| | Still vibrating from an amazing session.
I haven't been posting much here as I've been working through MCTB, and have had plenty to do as I've been trying to "understand" the stuff about vibration and "bare sensations". Especially since I've been switching over to breathing from 18 months of Goenka style body scanning.
But todays session was a wild one, and I'd love to get some feedback both on what happened, and any thoughts or direction.
I've upped my time to an hour a day over the last few weeks, and have been making some real progress over that time.
That said, I've been struggling with concentration on occasion, as well as feeling "stuck". Luckily, I'm pretty hard-headed. When I'm working a system I like to push hard into it, and really see if what has been described in that system exists for me.
So, for today I wanted to focus on seeing if I could sense vibration on the sensate level, as described in the book.
For a good long time there was nothing. Just another session of breathing attention that seemed to not be yielding much.
Then at some point during the session, some noisy birds were in a nearby tree, meanwhile sunlight was flickering across my closed eyes, dancing against my eyelids it was being filtered through the branches of a tree outside of my window. Rather than fighting it I began working through the seven factors.
For an instant, the light was cleared, and the vision turned to heat. At that instant it dawned on me that perhaps I've gotten stuck on investigation. I added in energy to allow me to start to process all these elements as quickly as possible. Then I pushed on even more, focusing on the birds, the lights, and the back to my breathing—seeing how much I could handle if I overloaded, and what sensations from that would appear.
Zoom! Things started going faster and faster. I could feel sensations rising and falling. And there was a dawning realization that the way to get to bare experience was to move to the next moment without following the need for the mind to create context for each sensation. One simply proceeded the next. There was no narrative for them—no story. I could feel the self peeling away as sensations occurred faster and faster!
Woo hoo!
Then I reached a point of struggle. I've hit rapture occasionally over the last few weeks, but it's throws me off (and out) of my experience. There's a terror and dread that comes with it. It's a lot like turbulence for me.
I checked in with the factors. Could I fix my fear with concentration? I tried! (As write this, I realize I had the order of concentration and tranquility reversed, so it was a wonky sort of rapture trip. Not terrifying, but not stable.)
My quest for concentrations seemed to help. I sat there for a while, enjoying the the moment of respite, shootin' aliens.
"Strip narrative from experience" a realization. It became a mantra now. I couldn't wait to write it down. It was so exciting! But my focus and excitement on that realization was consuming my mind. I was actually losing mindfulness.
"When in doubt, note it out." I turned my attention on the realization. I reduced it to a thought. I stripped narrative from the idea of stripping narrative, and played with that until the bell rang to end the session.
Some thoughts: The seven factors are, for me in this moment, something that are stacked. When I'm going through them, the next step is to see out how I can reach the next element. Although I didn't fully get there (and I got the order wrong), I'm suddenly seeing how you each factor "stabilizes" the one that proceeds it.
The "strip narrative from experience" message is a powerful one for ,me, especially as a writer. I'm not going to over value it, but I really do feel like I'm seeing the beginnings of bare experience, and how observing transcends the story of self.
Does anyone have an thoughts or hints that might be helpful going forwards? |