recording and learning

90 minutes noting at lunch - Harder to keep on task today for some reason, tired in the beginning, finding sensations and thoughts that make up 'tired' - noting them. Tiredness and lazy/avoiding mindset didnt last too long, worked all over the body, some hearing/seeing as well, going from body to mind and back, noting, watching the mind superimpose an image of a 'me', like a dream fragment, on top of body sensations in the head, chest.. At some point becoming much more centered in the body, noting sensations all over, images of a self - the whole body breaking up into vibrations, sensations, tingling, warmth, exapanding sensations, no agitation or anxiety anywhere... Noting these feelings, noting images of a self which occur to superimpose over sensations, feeling less and less solidly a 'me'. noting calm. At some point I noted a strong, pulsing intense pleasurable pushing, moving in and near third eye area, noting warmth and tingling over whole body. Never know which way one of these sessions is going to go! - also I keep finding these really small 'sticking points' of sensation in the body.. Spots I cannot really feel at first, that turn out to release later with a pinpoint of sharp pain, then gone.. How interesting.

30 minutes last night on the breath/2nd gear..

50 minutes candle kasina this morning. Not easy before coffee! On a purely intellectual level I understand why the pleasure of Jhana is so important - pleasure allows our brains to learn quickly and form deep grooves. It is my belief that the pleasure aspect of the jhana allows the brain to become very adept at focusing on something, much more so than if there were no pleasure. Therefore, I can see how/why having a strong intent to create interest in the object of concentration is important, because it should allow for more positive feelings to arise and cause faster improvement to concentration skill. Not my opinion, just a fact of neuroscience really - otherwise they would sell beer on TV using ads full of repulsive people instead of models cause they are cheaper ;p

57 min noting at lunch... Rising, falling, sensations in the breath, attention not wanting to be controlled very well, tiredness, thoughts of avoidance, thoughts of 'I cant do this', hearing cars, pressure on sit bones, tingling in head, contraction in chest, vague area of pleasantness, thoughts of tiredness...

Funny how many different ways the mind has to try to avoid being present eh?

I always find it odd that it is so easy to get into a soft J1 during the day just wandering around if I keep coming back to the breath.. Its almost as if for me the hardness of the effort isnt what does it as much as the length of time...
edit - going to have to switch to noting here during the day as I am getting a bit too pleased with the breath...

30 min last night noting - started noting an area behind the eyes and something relaxed in the middle of my head, everything got very very still and serene, got sort of lost in that for a bit until I started finding more stuff to note again. As I lay down to sleep I had this eerie feeling of being distanced from my whole body by a few inches..

I like how yesterday turned out, concentration the first half of the day during the day and noting the second half. I could walk around noting things and noticed that there was a clarity and vibrancy not normally present.

"WSH3: On a purely intellectual level I understand why the pleasure of Jhana is so important - pleasure allows our brains to learn quickly and form deep grooves. It is my belief that the pleasure aspect of the jhana allows the brain to become very adept at focusing on something, much more so than if there were no pleasure. Therefore, I can see how/why having a strong intent to create interest in the object of concentration is important, because it should allow for more positive feelings to arise and cause faster improvement to concentration skill. Not my opinion, just a fact of neuroscience really - otherwise they would sell beer on TV using ads full of repulsive people instead of models cause they are cheaper ;p"

I love this. Your notes have been encouraging me to do kasina practice more. It certainly has been helping. Thanks!
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thanks - I get sucked into theorizing and trying to 'be right' alot though, so I keep having to note that... Beware ;p

I also see how this mind has been obsessing over the maps and techniques, getting the idea that I *must* get hard jhana for some reason.. (who is concentrating?) while my experience is showing me that noting produces the best results. I see value in concentration practice but I have a 3 day retreat in two weeks which will be full time noted! It seems to me that when I get the most lost noting is what gets me unstuck!

Also seeing obsessive thoughts about where I might be, how close I am, when will I get a cessation, etc... Truth is it doesnt matter. Everything deserves to be noted and my job is just to experience this reality as it is, in every detail, watching it change, looking for the three C's.. Thats it. What is THIS!??

