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adam's practice journal

adam's practice journal
Answer
10/25/12 4:05 PM
after having experimented with plenty of techniques and given at least a few of them a sincere try i think the type of practice which is most effective at affect reduction is the 'direct mode' practice as described by Kenneth Folk. i'm not totally sure that what i am doing matches up perfectly with that - I am essentially fixing attention on affect as it is felt in the body and not allowing it to invade my thoughts or way of perceiving things. i suppose i differ somewhat from the practice as described by him in that i do not treat the grounding of emotions as an end in and of itself but as a means to dissolving the bodily aspects of those emotions, which happens of its own accord if they stay 'grounded' and my attention remains fixed on them without creating any new affect.

i have been way more inspired to practice than ever before because of how fast progress has been going and how clear the whole path is when you do this type of practice. getting motivated and sincere about practice has perhaps been my weakest point as a meditator, this sort of practice is great for me because in watching affect dissolve one can see very clearly how the development of this skill will lead to the end of suffering.

after the big surge of progress over the last 4 or so days i seem to have slowed back down a bit, there were a bunch of energetic effects over a few days which left my body feeling soft and open as opposed to the previous tension which i was grudgingly being equanimous towards. perhaps there is a sort of 4NT cycle of insight in which one sees suffering and begins comprehending its cause, then goes through a period of energetic realignment which leaves one with a reduced amount of suffering. this is approximately where i am in this hypothetical cycle, i would guess that the next part of the cycle would be simply seeing the subtler levels of affect present, back to the first truth.

my chest and gut feel very open and comfortable for the most part although there is some tension present, the head tension is a bit coarser, they are all becoming more clearly dhukkha. I will continue with the method, which seems to be the same no matter where you are in the 4NT cycle, which is maximizing equanimity and awareness of stress in the body - next step is realizing that the suffering present is in fact intentional tension.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 12:19 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
Sounds like you may be overcomplicating things for yourself here.

Would I be right in thinking that you're trying to eliminate affect entirely? If so, there are better ways to go about this than what you're describing since the method you're using will not lead to the outcome you're looking for. Just watching emotional states pass away does not lead to the end of suffering, you need to find out how and why they arise in the first place so that you can cut the chain of dependent origination at it's root.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 12:24 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
I've noticed that it is really important not to put the cart before the horse and call the affect tension before you really see that it is tension. you have to just look at it as a sensation, once its cause is seen and you know it is tension that knowing will just translate into relaxing, but if you go 'calling' it tension before you really 'see' that it is tension you'll try and push it away because you are giving it the label of 'optional' before you can actually take the other option.

this practice is very much about what you *don't* do (consciously)

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 12:28 PM as a reply to Tommy M.
Would I be right in thinking that you're trying to eliminate affect entirely?


yes

the method you're using will not lead to the outcome you're looking for


how are you so sure of this?

you need to find out how and why they arise in the first place so that you can cut the chain of dependent origination at it's root.


that is sort of what i am doing, being aware of the suffering as a sensation until it is clear that it is tension, by that i mean seeing that it is caused by ongoing intention (that part is sort of speculative as i can only infer that this is what is happening)

anyway what would you suggest instead

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 1:44 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
Adam . .:
after having experimented with plenty of techniques and given at least a few of them a sincere try i think the type of practice which is most effective at affect reduction is the 'direct mode' practice as described by Kenneth Folk. i'm not totally sure that what i am doing matches up perfectly with that - I am essentially fixing attention on affect as it is felt in the body and not allowing it to invade my thoughts or way of perceiving things.


Sounds close enough that it's probably leading to the same state(s).

The key to direct mode, as I understood and experienced it, is the continuous directing and re-directing of attention to "ground" the affect. However, there is a subtlety here: the amount of "force" or effort or whatever that's required to get this result isn't always the same at all times. The more you try, the more affect you generate; so it's helpful to match the effort you exert with the effort that is needed to keep your attention working in the right way.

So, a practical suggestion: once you get good at this practice, see if you can progressively use a lighter and lighter touch, and yet retain attentiveness. (Don't hestitate to use a heavy touch when you need to, just remember that if your concentration is good, it may not be required, and if you stick with the practice long enough, you can slowly move to a lighter and lighter touch as your default.) That's what worked for me (though I didn't necessarily think of it in these terms at the time).

