Let me explain what I mean....

I'm still pre SE. I've been learning a lot of stuff. And maybe have changed my baseline a little.

My center of gravity is DN/EQ... transferring to EQ. 

My furthest sits get me to a very altered state EQ, with the classic descriptions. All the senses flow into one homogenous thing. It feels pleasant in a neutral way. I feel a little high, almost drugged. But clear headed. The thoughts appear like little clouds

But here's the thing. I've learned to do this at any time, outside EQ. Only for thoughts. It can be purely attentional, the thought is known as a gentle fluffy little cloud. Or I can note it. I just say "thought".

Another way to say this is that it's easy for me to disembed from thoughts, or not identify with them as strongly as I've used to.

But the problem is emotions. They suck. I feel them viscerally and strongly in the body.

I wish to turn them into fluffy little clouds also.

I categorized this as concentration because, IDK. Seemd right. ?

This might be a tall order of a question. Im not expecting to learn this overnight. I feel like if I hit SE this would he irrelevant. For a time. Or permanently. Nonetheless, if I work on this, I feel I'm working both on it, and progressing to SE, simultaneously.

I just thought, if I did it with thought, and emotions blow so hard, maybe I could do it with them too.

I can still get sucked into a mind storm. But its really really easy to quickly recognize it and stop that shit.... usually. The only thing that mostly catches me lately is the literal psychopaths I know. But other than that c:

Edit:

Maybe I'm just looking at this wrong. Thoughts are inherently fluffy little clouds. Even the mind storm is still made our of clouds. It just took a while for me to see this.
Emotions seem like big dense things. Maybe not capable of being clouds. I have no fucking idea. I'm a noob. I'll see by the time maybe I'm an, airuhhant. If I ever am.

But don't let this addendum get in anyone's way. Let er rip. I'm open to anything

I guess it just comes down to equanimity.

If I can learn to have equanimity with these emotions it effectively is the same as making them fluffly little clouds.

Really what I want equanimity to is stress at work. I want to stop reacting to it. Negative thoughts can be easily seen through. I want that for body states too.

​​​​​​​Thanks

Ok, I'm ripping
I look at question marks and then try to respond. 

Do you want ALL emotions to be ....uh, cloudlike? good and bad? or just the bad ones? 

I want to cling to good stuff, and avoid/dismiss bad stuff.

I totally want to permanently, create a satisfying abiding self.
I hope that you do, so far I have failed.
My personal end goal of "contentment" is still nebulous. I cling to EQ.
sigh,
good luck,
​​​​​​​~D

Thank you so much for letting her rip.

I made a response but it's late, and I'm taking this very seriously.

I'll sit on it, and make sure I can respond as honestly as possible within reason. I'll sleep on it so my brain can decide what it actually thinks! Lol

Anyone else is welcome to respond however. Thanks 

A bit of a breakdown, I was too vague

https://www.zen-buddhism.net/letting-go-understanding-attachment-in-buddhism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence
To say that I've totally failed is limiting, every awakening I have had has been great. My personal understanding of awakenings is that of deleting vs creating. Less seems to be more.
I'm a calm quiet contentment junky vs a bliss bunny.
I want to EQ all the time since I first experienced that.
Clinging to the jhanas(esp. arupa) is my current deconstruction goal. 
Most people I know who have improved emotional well being quickly have done so by some sort of therapy(official or self guided), rewiring buttons/triggers/habits. Awakenings for me have worked also but are a hell of a lot more effort/time than other options. They actually work synergistically to ratchet you up further. I unfortunately projected too much on meditation and made my progress harder(maybe, who knows without a redo)

I can't remember if you have read/watched Angello Dilullo. He has some useful stuff on emotions. He is a direct-action guy so maps don't really matter for his stuff.

"Another way to say this is that it's easy for me to disembed from thoughts, or not identify with them as strongly as I've used to. But the problem is emotions. They suck. I feel them viscerally and strongly in the body."

