AndyW's Practice Notes, Version 2.0

Had a lovely 60 minutes on non-meditation. So much of the anxiety that used to accompany this practice is now gone. I really like doing it. There were some meandering thoughts, but interesting very little of it was the usual planning or worrying. The vast majority had a flavour of gratitude and metta. Which is nice

Off to a music festival this weekend, which is usually my annual break from practice. Not this year! I am determined to keep up the two hours each day on my inflatable zafu even if everyone else thinks I'm crazy!

Three days of music festival, and still two hours a day. It may not have been the best practice, and I may have had to get up at 5.30 to do it before the kid in the tent next to me started singing "Go Go Power Rangers" in a futile bid to rouse his sleeping parents, but I did it. So now I'm on 271 days of continuous practice of at least two hours a day. And no regrets!

Still getting the bliss waves: energetic rushes up the spine and a sense of joy and gratitude. Between three and four in an hour's sit. Otherwise there is either a sense of calm, or some fidgety aversion and restlessness, but even this is known quickly and allowed in, where it relaxes and softens.

Today: Did 40 mins of noting this morning, fairly fidgety and distracted, with some anxiety mixed in, so I got up and did 20 minutes of distracted walking instead.

This evening: 60 mins of doing nothing. I like collecting new pointers and having them on rotation since they get stale so quickly. My current favourite is Shinzen Young's explanation of what it means to "do nothing". He says: "you can always stop an intentional act, because if you cannot stop doing something, it is not really intentional and you don't need to stop. The instructions are very clear; only stop doing what you easily can stop doing. Let anything else happen as it will."

It was fun asking myself what "I" was doing. Was there anything that "I" was doing? Yes, asking this question. But so much else, even thoughts that "I" feel invested in, are all just popping up of their own accord. Seeing this, ripples of energy flow through the body in a pleasant and joyful way.

Other fun things I have been playing with today:
- catching experience before I have a chance to categorise it. Sound as sound, not as "bird song" or "car noise".
- finding what areas of experience flicker and bubble in a post-A&P manner, and which feel more solid. Sounds flicker, body sensations flicker and the visual field flickers. So now I have been looking at mental images, which play a big role in my phenomenology, and testing their solidity, daring them to actually stay still for a moment and finding that they don't. More bliss waves when I find this out

Sat for 2 hours this morning, in three stages.

First 60 was noting, quite distracted after taking a long time to get to 30 breaths. But there was no agitation or frustration about the distraction, just a lot of calm and ease. Then 15 minutes of walking (pretty pedestrian if you'll excuse the pun) and finally 45 minutes of Mahamudra Noting, which I combined with the "Toll Booth" practice.

I had never really got Kenneth's Toll Booth practice until today. I didn't understand how you could hand over "all your resentment, all your fear, all your anxiety, all your stress, all your manic joy, etc" as he recommends. But today I realised I could do it with aversion and craving. Say a thought or a pain arises. I don't want them there, and so I suffer. But if I hand over the aversion, it all becomes really light and easy. Then it comes back, I pay the toll again, but this time I am craving the lightness and ease that comes after paying the toll. So the toll isn't really paid. Hand over the aversion AND the craving. Done. Ease. It was so simple and so wonderful that I found myself laughing out loud at the ease of it all. I now use the word "surrender" to pay the toll, in place of the word "release" that is usually done in Mahamudra Noting.

Ended with a few minutes of metta.

Since yesterday, I have noticed some old familiar anxieties and thought loops arise. This can get a little murky for me because so much of my dukkha is to do with the dharma itself. The reason being, I suspect, is because my first big opening was my encounter with Christianity nine years ago, and the disappointment, doubt and anxiety that followed the initial joyful surrender has left me particularly wary of religious and spiritual systems, and yet hungry for them at the same time. The various shifts that happened in my belief system over the years has engendered a fear of "being on the losing team", and so I don't always accomodate doubt that well. I thought that recently I might have surmounted these particular mental loops, having not spun in them for most of this year, but I have noticed them arise again in the last 24 hours, worrying about which version of the dharma is "right" etc. When they start spinning, I get mental images of the exact places where I was when I experienced them before, and I recognise the same bodily feelings. Perhaps this is the beginning of the Dark Night of 3rd Path, or perhaps it just shows what I thought was 2nd Path wasn't actually so.

