| | Hi Peong,
I'm sure you'll keep getting good suggestions here. I'll chime in with my thoughts also.
I'm reminded of the myth of Da Mo (Bodhidarma) coming to China from India. He went to a certain monastery and found that all of the monks there were having trouble sitting for any length of time in their meditation, due to sluggishness and lethargy. So, he developed a bunch of exercises, Yi Jin Jing, to enliven their nervous systems, and get their energy flowing.
Question to consider:
* How are you doing in terms of focus and energy in the rest of your life when you are not doing formal practice? Make sure you've touched the common bases before you start to worry about it too much as a strict meditation issue. The common bases are: sleep, nutrition and physical activity.
Also, as Indrasnewt pointed out, switching to a standing posture is extremely helpful. I did this myself. In a way, standing meditation is the easiest. Of course, it's physically challenging, but it provides a natural guardrail for the attention.
I think I also tend towards torpor. In my first year of renewed practice, I used a combination of standing meditation and mental repetition of an important passage to build stamina.
Sometimes I would repeat the passage mentally without worrying about rhythm. Other times, I would repeat one word with the inbreath and the next with the outbreath. Other times I'd do one word with inbreath and outbreath, and then move to the next word. Finally, there were times when I'd focus on the content of the words, and not move on to the next word until I felt I'd truly experienced the word or words that I was repeating.
All of those helped me to deal with torpor. But that was obviously just my experience. |