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Bernd's Metta adventure

Bernd's Metta adventure
Answer
9/18/14 12:04 PM
Hi all,
This is me

and this is my 1st practice log. I intend to irregularly post random observations, thoughts or questions about my practice.
I decided to start this because so far all my practice reports happen to be scattered all over the board.
Answers, help and random comments are very appreciated.

Here's a bit background about me: got an interest in meditation/mind-changing techniques in 2009.
Stumbled into A&P-territory in 2010.
After aimlessly & desperately playing around with this and that, I finally did a Goenka retreat in summer 2011.
I was quite impressed, but not really convinced by the organization and the technique.
So afterwards I did an introductory course in a Mahasi (or more precise: Ajahn Tong) retreat centre at the end of 2011, where I got to know all the vipassana nanas except those >11(equanimity).
Since that, I found MCTB, did another 4 retreats in that tradition and (probably) experienced stream entry in summer 2012.
Apart from Mahasi technique, I'm interested in methods such as Metta, Focusing (Eugene Gendlin) and Feldenkrais.

The first post will contain my experiences on a Metta retreat I did lately.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
1/14/14 5:57 PM as a reply to bernd the broter.
In Dec. 2013, I participated in a Metta retreat led by Bhante Sujato. This was quite impressive, so I'm posting a bit of information about it in general, and about my experiences there, before the memory fades.
I thought about posting this information on the retreat centre page, but since it was done in a rented location, I didn't. But: if you ever think about doing a retreat with Bhante Sujato, it will probably be similar.

This post has 2 parts. The first is about the organization of the retreat and the technique in general. The second contains my own experiences. I talked to some other persons and found that those varied very much, so I'm not claiming that what I experienced is what usually tends to happen.

PART I:

First, here is the schedule:

Tuesday 10th December
14:00 Arrival and registration
18:00 Welcome
18:15 Introduction, chanting, meditation teaching
21:00 Meditation (optional)

11th – 20th December
6:00 Guided meditation
8:10 Breakfast
8:45 Meditation & interviews
11:00 Lunch
12:00 Relax/informal meditation
14:00 Meditation & interviews
17:00 Afternoon tea, rest
19:00 Chanting & Dhamma talk
21:00 Meditation (optional)

Saturday 21st December
6:00 Guided meditation
8:10 Breakfast
8:45 Meditation & interviews
11:00 Lunch
12:30 Farewell gathering
14:00 Finish

Obviously, the schedule is very relaxed. Note that this was only a suggestion. Everyone was allowed to do whatever he or she wanted at any time, even not attending the dhamma talk would have been ok. Doing things like yoga or tai chi in between was totally allowed and even encouraged, too.
Also, there was no strict rule of noble silence. Everyone could do noble silence or just not.
A note on Bhante Sujato: He's really cool. He got somewhat infamous through a series of youtube videos in which he 'gossips' about some other Theravada lineages, e.g. Goenka, Mahasi, Ajahn Tong, Pa Auk (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3tUCtwmVGY).
This makes him seem like a bit of a 'fundamentalist sutta head', but that impression is misleading. He's very pragmatic about practice, (in fact he's more pragmatic than all the goenka/mahasi teachers I've studied with so far) but knows a ton of stuff about the suttas. He denies that the MCTB-fruition is what the suttas describe as stream entry, but that's pretty irrelevant for practice, especially if you're going to take a Metta retreat with him.
Sujato mainly leads Metta retreats, because hardly anyone else is doing it. The dhamma talks in the evening were a mixture of practical advice, stories from the suttas, and his own stories. They were extremely nice to listen to, very helpful and funny. After that, Sujato would answer all kinds of questions. (Everything from 'can you even ride a bike with those robes?' to 'I read this particular thing in line 123 of sutta 654, what's your interpretation of it?')
Also, Sujato seems to do different dhamma talks every time. There were maybe 5% of stuff I recognized from his other Metta talks on the net.

The metta meditation method he teaches he's got from some teacher of him, Ajahn Maha chatchai. This is how it works:
The metta consists of four stages: metta to self, loved one/friend, neutral person, the disliked person(i.e. "someone who's going on your nerves"). you start with the first, and after some days of retreat you can also include the 2nd person, and so on.
Repeat the words "may I be happy" in your mind, and keep the rest of your attention in the body, e.g. in the heart region. When the feeling of metta comes up, let it spread through the whole body.
This method is so simple, it's totally idiotproof. Which I really like about it. This can be done while sitting or walking. According to Bhante Sujato, the following is a good way to do a meditation session:

1. sit down and get settled in the present. for some minutes just be aware of the body in general, of the body sensations of sitting and of the skin touching the clothes. see how the mind generally feels now and accept that.
2a. start with stage 1 of metta meditation. Say the words "may I be happy" over and over again, as if you really mean it, "like Shakespeare".
2b. after some time go to stage 2 of metta. (aka the loved one) This happens by exchanging just one word: "May X be happy."
2c. stage 3
2d. stage 4: the disliked person. after this stage, the mind could go into jhana, but that takes a lot of time.
3. let the words of metta go. let the feeling of metta dissolve. watch how the mind goes back to a neutral state. (don't skip this! Note that this actually develops insight into anicca, too.)
4. reflect: what happened in this session of meditation? how did my mind behave? what was (un)helpful for the meditation?
5. send merits to anyone.