There are always parts of this, or any path that make you doubt whether you have ever made any progress in the first place. It's just another emotion that will pass. If you got 2nd, this is the time when (at least in my experience so far) you will feel like you go from superhuman with special powers (I am exaggerating) to pre-SE in no time flat. I find it helpful during the doubtful times to go back and read my own log from the beginning and realize how far I have come. Try it with your log. I even did it today and actually laughed at my posts many times and just watched myself go through these cycles over and over again.

I Agree with Aqua here..

Thanks guys. When I was perusing the KFD back catalogue for the "Best of..." thread I started today, I did find some pretty moany posts from me! And I guess it's progress that I can recognise these anxieties as rehashes of previous content, and that I'm able to stand back from them somewhat.

Just did 30 minutes of metta - very helpful - and then 30 minutes of doing nothing. Both very grounding. Halfway through the metta I encountered a sense of heaviness in the body, pulling down from the mid back, which continued throughout the sit. There were also some mini cessations/blips/snags along the way, and one or two energetic rushes.

Andy, one of my favorite practices for difficult times is Father Thomas Keating's Christian Centering Prayer. It's vipassana with a Christian flavor. You name whatever arises, just like vipassana, then say "I welcome you." For example, "anxiety... I welcome you," "heaviness... I welcome you," "doubt... I welcome you." You can feel your heart opening with every note. It adds the element of compassion and takes a lot of the sting out of painful mind states and sensations.

I first tried this in '93 while working toward 2nd Path in Southeast Asia. It's a beautiful practice and the idea of reconciling Buddhism and Christianity is in itself appealing. Father Keating developed the practice after doing lots of vipassana and Zen practice in addition to his native Christianity.

Thanks Kenneth. Your description of Centering Prayer sounds a lot like what naturally emerges for me in surrender practice (saying "yes" to everything) and also in Mahamudra noting.

It was interesting to see the anxiety and doubt yesterday shift into something much more tender, a kind of sadness and even grief at something lost. As you've said to me before, this is the flipside of compassion and so perhaps now is the time to cultivate that through something like Centering Prayer. I have been really steeped in the other brahmaviharas recently - feeling lots of friendliness and equanimity, and particularly appreciative joy, mainly in the form of gratitude. Perhaps this is compassion kicking in.

I told Beth last week that I wasn't that bothered about attainment any more - because some level of suffering had just shaken off. But now I'm back in the tougher stuff I suddenly want to know whether that was Second Path or not! Did you have any thoughts?

It sounded like 2nd Path to me, Andy.

"It sounded like 2nd Path to me, Andy."

Awesome Andy. Good work. Keep doing what you are doing!

Thanks Russell and Kenneth.

Glad to have hit 2nd Path, but what Russell said about going back to a kind of pre-SE state is becoming painfully apparent to me. I have had some pretty strong aversion to sitting the last few days. Fortunately it hasn't been strong enough to make me break my chain, so I have still done the 2 hours, but they have been very distracted, very disengaged and highly restless. Lots of fidgeting on the cushion, switching to walking, then lying down, switching between techniques, planning, fantasising, pursuing little projects in my head. Sits like this feel barely worth reporting!

The only sit of any note I've had recently was one a few days ago when I had a very noticeable A&P (cool, pleasant rushes of energy up the spine), then a very noticeable Fear (B movie mental images, "the willies", spooky tingles, something in the pit of the stomach falling away as on a rollercoaster), a slightly less noticeable Misery (a sad tenderness in the central area, some cool rushes), and a very noticeable Disgust (mental images piling up in a grotesque roccoco way, knots in the stomach, skin crawling). I then seemed to jump (is this even possible?) between being grossed out by sensations (presumably Disgust) and being plunged into the spooky tingles/pit of the stomach falls (presumably Fear). This went on back and forth for several minutes.

It wasn't a horrible experience by any means, and in a way the tension and aversion of distracted, bored sits is worse. But perhaps the reason I'm tuning out so much at the moment is because the dukkha nyanas are all I've got.

In a way though, all this feels so familiar, there's something kind of comical about it. Samsara, what a hoot, eh?

