Hi,  don't have a ton of access to Sangha or teachers so posting for feedback on my assessment of myself and ideas for improving my practice.

Been on a few retreats and have a decent daily practice routine at the moment.

Best guess as to where I am is that I experienced stream entry on a retreat prior to covid.

I've tried to have a very curiosity driven practice and after what I thought was stream entry I decided to take a break from practice to see if the changes I thought I perceived would last.

After the stream entry retreat I was also feeling pretty disconnected from the world my relationships etc. I invested a few years in therapy which I hadn't tried before and learned quite a lot through that.

Having returned to practice I feel a little directionless. I usually practice mahasi noting in the morning and if I sit during the day and then work through the exercises in loving kindness before bed. My goals for daily practice are to live more skillfully in my everyday life and to lay a good foundation for retreats as I am able to take that time.

Overall I find I am pretty good in the concentration, tranquility and equanimity categories while I need to work on energy, Joy and curiosity.

I'm generally looking for ideas about how to continue building the softer interconnected skills I think I'm weaker on. Are there good practices in "morality" I could look into?

I just find myself feeling nihilistic and lacking a lot of intrinsic drive or motivation and would like to cultivate some of that.

I'm currently rereading MCTB to see if I find inspiration in that.

Thanks!

Congratulations on your progress. You seem to be someone who is really able to put in the work. 

What are the softer interconnected skills you are hoping to build? The phrase is new to me.

Here is a little morality-related hack I have used when I am stalling. Make a plan to do something nice for someone every day for a week, or once a week for a month, or just this Saturday, or whatever. The hard part is, that the beneficiary must not be able to find out it was you. This can be engaging because it gets us to think about what other people could benefit from, and it involves some planned sneakiness :-)

I think one of the things I'm trying to work with is that I come from a background in endurance sports so the concentration and perceptive stuff I have a good background in but the morality and brahma vihara stuff (what I'm calling softer stuff) doesn't come very naturally and I think that's currently where my practice is hung up.

Imade the effort of getting into some sangha type things like this and else where to feel more connected to other practitioners.

>I like the idea of a daily generosity practice like what you're describing and will give that a shot. Any ideas along those lines from anyone else who happens to read any of this would be great too. I think anything that builds on the loving-kindness book would be helpful too.

Thanks!

I see. Makes sense. 

I've always suspected that a facility for endurance sports would correlate with a facility for concentration but I never heard anyone else mention it before. 

Have you tried TWIM? It's metta-based jhana. I never did well with metta, even after reading Sharon Salzberg's book and listening to many talks and guided meditations.  But TWIM really clicked for me and I found it had lots of practical applications off the cushion too. To be honest, I don't agree with the scholarly underpinning of the practice but if I take it simply as practice instructions it works very well for me. The instructions start on page 74 (chapter 5) of the book.

https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the_path_to_nibbana__d_johnson_f18.pdf

Just returning to this to write down some very small wins.

I have struggled to implement the "doing something nice" practice very much, which maybe be due to life context at the moment, not a lot of day to day interactions with people, remote work etc.

I did find out about Rob preece, who seems to be writing things relevant to what I am working on.

I have also had one or two conversations with people where I semi -successfully held the intention "to connect" and worried less about other goals I might have in conversations, getting something from them, impressing them, etc.

I'm currently working through the loving-kindness exercises, maybe once I've finished that I'll try out the twim stuff. Shifting from vipassana oriented practice in the morning to concentration practice seems to have helped too so that fits nicely.

I second that metta could also be a useful route. For me, I had a tough time getting the hang of it until I came across it on the Waking Up App, which I think S-tier guided meditations specifically on that (the other stuff on there is good to. And they bring a lot of different teachers from different traditions to do little sets of guided meditations. So it could be an app that lets you try a few different things to see if something new might stick).

The reason I suggest metta, is after talking to a few regular practitioners, it does seem like something that over the course of say a few months, it really does start to work in reprogramming the basic thought trains of the mind to be kinder and gentler to yourself and to others, and just generally seems to bring the baseline of stuff closer to a default of compassion.

1. It's fun to guess.
2. I like rereading MCTB too. Did that inspire you last time?

It would be easier to answer you if you actually had questions with question marks.

1. Do you actually have a goal? What might that be?
2. What did you do last time you set a clear goal?
3. Did you follow some kinda instructions to get that goal? If so please explain?
4. In what way did you evaluate the results to decide you "got" something?

Please feel free to be yourself and express yourself however you wish. 
Good Luck,
~D
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Win!!!

I have NOT struggled to implement "doing something mean"...... have you compared the two? what is the difference?   
I blame context.
Is it easy for you to be an asshat like me? Why is nice hard? how is it different from being a jerk?? Wouldn't being nice be easy?

Ah, thats great! 
Who? 
Relevent? In what way?
ok, I too have found out about people who wrote things and stuff relevent and not relevent to stuff I am or have or possibly not worked on at times.

ah, thats, uhhh,
How was that semi successful conversing whilst holding intention"to connect" and worrying less than something about other goals of some sort or another in conversing to have something to get , impress etc about all the etc?
I do hope "it" went well, whatever it was that you wished

Thats great!
Keep on keeping on!
Good luck doing that , that you do. It is obviously helping you so very clearly.
~D