Starting a journal

Alessandro Migliori, modified 2 Years ago at 1/5/22 8:16 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 1/5/22 8:16 PM

Starting a journal

Posts: 27 Join Date: 3/24/21 Recent Posts
Hi. I m starting a journal because i know there are really advanced practitioners on here so i hope i ll get some help. What do i do, i update it daily?

My practice now is ~40 min of meditation a day,and some 5 elements work once a week after seeing how much shargrol recommends it. I meditated 2/5h a day for a couple of years, but was clearly in the category of trying too hard and shoot past equanimity, so i reduced till this and started to actually stabilize in equanimity. 

I ll start putting an usual sit and see if i understand somewhat the nanas:

I sit and feel really blissfull and no thought - starting from mind and body. 

After a few minutes i start getting all kinds of energy stuff in the spine and in the head ~ arising and passing away

Now there i can fight and resist all the energy stuff, or let it lash out, and it get worse and worse like it has no end and get loopy about all this process - stuck in dukkha nana

I can sit still and ignore the urge to move or resist, and just bring stillness and equanimity to the unpleaseant sensation, after a while the gross unpleasentness subside, and i start remembering old memories from childhood / years ago, i remember of dreams made a lot of time ago, get daydreamy at the point of dreaming while awake, the sense of the body get very blurry and merge with the envirorment and subject/object duality diminish, sometimes my head falls - here i am somewhere in equanimity. 

In the last months i get to equanimity daily after ~15 minute of my sits, after 35 minutes i start to get some pain in the legs but it s bereable.

Last days during meditation was investigating how when a thought arise it has scripted inside it's thinker and a story and the conceptual subject of the experience and then see it subside leaving only the other sensations, and seeing that there is no subject except from these conceptual assumption. 

​​​​​​​Also some days ago i got very deep and seen mandalas / Tantric deities having sex, deknotted a lot ot the tangle of sensation behind the eyes and recognised clearly the "knowing", was seeing so much clearly how there was of the stuff of experience and the things in it that were usually a "me", and how all that was effortlessy known,a knowing that was always present and effortless and pervaded experience, reminded a lot by what shargrol says to investigate in high equanimity. 
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Niels Lyngsø, modified 2 Years ago at 1/6/22 12:38 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 1/6/22 12:36 AM

RE: Starting a journal

Posts: 414 Join Date: 11/15/19 Recent Posts
Hi Allesandro,

I am not an advanced yogi (still pre-Stream Entry), but I have been logging a lot, both privately and here, so I thought I would chime in:

​​​​​​​There are huge differences in how people log their meditation. To use myself as an example: I have had periods where I updated my practice log twice a day (!), because it felt helpfull at the time since the fact that I knew I had to describe my sittings afterwards helped me sharpen my metacognitive awareness during the sits, and also helped me develop a hopefully more phenomenologically precise language, which helps you get more precise advice. In the other end of the spectre, I have had periods where I updated my log maybe once a month, because at that time daily logging felt unnecessary or even as a hindrance, since the logging thoughts during the sits now seemed to be distracting. So my advice would be to find out what pace of logging will be most helpfull for you right now. And to be open to the fact that both the pace and the style of the logging will change. Also: Take a look around in other people's logs and see if you find anything to inspire you!

Good luck!
Alessandro Migliori, modified 2 Years ago at 2/6/22 7:17 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 2/6/22 7:15 AM

RE: Starting a journal

Posts: 27 Join Date: 3/24/21 Recent Posts
Sorry for the absence but i update with a big insight i had yesterday. Basically i ve seen an huge blind spot in the mind that was emotions, for the first time i ve felt an emotion not in a contract way but i ve crearly seen - there is space around emotions and for the first time i got completely disidentified from that strata of the mind and i ve seen where a lot of fault lies. When a practitioner first start to sit, sees for the first time that there is space around thoughts, so that thought doesn t need to be believed and are just mind objects coming and going. This start the path about understanding no self but the process is far from complete because emotions are still felt in a contracted state creating a self out of them. When seeing space around emotions happens now you see that also them are mind objects coming and going and don t create a self so that no emotions is coming from behing and imposing how you must feel, so no event happening outside or any objects happening outside has really power over how you feel. When a practitioners sees space around thought he understand no-self but in the felt-emotional experience there is still a sense of wrongness so that he understand it but doesn t get it because in the felt sense there is still a felt self made around emotions,now that i ve seen crearly that strata of the mind everything is so different. When i sit i can just sit, nothing "needs" to happens to make me "feel" in some way, now i can really just sit in equanimity 
George S, modified 2 Years ago at 2/6/22 8:07 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 2/6/22 8:07 AM

RE: Starting a journal

Posts: 2722 Join Date: 2/26/19 Recent Posts
Great!
Alessandro Migliori, modified 2 Years ago at 3/3/22 6:23 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 3/3/22 6:23 PM

RE: Starting a journal

Posts: 27 Join Date: 3/24/21 Recent Posts
Today i sat more than usual and seen clearly the nanas :
I begin meditating and at the 30~ min mark i m in a strong a&p territory, after that some Red and dreadful forms appear in my mind and meditating it s a bit hard,past 40 min i check the timer every 5 min and i stop, probably ended the sit in dukkha nanas. 
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After some time desire for deliverance kicks in and i meditate again, but i can only think about attaining something, and try to game practice as shargrol would say and see what i can do, after a few minutes like this dawns on me that i m in desire for deliverance mode, so i relax and just see how reality happens without my control, i don t need force to be aware of sound etc and sensations happens without me doing them, all solidities and energies starts to dissolve and flux, timelessness sets in and i m clearly in equanimity territory, my mind was very gently curious, i could see how awareness is effortless and everything that make it seems like as effort can be seen as a psychosomatic tension and release it, then got curious about the nature of what know all that and tinelessness got stronger and the feeling of reality breaking apart unsupported. 
Now my mind feels very good and refreshed, deeply relaxed, probably dweelled in high equanimity at the end of the sit. We ll see tomorrow

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