Thank you, agnostic! I think so too.



Ni Nurta, if I understand your question correctly, you are asking if I continued to work with these more difficult states of mind in which my sensate experiences become more subtly blended with my reality, and the content of which I become much more easily lost.

The answer is that this has been a cycle for me, and each time I am confronted with this new challenge, I must work diligently to "wrap up" my difficult experiences within a new layer of love and acceptance, which feels like the very first time every single time I do it. It is like I forget, each time, what my mission and purpose is on this journey, and I must re-learn the same lesson over and over, albeit at deepening levels of subtlety and skill.

I am still on this very path, and depending on where I am in the cycle, I feel old symptoms of mental distress, confusion, abandonment, pain, and disconnection (during difficult phases), contrasted with unity, connection, love, openness, and so on (when I can finally understand, love and accept this new layer, until the whole cycle resets again).

As I cycle through, I see a very gradual decrease in overall mental distress and disconnection from myself and others. I see a very gradual ability to love building. Every single meditation session since the start of my Mahasi practice has been accompanied by tears, sometimes only a few drops, and sometimes buckets.

I hope this answers your question.

Thanks for sharing your valued experience Linda. I understand and am very grateful for such kind concern on this forum, something I am generally not used to, and which I can sometimes brush over in a desire to get to the more fun, "intense stuff". Like you say, I think I have a good intuition as to my internal world generally, and I know I am at very low risk for psychotic episodes. If I feel exhausted by my practice, I will generally tone it down for a while, never doing more than I feel I am capable of.

What you say about your ADHD and Tourette symptoms is very interesting to me! I do find that while I see an overall reduction in my mental symptoms (dissociation being a big one), very deep and hardwired tendencies seem to manifest afresh with each layer I peel back. It's like a tiger shedding its weathered and faded coat, and a new coat, vibrantly pigmented from the basal blueprint of its skin emerges. I think with time, these dermal patterns shift and move at their own very slow pace, while the seasonal coats grow, shed, and repeat. Do you find any long-term changes underlying the cycles at all in your case?

"Low-hanging fruit" is a great way of putting it! To stay positive, and to see it as showing us the way forward, is what I find helps. It can be confusing when I emerge again into an amnesiac state, to suddenly feel the weight of my symptoms bearing down upon me, and to have to muster the mental fortitude to remember my own private dream from which I must re-awaken every time. It's an odd sensation, but I also feel a broad sense of general awareness in the face of my own capricious psychology emerging, a patience with myself, a communication with some internal daemon of my organism as distinct from the consciously controlling entity with which I type this to you now.



I feel like my meditation practice is actually stalled until I undergo this construction. It does not feel conscious to me, but like I am stepping out of the way to allow unconscious process to take their normal course, to un-dam a river and allow gravity to do its thing. Every time I achieve some beautiful new perspicacity in my practice, it's like I hit a glass ceiling, and the tears flow, and my mind shifts, and the cycle starts over. I believe you hit the nail on the head with what I am doing, I'm "shoring up my resources" so I can dive more deeply. Both seem to be happening in tandem.

Thanks again for your thoughts, Linda, and for your kind wishes. I wish you success on your own journey.



Hi Tim, thank you for your thoughts. It does feel like I am going through mini-cycles of grief and acceptance. I am not confident enough at all to pin myself on a map, but I find myself going through depressive, and then equanimous cycles with some rapidity. I find myself able to observe thoughts as thoughts, so I imagine I am at least around the Body & Mind stage, but it seems very non-linear and quite erratic, jumping all over the place.

The tears do indeed feel like a reconnection, a gratitude, a gift. It's interesting what you say about the weeping Bodhisattva. I find myself incredibly weepy in general these days, but I have a hope that it will cease at some point, at which stage I will learn more about this axis of development along which I seem to be an unyielding traveler. 

Thank you for your kind words!


Tommy, I very much appreciate your concern, so thank you for that. What I find interesting about your subsequent comment about karmic patterning is that I wonder how far in a single lifetime this kind of patterning can be altered. I know that we all have biological limitations to the amount of healing we can achieve along some axes, and that morality is a training which goes on indefinitely, and can never really be mastered. What I have pondered as I have moved through my own cycles of karmic patterning is when the point will be reached when this particularly fertile period of rapid psychological change will slow to a snail's pace, and I will have to work on accepting things on a much longer time scale, with some things perhaps never changing (a cap on my ability to freely feel and express love, for example, or accepting and dealing with certain psychological weaknesses or permanent scars). I wonder if I have the answer to this question from what I can already observe in my practice.

Thank you again for your thoughts.

Ah, yeah, this is interesting. I think Ni Nurta may be right here. A healthy sense of self and healthy boundaries make the practice less risky and more fruitful in the long run. Deconstructing something that is already shaky can be unneccesarily challenging and perhaps also missing some marks. For me, I had this happening with regard to mental images and a sense of being in the body. I read about how other people were  having their mental images and bodies fall away, and I had to develop them in the first place. Having them as a resource is very helpful now, but it felt like going backwards on occasion. I personally find it important to realize that people have different wirings and may need to go through different developmental processes in the dharma as well as in the mundane everyday life. The path involves not only deconstruction, but also construction, and we all need to find what balance is most skillful for us in any given context. I think diversity is a great resource, because sharing our different experiences makes us all more aware of what we are taking for granted. There's so much wisdom to be found there. You may find that even if you need to construct some aspects in a way that feels like undoing the work, actually it can be a great advantage later on because you already know that the self and the boundaries that you constructed aren't as solid and given as many people think they are. There's a flexibility built in there, because you were aware of doing the work and you remember them not being there. What you built, you can also rebuild if needed. You know from experience that they are a construct.