Yuki's practice

11/17
After certain amount of time on the cushion, things tend to calm down to the point that I am brought into this state with waves of sleepiness, nodding off, then coming back to myself. The nodding off and coming back to my self is often accompanied by flash of light. I also did lying down meditation, or perhaps could just be called dozing off, except that I was trying to be mindful of the waves of sleepiness. At times, I was almost not breathing at all and so coming back to myself part is accompanied by gasping for air.

11/19 (morning 40 min sit) Started with couting 20 breaths. Tried to note as the objects arise. Noted touching sensations, tensions, pains and releases smoothly. After various tensions and pains calm down, certain mind states such as urges and doubt comes up. Then, stream of dream thinking and sleepiness arise. These are streaming up continuously and it's difficult to note as my noting of "sleepiness" and "thinking" becomes quite monotonous like a mantra and I start to lose the clarity of noting that I have with other sensations. Towards the end, I pay more attention to the vibrations. The strobing behind eyelid is quite fast and fine. I try to pin-point the ending of the flashes but as they are pretty fast I have a difficult time. Focusing on the flashes brings pressure and tingling to occur in the third eye area. Also, I can feel a subtle vibration of my perceptive field shaking from time to time, aside from the strobing behind my eyes. The ringing in my ears is also persistent but it changes its pitch w/ some frequencies going in and out. With the ringing, I recall from the night sits that after meditation and I lie down, there is this unpleasant feeling of it magnifying in intensity and taking over my brain. Rather nauseating and disorienting.

11/20 (morning 30 min sit) I was wandering here and there in my mind this morning partially due to external circumstance I think. I was wavering between techniques and generally feeling a modicum of mindstates such as doubts, wavering, depressed and bored. Other than that the sit was similar to what it has been, progressing from physical tensions, the tensions breaking up, then some calmness followed by lots of dream thinking then some lights. Dream thinking involved many non-sensical thoughts. Sometimes I get sucked into these non-sensical thoughts to coming back to myself a moment later thinking like what nonsense I've been thinking. I think have not sufficiently disembedded from these thought-loops...I also felt some twitching/popping sensations in my forehead area which was new. Usually, popping sensations happen along the sides of the spine, arms or legs.

There's quite a few sensations associated with my daily life that I think I am forced to confront and examine especially the restlessness, guilt, anger, discomfort and the emotions that appear as counter-balance to these such as euphoria, longing, self-gradiosity and so on. These sensations are something associated with dissatisfaction and guilt about my current life circumstance and my relationship coupled with nostalgia for the glory of the past. I identified the pressure inside my head associated with the discomfort and anger when I note the above negative emotions. The euphoria, longing and self-grandiosity are more difficult to identify, but I feel that some of them have to do with physical awareness of distance and space.

11/25:
I had an altered-state type experience in the morning where I am first looking at a black screen with some hint of lights around the edges. Then, I am sucked into the screen (there's a physical sensation of being sucked in) and I am transported along some tunnel where there are lights around the periphery of the tunnel and there's a loud screeming voices in the background.

The sitting session starts out with noting, but I'm noting in a more sparse manner while paying more attention to the quality of the individual sensation that manifests. In the begenning it's physical sensations of tension, pain and especially the sensations in the neck and chest area and their associated emotions of guilt, anger, restlessness and doubt. Towards the end, thinking becomes prevalent. There usually comes a dreamy thinking with non-sensical content that bubbles up in a periodic manner. In terms of content, they are sensations of someone's presence, but the associated sensations seems to have variations, like someone's voice, image or even spatial awareness of him/her being in front or to the side of me and possibly also some tactile sensation associated with dis-ease of being in the "presence" of that person.

11/26 (evening, kasina) I tried kasina practice this evening. WIth kasina I go through a progression of focusing on the kasina, then there is a period where it becomes difficult to keep my gaze at the kasina as the visual field seem to distort, then there's a lock in, then I have waves of blue speckles in my visual field closing in on the kasina. The sensations in the visual field seems to cause some tension in my temples and I admit that the practice is straining to my eyes. I think I prefer breath counting for concentration.

11/27 (morning 30 mins sit). I start with breath counting, then try to stay with the witness. However, there's quite a bit of thinking and sleepiness this morning, and I turn to investigation of the sensations of thinking. I could not concentrate on the sensations as clear as I could on 25th sit as the thinking seemed to be more of a murky and meaningless noise in the background. I noted that there's a dislike of this noisy-state that does not have a clear handles from which I can investigate.

11/27-28
Day: Mind states such as anxiety, restlessness, boredom and anger come up frequently during the day. I note them and note the simultaneous physical sensations of tension in throat and chest, heartbeat, coldness of feet, pain inside the head and temples, irritable sensations in the stomach region.

(11/28 morning 40 mins sit) I had a sourthroat that made it difficult to concentrate this morning. There are quite a bit of dreamy thoughts. In contrast, sensation of buttocks contacting with the floor gives grounding feel and I often tune to this sensation. Every once in a while, during bouts of sleepiness there are moments of feeling awake in the midst of sleepiness. It is subtle but a bit like an altered state where I feel that I'm in a different place from where I sit. I think it has something to do with the distortion of spatial perception.

12/1
Did a few sessions of kasina practices. During regular sitting, the images were more pronounced. Doing mostly skeltal noting with more specific notes for obvious mind states that come up occasionally. I'm also experimenting with Shinzen Young's noting of flow, gone and in/out for the see/hear/feel.

12/2
Energy phenomena in the morning. This time, I felt the energy going from my stomach region up into my head. The interesting thing was that when the energy entered the head it turned into loud/screaming voices.