On the retreat, we also did general mindfulness meditation in whichever style we wanted to. The instruction was to do Metta just whenever it feels good to do so - otherwise do another meditation. So the task was implicitely to develop some intuition for that.

PART II:

So, here are some of my own experiences on the retreat:

I was kind of ill at day 1,5,9, so I slept over most of these days.(Sujato said that this isn't something which usually happens to people in Metta retreats so don't worry.) Also, I can't do walking meditation for long periods of time due to knee pains. Since I needed to balance walking meditation with sitting, this also reduced my sitting time. Apart from that, I felt too undisciplined to strictly adhere to the noble-silence rule. All in all, i never felt as lazy on a retreat as on this one.
So I probably only did 30-50 hours of meditation in total, which still turned out to be quite impressive.

Day 0: Introductory talk. Everyone got a picture of a teddy, and of a young cat (or other animal)
Cute! Note: teddy is a meditation master. Whenever you don't know what to do, look at teddy. he meditates all the time, and he's so good at it! Teddy was sitting at the front for the whole retreat.

Day 1: This day was about establishing some mindfulness first with whatever technique we felt comfortable with, so no Metta yet. When I told Sujato that I felt horrible, he told me to go and get some sleep. So not much happened on this day.
In the evening, Sujato introduced the Metta meditation method first. He talked a bit about something he called 'the problem of subject-object-duality'. In his experience, people often think things like "this or this has to vanish from my mind, so I can do the metta meditation properly. He insisted that this attitude futile, and that we need to accept our responsibility for everything that's going on in our mind.
This seemed quite important for him, but I'm still not really sure of what he was getting at.

Day 2-4: I did some really good practice here. On day 4 or so, the 2nd stage of metta was introduced. The mind slowly became calmer, but also quite tired. I added walking meditation to the mix, then the tiredness vanished.
I asked Sujato, whether we needed to concentrate on the intention of Metta, or only on the words. He said that the intention is somewhat subtle, and it is best to start with the obvious thing - the words - first, and just go to the feeling when it arises, without worrying much about the intentions.
The Metta feeling sometimes showed up, but usually didn't stay for long. By day 4, it got more reliable. It seemed to turn into a disposition, like a subtle undercurrent, which was always there. I felt like a genuinely friendly person by this time. Cool!

The words sometimes changed their appearance in the mind. At the beginning, the mind would often start to play around with the words. I saw the words (i.e. the actual letters) in my head changing their size, their colour, dancing around... and doing all kinds of weird things. After a day or two, this stopped.
After that, some random intentions seemed to 'mix in' with the metta phrases. So I would say "may I be happy" and notice that I was actually angry/resignating/sad/... when I said that. So I tried to say the words with more conviction again, and some other intention would interfere. It often took several tries to 'nudge' the mind back in the right direction.

On a side note, I have some problems with depression/anxiety/difficult unaccepted emotions.
In meditation, some of those emotions would come up and I didn't really know how to handle this in meditation. Sujato taught me to hold them as a 'little child' for a while, so they would be soothed. ("but not all the time, or they become spoiled brats!")
This seemed quite difficult at first, but then worked surprisingly well. (On Mahasi retreat, I was usually told to just notice them and go back, which wouldn't really help, so I was very positively surprised at this way of dealing with them.)
Sujato stressed that all these things needed some experimentation, and that we shouldn't see it as failures if it doesn't work at once. He likened learning meditation to Edison's 10.000 tries of producing a working lightbulb.

Usually when I sat down to meditate, a lot of sadness came up. And some resistance to the idea of "may i be happy". But it never became more concrete.

Sujato also taught me a bit how to trust my intuition, so I could start and end meditation sessions without a timer (which was forbidden in the meditation room). I had virtually never practiced without a timer, so this was quite unusual for me. After some time, I really started to appreciate this way of practicing.

Day 5: I wasn't well for seemingly no reason at all (felt very good the days before), so I slept for most of the day. So not much happened here.
I noticed that the feeling of metta would come more often and more reliably, and with the liked person it was much easier. When I started giving up on really wanting the Metta feeling to appear, it came just by itself.
Usually, I would then invite it to spread in my whole body, and one of two things happened:
a) something else (e.g. anger or distraction) came up, I would lose focus and the Metta would be gone.
b) I would try to somehow force the Metta into spreading in my body. Then the feeling would soon vanish, too.

Day 6-7: This is where practice became REALLY interesting.

Sujato introduced us to the 3rd stage of Metta, the neutral person. He talked a lot about how we need to develop the 4 'iddi-palas'(not sure if that's the correct term) because otherwise we would likely become too uninterested in the meditation and fall in the 'bawonga'-state. (i have no idea how this is written in pali)
So before every session we should reflect on some things, among them our motivation to practice. I felt totally demotivated and it felt as if my mind was resigning before I had even started. I was absolutely convinced that it was impossible to develop Metta for the neutral person, and somehow also that it was actually a dangerous idea.
I talked to Sujato about this - he told me that this means I'm not ready for the 3rd stage yet: "At some time, the mind wants to go there by itself, then it will be easy. Until then, stay with stages 1&2. This reaction is actually very useful, because it allows you to check how you're developing."