60 min noting at lunch - vibrations everywhere, vibrations, pressure, hearing, rising, falling, images of self, thoughts of striving, thoughts of attinment, questioning mind, pressur in third eye, intense pleasure in third eye, vibrations, vibrations... Sensations of body are composed of these tiny little explosions, little 'dots' of sensation, turning on and off rapidly.

I keep having this experience, twice now in the last two sittings, of noting sensations close to my sense of the observer and then having awareness spread out, relax, and seem to have a much more diffuse center, or almost none at all.

30 min noting last night, 60 min this AM...

This morning I was very very tired - didnt fall asleep for a while last night. Noting tired, trying to see what makes a 'tired' - where? Who is tired? Rising and falling of the breath, how many sensations can I see in there? Noting thoughts of wanting to sleep. wanting to fuzz out, noting how/where this feels in my body - I dont really have the vocabulary for these sensations.. Its weird to be on some aspect of experience and be at a loss for words - very hard to stay on track when I am tired. I'm sure I will get to see this mode of being much more in the future!

Going to try more and more to do noting during the day.

50 min mostly out loud noting at lunch...

rising, falling, tingling, pressure, falling, thinking, hearing, seeing, pressure, tingling

Still working on vocab - out loud is a bit stronger, seeing some thought loops I am not normally aware of, note them as thinking and they pop away, space is added for a second, and some energy releases in my body/head - at one point I saw 'thinking' and the thought was crystallized for a second, an image of 'me' frantically trying to improve, to 'be good enough' - noted as thinking and waves of strong tingling sensations spread all over my body, to crown, got interested in it for a second or three and went back to noting. This technique is difficult to master I can see but has very high potential for freedom. Gratitude.

90 min noting, breath anchored, this evening. Opened up a 'can o worms' after the sitting at lunch... Appreciating the anchor of breathing in the hara - interesting how thoughts of failure and powerlessness like to attach to sensations in that area.


Dark Night - the first Haiku.

pain of the body
trapped in a loop of thinking
one note at a time

50 minutes noting at the dawn sitting - More thought looping, tension in hara, rising, falling, hearing, seeing, tension, tension, thinking - the thought loops remained unclear and kept taking awareness for a ride, 'thinking' 'thinking' but unable to see the images clearly... Closely held elements of this personality, because when that particular loop is not running it feels very light and free.

55 minutes noting at lunch - quiter, more vibrations, stayed on the breath at first then moving around the body again. Noticing how the speed of the mind affects things, wondering what causes it to speed up?

Realizing that if I dont really do the 4F's I will get stuck - I have always been diligent about residing in the body but the mind tends to drag me around pretty badly at times. Its just asking to be noted! Next time I will either stick with one 'F' the whole sitting or try to shift gears every few minutes - will post results here.

3x30 noting - difficult time, noting thoughts of 'i dont want to be here' - painful contraction in throat/neck, mind throwing tantrums, noting as best as I can. There is this tension that seems to work its way up the body, and where it gets stuck the mind starts to loop in certain ways depending on where the tension is at that moment.

So the last few days have been an experiment in doing noting only and no concentration, or a bit of concentration during... I can notice that without the concentration practice the mind gets 'mushy' and resistive to the noting practice and it is difficult to get any momentum going...Good to know that for me at least right now they need to be balanced.

30 minutes concentration on breathing in the stomach area this morning - needed it. 90 minutes tonight, 60 of breathing, 30 min noting - my concentration isnt that great but powering the noting was fairly amazing - there are still lots of gaps and the noting technique will take years to master, but I reached a point tonight where I was noting 'image of a self', and saw clearly it WAS just an image, and was sitting in waves of energy rising up my body building into a crescendo inside my skull, noting 'thought of something seeing' 'thought of something feeling' - kind of like a second gear of noting...

also noticed during yoga today - I was doing lots of hara breathing and found a different sort of power and stability comes from that area. My experience of breathing into different areas of the body comes from a few years back when I noticed there was alot of grief and stuff in my chest, and after 1.5 yrs of breathing into that area it got almost all cleaned out - side effect is that it is super easy for me to feel love for people now, which took some time getting used to. I wonder what happens when the abdominal area gets clear? Interesting stuff.

