| | Helpful comments; thank you Pavel. Your suggestion regarding my second question, roaming versus sticking to breath, is that I really ought to use whatever works best for now. Good advice. Reflection after this morning's sit suggests to me that I ought to try sticking mainly to the breath for now, at least until I feel more confident with the noting process.
With the breath, I find it easy to consciously perceive a little quanta of abdominal breath rising, then note it as "rising", and have completed this noting in time to await the next little bit of sensation. Once in while, I can even begin to notice the "blank" gap of nothingness before the next perception comes along. (I do not for now attempt to note such a gap - if I think I see one, it is too brief and vague, as well as a rare occurrence.)
As long as I am focused on the breath, I find that I can successfully discriminate little chunks of sensation or perception and note each one without missing much. In other words, my difficulties reconciling the rate of the flow of individual sensations with the time required to note them each is not so much a problem.
I tend to get three to five individual pieces on an in-breath, and the same or perhaps slightly more on an out-breath. (I find that this rate can vary breath to breath. Although on a nice quiet sit the breath will have tended to settle into a fairly steady frequency, the little perceptions may come in with a bit of syncopation or irregularity.) Some breaths will have a more pronounced pause when turning around at the top or bottom, and I often get some sort of body sensation, such as a perception of my seat or some part of the body, and I can easily note this and keep on top of things.
Also, non-breath related sensations, such as sounds, somatic perceptions, and what-not can pop in from time to time, and I am generally able to note these without losing my stride. Reflections on any such non-breath items, or on any other thoughts or sensations which come up on can be noted once they're discovered, but these tend to be a bit more problematic. (More on this below.)
In some ways, then, my beginner's noting practice, if I do it with a focus on breathing, seems to have some similarities to my experience with breath focused samatha practice, in particular, this recurrent process of observing departures from the main breathing theme or object, and returning to the breath.
The main differences, however, seem to be two. First, whereas in my concentration practice I was allowing, even encouraging the breath to present itself as a unified whole, now that I am noting, I regard it as disaggregated into individual raw percepts. (Indeed, for me this is easy - in early stages of working on concentration I actually struggled with getting these bits to appear as unified.) Second, noting breath "feels" really different than did concentration on breath. No hint of bliss or soft pleasures with noting so far; rather, it feels mildly irritating, although I don't mind this. Finally, of course, is the obvious difference that with noting practice I am doing the "noting" thing.
I strongly suspect, however, that despite one or two apparent similarities with concentration practice at the beginner stage, noting will lead me in very different directions as I move down its path, and probably more obviously so once I feel my noting skills are stronger and I am able to maintain noting even whilst allowing more open roaming.
On thoughts, just as these were a bit nettlesome for me in early stages of other forms of practice (as for I suppose all meditations), I find them a little more of a challenge with my early stage noting efforts. With concentration practice, I was able to stop getting lost in the content of a thought train initially by learning to actually stop caring so much that this was going to sometimes occur. After a while, the breath concentration and its associated jhana phenomena strengthened to a point where discursive thoughts were naturally relegated to a low simmer on a back burner, bubbling up from time to time but rarely carrying me away from the main theme of the sit.
With my initial attempts at noting, especially when I try to stay mainly centered on breath rising and falling sensations, thoughts can break the noting continuity. Of course I know well that a thought is just another mental event, equally useful as grist for the mindfulness mill as are bodily sensations, sensory perceptions, emotions or whatever. For the moment, however, I find I am once again more vulnerable to getting hijacked by a thought train, lost in the content. When this happens, I might be twenty or thirty seconds or more into the content of the thought before I realize it, and my noting of rising and falling and other things has been relegated to an absent-minded background process. When this happens, I quickly note "thinking" and bring the noting back to the foreground.
Of course, there are always those little seminal thought germs, flitting in and out of the background but not accumulating enough momentum to get firmly into the foreground. These are not a problem; I do not attempt to note them for now because my perception of them is not clear or discrete enough. The problem is when a thought's content comes sufficiently into focus and it carries me off with it. Then my noting of things unrelated to the thought becomes robotic or dies altogether, until I discover what has happened, note the thought and get back on track. Although I am comfortable that this will get better as I gain experience keeping my noting in the center of focus.
Later, however, when I begin to do noting over anything that comes along, I wonder how it will feel. How do hardcore noting and content-intensive thoughts coexist? Pavel, or anyone, I wonder if you could mention whether you are able to have a well-formed thought, be noting the thought, and still have the thought proceed and move along its trajectory and then pass away, all more or less normally all the while keeping mindful noting of this same thought going on? Or is it more a case of a thought coming and going, and then noting it in hindsight?
Thanks again, this new territory is all quite exciting for me. |