I started to see what Sujato probably meant with the 'subject-object-duality'. I could observe in great detail, how the mind was really 'estranged' (not sure about the translation here) internally, i.e. there seemed to be lots of conflicts. Some part of my mind always wanted some other part to disappear, or had some bad jugdment on it.
The more I practiced, the more 'integrated' the mind seem to become. The conflicts seemed to vanish, and the mind slowly became peaceful and actually content with itself.
The feeling of Metta often filled most of my body and started to feel a bit 'deeper' than in the beginning.

I noticed that I was always using some force when trying to be mindful of this and that. Finally, I could let go of this, and just chill out. I slept much better, and I actually started to wonder if I'm doing it wrong because the meditation felt so incredibly 'easy' and uncomplicated.

Also the difficult emotions mentioned above were gradually soothed. Although they were still there, they didn't try to 'torment' me any more the way they had done before. It felt, as if I had gradually invited all parts of my mind to really feel 'at home' under one common roof.
Once they were there, I felt a bit 'reborn', and in a good way. I suspect that this state is what methods like ACT (Acceptance & commitment therapy) are trying to get at. And I'm truly puzzled why no one really advocates Metta as a method to actually get there.
The most impressive instance of this was like this: I was doing the Metta meditation. There was a lot of metta feeling in great parts of my body. Then the feeling of anxious sadness came up. So I had a big block of metta and a big block of sadness beside that, both in my body. I was a bit confused what I should do now. Then, just on its own, the 'Metta block' seemed to console the 'sadness block' which in turn felt really good about it. Although hard to put in words what really happened, the experience was quite amazing.

Another thing that camp up was the wish to 'abandon the world' for some time and go an a really long retreat (like 6 months or more) as soon as the circumstances permit it. (i.e. 2-3 years down the road.)
It seemed that this wish had been there for a long time, but the Metta retreat really enabled me to recognize and accept it.

Day 8: The above developments were quite cool. So I got really excited about them. The mind started to become totally enthusiastic about them, and spent some hours developing great plans what to do after the retreat with its newly-won Metta-superpower.
I got a bit irritated, since this should usually happen on the last day of the retreat, but I had still 2 days to go...
After thinking over its grand plans enough, the mind realized that all of this would still not be really satisfactory, and felt somewhat depressed. The feeling of Metta hardly reappeared, and it felt hard to actually go back to practice again and again.
I felt like I was wasting precious retreat time, but couldn't really do much about it.
Sujato said that all these things need some time to get balanced, and until that happens, these things can happen.

Day 9: I felt really bad and again slept for most of the day.

Sujato had introduced the 4th stage, the disliked person. He said that we should think about the disliked person as little as possible during the 4th stage. If we succeed in this, the mind would really get some energy in this, and soon go towards unification. He described in detail, how a nimitta would appear, and how the mind would finally go into Jhana.
This sounded quite cool, but I was still strangely uninterested about it. He said that jhana was the place where the 'breaking down of the barriers' would happen, an experience where it is impossible to think of a distinction between different persons, i.e. who gets our metta (:
I'm not sure if I will ever experience that but I'm sure there's yet a lot of work to do before. Since I didn't proceed to stage 3, I didn't even try stage 4 more than once. Sujato said that probably 80% of the participants wouldn't get past the 2nd stage on the retreat.

Day 10: After days 8 and 9 I couldn't really motivate myself to practice much. So not much happened any more, and the mind behaved largely as if it had already left the retreat.
In the evening, Sujato answered a lot of questions instead of giving a talk. There was a big discussion about all kinds of things, especially bikkhuni ordination, religious fundemantalism and the destruction of the planet.

Day 11: Some more discussion about various sutta passages and the destruction of the planet. We were allowed to keep the photos of the teddy and the cats.

Reflections after the retreat: Good question. I felt as if reborn (see day 6-7) for a few days, but couldn't practice any more, so it gradually faded. I've resumed practice now, and am currently trying to get to a similar place like when I left the retreat. Let's see if that happens.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
4/9/14 1:51 PM as a reply to bernd the broter.
This seems to be a good time for a new post, since I now feel fundamentally different. I think the practice starts to permanently and clearly bear fruit.

Here's what happened: I did 2 small home retreats, length 8 and 4 days, meditating 3-6 hours a day.
And then another 6 days of practice or so, somewhere in between.
Most of the rest of the time, I kept up practice with 30-90 minutes a day.
In total, that may sum up to 100 hours, but I didn't really keep track of it.

I needed the first 8 days to get to a similar state as directly after the retreat. This means:
-anxiety soothed
-disposition of friendliness
-could call up feeling of metta arbitrarily

Only after that it became really interesting. A few more days of practice, and what came to the front was:
anger. LOTS OF ANGER. But this was hugely different from the sort of 'neutral anger' which I knew from Vipassana practice, where it also would occur frequently and with high intensity. No, this kind of anger was actually directed at myself. Often I felt as if it was bombing me with insults, scolding and... well, bombs? Not really, but it was actually physically painful and at times felt as if it actually hit me.
This was really weird. As if an external force was attacking me. Obviously this kind of 'self-hate' is something I have been exercising for probably >10 years or so, without ever really having noticed.

