Hello all.

I recently read in a dharma book that meditating 45 minutes a day was an expected prerequisite. Since I'm looking for work and I probably won't have as much time to myself soon, I said you know what, screw it, I'll go for 45 minutes every day and see what happens.

I've managed it for 3 days and it definitely helps give me some relief from my suffering during the day. I like having an anchor of having had a big practice that I can then recall and drop into a useful state whenever during the day.

What I remember best about my practice is the instructions I give myself and it feels a little embarrassing to look at what I actually sensed during each session. It's like everything that goes beyond the bare instructions is... a terrifyingly deep iceberg.

deep breath, I'll be brave. Here's what today was like: started with medium speed present-oriented noting for 20 minutes. Next, 30 minutes of close-focus sensing of impermanence/flow centred on "internal" and "external" body sensations with peripheral awareness of flow in the visual field and sometimes all of the (sometimes uncomfortably frenetic) movement would suddenly cut out and I'd get a few moments of just hearing my air conditioner humming away and the cars driving outside, which is the closest thing to "silence" in my city apartment. Those internal-experience-totally-cutting-out moments always feel pretty chill and good. As I'm sitting here it feels natural to just drop my attention through my body and get a nice transparent cool feeling, like a comfortable Autumn breeze, so I wonder why I perceived it as such a struggle this morning. Maybe it was because I was resentfully looking at all the shifting auras on the ceiling for a lot of it and resenting that I wasn't feeling the flow like I set an intention to. Maybe my intention was sort of arbitrary and it makes sense that my attention-stream didn't respect it. In any case, something that helped to not perceive the ceiling-flow as a "distraction" was feeling out from my body into the visual field. Kinda trippy to feel out into the world, but what else am I doing when I hear a noise and then I get a little startled and feel butterflies in my chest? The reaction inside arises simultaneously with perception of the sound outside. One interesting pattern I noticed is that the colourful red/green/blue ceiling flow was less vibrant when I focused on it and more vibrant and beautiful, rainbow-like and broad, when I was focusing on somatic experience, as if it was an ambivalent peacock struck with shyness. Ended with 5 minutes of gentle present-oriented sensory noting as well as trying to pin the self to the sense doors.

If anyone has advice or encouragement I'd love to hear it. My biggest and most important practice goal is improving my equanimity, like being okay with my life just as it is, being okay with my romantic partners and friends just as they are. Stuff like "luminosity" and "clarity" feel pretty good, they are rewarding textures of experience that come and go, but equanimity is really really deep and important and totally the priority. It's too sad to live a life wishing I was someone else.

Okay, wow. This morning I did 20 minutes of sensory noting, then I took a shower. I was noticing colours more clearly -- this made me really excited to get back to practice. When I sat down (well, laid down) to practice, I was there for 30 minutes, which is possibly the longest continuous session I've done so far. I started with bare sensory noting without much more intentionality than that, but some frustration started to build up around my sense of self, to which I attribute my.. characteristic existential suffering. So I started to do sensory noting specifically on the parts of my sense field that created the impression of being someone.

I noted "performing", "explaining", "investigating", and it cycled a lot. I think because of breaking down my sense of self, I started getting more emotionally volatile. The sound of my roommate made me rage so much I wanted to SCREAM... it has been a while since I've felt that raw, it was a little scary. I noticed a lot of a feeling of "grimness". Some positive feeling like pride, happiness would arise, and then grimness would set in. It was like I could feel my soul sneering, like, "you thought that would last?"

I feel pretty antsy and unsettled now, confused even.  I think I am noticing how a lot of the stories that I make up about my feelings are kind of like substitutes for just accepting the feelings as they are. They don't stand up to closer investigation, and when I look closely there is not some story that comes up to replace them or anything. About halfway through the 30 minute session I had this burst of energy rushing into my body and I tensed up, my eyes widened and I drew in air really quickly, like I was afraid of what was going to come in. I think it's even freakier to think that if I let go, that nothing will replace the "me" that I had there before. There's no new identity, there's just no identity. There's no answers, there's no "fixes" for any of what I'm feeling, it's all just an incomprehensible irreducible enigma.

