My first log post.

I’ve had long and circuitous misadventures through various paths – religion, atheism, mysticism, occultism, and Buddhism. One repeating theme has been my failed attempts at establishing a consistent solo practice, including meditation. I had bouts of consistency only, and I thought I finally got there last year. But, as I wrote in my first thread, I abandoned that too. I’ve resumed now for 6 weeks, brought back to the cushion by suffering despite the stability of my outward life. The suffering was painful and disturbing; lots of ill will & anger; also imaginal or vicarious experiences of horrible or gruesome things. Again, outward life was stable, and I have remained a healthy, well functioning person.

I’ve worked back up to regular twice daily sits of 30 minutes, or one 45 minute sit if I don’t do two – just sitting and watching things come and go. Plus micro-meditations, if you will, during routine life. The suffering is attenuated, sometimes gone entirely such that I forget it was ever a thing. The effects on my day to day experiences & reactions are significant. Generally, things arise and pass, and I’m either dispassionate or compassionate. Sure, things still push my buttons. But they come and go too, just like everything else on the cushion.

About the sits themselves: morning sessions are energizing and bodily / sense focused. Nighttime sits are choice-less awareness punctuated by hypnopompic experiences from which I jolt back and do breath-awareness to center. I’m not trying for jhana. I let things come and go, catch myself in something, then step back to watch, and so on: breath, body, 5 senses, internal images & stories, interior vibrations both subtle and pronounced; it does not seem to matter. There are mild A&P phenomena which I turn into objects of meditation; or they happen off cushion and are not destabilizing.I find a goalless attitude very helpful. I’m not claiming to be Zen (or not Zen). My intention is to sit, and that’s it, which is a nice antidote to my thoughts of “what’s the point? Why am I doing this? I’m better, is this a waste now? Is this too much?” I guess that’s doubt, which I’ve been turning into an object too. Not a hard split though, as a smooth subject & object blending seems to have carried over from last year.

So far, so good, one day at a time. Feedback is welcome, I am grateful for DhO.

Keeping at it, twice daily sits, leaning into vipassana

• Sense objects are diffuse, "gaseous". Less solid than some of my mental maneuvers which seem more solid or sharp than physical sensations
• Mind seems both
  • kaleidoscopic - a flat screen of experiences inter-blending
  • hierarchical or nested - multiple states / experiences happening at once.
• Experiences coming and going is not-self. But actually various selves birthing from contact, then dying to another contact. All are empty, impermanent. But why one contact after another and ensuing selves? Craving, aversion, etc… ultimately dissatisfaction. So, three characteristics all around, in & out
• Sometimes when contemplating dhukka my body suddenly relaxes, including my face; an involuntary smile forms and I accept the dhukka as is with a touch of loving kindness. After the sit my analytical mind wants to judge that is cruelly indifferent or even psychopathic. But I also know there is nothing directly I can do, and getting upset or some other emotional response only reinforces a self-image (e.g. a caring person). Still, Right Action
• There is nothing to win by samsara, just more samsara… "reborn in realms of woe..."

A week of travel, now back at it:

* noting people during the first of travel day: unpleasant things (eg, ill will) were centered entirely within, not reflected by others, so no projections. Pleasant seeming things (eg desire) still drew my attention outward. Then this noting switched into raw sensing: no attraction or aversion, no judgement or reading, etc... only seeing

* noting the raw sensations of airplane flight, just my physiological changes during each  phase of take-off. All just sensations - and mostly pleasant - without any narrative

* only 1 formal sit during travel, otherwise noting or re-centering on the breath during activities

* returned and back to sitting 2x/day

* In the first sit the breath was enjoyablr, especially as it slowed; it wanted to stop at the end of the exhale; then pleasure slowly arose and expanded to fill my entire body with a calm bliss. That subsided into emptiness

* During another sit, my senses retracted inward and I reflexively accepted that I would die; the "when" was irrelevant. I retracted further inward and was surrounded by a vast space suffused by a charcoal grey cloud, swirling and billowing all around. Not the first time I have "seen" this, but this time I noted it as "death". I was calm  throughout the sit, no residual weirdness

* During subsequent sits, the senses have been sharp, especially bodily sensations: painful cramps & asymmetries which I've been noting and concentrating on. I could attribute these to the much increased activity during travel. As painful as these bodily sensations are, they are accompanied by a deep respect - even reverence - for cause and effect, as though that is the only necessary ontology.