As a result, another part of me went TOTALLY SAD about this.
So, a typical sit would look like this: I close my eyes and soon start reciting "may i be happy". A lot of anger comes up to insult/scold me/whatever. I get very sad and start crying. At the same time, my face is full of tension, actively expressing the anger. Tears get on my tongue. I get carried away by the salty taste. The overall impression is: hilarious.

Fast forward to now:
For several weeks I felt really sad all the time. Also angry, but the sadness was the more frequent & obvious emotion.
All day I often noted that I was criticizing/scolding/insulting myself for no reason. Usually, it wouldn't even be verbal thoughts in my head. Imagine seeing two people having a fierce dispute, with sounds off. You can "see the emotions in the air", without hearing the words. That's what it felt like. With more practice, I got better at spotting this behaviour - not intentionally doing it, recognizing what was there happened automatically. Finally, it just seemed like silly madness, and whenever it came up, I would automatically dis-identify from it. So the anger would do its thing, scream at me for a while, and then leave.
Now the anger is gone, as well as the excessive sadness. I feel that this change will last, even if I drop practice now.

I feel I am still very far from mastering the first stage of Metta. There are still some obstacles (read: unclear, difficult emotions such as anxiety/worry, sadness) which come to the surface when the feeling of Metta is called up. But as of now, blatant self-hate/self-anger (don't feel like I even have an appropriate word for whatever it is) isn't the biggest hindrance any more. I feel really thoroughly relieved with that change, although very unclear and a bit anxious (sometimes: very anxious) about what will happen next. Sometimes it feels as if all the anger was there to protect me. Now it's gone and I don't really know how to cope with that.

Conclusion/Suspicions:
Metta is good. More people need to do it, because it is totally possible to really be oblivious of great amounts of self-hate/anger, which creates a great amount of suffering.
NOTE: I did >500 hours of diligent Vipassana (100 Goenka, >400 Noting) gaining lots of insight, but those methods did VIRTUALLY NOTHING to make me aware of all the self-directed anger.

The self-hate/anger leads to the 'censoring' of certain difficult emotions, which means that it makes it impossible to create a fruitful relationship with them, which is probably a requirement for successful Focusing (Eugene Gendlin's method) and similar approaches. Also this leads to the aggravation of symptoms such as anxiety.

Now I'll go and do more practice in the same style. Let's see where it leads.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
6/29/14 8:50 AM as a reply to bernd the broter.
3,5 months since the last post, so this seems to be a good point for a summary of the latest developments before I forget to appreciate that they even happened.

After the last shift (described in the last post) the mind recollected its internal inertia. So some of the anger came back, with even more force. It felt like 2 weeks of genuine madness, which I just wanted to end. I didn't even dare to practice for some weeks. After that period, the remaining anger subsided, and the territory changed.

When I took up the practice again, I found more, new anger. This time it was really different. Less obvious, more of a 'backstabbing' kind (no idea how to properly describe this o_O). It also seemed intrinsically connected to fear, doubt and most importantly shame. I listened to Dr. Brene Browns talk on youtube, in which she links 'shame' to some other things. I had listened to them before, but this time they really made sense, as I could observe much of what she talks about in my mind in real-time.

I would observe this new kind of anger for many weeks, and I discovered more and more of it. It got increasingly frustrating. The urgency of eliminating this anger once and for all became more and more clear.
3 weeks ago, in the middle of a 4-day-home-self-retreat I suddenly knew it was over. The anger would arise, and cease before it was really there. After a few hours it didn't even arise any more.
For the rest of the day, I felt very peaceful and relieved.

Now I'm quite confused. I practiced some more, and discovered more anger. It seems as if for every 'unit' of anger which is eliminated, 5 new units come up from nowhere. I start to wonder if this is a bottomless pit. My mind seems full of anger, it's there the whole day somehow, and I'm getting really pissed about it. I just want it to be eliminated and never return again. Yeah, that's some form of anger, too.

On the other hand, I'm quite happy about the anger that's already gone. In some respect, I feel more peaceful than before. It seems that I come closer to accepting difficult emotions which are still around, since much of the anger towards them isn't there any more. I'm starting to think that I need to complement the Metta practice with something else, but I'm not sure what that would be.

A few days ago, I tried forgiveness practice according to those instructions by Jack Kornfield:
http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/single_practice.php?id=21581
It seemed curiously appropriate, much more so than when I tried it prior to Metta practice. In contrast, practicing Metta feels a bit like banging my head against a wall (although effectively) because the anger is just too much.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
7/13/14 6:04 PM as a reply to bernd the broter.
On reflection, I was lost in some doubt.
When I realized this, I got back on track, and managed to established a regular metta practice of 2 hours a day, one in the morning and one in the evening, which seems effective.

