Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

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Fitter Stoke, modified 11 Years ago at 1/13/13 3:03 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/13/13 11:10 AM

Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 487 Join Date: 1/23/12 Recent Posts
I've begun to do a practice based upon the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta. If you look at the Guided Meditation in Noble Strategy, that's basically the technique I'm using, plus my intuition/good judgment.

This is not extremely different from the practice I ordinarily do, but the focus is different enough that I'm not 100% sure how to interpret the results. Ian And, if you're reading, I wouldn't mind hearing your feedback. You too, Nikolai. Or anyone else who is used to doing jhana the way the Old Man prescribed.

I did this for 45 minutes right now. For the first 30 minutes of this, I'm basically just going through the body, piece by piece, feeling the breath in each part of the body, until I get the whole body breathing, i.e., every breath is being registered in the body as a whole, in this kind of soft-focus, medium-angle impression of the body. The body is pretty calm at this point, so areas of tension - like in the shoulders - are sticking out. To the extent that I can release tension, I do. After awhile, it becomes apparent that some of these areas have injuries, and I'm only going to make them so relaxed, so I stop making a project out of that, and just return to that medium-sized soft focus on the body.

So this is about 30 or 35 minutes into the session. I don't really think I'm in any state right now, but I do feel relaxed. Up until this point, I had been directing myself: "Okay, the attention moves here now ... now here ... now I release this ..." etc. But since the body is really still at this point, those sorts of thoughts in my head are getting very loud. I make an attempt to stop them, but it doesn't work. Lotta running commentary.

So I take a different approach. I focus back on the body as a whole, but now I'm watching the interplay between thinking and the sensations in the body. And what I begin to perceive is that certain patterns of thought are causing or are being followed by contractions or tensions in the body, especially in the shoulders and arms. This is happening on a very subtle level, but things are pretty still now, so it's really showing up. So it kind of occurs to me in this directly perceived way, "Oh, I can go deeper, because every time the thoughts stop, even for a little bit, the breathing body gets even more still than this."

At this point, the whole body starts vibrating and feeling like it's lifting off the ground. (I was doing this laying on the floor, which really helps in terms of releasing tension.) "Cool!" I think, which is followed by a tension down one side of the body, which stops the vibrating and levitating, which is experienced as dukkha, albeit on a microscopic scale, which results in the thought ceasing, which results in the relaxation and concentration deepening, which results in even more emphatic vibrations, a sense of the world dropping away, a sense of the body as a vibrating energy field in and for itself.

At this point the lightshow behind my eyes is so strong, I'm nearly convinced my eyes are open, but they're in fact closed, and it's only like I can see through them. It was cool.

I wanted to go longer, but there was a distraction at that point which rudely jerked me out of my meditaiton which I will make sure doesn't happen again in the future.

The interesting part of this session for me wasn't so much which state I got into or didn't get into. What was really interesting was seeing, directly, in real-time, on a microscopic level, how dukkha was fabricated. The mind was focused on the body. The body was very still. So it was easy to see whenever the mind decided to toss something up, no matter how small, to shatter that stillness. As the meditation became more and more refined, it was easier to see it happening on more subtle levels. This in turn clued me in, "Ah, yes, there is an even more refined state I can get to, so long as I cease this more subtle degree of fabrication." And then the body would dislocate from the world even more, become its own thing even more, expand, distort, whatever. And so long as I didn't do much with that weirdness, but just kind of kept an eye on the mind and what it was doing, things were pretty good.

And if you can cause dukkha to cease during meditation on that kind of nuts and bolts level, theoretically you should be able to do it when you're not meditating, albeit with a lot more practice.

Thoughts?
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Bagpuss The Gnome, modified 11 Years ago at 1/13/13 12:08 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/13/13 12:08 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 704 Join Date: 11/2/11 Recent Posts
At this point, the whole body starts vibrating and feeling like it's lifting off the ground. (I was doing this laying on the floor, which really helps in terms of releasing tension.) "Cool!" I think, which is followed by a tension down one side of the body, which stops the vibrating and levitating, which is experienced as dukkha, albeit on a microscopic scale, which results in the thought ceasing, which results in the relaxation and concentration deepening, which results in even more emphatic vibrations, a sense of the world dropping away, a sense of the body as a vibrating energy field in and for itself.