Deconstruct them vipassana style. The fact you feel them strongly in the body may actually make this easier. Notice that your emotions have a limited "palette" that they use to communicate. Learn the palette and it gets easier to deconstruct them. Anger and shame both involve feelings of flushed skin and warmth in the face, and a feeling of contraction both physically and mentally. Extreme happiness and sadness can both involve releasing tears and paradoxically feeling a sense of fuzziness and comfort (a good cry) like being wrapped up in a warm blanket. What are the differences?

Fear can feel like a wordless scream with physical contraction, but so can frustration and pain and many other emotions. Point is, if you're noticing the colors that make up a painting you'll be focused less on the story of the painting. When anger shows up and you feel it as warmth in the face, it's less likely to proliferate versus feeling anger as OH YEAH? FUCK YOU.

Unfortunately it's more difficult with more subtle emotions that have less strong physical symptoms. Same basic method, but it needs to include the more subtle mental aspects as well. I struggle with pride and being overly judgemental, no rainbows shooting out of my butt just yet.  *crosses fingers*

If you experience emotions right at the point of arising they are the most fluffiest things in the universe. If you experience emotions after they have coagulated and turned rancid, then they suck.

Take some time in your practice, for sure, and occasionally in your life, if possible, to go right >into< the experience of an emotion and surf it right at the point of its arising.

When you experience emotions when they are ripe, then you get to have their energy. It's wonderfully invigorating. When you experience motions when they are stale, then they suck the energy out of you.

Best wishes!

​​​​​​​
Bud E already said this but I'll reinforce it: 
​​​​​​​
You can use the same vipassana investigation skills that you've used on all other objects. Emotions are objects like everything else but you're buying into the stories they're telling you, so they have more weight. You know how to do this stuff!

Dream Walker, 

"
https://www.zen-buddhism.net/letting-go-understanding-attachment-in-buddhism/
"
Do you really endorse what is "peddled" in this article? 

As i see it, & I have to admit I just skimmed the text as it is long & repetitive, there are at least two big issues:
1. The idea that "mindfulness should be non-judgmental". This is a judgment & Mindfulness doesn't have to be non-judgmental or anything else.
2. The focus on developing "letting go". With ignorance still ruling the show,  there is no letting go. Never. At least not the fundamental kind. With ignorance "seen through", letting go just "is".

I am not a teacher & may just be missing the didactic aspect of things & the usefulness of this kind of "teachings". What i am Curious about is that "do you think that they are ultimately true?"

nota: sorry for "intruding" here if I am not welcome or this isn't helpful. 

Todo, did you happen to read the part that explains the Buddhist version of attachment? If you didn't, you should. It seems to agree with what you posted to DreamWalker. It wouldn't hurt for you to take some time to get more knowledgeable about the meditation practices you're criticizing. That's a fairness issue in my mind. Try not to give things you don't agree with so little consideration. Most meditation practices revolve around two themes; understanding how the mind works and concentration. Both of these purposes are extraordinarily successful if used properly in a dedicated way.

Just trying to help you see what you might be missing.

Holt shit. A lot of responses. A lot of good shit here. Thanks. I'll respond as I can. I'll respond to everyone. It'll just take me a few days probably 

Chris,

"Just trying to help you see what you might be missing."

this is exactly what I am here for.

i will definitely take time to read that part.

thanks a lot.
​​​​​​​super helpful. 

There isn't a magical switch you can flip to turn things into clouds (because there is no you, and there is no control). Keep paying attention and the things dissolve eventually by themselves.

I think you would be best off understanding that emotions are not light fluffy clouds.

They are more like soap bubbles that go "poof!" when you burst them.

In my opinion, if you want to suffer less from emotions, you have to face them, let them out, observe them, dig through layers of them until you reach the bottom, see how they arise, see how they fade, notice how the ego or self-image is involved. This is a lot of work and can take years. After you start, you might find you opened a can of worms and need a therapist to help you deal with them, so don't say I didn't warn you, and you must decide for yourself if you want to proceed.

But if you want emotions to get better, you have to let them flow freely.