Since I still felt somehow stuck, I listened to Sujatos talks and reread some other material.
Here's what turned out to be important:

- Subject-Object-Duality: not owning one's behaviour. If you think "oh there's this anger thing over there" instead of "I there is anger which is a behaviour of mine", then you've split yourself in this and something else. Which is simply a behaviour which is not conducive to the Metta meditation.
Sujato talks approximately 45 minutes about it here and claims that it's a widespread problem. I find his talk helpful: http://www.dhammanet.org/bhante-sujato/dhamma-vortrag-subjekt-objekt-dualitaet-und-metta
In practice, I tried some phrases to remind myself when it happened again, and "this is a behaviour of mine" turned out to be appropriate.

- It's ok to enjoy the Metta. The feeling of Metta is really what nourishes the mind and it's a good idea to experience it fully.
Upon hearing that advice, I realized that I was still somewhat skeptical if the feeling of Metta is really what I was looking for, and that I wasn't allowing myself to fully enjoy it.

- Although I can't control what happens in the mind, I can still choose my response. This attitude seems to be necessary to alleviate anxiety.

Now, all in all, the practice feels much better.
Ofter during the day I will stop and feel that there are 'holes' in reality - situations where 'normally' anger would appear, just nothing happens.
Metta practice feels much less like a battle against all the resistance that comes up with Metta. I was able to let go of most of it.
Mostly, it feels just like I'm bathing in the feeling of Metta. It's also possible to do this for a much longer time. I'll need about 30 minutes to establish the feeling in my whole body. The other 30 minutes are just enjoying the feeling of Metta, which feels quite healing. After that I often discover some more anger which was somewhat subconscious before.
There's still a lot of sadness whenever I start to practice Metta, but the anger towards it seems to have dropped away completely.
The same used to happen with anxiety as a response to Metta practice. It's nearly gone.

It's quite paradoxical. Rereading this log, I realize and appreciate how far I've come. However, with every day, much more work seems to be put in front of me. I'm beginning to appreciate why people become monks/nuns and still think that they'll need more than one life for the job.
Every day I'm more fed up with all the anger that's in my mind, but the task of eliminating it seems so overwhelming, it's quite unfathomable, how it could really ever be done completely.
By comparison, gathering insight into the three characteristics seems like a piece of cake.

Edit: here's another observation:
When I started this, half a year ago, I regularly took 15-20 minutes of breath meditation (or noting) as preparation for the Metta part.
When I try that now (with both breath meditation and noting), it gets me into A&P territory very fast, within 5-10 minutes I find myself in dissolution, and sometimes I hear a 'silent snapping sound', and am subsequently filled with Terror.
That sequence is now quite reliable. When I try to start the Metta from there, it's much harder to stay with the feeling, and it's also not as obvious.
So now I restrict the preparatory breath meditation to only 3 minutes, so it doesn't take me past A&P.
Every time I get into the progress of insight in this way, I feel that I really want to finish that cycle sooner rather than later. Sadly, now seems clearly not the right time.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
8/11/14 10:16 AM as a reply to bernd the broter.
A few impressions on how it's going:

I've kept on practicing Metta. For the first time, I really don't have an idea where it is going. My impression is that there is progress, and that it comes much easier/more natural than before, but that it doesn't really have a 'direction' any more. Before, I had always some idea what anger would be wiped out next, but now it feels much more like an open experiment.

Somehow it felt like the right thing, so I started practicing noting again, usually as preparatory practice. So I'll do 30 minutes of noting and 45-60 minutes of Metta. That's a lot of sitting, which I have never done before that long, but it's surprisingly comfortable.
When transitioning to Metta, it is much more clear (in contrast to without noting) how the feeling behaves. It's usually there very strong after a minute. It stays for a long time without declining. There are also lots of other things, most importantly sadness, but the glowing Metta stays visible. I wonder if this is the Uggaha Nimitta that Bhante Sujato talked about.

I really feel that while at the beginning practicing Metta was quite a struggle, now it just feels necessary, and like obviously the right thing to do. It feels like I have begun a process which I can't let slide back with a clear conscience. I have no idea what will happen next, but I've almost stopped caring. Before I was practicing to achieve some goal with this. Now I'm much more comfortable with the idea that this is a life process.
Also, I now feel that it is not enough to confine Metta to the cushion, so I've started to do it whenever I remember it.

Visu Teoh describes here
http://visuteoh.net/teachings/metta-in-everyday-life.html
how Metta can be done basically 24/7.
As I understand his instructions, thoughts of Metta can become a habit, replacing other thoughts, if practiced for a while. My first day of trying this looks promising, just as if there's some kind of mechanism which keeps getting me back to thoughts of Metta, without me actively trying to do so.
However, this seems to contradict Bhante Sujato's instructions that the feeling of Metta shouldn't be carried around the whole day, and always let go of after some time. So I don't really know what to make of that. I'm just trying it for a few days or weeks and see how it goes.

Somehow I also really want to go back to pure insight practice. But not before Metta has irreversibly become second nature.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
8/14/14 10:54 PM as a reply to bernd the broter.
Hello Bernd, kind regards.

I got some personal insights reading your metta practice log.   I also have a metta practice log, and I see your approach is slightly different from mine and I see that I need to also incorporate a "nice" person to balance the practice.  However, I think I will end the practice with a "nice" person.