* further insight into dukkha, especially my roles in them, with widening compassion and equanimity. While sitting, one intense re-experience of a particularly painful event, arising with a deep in-breath, releasing completely with a deep out-breath

Continued sitting 2x/day, ~25 min each session

* Senses remain sharp during sits, not diffuse anymore. Also mental chatter is getting louder – my mind enjoys playing with ideas and words. During one sit I noted myself reflecting on free will vs determinism, which I saw through and abandoned as not a worthwhile or pragmatic issue.

* Asymmetries & cramps persist, but realign and loosen after about 15 min. I added stretches and asana to my daily routine to improve my posture. I could prop myself very comfortably on a couch so that my back is upright, but that is too comfortable at cost of clarity.

* Twice during sits my center of awareness shifted outside to behind my head and shoulders, as if I were standing behind myself and staring at my neck. It was too uncomfortable to maintain and note that perspective. Opening my eyes slightly helped to reorient, but very little. Hearing was getting too sharp also, and I had to abandon one sit entirely because I felt overstimulated with mild sympathetic arousal. I relocated the other sit to complete the session.

* Overall it seems I’ve suddenly taken a few steps back, but just noting and dropping that judgment. I’m noting my mind trying to find a reason “why”, apparently to solve the problem, as it were; so working to note such judgments as craving, 3 characteristics, etc.

* Will try out a virtual sangha to formalize group sits at least 1x/wk. I did many group practices in another spiritual tradition decades ago, with a strong residual and persistent aversion to all of that. But, it could be interesting to work on aversion, and I am open to try sitting with a Buddhist group.

Continued sits 25 min 2x/day

- asymmetries have declined significantly, almost disappeared back whence the came; asana targetting the area and balanced awareness during the sits (increasingly experienced as an internal energy or force that I can direct around and through the body) seem to be the keys

- just sitting & watching whatever wants to come and go, which eventually turns into a vast emptiness pervaded by awareness

- satipatthana – primarily breath, body / energetic phenomena, and thoughts; 3 characteristics

- one 45 min session broken into 30 min fire kasina (candle flame), followed by 15 min satipatthana during which the kasina or other nimitta would arise spontaneously

I remember kasina meditations being more dramatic last year when I started experimenting with them, the most dramatic being once when I did about 1 hr of light & water kasina: watching sunlight reflect off of the surface of an undulating, large body of water, and feeling merged therewith. That resulted in tremendous tranquility lasting a couple of days.

I imagine I would need to spend much more time on kasina practice for results compelling enough to continue. But overall the most compelling reasons to continue sitting at all has become the results off of the cushion; not the practice itself, but because of the practice.

Continued sitting twice daily, increased to 30 min per sit

- “just sitting” vs vipassana

- increase in experiencing and remembering dreams. I don’t make too much of them but they feel more lucid and meaningful, and they have been worthwhile to reflect on

- turned vipassana onto awareness itself, analyzed as 3 characteristics, often resulting in a laugh at the emptiness and non-self of awareness too

- noting phenomena, then noting my mind’s reaction to phenomena, and asking “is that so?” as my new koan

-  insight that 3 characteristics are gateways to freedom: nothing has permanence, true satisfaction, or inherent essence to cling to; there seem to be 2 characteristics at a time that dominate

- energetic phenomena persist, usually experienced as circular, counterclockwise motions centered in my head or torso, sometimes abdomen; I often catch these spirals after they have started, and I can slow or stop them, or make them vertical

- I also experience internal vibrations or buzzing that I can move around the body at will. I used this 2x for a full body scan. The first time it dislodged some intense dukkha

- other random dukkha arise with an inhale and bodily tension, then release with an exhale and bodily relaxation

- in one session I was mindful of my thoughts for the entire sit. I experienced my thoughts as a constantly moving and morphing wave inside my head; like the old screensavers of lines twisting and stretching as they bounced around the screen. I didn’t see my thoughts like that, but I felt them, "I" was them, in that form. Then I would notice a thought “want” to become a verbal expression, which did not “need” to happen. But I realized how non-verbal and sense-based my thoughts have become over the years (my first real practice of meditation many years ago involved quieting the internal verbal chatter)

- I’ve experimented with skipping a sit, and I seem to have an 18-hour window before grief/fight/flight vs dukkha nana start to set in. If stages of insight apply to retreats only, then I have no claim to dukkha nana, nor the seeming equanimity that returns from regular sits. But what would ‘claim’ be really? And if the goal is full presence, why put the goal in the future? Why not just sit and be present with whatever is, and be present when not sitting too?

