Nadav's practice notes, part II

I was able to request Ego Tunnel via an inter-library loan program in my state call the Michigan E-Library (mel.org).

It works like this: I go to the website, find and request the book I want from a network of hundreds of Michigan libraries. It then gets delivered to my local library, and then I get an email when it shows up. No charge.

A little weird for the past few days.
I've been doing some 2nd gear practice for the past week, mainly by asking "for whom does this arise?" or just noticing that while the body (especially the head, chest and hara) are like the focal points of attention, there's nothing really marking them as "me". I've also been reflecting on how everything perceived is a representation. It's especially potent right now to recognize that even the sense of the body is a representation... exactly the same as all "external" sensory stuff.
I first noticed a subtle difference in the way the body is perceived, about 3 days ago. Hard to describe. Like the body is thinner? Then for the past 2-3 days, less of a sense of control, more detached/dissociated from what's happening.
Sustained concentration is difficult and I have no appetite for anything intellectually demanding... I had to put down The Ego Tunnel and turn off a Buddhist Geeks podcast in the middle, hehe.

It's been close to 3 months since I attained 4th path. Remembering this helps put my experience in context. Things are still settling.

I've become more peaceful lately. The dissociation of my previous post has passed, but I still find myself a little aloof when interacting with other people sometimes. I'm just more interested in the feeling of being in the room, appreciating the beauty of vision than making small talk. Most of the time it's not like this though. I can also be more open and genuine and intimate and agreeable with other people than before. So, still settling.

There's been a huge decrease in striving these past couple of months. I've been shedding my identity as a spiritual person, a pseudo-buddhist or whatever. That's not important. It's definitely not totally gone though... put me around other meditators and I'll still be thinking about how great I am.

Practice is life, life is practice. I'm either awake or not in any given moment. Doing little to no sitting practice these days. It's fun when I do it and I go deeper than I would otherwise, but I'm more likely to do other stuff.

I had a short chat with Kenneth yesterday. He suggested a king of self-enquiry practice of looking at the sensations that signal "I" until they're no longer seen as self. A fine tuning of the 2nd gear stuff I've been doing.

[2/17/12 11:54:41 PM] Nadav: So, find the sensations that signal "I" and simply pay attention to them
[2/17/12 11:55:08 PM] Nadav: and repeat as the layers are seen through
[2/17/12 11:55:34 PM] Kenneth Folk: It's that simple, yes. The only trick is that you have to practice it until the perceptual resolution and acuity are high enough to see those subtle sensations clearly.
[2/17/12 11:59:18 PM] Kenneth Folk: When it is seen clearly, you can ask the question, "where am I in this picture?" and the answer is "I'm not in this picture."
[2/17/12 11:59:36 PM] Nadav: aha
[2/17/12 11:59:46 PM] Nadav: otherwise asking the question can show where to look
[2/17/12 11:59:56 PM] Kenneth Folk: That's it.
[2/17/12 11:59:56 PM] Nadav: because it points to the body, for me right now
[2/18/12 12:00:18 AM] Kenneth Folk: The question is just a reminder to keep objectifying those sensations.
[2/18/12 12:00:23 AM] Nadav: mainly sensations in the head and chest
[2/18/12 12:00:51 AM] Kenneth Folk: yes. I think the really relevant sensations in selfing are around the eyes and forehead.

"Sustained concentration is difficult and I have no appetite for anything intellectually demanding..."

This is something that has stayed with me for several years now. Nadav. I think it's endemic to the place in which you now find yourself. And it's not debilitating in my experience. It's living now, right now, and facing what's going on now, right now. Things take care of themselves. They always have. You thought you were helping them along and making them go certain ways, but you weren't. Let go of that "urge to control" and keep shooting the clay pigeons being generated by your default mode network.

Oh hey, it's been a month since I posted. Not much to report... the aloofness I described in #27 is gone.
Sitting very rarely these days. Enjoying spontaneous moments of awareness [of being aware].