Open your emotional gates, if too much unpleasant stuff flows out, shut them and work on it again later.

Eventually you may be able to keep your gates open all the time and emotions will arise, and fade as soon as they arise.

I also recommend practicing some type of relaxing samatha metta or jhana meditation in addition to vipassana.

(I apologize for this interruption, maybe you can sympathize since you know psychopaths, but I'm currently being harassed on multiple forums by a demented internet stalker who goes berserk every time I mention relaxation, so I hope you appreciate the risk I am taking by giving you my best advice. He has some kind of mental illness and needs therapy. I've tried ignoring him, but it just encourages him because he thinks I'm an easy target. So, preemptively, for his own benefit, I have to try to be mean to the pathetic a*s hole, even though I don't like it and I'm not very good at it, and it contradicts right speech. But because I want to do what is friendly, I will just say:

"Dear Demented Stalker, please stfu, it's a free country I will say whatever I want. The more you try to censor me, the louder I will shout. I am not going away and you should crawl back under the rock you wriggled out from. Everyone knows you are a sanctimonious hypocrite who knows nothing about the Dharma, your mind is full of wrong information and you can't see the truth when you trip over it. Your real problem is that you are tense and you need to learn how to relax. All those smiley faces are laughing at you, and the rest of us are laughing at you with them. "

I hope that helps. but  I really don't know how to do it, my parents always told me to ignore the bullies, not to defend myself. That strategy caused me a lot of trouble in grad school when I had to defend myself in oral exams, so I know I'm not good at it. Anyway back to my post ...)

Having clarity about suffering is what ends suffering. When you understand the source of suffering, you see how it is caused by a conflict involving the self-image (the self) and you understand the self-image is projected by the five aggregates. The self isn't a thing it is only a projection, an image, and the aggregates that generate it are the same aggregates that produce every other thought, emotion, and impulse, you experience, thoughts that distract you during meditation, emotions that are unwanted, and impulses that are often unhelpful, and all those things sometimes work at cross purposes or undermine your conscious goals. So you are dubious about (disenchanted with) the self-image, you see how it's the cause of suffering, and if you're experiencing the truth of this through observation not just remembering facts, the suffering vanishes (goes "poof!") - even if you are in the middle of an unpleasant situation.

This is what Shinzen Young calls a complete experience, an untangling of perception through a critical mass of clarity, concentration, and equinimity.

More on relaxing meditation, observing the mind, digging through layers, jhana, metta, the kind of emotions meditation can help with etc. here:
https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/meditation.html

UPDATE: Above I am really describing three approaches, relaxation (relaxation = letting go, develop that as a skill), understanding emotions, ending emotions by seeing how they are caused by a dubious image of the self. You can pick one or more to use separately but I think they work best if you do all of them.

I love you, Sha-Man, but this is misleading as stated. There is an assumed "you" that persists even beyond awakening (when it is seen through entirely but not eliminated). There is "control," or we couldn't survive in the world. There is intent - we can decide (yes, decide) to raise a hand, walk to the store, and so on, and we then actually manage to do those things. What we don't have is a "man in the machine" style executive function that manages everything we do in real-time.

​​​​​​​Our existence is much more nuanced and complex, consisting of some elements of duality and others of non-duality, some elements of "me-ness" and not-me-ness, and some elements of directed action and some automatically generated action.

I'm sorry, but sometimes the language we use matters. This is one of those times. I mean no offense, but wanted to provide more context and accuracy. Telling early-stage meditators that there is "no you" may misdirect their efforts to rid themselves of naturally occurring human attributes literally. We've seen, right where on DhO, the unhelpful effects this can have on them as they try their damnedest to lose all their normal, natural human effect.

Jim, thanks for letting us know about the stalker -- are they bothering you via the DhO messaging system or is this something happening external to DhO?

I will reply with a private message.

Jim, I sent you a PM - please reply to me there.

Thanks!