Regardless, less suffering is good. I guess it’s like brushing and flossing teeth: significantly less suffering at the dentist.

Some good insights !!

 Thanks, that is encouraging :-)

Stages of insight are not applicable to retreat only. They're a living process that everyone experiences though meditators may tend to get a wider variety of them and perhaps deeper experiences of them. 

I advise you learn about the stages through direct experience and for now let any analysis or need to understand them go. 

They're quite obvious once you've experienced them, and moved between them, a bunch. 

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Specifics

- increased each sit to 35 min, still 2x a day (exceptions below)

- Jan 21 30 min AM, 30 min PM, followed by short break and another 30 min. In the PM sits I was zooming into tranquility (or equanimity), then formless, then feeling something important was about to happen, then suddenly return to causes & effect & 3 characteristics

- Jan 23 AM couldn't sit more than 17 min, body-mind just not wanting to cooperate

- Jan 23 PM sit 35 min, started with spinning energy center of my chest and rising joy, then settled into mild buzzing/pitti all over, then lots of hypnogaugic startles as I caught myself nodding off

- Jan 24 to 27 loosened the regular schedule, partly to experiment with flexibility and to counter rigidity & expectations. Was living day to day while keeping everything in view; no sitting at all 1/26 & 1/27. Just slightly more thoughts and mental screenplays with concomitant emotions.

- Jan 28 back to sitting, no agenda except for time (35 min), and being fully present to anything and everything. It was nice.

Generalities

- feeling more sensitive to unskillful or unrighteous thoughts, remembering past shames or regrets, which come and go very quickly

- noticing a similar patter in most sits: a few minutes to settle, breath wants to stop in the first 10 min or so, then c & e, then 3 c's, then buzzing and energetics more prominent, followed by tranquility (or equanimity) and formless or awareness-only states

- increased twitches that surprise me, mostly in fingers & hands

- increase in hypnogaugic experiences, now with sounds & voices; various persons speaking various languages, phonetically correct but semantically gobbledygook. My work involves lots of conversation via interpreters, and in one particular sit it was funny to watch my mind create an encounter to play the roles of myself, an interpter, and a 3rd person speaking a foreign language. Such experiences are similar to the beginnings of lucid dreams in that I am watching the events unfold and recognizing the dream state, however sudden or fragmentary

- the arcs of energetic spins and spirals are getting larger and coursing throughout my entire body in waves, less centered in my head, behind my eyes / face, or in my torso

- tranquility (or equanimity) toward the middle/end of most sits, except for Jan 23 AM. Whatever happens, I note/notice, then return to the breath or just rest in the flux & emptiness of things. Eventually in most sits all experience becomes a diffuse spectrum - mind, body, room, world, universe; "me" being there or not becomes irrelevant; me not having been around for billions of years - irrelevant; me not being around in a relative blink - irrelevant. Same with the everything else.

- 3 c's are implicit and I don't feel the need to incline my mind toward them. In fact, my mind inclining at all in any direction is yet another object to note/notice coming and going.

Nice, this is great practice. From time to time it can be useful to incline towards each of them in turn as this can be very fruitful in deepening our understanding of a characteristic and thus deepening the natural inclination towards them in meditation when we return to letting them be seen together. 

Some Tidbits:

* Forgot in my most recent entry to mention that last week I was listening to an old favorite song when my hearing sense suddenly changed such that I was not the one listening to the song; rather, it was the song – the notes, chords, phrases, everything – that was alive and “listening” to me. That is, the song became the object and I the subject. Then the subject object divide just collapsed, and there was no distinction between the song and my hearing. All this while driving, without tying to do anything meditative. My mind was aware of everything happening, and another part of it was delegated to driving – very precisely and carefully I would say. 

* Just yesterday, while out running, a similar thing happened with the visual sense and the external vista, followed by a few moments of centerless awareness. I can’t consider this a runner’s high because I’ve been running for decades and a runner’s high is very different, occuring under different condititons (for me). This centerless awareness was so remarkable in it’s ordinariness: my body was doing its thing (strain and all) and the world was doing its thing; and there was no separation between them.

* Resurgence of dukkha and defilements, though mild and with understanding & insight (e.g. recognizing them as the logical extensions or shadow sides of something I used to prize about myself).