I've found myself going to almost comical lengths to avoid meditating. There is always "something to do" before I can sit. Fortunately my refusal to break my chain of daily two hour sits is keeping me at it, even if this means doing it all at once before bed because I've put it off all day. Truth is, meditation is messy and unpleasant at the moment.

Perhaps because of this I've felt drawn to concentration practices. I tried resolving to get to first jhana last night with no success, but this evening I may have hit first and second. I say that because I noticed pleasurable sensations in the head and a sense of happiness arose, and then the pleasure dropped away and happiness remained. It was shallow and I dropped out if it pretty quickly, but it seemed like 2nd jhana characteristics. Anyway, it made noting afterwards a lot less unpleasant, even easeful. I'm realising that when practice gets difficult and when I become aversive there's a tendency to think that more seriousness is the answer. More likely what I need is patience, friendliness and a sense of joy. Trying to cultivate these a little more now.

And I'm back. I moved house in September and still don't have the internet in my new place, so reports will continue to be infrequent. But I'm still doing 2 hrs a day, and gunning for the year. It's a been a difficult phase recently, with lots of bodily tension and aversion to sitting, as well as the recurrence of some old patterns of craving.

I think I'm over the hump now - or rather, I'm making my peace with the hump. Starting to get back to 3rd Gear practice which I have been neglecting in favour of vipassana or samatha practice. Last night I listened to the start of a Rodney Smith talk in which he mentions how all our mental noise is really a distraction from a present moment that is in some way unsatisfactory to us. I played with this a bit, seeing the noise arise and then dropping it, and returning to whatever it was masking or shunting aside. I saw the fear and the witholding in the noise, and the okayness of whatever remains. Not nearly as scary or as unpleasant as anticipated. In fact, just letting it be, in all its glorious mundanity, allowed for a sense of joy, peace, release and amusement. I'm not saying I can do this all the time, just now and again, when the pain isn't so bad and I have enough courage to challenge it.

Otherwise just bashing on with noting. Need to rekindle some of the everyday mindfulness, which has also fallen by the wayside (at least in its deliberate aspect, I often find myself noting automatically and am most often aware of bodily sensations).

Hey, Andy, is that Rodney Smith talk publicly available?

Hi Andy, better late than never!

www.dharmaseed.org/feeds/talk/148/9823/

He has some excellent stuff in that talk.

Yesterday marked 366 days of meditating for two hours a day. I will admit that there have been several days, particularly recently, when I have practiced in less than ideal conditions, such as on trains (once just sitting on the floor because there were no seats), in noisy campsites and, worst of all, lying in bed at 11 or 12pm, trying not to fall asleep. There were also two days when I forgot to finish the day's practice - once when I missed 15 minutes, and once when I missed 30 minutes. But I made the time up in the days following, and decided to be kind to myself and allow it to contribute to the run.

I made the commitment after sitting a Goenka retreat this time last year, since Goenka himself suggests this to all retreatants on the final day. Although such a rigid approach has occasionally felt slightly spiritually materialistic or bureaucratic, in general it has been hugely motivating and helpful. I now know that (bar two occasions of forgetfulness) I can do it, and this level of practice has become my new benchmark. This year, I have been able to confirm stream entry with a decent review stage and attain 2nd Path, so something must have gone right. I'm hugely grateful to Beth for all her support and motivation, as well as my very patient girlfriend.

I now plan on doing at least an hour a day, allowing myself to do 2hrs or more when it feels right and I can devote myself to it, without having to cram it in on busy days.

[cont...]

[...]

Yesterday, perhaps appropriately, was a reminder of all the dukkha in my life. I procrastinated, I put off meditating, I got lost in old patterns of craving and indulgence. But finally I decided to sit, for 2hrs30, pretty much straight through with some swapping of legs around in the middle. I sunk into a decent samatha, managing to hit either access concentration or maybe 1st jhana, and then after 30 mins or so of that, maintained very steady out-loud noting for the vast majority of the sit. The fug of the day dissolved, and I had felt focused, at ease and calm, even with the tensions and knots and distractions. Sometimes the only difference between a sit with traction and a sit with, well, DIStraction is just a bit of patience and a willingness to draw near to irritation, boredom, frustration, anger and even hatred. I really acknowledged all the irrational anger - for example, I noticed myself getting irritated by mental images, which - oddly enough - were all connected to my old workplace. For some reason I was just glossing over the aversion that accompanied these pictures, perhaps because the reaction made no sense to me. (I mean, I was often bored at my old job, but rarely angry!)