This is where you want to be. At this point Thanissaro (going by the sutta) instructs to "calm the bodily fabrication", ie the breath. Not to say that the tension thing doesn't sound awesome, but you may be jumping ahead a little. The interesting thing about the whole body as (breath) energy is that if you search that energy you will discover that the piti and sukha are already present. Your job is simply to "tune in" to them, rather like finding a really tricky station on an old fashioned radio --careful adjustment until the signal becomes clear. As you do that, you're moving into the second tetrad.

Not that they have to be done in order (again according to Thanissaro) but I've found you pretty much have to do the first tow in order at least until your body-mind does the first one without thinking and you move directly into full body awareness and jhana.

Hope that helps.
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PP, modified 11 Years ago at 1/13/13 1:18 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/13/13 1:17 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 376 Join Date: 3/21/12 Recent Posts
Hi,

An interesting thing to watch is any remaining (subtle) body tension after emptying the lungs and before in-breathing. That is, the residual tension in the body (and mind) that couldn't be released with the out-breath.
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Fitter Stoke, modified 11 Years ago at 1/14/13 3:25 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/14/13 3:25 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 487 Join Date: 1/23/12 Recent Posts
Repeated the experiment. This time, shortly after I began breathing in sensitive to the body as a whole, the entire body was filled with very strong piti. I understand now why there's a difference between piti and sukha. Piti isn't exactly pleasurable. It's not like a soothing caress. It's a strong, bright energy, and it's easy to lose concentration when it arises (which is what happened to me). The one thing I did notice while I was in it was that there was not a shred of pain in my whole body. All those injured parts of the body that usually show up as energy "blockages" were blown through and dissolved, so the entire body glowed with rapture.

I've had piti come up in meditation before, but I've found it hard to "spread it", as you're instructed to. This is usually because I was focusing on the breath at one point, like the nose or the abdomen. The advantage of using the whole body as a kasina is that it's very direct. Once the whole body was in focus, it was like tossing a spark into a pile of gunpowder. The whole thing went up right away.
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Dan Cooney, modified 11 Years ago at 1/15/13 1:15 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/15/13 1:15 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 60 Join Date: 10/22/12 Recent Posts
I need to have another window open to look up these terms, I still dont recognize most of them when I see them emoticon piti, sukha, etc.

anyway, I approached all this via the rote method of streamlining and harmonizing breath mechanics, wrote about a bit of it here in a couple other threads, perhaps that may be of some interest emoticon

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3841514;jsessionid=1AD7630EC0DBD9F16A2A4C70120400A0

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3835911;jsessionid=1AD7630EC0DBD9F16A2A4C70120400A0
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Nikolai , modified 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 9:45 AM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 9:45 AM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 1677 Join Date: 1/23/10 Recent Posts
Fitter Stoke:
I've begun to do a practice based upon the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta. If you look at the Guided Meditation in Noble Strategy, that's basically the technique I'm using, plus my intuition/good judgment.

This is not extremely different from the practice I ordinarily do, but the focus is different enough that I'm not 100% sure how to interpret the results. Ian And, if you're reading, I wouldn't mind hearing your feedback. You too, Nikolai. Or anyone else who is used to doing jhana the way the Old Man prescribed.

I did this for 45 minutes right now. For the first 30 minutes of this, I'm basically just going through the body, piece by piece, feeling the breath in each part of the body, until I get the whole body breathing, i.e., every breath is being registered in the body as a whole, in this kind of soft-focus, medium-angle impression of the body. The body is pretty calm at this point, so areas of tension - like in the shoulders - are sticking out. To the extent that I can release tension, I do. After awhile, it becomes apparent that some of these areas have injuries, and I'm only going to make them so relaxed, so I stop making a project out of that, and just return to that medium-sized soft focus on the body.

So this is about 30 or 35 minutes into the session. I don't really think I'm in any state right now, but I do feel relaxed. Up until this point, I had been directing myself: "Okay, the attention moves here now ... now here ... now I release this ..." etc. But since the body is really still at this point, those sorts of thoughts in my head are getting very loud. I make an attempt to stop them, but it doesn't work. Lotta running commentary.

So I take a different approach. I focus back on the body as a whole, but now I'm watching the interplay between thinking and the sensations in the body. And what I begin to perceive is that certain patterns of thought are causing or are being followed by contractions or tensions in the body, especially in the shoulders and arms. This is happening on a very subtle level, but things are pretty still now, so it's really showing up. So it kind of occurs to me in this directly perceived way, "Oh, I can go deeper, because every time the thoughts stop, even for a little bit, the breathing body gets even more still than this."

