Howdy, everyone! I love this forum so much. Long-time lurker.
I first meditated in 2018. I only did it once that year, but it left me with a blissful afterglow and the sense that meditation was important. I'd do it off and on over the following years, but really committed to a regular practice in 2022. Reading Mindfulness in Plain English was motivational, particularly the talk about the part of us that is always rejecting reality, always tensing, always defending and controlling. After hearing Daniel's interview on the Ten Percent Happier Podcast, I read MCTB and fell in love with his approach.
I started noting. I'd do my best to track the breath, noting "breathing" about every 2 seconds. When something distracted me, I'd note that too. I was comfortable going on long tangents, noting random stuff that happened without returning to the breath. I was also practicing throughout daily life.
In July 2023, I went on a 7 day retreat at Deer Park Monastery near San Diego. (That place is nice—super mushroomy, no Noble Silence, no concepts or frameworks, few dedicated practitioners, but cheap, with places to hide away and meditate, and beautiful grounds and helpful monks.) A monk told me to open my eyes as I sit, and this resolved my dullness issues. I reckon I hit the A&P—experiencing reality as super fast and immediate and being totally hyper.
Fear and sorrow soon followed, but it took me a few months to realize it may be the insight stages. I continued noting. While walking, I would use the sensations of my head as a noting anchor. I actually really hated noting with an anchor, and looking back, I probably didn't need one. It felt too contractive. I also hated watching the breath. I eventually dropped the anchor and went wherever the mind took me.
I remember a remarkable session where I started sitting, but spontaneously got up and threw myself around my apartment for an hour, contorting my face in hyperbolic grief, fear, anger, etc. It was all experienced as not-self, with the help of Ken McLeod's "Look at it _____" noting . During this period, I was generally miserable, although this is confounded by it also being my first semester of law school.
I began to experience weird, violent, highly powerful rips of energy enter my sense field and rattle around. I resisted them at first, since it felt like they'd "hit" me and destroy me. But they were harmless, and so I relaxed. It's almost like they were teaching me that there was nothing that could be hit, nothing that could be destroyed.
I also experienced all manner of involuntary movements: swaying, flinching, gasping, convulsions, burying my head, pouting, planting my hands on my face like The Scream. I had to repeatedly resolve: "For the sake of my respiratory system, I will stop gasping."
After a while of that, I would break into Equanimity and feel okay. The fear and anger would abate. And then return. And then leave, and return. The A&P would also recur—during those times, I'm sure some of my friends wondered what I was smoking. Once settled in Equanimity, I dropped noting and just watched the mind without labelling it. I was able to settle in the gentle flow of it all, without controlling where attention went, and then reality stopped and restarted on October 17, 2023.
It felt like I was in a crowded restaurant with a bunch of noisy conversations, but suddenly, everyone started whispering. Thoughts would still come and go, but they didn't yank me around like before. Even though it felt like I had "learned" a layer of the mind, a new one presented itself. I was being tugged along, moment to moment, by non-verbal attraction and aversion. Wanting this, not wanting that, being this, trying not to be that, avoiding this or grasping for that. I had an intuitive confidence that if I watched this process for long enough, it would be put to rest. It was painful! With enough time, I thought my mind could understand that.
I kept watching the mindstream. One day, I was just laying on my bed, watching the mind, when my body got up and started doing little chores on its own. I realized that I didn't ever need to exert any control at all, and that life would continue on. This allowed me to shed a lot of resistance and guilt about my productivity. Every day no longer needed to be a wrestling match with my mind. I did not need to resist the vices I hated. I could just surrender.
I went through the insight stages again and had another cessation on November 14. Sometimes, in daily life, I felt like the concept/image of my body would detach from my actual location, and, like, crawl around on the floor or roll around. My senses would stay normal. One day, while studying, I decided to try surrendering while in the very act of studying. Something clicked, and I experienced 10 minutes or so of seemingly no contraction. I didn't keep studying, of course; I walked around outside and checked stuff out. Everything was happening spontaneously with no obvious sense of control. I don't think it was a perfect non-dual experience, though.
After a third trip through the insight stages, I had another cessation on December 2. This time it happened while I was washing my hands, rather than in formal meditation. Everything did itself, it seemed. Even the emotions. There was still a sense of subtle control, though.
The next day, I went down to sit and couldn't find any contractions to investigate. This made me nervous: how the heck do I meditate now? I proceeded to massively over-effort my meditation for an hour or so. I hung out with my girlfriend later that day, and I was tense. We were walking down a hallway when I lost the ability to move in anything faster than slow motion. I couldn't think normally, either. Just locked up. It wasn't until I said goodbye and left her building that normal movement returned. I decided to stop juicing the effort so much, and just went back to my normal technique. Within a few days, the remaining contraction bubbled up and became obvious.
About a week later, I was meditating and had another non-dual experience, this one seemingly more centerless and easy. While in it, I ran into my buddy and proceeded to act all goofy. I had to lean on him to walk at a normal pace, but I was able to run on my own. At one point I kind of sunk to the ground and didn't get up, and he asked me why I'm on the floor, and I told him I didn't decide to be on the floor. I was able to get up not soon thereafter, though.
I was able to navigate my finals by just watching my mind. I didn't try to really "take control" at any point. I think that helped keep me sane. My behavior was still not up to my ideals, but it happened on its own.
The difficult stuff about my experience was no longer the emotions. Rather, it was this burning sensation present in every moment. It was a non-verbal resistance to all experience, a rejection, a greed for something else, a fear, a desperate defense. I had a crushing grief that everyone else was secretly suffering just as much as I was, they just didn't know it.
One day in December, I felt totally depressed. Just hollow. No vigor, even though I was out with my girlfriend and her family. I was sitting in my car afterward, reading this site, when I read a post by someone claiming fourth path. They said that their path-moment came when they realized that "There is no fundamental difference between: an acute lack of self in the fourth jhana; a vague sense of self while zoning out on a long driving trip; and an acute sense of self while shameful" (paraphrasing). My mood suddenly did a 180, everything felt really nice and pristine, and everything seemed to completely do itself. This lasted for maybe six hours. I think I had been really frustrated by being unable to abolish that "vague sense of self" mode, and so this let me let go of that resistance.
I woke up the next day feeling like shit. Everything still seemed to be doing itself though, so I started to believe that I had "done it," and that this was just what it was like. I started looking into Actualism (heh heh heh). I went on another 7 day retreat in January, planning on learning the jhanas because, again, I thought I was "done." Within an hour of that retreat, though, I realized I was very much not done. I pivoted to insight.
I was doing "drop the ball"/"do nothing" practice, which was nice, but too low-energy. I felt zoned out. I started watching the mind again about half-way through and felt reinvigorated. I felt pangs of fear—not like the hum of the Fear ñana, but more like "slowly falling into the cosmic woodchipper," as Sasha Chapin puts it.
Toward the end, I would watch the mind and my vision would suddenly become much more panoramic, but then quickly contract again. I went through that pattern many times. "Watching the mind" felt very effortful, like I really had to hold onto this super fast zipping-around thing.
It's April now. The effort I expend has become much more subtle. It's dawned on me that it's really about knowing the moment as it is, however it is. It's not about trying to change the moment by clenching onto some elusive thing. Or vaporizing the moment through ultra-vipassana. My vision is quite panoramic, the non-doer dominates, there is a good amount of space, I don't try to control stuff. I think I've been having a cessation every few weeks.
