Hi,
A couple of points, responses inline.
Mike Kich:
There doesn't seem to be any technique or tradition in particular that I'm actually very interested in consistently doing, and during meditation I even have to struggle against the impulse to switch techniques in the middle of a sitting. I've never been under the impression that meditation of any kind should be 'easy', but it should be definitely more interesting. I mean, I know what all of this means in the sense of 'yes, I know it at least has somewhat to do with my Dark-Nighting', but what to do about it practically speaking still has me stumped.
Why does this have to be dark night related? It would seem to fall under the hindrances of sloth-torpor/restlessness from my view. Sitting and meditating is _hard_, the mind is being forced to do something it isn't at all used to doing. Getting bored when sitting feels like a very common problem and hardly unique to the dark night. For me, switching technique in the middle of a sit has always had to do with boredom/lack of focus.
I recently listened to a talk by a teacher that was adamant that you needed to pick a technique and stick with it or there simply wouldn't be much in the way of progress.
Mike Kich:
Like I said, it just doesn't seem intuitively right that meditation should be characterized by this kind of grim struggling with even the technique itself and horrible problems with the posture and limbs constantly falling asleep and the mind just refusing at a certain point to stay on task. It just seems there's something flawed about my basic assumptions about what my attention and concentration should be like, optimally speaking.
I to have/had this problem, which i imagine is fairly common, and have simply decided to go with a technique with more emphasis on relaxing the mind, which has done a lot for relaxing the entire meditation process for me.
Mike Kich:
I do all kinds of practices actually, maybe too many, almost every day: Yoga, Tai-Chi, Karate again (which is also somewhat the same deal), and formal meditation. And all of them definitely have benefits, and I really enjoy Karate for example...but there's this kind of passionlessness that being in the Dark Night just seems to unavoidably engender. Something has to *stand out*, and that quality of standing out just seems to have left the boat at the A+P. I want to find technique or practice that I really *click* with, because it seems like that's the only way to inspire real progress, and yet that isn't possible it seems. I don't find it acceptable that the whole rest of my journey should be this uninspired and difficult, and that implies I'm working from a wrong-basis.
This, to me, sounds like perfectly ordinary boredom. I have picked up plenty of hobbies in my life that from the outside seemed really fun, and i really really wanted to enjoy them because i enjoyed the _thought_ of me practicing the hobby, but when it came down to it i simply didn't enjoy it. Finding a hobby, or anything really, that really stands out, that you 'click' with, is _hard_, it's not something that happens every day. None of this is particularly unique to the dark night in my eyes. I'm not saying that meditation is a 'hobby' by the way, just using hobbies as a basis for comparison.
I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't meditate, or stop looking for a particular technique that will *click* for you, but perhaps try to find other reasons to meditate than that it must be fun. Look at the benefits it brings your life off the cushion, perhaps you can find motivation there rather than in the process of meditating itself.
Disclaimer: I've only been doing this for a year, please don't give my opinions any more weight than that.