If you're examining what's pleasant and what's not pleasant, and seeing that more clearly over time, I'm confident that any reasonable practice that involves attentiveness will work, and it's just a matter of determining what plays to your strengths and life circumstances.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 5:02 PM as a reply to End in Sight.
thanks for the tip on lightness of effort, not sure exactly what to make of it, i think i was doing it intuitively already but i'll keep it in mind.
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i started putting too much emphasis on trying to drain away the physical sensations of affect, what i really should have been doing is just grounding the subtle aversion which manifests all over the whole body, 'skin crawling'. the fact is if emotions are completely grounded they will just go away themselves, which i said a few times already here but was forgetting.

note to self - the experience of emotions as body sensations should be treated as the end in and of itself, even if i can't remember why this type of experiencing is pleasant.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 5:36 PM as a reply to Tommy M.
Hi Tommy M.

I am Martin and I live in Scotland. I'd like to get in touch with you but I didn't manage to PM you. Can you answer this message to my e-mail address (verbeke_martin@hotmail.com)?

Thanks !

Martin.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 10:02 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
how are you so sure of this?

How else would I be sure of it?

that is sort of what i am doing, being aware of the suffering as a sensation until it is clear that it is tension, by that i mean seeing that it is caused by ongoing intention (that part is sort of speculative as i can only infer that this is what is happening)

It may just come down to a difference in the way we're describing things.

anyway what would you suggest instead

You may or may not be doing this already: See how craving and aversion are the same thing and come about in the same way, look at pleasant, unpleasant and neutral affective responses and see what causes them to arise. Pleasant and unpleasant are two sides of the same (imaginary) coin, neutrality is the potential for either to arise.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/16/12 10:09 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
the experience of emotions as body sensations should be treated as the end in and of itself, even if i can't remember why this type of experiencing is pleasant.

This is something which will likely occur if you practice well anyway, from this point you can begin to investigate what causes those emotions to arise in the first place and dismantle their underlying belief structures. The reason why this type of experiencing is so pleasant is because "I" am not involved, it is affect which gives rise to this sense of "me". Hope that's of some use.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
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4/16/12 10:13 PM as a reply to Magada Rtinguindin.
Hey Martin, I'll drop you an email tomorrow. I just checked out your own practice thread but thought I'd respond in this thread quickly as it's 4am... emoticon

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/17/12 6:38 AM as a reply to Tommy M.
ok thanks tommy, i will try and finish working on this grounding skill before figuring out the causes of emotion, but in doing the grounding there is clearly some sort of development in terms of amount of affective experience. it's not just dissociation/disembedding but i don't really know what else it is.

-

Been in a good EE since last night, lots of natural wonder. the decision to focus on just the grounding seems to have really done its job, i will keep this up. i am finally beginning to get a grip on the altruistic idea of this practice, i can really see how this makes people around me happier. i don't really have much resistance right now, so i will take Jill's advice and switch up my pattern, no TV no distractions etc. will report on how it goes.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
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4/17/12 9:25 AM as a reply to Adam . ..
the EE is still going strong. i didn't report on the sense of actual pleasure that has been building since last night as i assumed it would pass. it's still going, feels like the pure non-orgasmic third jhana pleasure that has been purged of coarse excitement, it is experienced throughout the entire body, even the head - something i haven't experienced before, and increases in intensity when sitting and when closing my eyes. the developmental potential of this practice is more obvious at the moment, when emotions can't invade mind-states due to grounding they can offer up no defense, and so they just pass away, perceived clearly to be unnecessary suffering.

the revelation that the grounding should be treated as an end in itself is really important, that seems to be what is driving me right now.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/17/12 1:53 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
the pleasure was obscured for a while, i was still aware of it but it was tainted with pain, mostly in the back around the top of the spine - which was where the pleasure seemed to 'originate', this was enough to make me prefer that the whole [apparently linked] sensation would go away. it persisted like this for a while and i kept trying to ground everything as i had been before. unexpectedly it seemed that the grounding was causing the pain, i remembered EiS's tip about using as little effort as possible, i eased up and the pleasure returned as it had been before.

i know some others have mentioned pleasure something like this - is this just a natural sensation in the body which is normally obscured? it seems fairly strong and constant and it is strange to think that it could be so totally obscured - but that last episode seems to point that way.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
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4/17/12 7:31 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
i turned the effort down and just kept turning. mindstates were allowed to exist, depression, anxiety, doubt, they come up with their crushing convincingness.

i turn towards the intuitive self-distraction, watch some tv etc.

i realize i am being an incredible idiot and take a 5 minute sit. after 30 seconds everything is good... no, great, again.

note to self - too much is better than too little.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/18/12 12:50 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
big note to self: ground everything, everything, everything.

spent the last 5-6 hours in a state of witness, non-grounded, i was grounding every clear emotion but there was still a inner 'real' space. looking back i don't even know specifically which sensations i wasn't grounding, head? face? back?... i just know that i kept evaluating and thinking about my experience, some sort of emotional selfing mindstate. attend only to the feelings, only the body, if you start evaluating your experience you aren't grounding EVERYTHING, so it sucks. there really are only two mistakes in direct mode practice:

