J C:
Glad you're feeling better! I just found this log and have been enjoying reading about your practice.
I hope the two amazing opportunities you had earlier this year went well - they sounded very exciting!
This log has a lot about your life, a lot of content, but not a lot about how the actual meditation goes. Do you do samatha as well as vipassana? What do you experience when you meditate, any stages you notice, vibrations, and do on? Do you enter jhana at all? Are you observing the three characteristics? Noting? If it's something you'd like to write about, I think it would be helpful and I'd be very interested.
My apologies, J C, that I have taken so ridiculously long to get back here and answer your great questions and chat with you. I have had much greater success keeping up my practice than writing about it and for some reason participation on DhO fell through the cracks altogether.
I've talked a lot about practice beyond the cushion and how my life is affected by it just because even if you practice on the cushion two hours a day and sleep for eight hours every night, there are still 14 other hours in the day that you have to spend in some sort of consciousness; the more that consciousness includes the dhammas, the more I find I enjoy the way life goes, or at least my own response to it. The real power in this practice for me has been the ability to be moved through life more by my own chosen intentions and openness of interpretations, and less by circumstance and narrow habits of the interpretive mind...or put less formally, I find it both pleasant and instructive to spend as much time as possible observing myself not freaking out. The emphasis on applied practice is mostly intentional...
mostly.
I would like to talk more about practice on the cushion as well but have had some trouble doing so. I haven't really known how to describe much of what happens for me in meditation but your questions give me some in-roads. I had to ask a dhamma brother to help me understand some of your questions; I tend to be a fairly intellectually-minded person but for some reason I've not absorbed as much of the vocabulary around Buddhist-based practice as I would have thought I would, given my approach to other subjects. Let me see if I get the meaning of your (much appreciated) questions and can answer them meaningfully...
J C:
Do you do samatha as well as vipassana?
If I understand correctly, anapana is samatha. I do anapana in the way and for the purpose instructed by Goenka - if I'm finding focus lacking I do anapana but otherwise focus on vipassana.
J C:
What do you experience when you meditate, any stages you notice, vibrations, and do on?
It is very different from one session to another; there are few generalizations to make. I usually find areas of pain or discomfort I hadn't realized I had prior to my sit, and those usually dissolve before long. I have noticed that my general sort of "ambient mood" in life as a whole affects things a great deal; it takes more time and more anapana to get focused if I've been amped up about a topic or topics. There are a lot of things I experience for which I just don't have adequate words. I have, however, been privileged to experience bhanga nana many times during my less distracted sits.
J C:
Do you enter jhana at all?
When I asked my dhamma brother about this he made a distinction between hard jhanas and soft jhanas. The hard jhanas he described are foreign to me and I'm happy about that; they sound disorienting and potentially dangerous depending on others' reactions. (I heard a story of someone emerging from a hard jhana to find his wife thought he was dead or dying and the paramedics were just about to attempt to jump-start him, so to speak. I could gladly live my whole life without such an experience.) If I understand the general construct of soft jhanas correctly, then those are more within my field of experience.
J C:
Are you observing the three characteristics?
These being anicca, dukkha, and anatta (naming them mostly to reinforce my own learning and re-learning)...yes, though I don't often think consciously of anatta as much for whatever reason. They do all become apparent in this practice, very much so. A couple of times I have literally broken out laughing mid-sit observing a mixture of anicca and dukkha - a sort of gallows humor, I guess, but in this life I think that's actually a useful capacity.
There's always some kind of dukkha going on somewhere...it's all subject to anicca so I only have to take it so seriously...but at the same time, as surely as one manifestation of dukkha phases out, another phases in if it hasn't already...that's pretty funny in a way. The word never comes to mind, or at least it hasn't so far, but awareness of anatta does arise sometimes from that exact observation.
Things are obviously not anywhere near as concrete and stable as they feel they are...there are levels of change and plasticity in life that I have barely begun to familiarize myself with...so what the heck do I get so worked up about and attached to? What exactly is this I that seems to get so worked up? What the heck, with as little as I really know about even my own being, it seems premature to get too worked up about much of anything.J C:
This seems like one of those terms that could have either very broad or very specific meanings depending on who is asking and their frame of reference. It's not a specific term I'm familiar with given my meditative background. If you'd like to tell me what "noting" is about for you specifically that would be great.
And I will try very hard to make it back in less than five months this time.