| | Having left vipassana for a few years, I found that when I started again I was weeping in every session. It wasn't "boo hoo" emotional blubbing with any apparent content-specific cause, but more like having uncontrollably watery eyes, almost like a runny nose. It did feel fairly cathartic afterwards though.
I'm still trying to figure out roughly where I might be on the maps, and am wondering whether this kind of thing might be particularly indicative of any specific stage. Identifying my position in the progress of insight is important to me because my location in relation to the Dark Night has major implications for the kind of practice I want to pursue in the immediate future.
Up until recently I had very little equanimity and was breathing very chaotically and seeing lots of vivid random images from the past (though not so vividly as to be hallucinatory). I also used to have lots of minor convulsions, especially around my shoulders, but that seems to have eased up too. Although it wasn't pleasant in a hedonic sense, meditation did always feel cathartic in a positive sense, as though I was exorcising the demons of my unconscious.
Does all this sound more like Cause and Effect, Three Characteristics, Dark Night, or something else entirely?
Vipassana has definitely produced in me feelings of bliss, rapture, wonder and clarity too, but if that was A&P, it didn't appear to be a distinct stage that entirely eradicated the other manifestations I have described above. Can those things be experienced prior to actually entering A&P?
For about a week now I have been experiencing much more equanimity, very similar indeed to what Daniel Anderson Thorson describes in his post (http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/435747).
Echoing Daniel Anderson Thorson, I have no idea at all if I’ve actually entered the formal Equanimity stage or whether I am still somewhere in an earlier nana and have yet to experience the Dark Night.
In case it helps with diagnosis, my total vipassana experience to date is one 10 day Goenka course about 7 years back, some very irregular home practice, and then after a few years without any meditation at all, the recent beginnings of a more disciplined home practice and a 3 day retreat a few months ago.
Many thanks in advance for any input... |