More interested in practice again.

I've been doing direct mode for 3 or 4 days now. This is what I'm doing:

"Place you attention in your body and leave it there. Feel your body as a whole, alert to subtle energy disruptions, hard spots, or tension. Don't try to fix anything! Leave it alone. Just gently rest your attention on/in the body as you would rest your hand on the shoulder of a loved one by way of reassurance; you don't have to do anything."

"Each time an emotional charge arises, feel it as a sensation in the body and gently ground it to the body just by resting your attention on it."

Both quotes are from Kenneth Folk. This thread is also useful: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/42...jhana%2C+and+insight

Jayson (mumuwu) shared a nice pointer with me this morning that's integrating well with this practice. I'll try to paraphrase it:
Notice how the periphery of your vision is present even though you're not focusing on it. You can use the same kind of touch (i.e., effortless awareness without paying attention) with the center of the visual field. For me this unifies the center and the periphery into one wide uninterrupted field. Like a panoramic photograph.
You can do the same thing with background/foreground sounds.

In the direct path videos, Kenneth talks about noticing the beauty of objects (his green yoga ball, hehe) as a feedback loop for grounding. I'm now using the periphery thing in the same way: ground (as defined by the quotes above) sensations, then tune into the unified perspective or whatever, and repeat as needed.

I've continued to work with direct mode. Some emotionally difficult life stuff gave me a lot to work with over the past couple of weeks. I used some noting too to help with that.

Had a helpful chat with Abre on Monday. I realized while we were talking that I was mistaking nasty sensations in the chest that I associate with anxiety for the full package of anxiety. I saw at that moment that although the sensations were there, the mental/mindstate component wasn't - the mind was clear, calm, equanmious, etc. I'd noticed this in the past but it seemed significant in that moment. Took some power away from that perceived anxiety.

So, I've been noticing that since. Nasty sensations arise very often but the felt mindstate is either not arising or it's grounded instantly. Without this in the way, body sensations are more direct and interesting, like I can see them more clearly than before. I noticed this while sitting yesterday morning. Right now I'm noticing the beauty of the visual field too.

Hoping it sticks!

On to the next one!

This feels like a path. Feeling the same kind of reckless joy/lightness today and increased sensory clarity. Some moments of disorientation. Feels like a layer of tension in the head is gone.

I keep looking at the mind to see if anything negative seeps through. Again and again I just find calmness, equanimity. Seeing this generates random joy and laughter from time to time. Also having fruitions throughout the past 2 days or so.

I was running a little late to a gig today, one of my barometers for progress in meditation. Today, the habits and thoughts played their part but the mind was unaffected. No anger, no anxiety. The gig was a joy. Could've just been a good night, but it felt like I could hear more. Musical things that would normally irritate me were mostly amusing or seen as ego trips by the other musicians, so more pitiful than irritation.

Curious to see how this continues.

Ahhh, the joy of saying goodbye to a layer of tension.

I've enjoyed a new level of patience and ease. I had lots of nasty sensations for the first few days following the shift but they have calmed down since. There are thought patterns and behaviors surrounding negative emotions that arise and might trigger nasty sensations too, but emotions are not formed in the same way they were before. No sense of "I am anxious" or "I am pissed off" like before. I got to see this while travelling. With the mood swings out of the way, mindfulness is improved and the process of contraction can be seen in greater detail.

Current practice since Sunday, mainly thanks to Owen:
Become aware of awareness. Anything that can be objectified is not it. This leads to expansion of what feels like "me" and at times the thinning of agency. The near instantaneous contraction of clinging/aversion is stark against the expansive clarity. Self-referencing hurts. Dependent origination at work. It can then be relaxed/looped back to the constant awareness which never changed.