At this point, the whole body starts vibrating and feeling like it's lifting off the ground. (I was doing this laying on the floor, which really helps in terms of releasing tension.) "Cool!" I think, which is followed by a tension down one side of the body, which stops the vibrating and levitating, which is experienced as dukkha, albeit on a microscopic scale, which results in the thought ceasing, which results in the relaxation and concentration deepening, which results in even more emphatic vibrations, a sense of the world dropping away, a sense of the body as a vibrating energy field in and for itself.

At this point the lightshow behind my eyes is so strong, I'm nearly convinced my eyes are open, but they're in fact closed, and it's only like I can see through them. It was cool.

I wanted to go longer, but there was a distraction at that point which rudely jerked me out of my meditaiton which I will make sure doesn't happen again in the future.

The interesting part of this session for me wasn't so much which state I got into or didn't get into. What was really interesting was seeing, directly, in real-time, on a microscopic level, how dukkha was fabricated. The mind was focused on the body. The body was very still. So it was easy to see whenever the mind decided to toss something up, no matter how small, to shatter that stillness. As the meditation became more and more refined, it was easier to see it happening on more subtle levels. This in turn clued me in, "Ah, yes, there is an even more refined state I can get to, so long as I cease this more subtle degree of fabrication." And then the body would dislocate from the world even more, become its own thing even more, expand, distort, whatever. And so long as I didn't do much with that weirdness, but just kind of kept an eye on the mind and what it was doing, things were pretty good.

And if you can cause dukkha to cease during meditation on that kind of nuts and bolts level, theoretically you should be able to do it when you're not meditating, albeit with a lot more practice.

Thoughts?


Sorry, been away from internet for a coule of weeks. I would just keep doing what you are doing and explore and experiment even more with this approach. If it works....
Nick
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Fitter Stoke, modified 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 10:26 AM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 10:24 AM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 487 Join Date: 1/23/12 Recent Posts
Nikolai .:
Sorry, been away from internet for a coule of weeks. I would just keep doing what you are doing and explore and experiment even more with this approach. If it works....
Nick


No worries - I remembered you had experimented with this awhile back.

Update:
I've been practicing this every morning for the past week in pretty much the way I described above. Nothing new to report, unfortunately. After getting blasted with piti the other morning, nothing like that has happened again. I seem to be hung up on step 4 of the sutta's instructions, the part having to do with calming bodily fabrications. Either that, or I don't have a very realistic idea of what "rapture" is supposed to be like or how much there's supposed to be.

One useful thing I've noticed is that I have a tendency to hold or squeeze or tighten around the sensations of the breath. I notice this whenever I bring the attention to bare on the breath, that there's discomfort at the bottom of the breath which is very hard to relax. It's hard for me to tell exactly how I'm influencing that, though. The way the breath seems to become slightly more uncomfortable just by perceiving it reminds me a lot of the 2nd ñana.

This morning, the breath felt less tense in that region, though I discovered there was another way in which I was holding the breath. I wasn't really letting it bottom out. I was stopping it before it hit the bottom and sending it back up. And once I realized that, I was able to let it go, and the breath went deeper into the bottom, didn't come up as much, and in general felt more relaxed. There was a quick sense of ease when I did this, like I had really just relaxed something I didn't realize I could relax. But nothing much happened after that. There was some flashing behind the eyes.

I read somewhere that it's better to work these things out for yourself than to continually receive explicit instructions. I'm beginning to see why that's the case. Most of the "problems" I'm having - if you can call them that - are things only I would be able to perceive anyway.

I'll keep at it awhile longer. Hopefully the weekend will afford me time to do some longer sessions.
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Fitter Stoke, modified 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 10:27 AM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 10:27 AM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 487 Join Date: 1/23/12 Recent Posts
Pablo . P:
Hi,

An interesting thing to watch is any remaining (subtle) body tension after emptying the lungs and before in-breathing. That is, the residual tension in the body (and mind) that couldn't be released with the out-breath.


Yeah. That's pretty much where I am.
Change A, modified 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 9:07 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/17/13 9:07 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 791 Join Date: 5/24/10 Recent Posts
Fitter Stoke:
Pablo . P:
Hi,

An interesting thing to watch is any remaining (subtle) body tension after emptying the lungs and before in-breathing. That is, the residual tension in the body (and mind) that couldn't be released with the out-breath.


