super fox:
I just had a couple sits today and yesterday that have introduced me to what I think is a very promising strategy during meditation.
I use to read a lot of buddhist sutras and such where they talk about how a yogi needs to adopt an attitude of dispassion / disgust with the body, thoughts, etc - I mostly chalked them off as somewhat of a monkish/ascetic oriented thing.
However during meditation recently I've been having a lot of trouble with either the attention wave fidgeting with body tensions or getting lost in rather vivid day-dreams, and trying to escape out of them / reduce them seemed difficult. I figured I need to bulk up on concentration. However, I found that by simply adopting a dispassionate attitude towards all phenomenon that arise in the field of experience (basically the five aggregates), I was able to actually avoid getting lost in anything and found that I could very easily reach equanimous states.
I've also found that maintaining an attitude of dispassion helps in cultivating the faculty of bare attention (see Ian's recent thread on bare attention and its uses).
Yes, indeed, Super Fox. That (i.e. dispassion) is what I think that Mahasi Sayādaw was aiming to accomplish with his innovation of the concept of "bare attention" when he taught this method to Nyanaponika Thera, who in turn explained it in his book
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.
If one has the insight
to more closely consider what is in the suttas (discourses) in terms of suggestions for practice, one will undoubtedly come across more of these useful instructions for developing "skillful means" that one previously cast aside or decided to ignore.