Giulio B.:
1) What do you mean with dry vipassana? the only style of vipassana i currently know is Mahasi noting.
Mahasi noting is what I'm talking about. I'm not a huge expert, but I use the term "dry" to refer to noting without first developing concentration.
Giulio B.:
2) I have heard everywhere that to note effectively you would need a certain amount of concentration. Kenneth Folk talks about being able to count three full 1-10 sets, while staying with the object and off course not losing count. My teacher (who will be available in a few weeks) writes that yes, to note you need a certain amount of concentration, but that it varies with individuals. I don't think to be at that level yet in both cases.
It is correct that you need a certain amount of concentration, but from what you were saying it sounded like you already that amount. The main point is, though, that you need a certain amount of concentration to note
effectively. Even if your noting is not yet very effective, you can still
practice noting without concentration. The guidelines as to exactly what amount of concentration you need are not absolutely binding. I think a good way of finding out yourself whether or not you have sufficient concentration is to do a whole session of noting and afterwards try to assess how much of the time you actually spent noting and how much of the time you were lost in the content of thoughts / not really noting / not being mindful. If you find that you spent a good portion of the time actually noting one thing after the other, that means you are ready to just do noting practice without concentration training.
Giulio B.:
3) The pain isn't constant, sometimes there isn't any. For example, most of the times the first 10 minutes of meditation there is no evident pain. I'm not sure about what "taking it as the main focus" would mean. To use it as an anchor instead of the abdomen? There are three problems: the one of the first 10 minutes, although i can try to seek it out and make it more evident, as there is always some slight degree of muscle tension. The second concerns the hassle of straying from the known paths. Noting and breath counting are well known, tested and offer a certain amount of security. The last thing i want to do is go on my own, i must be sure to succeed. The third is that my teacher has noting and breath counting as his favourites.
You are again talking like someone who already has sufficient concentration to do noting rather than concentration practice. I feel like I should at this point share my own experience with fairly strong pain during meditation:
After a couple of weeks of counting breaths, knowing very little about meditation, I met someone who suggested I should note any sensation that distracted me from the breath (before returning to the breath). I started doing that because it seemed to help my concentration, not knowing that I had started a form of vipassanā practice. After another couple of months, I tried something he called "choiceless awareness." By this he meant noting whatever impinges upon your consciousness, then noting the next sensation right away, without ever returning to the breath. Within minutes of starting this, I got into A&P territory (the 4th vipassanā ñāṇa / the udayabbaya ñāṇa). However, it wasn't quite clear to me at the time exactly what was happening and how it related to the progress of insight.
After a couple of days of this, I had a really bad sore throat. It was nothing that I worried about dying from, but the pain itself, on a scale from 1 to 10, was probably about a 6, so that's pretty severe for a sore throat. When I sat down and started noting, I wasn't even really decomposing the pain into heat, pressure, or anything as elementary as that, but I simply noted "pain" whenever it was actually the strongest sensation, or rather
the sensation I was experiencing in that moment. To my amazement, it occurred to me afterwards that only about one twentieth of my notes had been "pain." The overwhelming majority were the usual, mainly neutral, phenomena (such as thinking, hearing, seeing). Ever since then my relationship to any kind of discomfort, physical and mental, has been dramatically different. Keep in mind, all this was "only" A&P, something that's relatively easy to attain, and you may be
a lot closer to it than you think.
In a way, this is how it is: Meditative success does not consist of changing the pain or changing what you are. It's about changing the relationship between you and the pain. In the course of all this, you will first better understand what the pain is, and then you will better understand what you are.
To bring it back down to earth: If you can, try to neither push the pain away nor seek it out. Simply note anything that you experience. Don't try to judge meditative success by how many of your notes happen to be directly related to a specific pain. You can get enlightened from a pain, a sound, a sight, a feeling in the body, a subtle sensation, a gross sensation. The point of vipassanā meditation is to clearly see whatever is happening. It does not matter what it
is that is happening, just so long as you see it clearly.
I hope this helps you. I have significant experience with meditation, but nowhere near the level of some of the people on here, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.