Yeah. That's pretty much where I am.


Not just that but any body tension at any phase of breathing.
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Fitter Stoke, modified 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 7:52 AM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 7:52 AM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 487 Join Date: 1/23/12 Recent Posts
Change A.:
Fitter Stoke:
Pablo . P:
Hi,

An interesting thing to watch is any remaining (subtle) body tension after emptying the lungs and before in-breathing. That is, the residual tension in the body (and mind) that couldn't be released with the out-breath.


Yeah. That's pretty much where I am.


Not just that but any body tension at any phase of breathing.


Do you have a lot of experience with this particular style of meditation?
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Dan Cooney, modified 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 1:22 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 1:22 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 60 Join Date: 10/22/12 Recent Posts
an interesting thing to note is the tension placed on the psoas muscles in full lotus - since the psoas connects the lumbar spine to the medial epicondyles of the femur, the lotus posture naturally stretches the psoas muscles a bit. which probably explains why its easier/more natural to do reverse breathing while in the posture. so think of what it does to the fundamental diaphramg-psoas-perineum dynamic!

part of the manifestation of a car's power relies on the back pressure that the exhaust system provides ;)
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PP, modified 11 Years ago at 1/30/13 5:35 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 4:24 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 376 Join Date: 3/21/12 Recent Posts
Change A.:
Fitter Stoke:
Pablo . P:
Hi,

An interesting thing to watch is any remaining (subtle) body tension after emptying the lungs and before in-breathing. That is, the residual tension in the body (and mind) that couldn't be released with the out-breath.


Yeah. That's pretty much where I am.


Not just that but any body tension at any phase of breathing.


Yeah, I wrote this recently in my practice log:

"There's also some degree of physical tension in every in-breath. Though this seems natural, what I have seen in me is that there's some mental tension added to it, for whatever reason. So while I'm in-breathing I recall the sensation of relaxation in the out-breathing. It may sound odd, but isn't difficult to do. Thus, the in-breath is much soft, like the crumb of white bread expanding and dissolving in water... As the in-breath is softer, when the out-breath sets in, the relaxation goes deeper. In just a few breaths I go silent and alert. When done laying down, in a couple of breaths I was sinking below the bed."

What I'm founding out is that in setting myself in a mental out-breath mode while the body does in it's own the in-breath, some parts of the abdomen and lumbar region follow my mental order and drop vertically. Thus, the lungs expand vertically and not horizontally in the in-breath. There's a pretty clear different sensation in the peak of oxygen storage between breathing normally and in the described pattern. The later sets a positive feedback loop of relaxed breathing.

Another interesting topic is that jumping to access concentration / jhana usually happens in the out-breath, but at least for me it happens sometimes just before or at the peak of full breath. As the breath is shallow and jerky while accessing jhanas EDIT[ early 1st jhana ], I see a connection with a soft tummo practice I've done in the past (Flying Phoenix, a blend of taoist & buddhist practices) where there's a specific set of irregular breathing to fire qi circulation that ultimately drives to jhanas (made-up example: inbreath 100% outbreath 40% inbreath 100% outbreath 20% inbreath 100% outbreath 70% inbreath 100% outbreath 100%). My working hypothesis is that both full relaxation / tension dissolving and breath jerkiness are factors that set up jhanas, and that different traditions build their method either narrowing the focus to one of them (taoist, tummo) or having a more holistic non interventional approach (theravada).
Change A, modified 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 10:23 PM
Created 11 Years ago at 1/18/13 10:23 PM

RE: Following the instructions in the Anapanasati Sutta for once

Posts: 791 Join Date: 5/24/10 Recent Posts
Fitter Stoke:
Do you have a lot of experience with this particular style of meditation?


I consider no suffering as when there is no residual tension in the body/mind and all my efforts have been to this end. I find this style of meditation to be particularly suitable for everyday life as I need not be concentrating on the breath. Earlier it was difficult to do because I had so much tension in my body but lately it has been getting better and better. I have found that stretching/yoga helps release deeply held physical tension in the body. I also practice kum nye in the tradition of Tarthang Tulku which has been extremely helpful in releasing tensions from the parts of the body which can not be stretched easily (for eg. inside the rib cage).

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