As with yourself I also come up against self-hatred and anger and usually it eventually takes me back to a scene of some sort of split I did with myself as a spiritual being and one side of the split had a moment (an eon might be a moment in that case) of intense dislike of being squeezed down into a mold and on some level it knew it did it to itself. Gets complicated...

Like yourself, I let anger rise passively (learned from Sedona Method) and it releases. On the other hand, I have dealt with it differently from you because I look for the thoughts accompanying it and repeat the thoughts until done.  For example, "I hate myself!...I hate myself?...."   A lot of shift occurs for me while repeating my self-talk.  

Continuing with my thoughts about anger, since a being operates off of goals or intentions, any of the basic goals of a being, when compulsive, could carry much anger.  For example, to love and to be loved and all its possible permutations.. Must love/must not be loved, etc., etc.

For example, I chose to work with people who have eating/drinking compulsions. and there is anger around being forced to eat and being prevented from eating and forcing another to eat and preventing another from eating.   No more eating compulsion, no more anger regards eating.  (My partner once had a plate of spaghetti thrown into his face when he refused to eat it.)  
One becomes equanimious about the subject of eating and being eaten (joke).  

But, if you check my Metta Practice Log you will see me putting up archetypes or identities -- similar to your practice -- and remaining passive while the mind exhausts its venom on that particular energy signature.  The results are always a surprise to me.

Thanks again for giving me the insight to put up some "saints"  emoticon

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
8/21/14 2:52 AM as a reply to Colleen Karalee Peltomaa.
@Colleen:
I don't really understand what you're doing with these archetypes, and why.
My best guess is that you're trying to call up a certain 'topic' in your mind, and then practice Metta to relieve the anger which is connected to that topic?

Anyway, I don't understand how that could be related to what I'm doing.
It sounds somewhat complicated to me. I like Bhante Sujato's Metta technique just because it is very simple, so I don't have to think about adding in all these confusing some-things emoticon


More about my practice:
I've been trying the 24/7 Metta for the last few days. It's been quite demanding. So far, I can observe several different modes of functioning, which alternate without a recognizable pattern so far:

-I practice Metta to everyone who's there. The communication and the connection to the other person(s) get easier. That feels good and seems to be overall the right thing to do. I'm surprised how much fun talking to other people can suddenly be.

-I practice Metta to everyone who's there. I'm overwhelmed with anger and self-doubt. I feel like I'm no good at Metta, never will be, and I feel like I'm a total fraud and that it's just ridiculous to be thinking the Metta-phrases when they're obviously that far from reality.

-When I'm on my own and I don't think about anyone, I revert to Metta for myself as default. I usually get extremely sad, with some more vague emotional components in there, which I can't quite identify as anything specific. I nearly start crying and it's overall very uncomfortable. In this mess, it's quite hard to actually still detect the feeling of Metta. So I try to stick to the words while being aware of the body.

I also noticed that I was very much overenthusiastic in the first few days, and tried to force the practice to occur 24/7. That kind of impatience was obviously not helpful, so I managed to drop it. However, now I less frequently remember to do the Metta words.
Sometimes, though, the Metta-phrases start without me really intending it, thus reminding me to do it on purpose. Maybe that's a sign that the habit is really starting to form. Often I'm in the middle of not-really-friendly thoughts about some person, and then I recognize that it might be a better idea to just drop it and direct thoughts of Metta to them. The realization that this is even possible seems quite empowering to me.

Conclusion: I suppose 24/7 Metta is demanding, yet effective. I'll just keep doing it. There is a tendency to neglect formal Metta practice with the thought of "I'm doing it 24/7 anyway". Giving in to that temptation is a bad idea.

Another observation about formal practice:
Whenever I repeat the Metta phrases for a minute or so, some huge emotional block or something comes up. Some mixture of sadness/anxiety/whatever. It's always been there, but now the fact that it never changes is going on my nerves. Also it feels as if I'm running against a wall, or fiercely trying to remove it. In any way, I can't really detect what's really happening here. So I suspect that I'm maintaining some strong resistance to it, but I'm blind to it because it's so much ingrained in my behaviour.
So sometimes I start to ask questions such as "Can I somehow drop any resistance to it? Is there something I'm doing that scares it? Can I accept failure at meditation and just sit around here without doing anything really except repeating Metta phrases?" and then the thing seems to soften a bit. That looks promising. It will probably still be a lot of work to let that release but I'm glad that it finally starts removing.
Sometimes I completely let go of Metta and slide into Focusing (Gendlin's approach) on the difficult thing which doesn't change anything yet, but often somewhat soothes it.

In this context I'm reminded of Moshe Feldenkrais's famous quote "If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want."
So I conclude that I have no idea what I'm doing here, which is somewhat remarkable after 8 months of Metta in which the behaviour is always there o_O

practice plan for the next weeks will be something like this:
-24/7 Metta.
-Morning: 45 minutes of noting + 5 minutes of walking meditation + Metta (sitting) as long as is comfortable
-Evening: 15 minutes of noting + Metta (sitting) as long as comfortable
-And some forgiveness practice once or twice a week.
-Focusing if it feels really necessary.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
8/21/14 5:54 AM as a reply to bernd the broter.
Bernd writes:
"Sometimes, though, the Metta-phrases start without me really intending it, thus reminding me to do it on purpose. Maybe that's a sign that the habit is really starting to form. Often I'm in the middle of not-really-friendly thoughts about some person, and then I recognize that it might be a better idea to just drop it and direct thoughts of Metta to them. The realization that this is even possible seems quite empowering to me."

