| | Forum: Practical Dharma
Usually when doing noting practice, I end up investigating impermanence, vibrating sensations.
The other night, I felt very noticeable pain in the back and legs, so I decided to go into a little more detail than simply noting "pain, pain".
At first, I tried to find the "borders" of the painful feelings. Tricky! The pain shifts around a lot, it turned out. At one time, I thougt I had found a "nucleus" of pain, but it vanished after a few moments, of course.
I didn't have such a hard time keeping my attention from rushing in on the pain, or turning elsewhere - I was able to just note these impulses.
But after a while, it all just became so awful, so annoying, so unasked-for, that I decided to stop meditating. "Woa! Almost followed it! Just note that impulse." After a few minutes, the same. It almost felt like a few years ago, when I started sitting for longer periods of time - the slightest pain would stongly draw my attention. Only this time, it wasn't the pain itself, but an unusually forceful "being-fed-up-with" meditating. "Is it time yet??" "Note: Wish to stop" "I'm really fed up with this" "Note: Aversion" and so on.
Afterwards, thinking about the experience, I had a nebulous hunch about the relationship between desire (second noble truth), and the defilements.
Anyway, what are your experiences with investigating unsatisfactoriness? What techniques do you use? How do you decide when to investigate unsatisfactoriness as opposed to impermanence or not-self? Do you mix these?
Cheers, Florian |