Simon Willis:
31/02/2013 5-6AM
Sat on the chair for an hour. Counted the breath, similar to yesterdays sit I drifted in and out of some kind of concentration state, im wondering if my practice is becoming wishy-washy, perhaps im being too hard on myself. My theory was that in a Goenka retreat you do concentration for the first 3 days, and you do 11 hours a day so after maybe a month or so of daily concentration practice (1hour a shot) I should be close to ready to move on. So ill keep on with the plan and plod, on and re asses in a few more weeks.
Or you can do vipassana, and thus build your concentration while also gaining insight.
I, like you, initially started out by doing nothing but anapanasati meditation in the attempt to build concentration. I thought, well, I'll build up my concentration muscle, and then switch to vipassana. But all I did was frustrate myself, since it is harder to see any results, except one time when I entered what I think was the 2nd vipassana jhana, which was really impressive, but I was unable to reproduce it again. Doing vipassana, you will build concentration along the way, as part and parcel of applying the technique successfully.
I guess an analogy would be someone interested in learning martial arts. You could, on the one hand, lift weights every day, building up your muscles so that you become really strong, and the start training in the martial arts, but it takes forever, and is kinda boring to just sit there pumping iron, etc., or you could begin training in the martial arts now, and build up your physical strength alongside learning the martial arts techniques, by applying the techniques.
Also, if you are going to be noting, it can take a little time getting used to/get comfortable with. So start practicing noting now, because it could take a few months to really slide into. If you build up great concentration, but your noting technique sucks, then what will become of all your concentration efforts? Concentration can best be built up by 1) applying the technique of noting, 2) meditating a couple times a day [spacing them out], and 3) noting off the cushion. This last point is crucial: Once you learn noting, you can utilize it throughout the day [driving, bathing, taking a dump, etc.], which itself will build and help maintain concentration.
Yeah, and also, once you pass the A+P, sitting becomes much more interesting, and one feels more compelled to do it. When I was just doing samatha stuff, it was pretty dull, and, besides feeling restful, I never really felt like I was getting anything out of it.
So that's my 2 cents, so to speak. I'd just hate to see you get frustrated and quit. I've got an abandoned concentration practice thread on the DhO, but once I started vipassana there was no looking back.
The best to you in your practice...
Oh, by the way, here is what Daniel Ingram wrote on a thread in which I asked about developing concentration BEFORE starting vipassana...
"I personally had really bad samatha skills until I had stream entry, but I learned to note early on and could do it well on retreat once I had some practice with it.
"That said, I crossed the A&P (which is second vipassana jhana territory) in daily life without any formal meditation training at all a good number of time before I learned much at all about meditation, so what does that tell you?
"Be very careful about what you call first jhana. If you adopt some very hard, high, samatha-heavy standard, you will likely shoot yourself in the foot trying to get that, when long before you ever attained that, you could have rocked out some serious insight.
"Remember, Mind and Body is first jhana territory (the vipassana aspect), and plenty of people can get to that quite easily. When I say you must attain the first jhana to do vipassana, that is what I am talking about.
"I know a number of other people who have good jhanic skills and never went on retreats at all.
Daniel"
PS - Also, this thread may be useful and/or interesting http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3642138