I haven't prioritized logging here for a while because I have regular access to feedback from live connections, both from my pawo and from dharma friends, and I'm too lazy to repeat myself. Now I have so much to summarize that I'm not sure how to go about it.
I have had a couple of very energetic phases, and a few dips when the fuel ran out. I need to balance riding the energy with fueling it, and sometimes it's hard to be in synch with it. It is obvious, though, how the mechanisms work. The more I do yoga and structured sits, the more happens on its own when I recline to relax.
At times when I have been able to increase the amount of practice, clarity has peaked. At times when daily life challenges have made it hard to squeeze in more than one sit, clarity has been lower.
In the fire kasina, I'm playing with a synesthetic approach to the nimitta. I think the photorealistic image of the flame is just part of it. There is also the nada sound. My hypothesis is that since I'm still not mainly visually wired, I might need to think of brightness as happening in more than one sense gate to begin with, and then eventually it will all distill itself into light. Also, focusing on the nada sound helps with distractions. Sometimes I get into a very sweet flow with it, with very little effort, and that gives me a taste of what is to come.
Michael Taft has us doing shamatha on stillness, silence and spaciousness (comes from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche) and then shamatha without an object while also doing Vipashyana on thoughts, not missing a single mind moment. It's good to revisit Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's three doors practice. I had almost forgotten how profound that can be. As for the thoughts, it is fascinating how many layers of processing and/or pre-processing there is before a thought is fully formed. Not that I always manage to capture that; this ADHD brain is quite messy at times.
I had a weird dream a while back which was mainly lucid. I heard the alarm and was trying to wake up because I had a morning meeting, but I kept waking up in the wrong room. I must have gone through 30 something rooms before I found consensus reality. At first I was confused, because I thought I really woke up but didn't know where I was. I hypothesized that I was at a friend's place, but then realized that I was still asleep. I went through a few similar episodes, in which I even told people about the previous rooms I had woken up in, but then I grew more and more alert to the fact that I was still dreaming and started dissing the rooms immediately, like "nope — next!" over and over again. I knew I was in sleep paralysis but made an effort to open my eyes. When an image of my wall images flashed through, I knew that was the right room and that the ones following that were not. Eventually I managed to wake up for real. It would have been fun to explore the lucidity more, but I had to work. Michael Taft commented that it was a bardo moment.
I have also played with astral projection/OBE. I have managed to almost leave my body at will but snapped back again as if there were a rubber band connected to my physical body. I have also glided into bright light a few times, in one of those sessions. I was intending to connect with a specific person. Funny thing is that at the same time (I can't say whether it was the exact same time, but at least roughly) I suddenly popped up in a dream of his, just passing through in an elevator.
I haven't done much standing practice lately for some reason, but when I do it, it adds something.
I had a trauma triggered at work a while back, from a smell. I can be very sensitive to smells, but this was unproportional. I was trembling for three hours after leaving the smell. It made me think that it might have reminded me of when we found my dad's body after he had committed suicide. So I did some talking to my subconscious, assuring it that it was okay for it to come up. And so it did, in a sit. It came in brief spurts, a little at a time. I could feel and sense what had been shut out due to shock at the time. I cried, but it was tears of relief. Later that night I welcomed it again. That time it came up as visceral agitation of the body, mainly in the hip area. I worked it through with support via video chat. I was basically crawling around on my yoga mat, letting my body do what it needed to do. My body invented its own movement and sound therapy (I later learned from a dharma friend who is an expert on such things that what I did is legit practice, but I had no idea at the time). When I told Michael about it, he said it was the tantric way.
In daily life I find it useful to be aware of whenever the pain body shows up (as taught both by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Eckhart Tolle) and to soften into it, seeing it for what it is. Even the most stubborn versions of the pain body will admit that even though "what I'm concerned about is serious shit", tensing the body does not help a bit. And it's remarkable how a relaxed body suddenly has access to much more constructive thoughts, or even space between them.