Also, I can pay attention to the immediate sense experience; vision, hearing, and body. Then finally mind chatter which is loud against the rest. When all of this is rolling, it feels like thoughts arise in the middle of the head. Putting awareness on this spot from within the expanded perspective can silence or at least soften them for a few moments. I'm also starting to find a way to focus on this spot so that the stream of thoughts just flashes by, just jumbled fragments. As I pause to do this now, quick flashes of images, mental talk etc and some vibrations there within the head.

After the excitement of my last shift (ooh, another attainment! something to grab onto... I'm so damn enlightened... yeah right), life feels more ordinary again. Just being here, with these sensations and thoughts and everything else. A few times a day I'll look for myself and watch everything happening all by itself without "me' in control for a bit. Not that I was there in the first place...

I'm happier than I used to be, and I think I'm more pleasant to be around. My judgmental, cynical, antagonistic, contemptuous patterns are much much weaker. This is one of the reasons I got into meditation in the first place. Another was holding on to anger, and I can't remember the last time I got really angry. I still get irritated but it gets dropped very quickly.

It's funny how much my relationship to practice has changed in the past year.

My main practice for the past month or two (whenever deliberate practice was appealing) has been self-enquiry as a way to recognize awareness/non-duality. More "who knows the witness?" than "the witness", as described in the middle of post #36.

The sense of self has become less obvious. For now, I'm returning to the body vipasana-style, taking an interest in sensations and at times paying special attention to the sensations in the face and chest that say "I" is within the body.

It was awesome to meet everyone at the Buddhist Geeks conference this weekend!

15 minute sit:

The body hurts: a painful knot in the forehead that draws attention, back pain, occasional unpleasant activity in the chest. Feel the weight of the body on the cushion. The body is a bubbling mass of sensation that the mind really does not want to look at. Attention pulled by thoughts: images; recalled and imagined conversations; a favorite bass solo playing on repeat with images of what the player would look like playing it, approximations of my left hand on the fingerboard playing it, abstract subtle visuals that follow the shape of the line. Thoughts about how I shouldn't be spacing out. Thoughts about how it doesn't matter. Thoughts about these are just thoughts too.
Noticing the breath. Brings up associated images and sounds of Hokai's guided meditation from the BG conference. Attention focuses on the breath, doesn't really want to, lets it go.
Forehead tension. Focusing on it to see it more clearly. Tension, wound up, aversion, contraction. Mapping thoughts. A bit of self-enquiry: is this seen as 'me'? Not sure. What would that really mean? Just a ****** sensation.
Attention shifts. Breath, sight, sound, body sensations. Trying to keep all 4 in view. They kind of merge to a central point. Slight kriyas, twitching. Body is bubbling up.

Lots of dukkha this past week. It feels like a big-cycle dark night. Irritable, impatient, judgmental, general dissatisfaction. Right now, the body feels tight with emotional / special sensations (the stuff we ground for 6th stage) in the chest and head (forehead, behind the forehead, around & behind the eyes, around the lips).

My investigative interest is in where exactly, given that all I have is the flow of the 5 senses and narrative thinking, the suckiness occurs. Nothing in the nature of experience has changed, but there's resistance to what's going on now and there wasn't any a week ago. As I've said before, it's easy to be equanimous with pleasant sensations.

Oh, it's interesting how whenever one of these tough parts come around, the mind finds some aspect of life (relationships, work, the future, etc) to grab onto and amplify and blame. Usually that problem appears to be the trigger, but who knows which way causality works... It's usually something that's already less than ideal, yes, but it becomes a lot worse and suddenly THAT is the one thing that's wrong with life that must be dealt with immediately.

Fortunately this is the breeding ground for progress.