60 min noting at lunch - trying to anchor on the breath somewhatin the belly... Spacing out, which is weird, pleasant, spacy, noting it, more noting images of a self, again seeing it as an image, a dream fragment ,and waves of energy rising up, vibrating strongly in the head, feels like my head wants to 'pop off' or something, cracking in the neck, head straightening on its own. Very hard to stay on task today noting, unable to concentrate, doing best to note this spaceyness and noting calm.. Felt like things getting more and more calm as I sat, could have sat there foreever, time passed quickly. 4 or 11? Who cares I guess.

80 minutes, 60 candle kasina and 20 noting - concentration was better, I can see now what real access concentration actually is, how stable it is. Wasnt there for too long though, but its a signpost of where to go back to next time... Noting was tough again, verbal side of the mind noted as 'lazy'.. Noting breath, hearing, thoughts of self, clarity, fuzzyness, etc.. I think tomorrow I will do another out loud session.

30 more minutes of noting with the GF last night - as usual my mind gets easier to deal with the later it is in the day...

hour of breath and some noting of the mind - its *really* tough to do anything in the morning, its like my mind goes way off the reservation in my sleep and I don't really wake up.. noting rising, falling, lazy mind, sleepyness, daydream, noting getting lost in thinking..
Its like somehow I can't tell whats real and whats thought in the morning - One thing I would like to discover is what the fastest way to getting the ball rolling in the morning for me might be, whether its focusing on the breath immediately on waking, or something else.

edit - does seem like noting the daydreams and mental activity was/is very effective though, and I probably learn more that way than just pushing the mind aside -
on a side note I am trying to prompt myself a bit to have some lucid dreams, because I want to do a noting practice inside a dream state to see what happens. May take a while to get it to happen as I haven't practiced any lucid stuff in a while, even though I seem to still have my 'superpowers' in dreams when I remember to use them (I have been training myself to alter dreams for years, just for fun - nobody really told me to do it or anything)

Props to Kennth on this interview - I find it helpful.

www.buddhistgeeks.com/2010/03/the-yogi-t...vestigating-reality/

edit - looking at this article I see more clearly where I am at, how I am still embedded in many different layers and what I need to do to disembed from them, starting with the body and working up the 4F's. Makes a bit more sense to me now.

55 min noting at lunch...

OK so I tried the 4F's - 10 minutes or a bit more with sensations, went OK, got better and better/faster at the technique as I went.
10 minutes with vedana, havent done much of this but seemed to get the hang of it - useful
then I started to look at mindstates - wow thats amazingly difficult for me. I can pick out thoughts but looking at the whole thing and identifying the mindstate is a bear. Lots of embedding going on there - noting states like 'searching' 'self-fixing', lots more stuff but I am amazed at seeing this stuff that drives the personality more clearly... Its running the whole time but I can't see it??! wow.

I really liked the way the practice worked when I did each foundation in succession like that - very impressive and gave enough momentum to see into blind spots. Cool. I had to shift back and forth from sensations to mindstates after while to keep from losing momentum when I got stuck at the mindstate level.

remarkable - I got the dream yoga to work last night. Woke up with an hour to go before the alarm was supposed to go off, which is normal for me. Made a resolution to become lucid and do some investigation, then forgot it and went back to sleep. Surprisingly it worked. I did note some 'body' sensations, etc, a few 'thoughts', but the quality of that experience is funny, not stable, and the stuff that makes it up doesnt like to be looked at directly - I made the dream unstable and put myself in a state where I could feel my real body again, and almost woke up, but then I dove back into the dream. I was able to go the other route and concentrate a bit to make it more 'solid', which works quite well. Walking kind of goes out the window for me once I know its a dream - I kind of just will myself around. Maybe I will start to focus on changing the content a bit more, perhaps see if it is possible to trim down the state into a stable visualization of a single object? Could be interesting. I lost lucidity at some point - what would be nice is to 'feel' the reality coming from the mind, to know even more clearly where it originates.

60 min noting at lunch - started with the 1st F, some 2nd , then the mind got *very* resistive...
noting images of a victim
noting resiting mindset
noting thought 'I dont want to do this'
noting tension, vibration, rising, falling, expansion, contraction, pinpricks, tingling, pulsing
noting resistive mindset
noting image of a victim
noting image of a person who fails
- lots of resistance *but* the noting was stronger, somehow at the same time. Feels like I am daring to tread where it doesnt want me to go.