Hello, Bernd, kind regards.

You are on the right road with your practice as long as you are persisting through the discomfort to come out the other side.

You don't really need to know about my practice, you are doing well  :-).   The similarity I see is that we are both focusing on the objects of our interactions. But not always, for example recently it was my Auntie; however I was looking for the most basic goal set expressed in our interaction since my interactions are goal oriented.   In her case it was must know/must be known, and adding that to the picture turned on more "sizzle" to dissipate.  

A person could also get a lot of metta karma points just plugging in the goal set of "to love" -- all kinds of people would come up and compulsions and thirst for sensation around love would get directly handled.  "I must love/I must be loved", etc.

As with yourself, all the discomforts appear and then vanish as I sit through them.

I too -- just yesterday -- find myself during the day putting my mind, or components of my mind all around me whenever I found myself starting to identify with it. Great practice -- to do consciously what we do unbidden all day long, i.e., create significances.

I contemplate your return.










RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
9/19/14 3:14 AM as a reply to bernd the broter.
The third "cycle" of Metta was finished 2 days ago. That's good. And a good opportunity to post again. Here are some observations:

I quit the "24/7 Metta practice for everyone". It left me sad und at unrest all the time. I just couldn't do it consistently, and felt like it brought me totally out of balance. Not sure if chickening out or just not ready yet.

I felt that I was still lacking something for mental balance, and that the pure Metta practice wasn't providing it.
After some searching, I stumbled upon an exercise referenced by Linda Graham.
(http://lindagraham-mft.net/resources/published-articles/the-power-of-mindful-empathy-to-heal-toxic-shame/)
Since much of the anger I found in Metta meditation seemed to be shame in disguise, this brought me the idea. I'll quote it here, as it was really helpful to get some balance. In spite of the instructions, I hold the feeling much longer. So I'll usually do Noting first, then this exercise for 5-15 minutes, then the actual Metta part.
1.  Re-sourcing

The first step, even before mindfulness, is resourcing which we can experience as re-Sourcing. To feel safe opening our minds and hearts to awareness of anything arising, we need to feel someone has our back.  Here?s a meditation practice from John Makransky?s Awakening through Love: Unveiling Our Deepest Goodness that can help us increase the sense of safety.

"Place your hand on your heart.  Breathe gently and deeply into your heart center. Breathe into your heart center any sense of goodness, safety, trust, acceptance, ease, you can muster. Once that's steady, call to mind a moment of being with someone who loves you unconditionally, someone you feel completely safe with.  This may not always be a partner or a parent or a child.  Those relationships can be so complex and the feelings mixed.  This may be a good friend, a trusted teacher. It may be me as your therapist. It may be your grandmother, a third grade teacher, a beloved pet.  Pets are great.

"As you remember feeling safe and loved with this person or pet, see if you can feel the feelings and sensations that comes up with that memory in your body.  Really savor this feeling of warmth, safety, trust, love in your body. When that feeling is steady, let go of the image and simply bathe in the feeling for 30 seconds."

Why might this practice help develop an effective resource?  The hand on the heart and the deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system and calms us down.  Evoking the image of feeling safe and loved can activate the release of oxytocin in the brain.  Oxytocin is the hormone of safety and trust, of "calm and connect". Oxytocin acts as an immediate antidote to cortisol, the hormone of the stress response, quelling the stress response of fight-flight-freeze.  Oxytocin is one the best resources we have to help clients recover from the effects of toxic shame and to support mindfulness practice, and we activate it by feeling loved and cherished. Doing the one-minute Hand on Heart exercise 5 times a day will actually begin to heal the heart and re-wire the brain.


What is still there now? There is a knot of sadness/fear/anger every time I recite the words. It's been there since the beginning. I will say something like "No wonder that I feel like this" every time it occurs, which is basically a Focusing (see Eugene Gendlin) move. Then it's a bit soothened.
I got really frustrated about this. I tried to say the words "May I be happy" and at the same time try to observe, what is actually happening in this very instant. Sometimes I seemed to get a bit of control over it for only a splitsecond, and could do something else with the anger and have it walk in random directions. Very hard to describe what happened here, I don't really know. Eventually, I managed to disidentify from the anger for only a few seconds. This seemed to be a turning point. The rest of the day was experienced in peace and I had faith again, that those two behaviours (Metta and anger) could be separated with more practice. I have an intuition that this is the next thing that will happen, but it's too early to be sure. I hope so, though.