Something seemed to open up last night. Perhaps it was just the contrast of steady practice with a day of somewhat unskillful behaviour and habits, or perhaps the sense of accomplishment from the year. Or something genuinely did shift - I felt myself experiencing the more positive qualities of some of the nyanas - such as the spaciousness of EQ, and the "flushing out" of the A&P - for the first time in quite a while. Whatever it was, it felt like a fitting end to this particular stage of my little pilgrimage.

Kenneth took me through a guided tour of Jhanas 1-6 this evening. I guess I had been accessing these strata of mind before, but not really knowing what was what and where to go. Jhana #4 felt particularly familiar, since it is so similar to 11th ñana. I got a bit lost with the 5th and 6th, and wasn't quite sure I got there. Kenneth signed off at the end of the session, leaving me to rapidly descend the arc. I found that I was now able to recognise them all clearly on the way down.

It's a fun practice, and probably the kind of thing I need right now, when other kinds of practice have felt a bit dry or difficult. It's also nice to have a challenge - dissecting everything into tingles and flickering particles comes so naturally to me now that working with solidity and smoothness takes some effort.

Tomorrow I am off to spend a few days at Cittaviveka, a Thai Forest monastery near my parent's house. Not sure what to focus on, but will definitely play with the jhanic arc.

Lovely time at Cittaviveka. They are in Ajahn Chah's lineage, so the emphasis is not so much on silence and formal meditation, but on community, meditation while going about tasks, walking and so on. This was a good challenge for the part of me that wanted to huddle away without saying a word and practice formally for 10 hrs a day.

I spent most of my sitting time on the jhanic arc, working with what Kenneth taught me about eye posture and dynamic jhana. I think I have managed to get a decent grip on jhanas 1-4, although I could be completely deluding myself. The edges to each jhana aren't very sharp as such, but the transition is apparent. There is still a lot of thinking, but most of the time it involves the jhana itself. When there is mind-wandering, I am usually able to catch it quickly enough to pop back into the jhana.

Some notes on each jhana (if anyone wants to corroborate or correct me, I'd appreciate it).

JHANA 1
Mood: Excitement, pleasure, subtle sense of strain and giddiness
Body sensations: Belly tingles, stirring, some tension in the face
Direction of energy: Contracting, narrowing
Breath focus: both in-breath and out-breath
Temperature: Warm
Mental colour: Orange?
Eyelids/visual field: Dark
Eye posture: peering down the nose, like looking into a tunnel
Awareness: narrow

JHANA 2
Mood: Joy, pleasure, happiness, freshness
Body sensations: Spinal rushes and tingles
Direction of energy: Rising
Breath focus: In-breath
Temperature: Cool
Mental colour: Blue
Eyelids/visual field: Brightening - light grey
Eye posture: looking straight ahead, but taking in a diffuse visual field
Awareness: slightly diffuse

[cont...]

JHANA 3
Mood: Relaxation, relief
Body sensations: Skin tingles, sense of dissolving or melting, some slumping
Direction of energy: Falling
Breath focus: Out-breath
Temperature: Cold
Mental colour: Purple or green
Eyelids/visual field: Dark
Eye posture: n/a
Awareness: whole body, at the level of skin

JHANA 4
Mood: Equanimity
Body sensations: Spaceousness, awareness of whatever pain was hidden by first 3 jhanas
Direction of energy: Expanding outwards
Breath focus: In-breath
Temperature: Neutral/lukewarm
Mental colour: White
Eyelids/visual field: Bright, but not a big factor in this jhana
Eye posture: n/a
Awareness: panoramic, going right around the skull, but still within a contained area, like the inside of a sphere.

I know that the imagination becomes important in the arupa jhanas, but I found it was helpful here too. I could just think of the flavour or character of the jhana and move into it. Sometimes it just felt right to move on. Like, "okay, next one now" as the body sensations stopped.

