Jason Siff's "recollective awareness meditation"

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Griffin, modified 3 Years ago at 10/8/20 6:15 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 10/8/20 6:15 PM

Jason Siff's "recollective awareness meditation"

Posts: 271 Join Date: 4/7/18 Recent Posts
Any thoughts or experiences with Jason Siff's recollective awareness meditation?

His book, "Unlearning meditation" got me interested, because it presents a kind of approach I didn't really encounter anywhere else in the Dharma world.

It doesn't focus on "right instructions", it rather focuses on the way we approach instructions, our relationship with it.

The book explores our intentions, deeply rooted believes we have about meditation, whether our inner voice is soft or harsh etc.

The goal is to make our relationship with instructiona more flexible, and to see that every conceptual framework about meditation is relative and that we can have the freedom to play with them.

There is something "meta-cognitive" about this work which fascinates me, because it seems so different from the traditional dharma literature. 
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Griffin, modified 3 Years ago at 10/12/20 4:50 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 10/12/20 4:50 PM

RE: Jason Siff's "recollective awareness meditation"

Posts: 271 Join Date: 4/7/18 Recent Posts
Nobody?
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Ni Nurta, modified 3 Years ago at 10/12/20 5:02 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 10/12/20 5:02 PM

RE: Jason Siff's "recollective awareness meditation"

Posts: 1072 Join Date: 2/22/20 Recent Posts
This harsh soft bit sounds interresting.
I believe paying attention to own motivations and how sensations present itself are the most important things.

I however do not really read dharma books, last one I read was MCTB few years ago so I cannot really comment on Jason's approach other than that it sounds interresting.

The question is: Where can I get it for free? Preferably something short because I have 2020 attention span emoticon
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Griffin, modified 3 Years ago at 10/18/20 5:48 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 10/18/20 5:48 PM

RE: Jason Siff's "recollective awareness meditation"

Posts: 271 Join Date: 4/7/18 Recent Posts
Well, instructions for Recollective Awareness Meditation can easily be found online emoticon. For example: https://santamonicaacupunctureandmeditation.com/meditation/instructions/#:~:text=Close%20your%20eyes%20and%20bring,to%20go%20where%20it%20will.

So, basically, you let your attention go wherever it wants. Then, after the session, you write down notes about what you experienced during the meditation.
So, the instructions are minimal (in order to prevent the tension that appears when instructions and your actual sensate experience come in conflict). However, the journaling is retroactively strenghtening the mindfulness: by making yourself remember what you experienced, the next time your mind will be drawn to experience it with more detail, notice patterns etc. This approach is implicitly aimed at raising the mindfulness of thoughts and emotions.

I really like when Siff says he doesn't claim this is some kind of "best" meditation, and that he expects that practitioners will evetually "go on". But the value of the technique is to relax the tensions in meditatior's approach to practice (fixations on "right instructions", "shoulds", rigid beliefs, judging etc.)

What made the strongest impression on me, however, is the originality of conceptual framework presented in his book (e.g. the detailed explanation about "impasses" in meditaton).

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