* Last night’s sit was bizarre. Unrealistic worry about a plausible but unlikely scenario arose out of nowhere. Initially couldn’t see “thoughts as thoughts”, but eventually that kicked in and the thoughts faded away. But my attention was also crap after that and I was in a sort of semi-conscious fog. When I came out of it, I heard my mind telling something it had to leave. Then I a saw a huge figure, a menacing villain  just smiling at me and saying “No.” After it faded, another vision: a female made entirely of fire who was much closer to my face than the previous figure. She didn’t say or do anything, just stared at me and eventually faded. After that the sit just continued in and out of the fog.

* This evening’s sit was uncomfortable from the start. I began with focus on the breath, then went right to distraction city. Could not concentrate. No energetics / spirals. I did get a buzzing heaviness in my hands and arms. But my mind was churning away again and produced more bizarre and absurd scenarios. At one point, I was "forced" to choose between a “one hour airplane landing” and a “toy snake”. I just noted and it faded. Comparing these to dreams would be generous; my dreams are coherent and linear by comparison. Then a painful, burning sensation in my left eyelid begging to be itched, out of nowhere.  2-3 times. I just watched it rise, peak, and fall. Then a sharp itch in my left side; again, rise, peak, fall, disappear. 3 C's were manifestly obvious, in my practice - past and present - in any experience, myself etc... Then my mind settled into a calm, spacious opening and inclusion of... everything. As if the weirdness was screaming “Me! Me! Me!” the whole time, and my mind finally just relented and said “Welcome”. And all was accepted and OK.

Sitting twice a day @ 30-35 min each. I went back to 30 min as an experiment, wondering if that had anything to do with the fog and weirdness of the sits. But that didn’t change anything. As it happens, I ended up sitting the extra 5 min some of the times anyway, or spontaneously during unstructured times.

* Have tried 2 different Zoom sanghas / sits since deciding to do so a few weeks ago. But not my thing (yet).

* Jan 31 - I found it hard to accept that my mind had accepted everything, including the weirdness. Sat with that and noted more selfing and 3Cs.

* Feb 1 – in the morning sit I felt ping-ponged between two complimentary states, not necessarily extremes, but a defiled or dysfunctional dyad. I instinctively resorted to occult path work that cut through and put my mind in a concentrated, clear place. In retrospect this may have been a failure or missed opportunity of further investigation and insight. But further insights into what was happening unfolded off the cushion, and there’s less selfing going on all around.

* since then my effort has been not to push against everything being OK, letting that be, and letting the sits be. MCTB2 chapters on re-observation and equanimity have been very helpful. More charcoal fog, more 3Cs, more buzzing in the periphery, more large and slow sweep of energy in new patterns covering the body, more smoky nimitta/lights, more 3D images, more it’s all OK.

* some sits have been utterly normal and fully present, having characteristics of equanimity that carry into daily life. In fact, distinctions between normal and remarkable are breaking down.

* it is interesting that awareness of sensations rise with inhales, and release with exhales. I want to extrapolate that as inhale = take in life, exhale = release into death.

* overall there is no effort to sit, no worry about not sitting, it’s just a thing I do like everything else I do. The Buddha Dhamma rocks and rolls, and settles into the easy listening of the universe just doing its things.

Sometimes it's good to just rest into the grossness. Other times it's more skillful to use concentration states or whatever else. Work with including any discomfort into the totality of your experience. See to what degree can you just rest with it instead of recoiling from it. Can you even lovingly soften with it? We can learn a lot about ourselves and the patterns which cause us suffering by noticing the strategies we use to avoid it.

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Nice !! Don't be put off by anything boring or mundane. Meditate with all experience. 

I would say I’ve been resting and noticing the vast majority of the time.

The maneuver was an instinctive reaction, likely an adjustment to just noting things. I would call it love expressed as the assertion of authority. You have to upend flawed systems of stability to give love a real chance.

Thanks for checking in.

My practice continues with a significant, nigh magical, reduction in suffering. Insights continue on & off the cushion, and stuff is less sticky all around. Were I to be mappy I would say I'm gently rocking back & forth over a spectrum between re-observation and equanimity. But what I really want to say is that it seems all good for me just to sit and do life without bothering about much else. I guess that ends this chapter or log of why I resumed practice. Glad to be here. Thanks all who supported and commented.