What I think is weird is that I have no good words to describe the difference between the 3 layers of anger which I have already removed. Although they felt very different, and I'm sure there was no getting around taking them up separately I can't really explain the difference between them. Also, because I experience the anger mainly as bodily sensations, and very rarely as actual, palpable thoughts.
One attempt would be this:
1st layer: Lots of direct, loud anger without reason. There's a lot of rage. Just blatant screaming. Without balance, without reason. This hurts me physically. Imagine a child throwing a temper tantrum.
2nd layer: This is more of the backstabbing kind. Indirect anger which makes me scared and seemingly wants to harm me. Really creepy. Still has some somatic representation, but is not that distinct. This has something to do with shame, but it's unclear, how. It feels a bit as if it's looking for revenge or s.th. similar.
3rd layer: This feels more mature. If it's on a coin, the other side is shame. This has a lots of accusations at myself. Which is fine, except that it is quite disproportionate never to make peace with this fact. Imagine a partner who is always nagging at you.

Something else is notable: I'm significantly more patient and friendly with many people. This change happened some weeks ago already. When other people react differently to you, or even tell you, then you probably know for sure that you've changed. It is notable especially because I'm still staying with the first person, i.e. myself.
It also helps to say "May you be happy" or "May X be happy" once, when I meet someone. I notice that I often relax immediately, and the state of my mind shifts instantly. Then it is much more fun to have a conversation, and it's more probable that I will actually say something kind. good stuff.

Apart from that, I really wish to get away from Metta as my main practice. Although I'm happy to have taken it up, basically every day I yearn for taking up serious insight practice 24/7 again. I'm still somewhere between first and second path (I guess), and it is really starting to get on my nerves. I'm confident that another shift in this direction would be no problem if I had better conditions for practice. I hope that I don't have to wait for another year or even longer before I take it up again, but now's still definitely not the time.

RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
9/19/14 8:41 AM as a reply to bernd the broter.
Hello, Bernd, good to read you again.

In an earlier thread you wrote this:  
"Conclusion/Suspicions:
Metta is good. More people need to do it, because it is totally possible to really be oblivious of great amounts of self-hate/anger, which creates a great amount of suffering.
NOTE: I did >500 hours of diligent Vipassana (100 Goenka, >400 Noting) gaining lots of insight, but those methods did VIRTUALLY NOTHING to make me aware of all the self-directed anger."

I'm sure all of your prior practice grooved you in to what you were to eventually experience above.    I mightily share this experience with you.   This was a couple of years after a wise person told me that ultimately all is merely self-to-self -- pointing towards Oneness.  My generalized self-hatred always takes me back to the first incident in this universe time.  The first act of "Creator" deciding to add persistency to his creation.   The force behind that was tremendous as was the resistance.  As long as I insist on holding my viewpoint on the side of the "must not know" barrier that makes me feel at total effect I am stuck in this universe mentality.   As I become more and more willing to look at this incident without flinching, the resistance to this creative act lessens and I am more and more able to get into my first viewpoint as "The Creator" of this universe.  And so perceive the Oneness and Allness.

From a creator - or All-That-Is - viewpoint, all youse viewpoints is mine :-))

Even though you did a different practice than I do, there must be some commonality that helped us to each separately arrive at almost the same place as far as diminishing the self-to-self dramas.  Certainly the first important commonality was the strong intention, and we would not have had that if we had not despised ourselves, eh!   What a laugh that gives me.

You seem to have resolved that self-hatred to your satisfaction.   I'm still enjoying the learning curve re my case and how my mind got cobbled together during this long tenure in this universe (map of unconsciousness, anyone?).  I'm eager for it now, and of course, the mind gets clever and now hides it, but I know how to play zen judo too: Whatever the mind can do I can do consciously, that is the trick here and what my practice is largely based upon.  To restore conscious creation and no-creation to the being is, I am certain, possible within one short time span.

I won't say I resolved it because I find that everytime I say that -  WHAM! - it slaps me upside the head again.   Which leads me to surmise that the upward path I am on is a sort of spiral and it simply takes the agony to a higher level of awareness and wisdom about mind-games.

love ya,
colleen


RE: The practice of Bernd
Answer
9/30/14 4:23 AM as a reply to bernd the broter.
(This is the last post before the upcoming Metta retreat.)

The week after the last shift was quite wild.
There was lots of more anger. It feels as if the last shift had opened a door and invited a lot more anger to come in.
After 5 days or so, it significantly cooled down.
A note about integration: I sometimes find myself in 'new' situations, when old anger comes up. After a few seconds at most I recognize what is happening, and it just drops. That feels... pretty cool.

After that came a rather quiet phase of practice in which I could hardly focus and felt like I had to start over again.

Now there's one major change: the knot of anger/panic/sadness has dissolved. It's not that the ingredients aren't there any more, but they don't appear in that solid, unmoving, stuck form. That's refreshing. It's sort of funny though how I had waited for that to happen for 9 months, and now it feels like a really unspectacular change...
My state off-cushion is always both sad and angry. I feel like I'm constantly scolding myself, although it's not really expressed in full sentences.

So I tried some more forgiveness practice.
But I couldn't really connect to it this time. It stirs up even more anger and feels somewhat misplaced, just as if the anger was upset about me trying to release it. (and, simultaneously, screaming at me to finally listen to it.)

I guess that means it's time to thoroughly learn the radical acceptance thing which I tried before learning Metta and which wouldn't work back then.
So I'll try that now.