I would like to hear people's experience with how the heartbeat affects noting practice. I'm once again jumping into noting practice, and one of the things that has puzzled me in past experiments with it is how much of my noting is actually noting the pulse in various parts of my body. I've found this fairly productive, but I've gotten the feeling, from reading MCTB and the posts on DhO, that using the heartbeat as an object for meditation can be problematic [1]. My impression is that people are doing much more than just feeling the pulse around their bodies when they do noting practice. My hope is that if I can understand more about what they're doing, I can get beyond some of the hindrances that have kept me from progressing with noting in the past.
Thanks in advance.
[1] For example, Matthew Horn's response on
this page.