldy: it misses so much of what is going on. So I just sit there. Sometimes I get anxious doing this, but if I'm able to cultivate an attitude of trust, surrender and feeling safe then I can just let it all unfold without me getting in the way.

Auf wiedersehen!

I am off to the Bavarian countryside for a two week retreat at Dhammacari Vipassana Meditationszentrum, which I discovered via the retreat centre section of the DhO wiki.

www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharm...%20Meditatioszentrum
www.vipassana-dhammacari.com/meditationszentrum_eng.html

It's a hardcore Mahasi centre, which considering current interests in no technique and letting things be might seem an odd choice. But I reckon I'll get all of the benefits of external pressures to practice - the gruelling schedule, the silence, a pragmatic and technique oriented teacher - without any of the unhelpful internal pressure that has accompanied me on so many retreats before. Even if I'm told to practice for 48 or even 72 hours non-stop (it happens, apparently) I'm still going to see it as a chance to open up, relax, enjoy myself, and allow myself to simply be with whatever comes along. As Beth said to me in our lesson last night, "the pressure is off."

Sounds like a great opportunity. Good luck to you.

For the last two weeks, I've been on retreat at Dhammacari Vipassana Centre in Germany. The place teaches Mahasi-style meditation, with a few modifications via the Thai monk Ajahn Tong, who was one of Mahasi Sayadaw's students and the principle teacher of the teacher at the centre. We were doing equal amounts of walking and sitting each day, starting with just 15 minutes of each per 'round', before quickly building up to an hour of each in succession. Towards the start of the second half of the retreat I was doing in excess of 10 hours a day of formal practice.

The teacher, Hildegard Huber, has a interesting take on the nyanas, whereby she guides all students through them on a day by day basis. So on the first day she asks you if you can see the difference between the mind and the body, the first nyana. The next day, she asks whether you've noticed that sometimes your leg moves to step before you've noted "moving", and other times, it's the note that comes first; the second nyana. And so on. But unlike here and at the DhO where the A&P can be a big mystical experience, she just asks you whether you can see the elements of experience arising and passing, and then asks if you're noticing cessations - which is Dissolution. Similarly, the Dark Night isn't framed as a big deal - she said it could just involve slightly anxious thoughts - but when I hit what was probably Re-Observation in a bad way on the middle Sunday, she did say "just like in the book!"

[cont...]

[cont]

I practised hard, perhaps too hard, in the hope of getting Stream Entry - the goal I've been aiming at for at least 12 months now. I was surprised to find myself back in the Dukkha Nyanas: everything since my last retreat has pointed to at least low Equanimity. But Hildegard seems to think that mind can cycle back to the start of the nyanas, "just to check" that life is really as full of suffering as the Progress of Insight seems to make clear. Also, Beth's made it clear to me before that I'm prone to visit different strata of mind, even when Equanimity is my cutting edge. Still, it was not very nice to hit the kinds of experiences I encountered on my first Mahasi-style retreat last March (see posts 38 and 39 on page 2 of this thread): loads of tension collecting in the area behind the eyes and nose, and definitely not my tongue this time!

Having had a good few days at the start of the retreat, with a really wonderful second or third day when I really thought I was getting into something like High Equanimity, I was soon very tightly wired, terrified of the throbbing in my brain, cursing myself for overdoing it and fretting about dogma and technique. Fortunately, I managed to summon an attitude of extreme patience on the middle Monday, and took everything very slowly, pausing as much as possible during walking to note the anxiety, the fear, the story-spinning that accompanied the unpleasant sensations, as well as all the doubt, the worrying, the thoughts about doctrine and different approaches to the dharma. And also noting the sensations themselves, looking at them as calmly as I could, and seeing - ultimately - that they weren't so bad.

[cont...]

[cont]
The tension in the face didn't disappear, but it did subside a little, and I was able to keep on practicing. I started to feel really good again, very calm and happy, but definitely not post-Path, and the mind started to lose interest in the retreat and I started thinking about mundane things: my life at home and so on. Boredom reigned in meditation. The teacher seemed to recognise this as Equanimity, asking whether I was able to approach the suffering and the happiness with a degree of distance.

The last three days of the retreat were days of "determination", where my already thrifty allocation of sleeping hours, which had started at 6 but reduced to 5 and then 4 hours in the second week, was completely taken a way, and we were made to stay awake well over three days, confined to a room each, practicing with only small breaks for tea, food and using the toilet. It was a pretty maddening experience. From midnight to about 5am I felt terrible, stumbling through walking meditation, and generally nodding off during sitting. Each night I'd also find myself asleep in some uncomfortable position on the floor, having crouched for a moment's rest, before allowing sleep to take over. But as the sun rose each morning and breakfast was brought to the door, everything awoke, I spoke to the teacher, and felt like I could continue. The afternoons each day were generally very good for practice: bright and clear.

[cont...]

The first day of determination we were told to resolve that gross understanding of the 3Cs would disappear and more subtle understanding arise. I can't really say I noticed much of a difference, besides the fact that my major gripes were no longer pain in the body or doubt or worry in the mind, but frustration with the meditation object itself - be it the step of walking or the breath at the abdomen and then a series of touch points we had to find on the body during each sit. The second day we were given a mala and told to use it to count the number of cessations during each sit - the little jolts and blips in experience. I sometimes counted none, sometimes as many as three clear instances an hour. And on the final day, we were asked to resolve that we experience "the state of meditation without consciousness of outside phenomena" and to note any sits, walks or breaks when the time had seem to disappear quickly. By this point, however, I felt like death warmed up, and feeling like every hour dragged on and on.

It's hard to say exactly what I feel like now. Practice is fine - although the tension behind the eyes still crops up every now and again. I definitely don't feel post-Path, and so Stream Entry is still the goal.

[cont...]

[cont]
One thing I did notice happening a lot is the occurrence of dreamy states of mind during sitting meditation, but without any recognisable sleepiness. Perhaps this really was a kind of dozy dream - hardly unsurprising given the lack of sleep - but it didn't feel like I was asleep, and yet they were not "daydreams" in the normal sense: they were distinctly "other" and not belonging to me in any way, the content uncontrolled by me: so I'd get these images of retreatants off to collect frog spawn, or a dream where I was being taught to milk an artificial cow. And sometimes I seemed to hear these very eloquent and yet also nonsensical conversations from other (unseen) people, in which I was not involved at all. Perhaps they mean nothing, but I know that some people - Daniel and I think Tarin too - have said that Stream Entry can happen when the mind is left to indulge in these strange flights of fancy. I'm making nothing of it - just noting "dreaming" as soon as I come out of them.

Slightly disappointed by the lack of Stream Entry - I doubt anyone will think I did it without noticing - but I try to remember to be patient. The upside is that my enthusiasm for practice has increased rather than decreased, and I'm still going at it with as much skillful effort as I can muster in daily life.

On the subject of cessations (if indeed that's the right thing to call these clunks/blips/snags/dropping out experiences) - sat for an hour just now and experienced about 9 or 10 of them. And yes, it did feel like about five minutes was missing from the total time when the bell rang at the end.