I've been looking at something slightly similar, and some of the answer, it seems to me, is that "where" is why the suckiness occurs. I don't know if this is useful to you. Suckiness, mood, thoughts, et.c. seem to me to be *interpretations* (for auditory thoughts, in a way that's similar to the way you can hear a song in the sound of a train passing by). These, as are natural for interpretations, do not in themselves have such qualities as "being in a specific place". Suckiness cannot be found when you look for it, but as you know,if you see the sensations associated with it clearly enough, it ceases. Some kinds of thoughts (most clearly, to me, visual ones) seem to be able to exist without being given a location.
So there is no "where", for suckiness, in the literal sense. This might incidentally be what is seen in 6th stage, not sure.
My own recent observations seem to indicate that tightness and tension is often the result of associating a recurring visual thought with an area or location, visual thoughts here often seeming to be such things as a kind of body image, "energy channels", "mindspace" (the recurring image of a space in your head in which thoughts occur, mostly coarising with the thoughts)

Not sure if that was useful, but good luck figuring things out.

I'm having some stuff today too - itchy, annoyed et.c. Try to look at subtle assumptions of permanence, solidity or thingness in your noting style. It seems to me i am giving these things more power sometimes when i note them.

With a nudge from a friend, I've returned to more structured practice. I'm good at dropping techniques when awareness is enough, not so good at remembering to go the other way when things get tough.

Doing two things:

1. Noting noisy or quiet for narrative thinking

2. Noting triplets and quads
Bringing the body and mind together makes it a very well-rounded practice. It's cool to see over and over again that the mind is almost always fine even though there are always unpleasant physical sensations. It can be an organic way of generating pleasant feelings without intentionally doing so via metta practice. Just noticing what's already there over and over. I think Kenneth mentioned eons ago that after 6th stage is a good time to cultivate the brahmaviharas, I think this is what he meant.

So, I'm noting sensation-feeling tone-mind state. For the quads, I turn towards awareness itself / emptiness / the unmanifest / what have you to get a glimpse of it and note what that brings. Whatever word I use to note this always feels inadequate right after I use it.

"So, I'm noting sensation-feeling tone-mind state. For the quads, I turn towards awareness itself / emptiness / the unmanifest / what have you to get a glimpse of it and note what that brings. Whatever word I use to note this always feels inadequate right after I use it. "

I've tried noting in quads for the first time this week. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing when I'm doing it, and the word does feel inadequate right after using it, but I'm impressed at the depth and spaciousness of mind that arises from doing it.

Try noting quads with the four foundations: sensation-feeling tone-mindstate-thought

Did a little mini-retreat thing today. Spent the first 2 hours or so getting concentrated. Then I counted thoughts for a while. I noticed how thoughts often associations (e.g, an image of someone I know, then a bunch of images of people I associate with them). Reminded me of something David Hume wrote about how ideas arise. Noticed some other patterns that I found amusing, can't recall anything specific now.
After a while I was mostly getting flashes/images (proto-thoughts) rather than fully formed thoughts. Counting thoughts didn't really make sense at this point so I switched to noting quiet/noisy. Eventually I was perceiving it as just very subtle movements of the mind, just a continuous bubbling. Was noting more and more moments of quiet as I went. For some reason, it was surprising to see how ordinary it was to experience life without narrative thinking. Just the same, but more quiet. It felt very liberating and I went for a walk afterwards. I have to say it felt a lot like a path moment... same kind of excitement, recklessness, clarity, somtething feels different kind of thing. It felt like thoughts had lost some of their power. The movement of attention to/from a thought seems no different than the movement of attention between any of the other senses.

Afterwards i didn't feel like doing any more meditation (in fact it wasn't clear meditating would even entail at that time) so I just sat there for a while and napped during the last sitting period.

Think I'm hopping on the tummo bandwagon.

20 minutes just now... 5 minutes of the pelvic muscle thing (did some of this yesterday too) then 15 minutes of breath retention.
30 seconds is my baseline for breath retention before the choking gets bad. During this session I got up to 40 seconds within a few minutes then some 45-50s and one 1 minute.

Great to have you on the bandwagon as well. Looking forward to hear how it goes. I'm very exited myself to be in the yogic energetic KFD laboratory. No mice needed. Real scientist's try on themselves