Hello everyone! 

I took this year off (from work, socializing, etc) to deepen my practice, I even made a post back in March seeking advice on how to find a solid teacher and advice on achieving jhanas and/or stream entry - and then promptly didn’t update the log I made! Sorry to the few who sub’d! I’ll update at the end of this post on how it went.

Long story short, this year has been magical and I've made a lot of progress. I’ve completed five retreats and am looking to do one more, a 2-3 week fire kasina retreat aimed towards liberating insight. I’m looking for advice on how to best utilize this retreat for liberation, as I’ve read and heard that fire kasina can be unique in that it naturally tends to produce insight.

Does anyone have any advice on how to better facilitate insights through fire kasina? Is there any benefit to inclining the mind towards insight or the 3 characteristics once you make it up past the murk, or would this reduce concentration too much? Or would a better idea just be to get concentration very high, moving up through jhanas and keep at it like a persistent hunter like Daniel Ingram says in that one video?

​​​​​​​Retreats this year -

• Completed 5 silent retreats, totaling 43 days
• The first was a 10 Goenka retreat in March, which, while not my preferred style of practice, was everything I needed from a first retreat. I loved the intense, bootcamp style of practice, and it being my first time meditating all day, every day, with no distractions at all showed me the potential of retreats. 
• Next up was a 14 day metta retreat at the lovely Dharma Treasure in the beginning of May. This was really special - it was led by a lovely human who radiated metta, and Dharma Treasure is absolutely lovely, nestled in Cochise Stronghold, in the mountains of Arizona. 
• I spent four months practicing at home, then returned to Dharma Treasure in early September for two retreats back to back - a 7 day nondual “Presence Awareness” retreat led by a phenomenal Thai Forest monk. This was the most challenging retreat, not only because I find nondual meditation a bit slippery, for lack of a better word, but also because the sits were 90 minutes which I’d never done, plus each day was a slightly different take on nondual meditations - but the monk really knows his stuff and I got a ton out of it. Plus I really enjoy nondual meditation now.
• This was immediately followed by a couple days off retreat but still keeping practice high, then a 3.5 day “Deconstructing Yourself : A Nondual Retreat” led by Michael Taft, which was equally as mindblowing. I knew Michael knew his stuff but damn can he lead a retreat!
• Mid October, I linked up with the guys from Jhourney.io, a tech startup created by meditators who found how transformational metta jhanas could be, for an 8 day metta retreat. Their goal has been to gather sufficient biomarker data from experienced jhana meditators in the hopes to be able to reverse engineer jhanas, helping meditators achieve them more quickly. I met one of the founders at the metta retreat at Dharma Treasure and figured I’d check their online retreat out to see what they could offer. I’ll be honest, expectations were kind of low as I wasn’t expecting some techy folk to lead a retreat all that well (no offense), but they actually killed it! Stephen Zerfas, one of the other founders, led the meditations for the retreat, and the tips and cues they provided were very effective. By their metrics, I was able to achieve jhanas 1, 2 and 3. Prior to this retreat, I kind of poo-pooed “sutta jhanas”, but I now see that they are no joke

Where I’m currently at - I kept practice momentum decently high after my last online retreat for about a week and a half, doing around 3 hours of mostly fire kasina practice, until I was beset by problem after problem. I'll spare most of the details, but had to take antibiotics twice for tick bites which were tested and had Lyme, and apparently antibiotics really wreak havoc on me, as I had tons of anxiety, depression and insomnia - that lasted about a month and half. Lots of relationship issues culminating in an eventual break up, plus my best friend had a crisis and had to stay with me for about ten days, which was really nice but not so much for practice.

All of that to say my practice took a hell of a hit the last two months, so I’m not going into this retreat with the momentum I was hoping for, but to be honest, I think all of the hardship may somehow work out for the better for this retreat. That’s my hope anyway.Thanks for reading and I appreciate any advice anyone has to offer!