I did try to get to 5 and 6, but these were way more vague, whereas 4 is distinctly recognisable and also wonderful. I actually stopped there rather than going down again, and just switched to insight practice - either noting or, more often, open, choiceless, non-doing awareness. It was great.

Best of all I found this practice really helped soothe the pain that I get when sitting. It was really nice to be able to welcome the pain back in at 4th jhana - to the extent that I was sometimes even able to welcome it back, like an old friend - but without the attendant dukkha that accompanies it when I do dry vipassana practice.

But as I say, I could be getting some of this wrong. I would appreciate some insights from more experienced yogis.

This is basically how I experience them, too. The only point you made that disagrees with my own experience is the 2nd jhana, which I experience as rising heat, not coolness. Also, behind the eyes, the 3rd one is diffuse and grey for me without the ability to focus on any one thing.

I'm kind of a slop-artist, though, and don't notice the edges of them too well. I sit, I start feeling weird, the energy gathers and rises and releases irregularly, almost to the point of being uncomfortable, then things get very vague and cool, and this is where I'm likely to lose concentration and fall down somewhere in the dark night, but I just plug away until, omg, everything is so vast.

You can use imagination to access the arupa jhanas, and I struggled with that for awhile, but eventually I figured out it was easier to just mentally say to myself "infinite space" or "infinite consciousness" and let the mind figure it out on its own. Because the sense of effort that came with continually trying to picture something in my mind's eye distracted me after awhile and made it hard to get any higher than the 6th one.

I mean, if you've hit the 4th one, your mind knows what spaciousness is already. Going from 4th to 5th isn't so much conjuring up a totally new thing as it is just letting go of everything material in the 4th. A similar thing happens in the transition from the 5th to the 6th, except here, space reveals itself as being nothing but consciousness already, because every time you try to "push out" into space again, you come right back to the beginning, which is a sense of an everywhere-observer. The other way I experience the 6th is that I can't get lost in the 5th anymore, because "I" am everywhere I go.

Anyway, I hope that's helpful! Sounds like you had a great experience and are quickly getting the hang of this stuff.

Thanks, apperception. Nice to have your confirmation. And I am definitely a slop artist too. But if jhana does nothing else but help me sit by soothing the pain I get in my back and shoulders, then it'll be a great boon to my practice.

One thing: I don't much like first jhana, and find it the hardest to get into. This morning, I spent 15 minutes getting into it, then 15 minutes going up to 4th, at which point I switched to insight for 30 mins. There is a tightness that seems inherent in the way I'm getting into first jhana. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I did get some of the dreaded face tightness while doing this practice at the monastery, but because of the jhana pleasantness it didn't bother me. Kenneth recommends kind of crossing the eyes to get the right eye posture for first, and perhaps from some quirk of my anatomy that results in tension for me.

Going to hold off arupas until further instruction from Kenneth.

"One thing: I don't much like first jhana, and find it the hardest to get into. This morning, I spent 15 minutes getting into it, then 15 minutes going up to 4th, at which point I switched to insight for 30 mins. There is a tightness that seems inherent in the way I'm getting into first jhana. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I did get some of the dreaded face tightness while doing this practice at the monastery, but because of the jhana pleasantness it didn't bother me. Kenneth recommends kind of crossing the eyes to get the right eye posture for first, and perhaps from some quirk of my anatomy that results in tension for me."

I think I know what you mean. I used to have issues with this, too (couldn't get into 1st jhana, felt too much tension in 1st jhana, wasn't sure about 1st jhana, etc.)

What helped me was to learn to just enjoy the breath in and out of the body. There's something intrinsically enjoyable about the breath in and out of the body. It's always there. You just have to let go and open yourself to it. I would sometimes mix light noting in: "Is there pleasure? ... Is there joy? ... Is there warmth?" and let the good stuff arise that way.

And then once I got that going, THEN I'd use the eye focus at the tip of the nose (like a cone 4-6in in front of you) to keep it there, to keep it from going into 2nd jhana.

I used to get really upset trying to get the 1st jhana! It's nuts. You can't get jhana that way. It's silly when I think back on it. You just have to love each breath, like it's the only one in the world.