| | hi there no-mark! congratulations on your first retreat. for those of us who have been at this stuff a while a lot of what you went through rings some bells. as you know, the idea alone of entertaining the possibility of dedicating ten precious days to silence and sitting is unthinkable. you got past that and maybe even attacked it with an adventurous sense of gusto. now you know its possible to do something like that which is a success in and of itself.
i too have sat through goenkajis sonorous and seemingly never-ending baritone chanting with pain screaming in my knees. at some point pure resolution to stick it out helped me get through that and at other times i just had to move. whether you call these things sankaras or just pure distilled agony doesn't matter much but since we tend to want to understand what value we got from that pain we try to align it with "stages" and "progress" and other labels that help us place ourselves on a systematic maps of these things.
sometime we are right and sometimes we are not. if you have not read MCTB you should, but i am guessing you have. some of the pain you describe could be from simply sitting for long periods as you suggest but may also be associated with the "3Cs" stage. at this point our focus and speed of noticing is building and we can tend to be like a terrier, focusing in on whatever is predominant in our field of experience: pain falls easily into this category ;-)
as far as the nighttime stuf: you assumed that it was simply exhaustion...maybe. is that a common reaction for you? this meditation stuff has very real effects on our brain chemistry and our sensitivity which could (and does in my experience) effect sleep amoung other things. but my humble advice would be to not make much of it. meaning don't look at that as a certain signpost of progress.
having said that, how is your concentration after your retreat: better? can you sit for longer periods now? are you motivated to practice regularly or for longer periods?
more sitting, more questioning, more reporting here about your direct experience of your practice will bring you farther.
CU
tom |