1. not attending to everything as a body feeling (too little grounding 'effort)
2. trying to attend something which is grounded and thus tensing up around it and trying to hold it still (much better mistake to make)

there is only one action in direct mode practice = ground. you don't have to think about it or make decisions or evaluate how good your experience is or whatever... just ground and ground... doing practically anything else knocks you out of direct mode... it's like Richard says - try to possess it as your own and it will vanish as quickly as it appeared... or something

more on this - you really can't be the wave and ride it. this means you can never fully see or understand all of experience if you are going to 'be' it. your head can't poke out of the water even to get a little glimpse, you have to put away the fear that things will go wrong without you watching it... be the sensations.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
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4/18/12 6:02 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
ah ok, the inner space thing seems absolutely key. i think it is due to not grounding some stuff on the face, chest, and arms - the front facing stuff, the stuff that makes you think you are located somewhere and pointing in a certain direction. with continuous and complete grounding, which meant EFFORT, the inner space totally dissolved for a while. the most important thing to remember when dissolving the inner space is that you don't need to step out of your experience and look at it from the outside, resist the urge, bring it back to this experience here, resist, resist, resist each moment again.

i took a drive out to get a burger for dinner. i make this trip often, i used maximum effort (not meaning 'trying' but simply not allowing any effluent, no flowing out, no inner space) the whole time and it was amazing, the most striking thing was the moment i pulled back into my driveway and it was the same moment as when i left, there is normally a sense of coming back or having 'done' something, this time it was literally the same moment when i got back, it was really as if i had been unconscious the whole time, the only way i know that this wasn't the case was that i could recall the specific bodily memories of the trip.

i will continue with this cue of minimizing inner space/collapsing the distance between me and experience/being the sensations.

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/18/12 6:40 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
I think I agree on a practical level with everything you wrote. It seems like you have the implementation of the practice down (how to ground, how to find unnoticed things to ground) pretty well. Just keep on doing it! Make whatever effort you need to make to keep it going as close as possible to 24/7. (Remember, my tip is to match the effort you make with the effort that's required at that time...at any particular point, it could be a lot of effort or a little. It's a fair assumption that, at this point, more effort is required than the amount that you would exert if you were just hanging out and not thinking about practice.)

By the way, do you currently have claim any MCTB path attainments? I'm interested in the interaction between paths (having or not having them) and whatever attainments come out of direct mode.

i know some others have mentioned pleasure something like this - is this just a natural sensation in the body which is normally obscured?


I think the normal human state just involves a pleasurable bodily experience. (Not in all cases though.) Don't know why.

? it seems fairly strong and constant and it is strange to think that it could be so totally obscured - but that last episode seems to point that way.


I had the same thought when I was working on uncovering and separating bodily sensory experience from affect. You dig for awhile, and it's a surprise what you find!

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
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4/18/12 8:49 PM as a reply to End in Sight.
no path attainments. i was going by "josh r s" for a while =p... adam is my real name, i was going incognito (as josh) because i thought that some admin was on a mission to ban me as my accounts (i was here as 'adam' before i was josh) were getting locked, i was going to mention this when i made this thread but i was too embarrassedemoticon

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
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4/19/12 6:39 AM as a reply to Adam . ..
anywaysss..
this morning was outside of direct mode for some time, constantly trying to go in but thinking that i had to deal with stuff, had to remain separated from experience, had to hang out in the inner space. the pull towards inner space was very conscious, i wanted to go there, in direct mode thoughts still happen but they are muted in a way, they are thought but they don't make 'inner sound' there is no space in which they echo around. this is scary because it seems like i can't think, and 'stepping back' to make sure that i can is the same thing as creating inner space.

this reminds me of my attempts with absorption concentration, you have to just do it, just keep inclining towards immersion in the experience, you can't step back and watch it or understand it because it is the opposite of stepping back

RE: practice journal - approximately "direct mode"
Answer
4/19/12 5:57 PM as a reply to Adam . ..
a bland day, i seemed to be grounding as effectively as i was previously, the inner space was intermittent. i don't know exactly what i was missing, as i assume that if i ground every mindstate to its affective feeling counterpart i will be totally without mindstate/totally without inner space/totally immersed in experience/directly perceiving. however i suspect that a continuity/momentum of total-grounding is needed to really create that closeness. the momentum doesn't have to be much - after about 60 seconds it kicks in, but during that 60 seconds you have to be actively inclining towards being the sensations, it won't do itself, you can't step back and look at the state you've created because the state you've created is the lack of stepping back and looking at it.

same realization different day, i will spend the next 3 hours with as close to continuous grounding as i can manage... seeya then dho