0_o........ yet somehow I feel I'm on the right path, despite the discomfort

This morning I started with a 23 minute laying-down session, alternating between calming (I thought, "be still & conscious like a rock is still & conscious") and non-judgmental awareness. Thankfully it didn't have quite the same agitation as yesterday. Aaand then I did 18 minutes of... sitting up and attempting self-inquiry. It was hard and I think my experience was too clouded by my discomfort to actually get into self-inquiry... I would go to my breathing and try to evoke somatic rest but it was difficult to ground myself because my back got sore and I had some painful tension in my throat. I told myself to just keep sitting and that I would get used to it, I would get stronger, things like this to comfort myself, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. My visual field kept getting clouded over by dark afterimages of the wall which I found irritating, and it was difficult to feel my attention pulled back and forth between the vague defocused visual sense and the bodily pain. The verbal comfort I gave helped it not to turn into more of a nightmare -- I'd like to think I was practicing metta.

I am thankful for one moment during the middle of that sit when I think I was staring at my desk and I felt kind of gloomy but I felt like it was important to say.. "I can't do this. I can't do this." and I accepted it and felt some relief. There was nothing I could do. Hey, self, all that selfing looks exhausting, take a break!

Anyway, I broke the practice and decided that in order to give myself some kind of feeling of achievement that I would do a straightforward Focus On A Point on the Wall meditation, which I ended up doing for 10 minutes before my partner offered me lunch. No huge insights or anything, no big spacious peace, but it feels good to have worked on my concentration.

31 minute session lying down this morning. Similar instructions as yesterday (with some subtle differences that I think made a big difference in results): focus on breath for calming to start. As soon as calm is attained, focus on a clearly perceiving "self", and rest in natural, free-floating spacious awareness if "self" awareness fades away in a calm sensory field. Practice this time had a lot more clarity and subtle bliss/sukha than yesterday's formal session. Maybe you can already tell this by the clarity of my instructions compared to yesterday.

I think this was inspired by an unusual burst of sensory clarity yesterday evening practicing in life where everything I was perceiving visually seemed to be at an unusually high "framerate" -- it was a little anxiety-inducing but mostly quite pleasant! Tracking the pleasant "high framerate" impression yesterday evening even through difficult stimuli, switching back to shamatha on the breath when I was concerned about overwhelm, was effective incubation for an insight that arose this morning: every sensation is an opportunity to practice. Every sensation right now. My fingers on the keyboard, the vague not-quite-hunger in my stomach, the completion of this very sentence. It doesn't matter if it's a "distraction", it doesn't matter if it's "vague", it doesn't matter if the feeling itself is confusion. It's still real and it's happening right now. This feels like a big relief to realize.

Another good insight from this morning: why do teachers say to drop out of thought, to not go into thinking? What's wrong with thinking? I realized that thinking itself is not a hindrance -- it's thinking about that is a hindrance. In thinking about, there is a palpable distance between the thinker and the thought. There is also a "projective" kind of feeling to it -- it's like I throw my thought ahead toward what I'm trying to think about, while also separating myself as a thinker from it. This is not the only option!

In the thought, only the thought -- that feels much better, more spacious, natural, and unforced. In the sensation, only the sensation. There is no separation here.

30 minute lying down session this morning. Not a lot to report, pretty restful, had physical discomfort and solid emotional discomfort at times but especially toward the end I managed to "breathe into" them, which helped. My acceptance/equanimity seems quite good at this point but this also has the side effect of making the formal practice seem like... hmm... like nothing at all. Unremarkable and difficult to remember, which seems... somewhat antithetical to mindfulness. Tomorrow I intend to notice more integrating, inclusive, spacious qualities of awareness to see if this helps.

Last two days, practice hasn't been quite so formal although I've still spent about a half an hour each day sitting with Loch Kelly's Effortless Mindfulness book, alternating reading it with going deeper and deeper in my practice until I'm done.

Yesterday was quite encouraging -- I had a moment of focusing on the book, then moving my focus into my head and shooting it back until the sense of focus dissolved into boundless space. Contractions of awareness subsequently popped like bubbles one by one, space bouncing in and out. I said "yippee!" and stuff like that over and over. Lots of rapture/piti!! My sleepy eyes were bugging me... thankfully I felt the drowsy sensation in my eyelids' "inside", which was full of shimmery rainbow energy, and it was beautiful, so it didn't feel like a problem anymore. The rapture was pretty much constant for like 15 minutes, and it faded quite quickly.

I sort of crashed even further from how good yesterday was today. I felt twisted up inside and there was a lot of internal movement and sound (music and talk) that I had to dance and sing out before I started practicing. Practice started out quite calm and frictionless but judgment started coming in and tangling me up again, and my throat is tight as I write. Trust is hard. At least it is calm and slow, and I'm not as agitated as I was earlier... The pain just feels like a gently aching wound at this point. Singing myself lullabies helps.