Chris M
DhO Moderator

If you practice experiencing your hand and moving your hand completely as jhanic experience then the experience gained through this practice is relatively easily applied to emotions. Well, harder due to dynamic nature of emotions but because what you seem to accomplish is exactly jhanic experience of emotions if you manage to just be in jhana all the time it will be relatively easy to have emotions like that. Relatively...

hmmm, back when, a lot of very advanced and respected dudes, worked on 'actual freedom' to master emotions.

Is this break down accurate for your mastery of emotions? (I would love to master my emotions.)

1. move hand
2. experience hand motion
3. Jhana experience (of some kind) will arise with practice of hand motion sensations
4. substitute emotion for kinesthetic sensations of hand.
5. stay in whatever jhana forever
6. relatively easy Results....which are yet to be defined but sounds ok.

I really do want to know how to do the emotional thingy.
~D

Right right. Yes I have been on somewhat of a Dilullo stint. Initially I didn't care about emotion type stuff. And I'm pretty sure I'm an ingorance type, in consciousness. It's to the point a lot of my Dilullo videos I listen to are sort of background sound, or I space out. That's the caveat. But his work has been really influential on me. Offering an alternative to MCTB. Just the basic idea of calling it "awakening".

 I was never really interested in emotional stuff that much before. So time permitting I'll crack open Awake, It's Your Turn, and jump to the emotions section. I think I only read 80 pages in, so far.

"direct action". Nice term.

I'm also now just discovering Loch Kelly, and for some reason it has really exponentially made bare conceptless awareness experience much more accesible. It really sort of helps going back to Angello's stuff, with this new change. 

@dreamwalker

I appreciate the update to your initial post. It definitely helps. Appologies, I'm going to reply to your post last. The other comments, I think I can make quick intuitive reponses. Yours will take a lot of contemplating, which is a good thing.

Since we're geeking out on emotions, here's one of my favorite write-ups: Aro - Embracing Emotions as the Path (arobuddhism.org)

" The fact you feel them strongly in the body may actually make this easier". Good. : ) I appreciate the reminder what/how vipassana works. That's painting metaphor is really easy to get. I'm beggining to think I have a huge blind spot (which is ok), with emotions. Because on the cushion they are more rare, and they blend in with physical sensations. And beacuse they are faster than physical ones. There are less opportunities to observe them. The desciptions of the phenomenolgy is helpful too, explaining what to expect, to look for, and what to note. Obviously we all experience them differently but, that's the fun of it. I'm going to study them like a scientist.

​​​​​​​"no rainbows shooting out of my butt just yet" HAHAHA!

Hi. Please see if this writeup helps in its specifics or in terms of giving a general direction to practice.

​​​​​​​https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/jm1h1h/vipassana_the_midl_practice_of_deconditioning/

I am sorry to hear that you have a stalker. I hope the person heeds your message. Take care of yourself.

Let me restate my advice, then - I don't think its wise to try to cultivate these big equanimity states (because they are states), and that will create a stronger sense of aversion when they arent there and create a false goal of that being the point of practice at this stage. My hunch for what Alex should do is start cultivating a radical attitude of equanimity towards whatever comes up so, and as this happens more and more, then mind will naturally relax the attachment and his baseline will become more equanimous.

So Alex, rather than gaining an understanding of the deep nature and cause of his problem, should just condition himself as Pavlov or Skinner were to suggest? See, I think the former tactic is far more useful to Alex than the latter, as it gives him a general notion of how his mind controls his experience. It leads to deeper insights and openings. It's why our vipassana practice is so powerful. It's results (insight) can be applied to all of human experience. We can this wake up to what we are. I don't think operant conditioning - becoming more or less numb to specific instances of dysfunction - gets us to the same place. It can certainly work in extreme cases, like helping people with fear that is debilitating. But it doesn't provide the tools that investigative practices do.

JMHO, of course.

I'm confused what point you're really trying to make Chris. Like the thing Alex wants, fluffy emotions, is a natural biproduct of good practice as your mind gives up attachment to emotions. That permeant flip though is essentially a random event that occurs after well looking at your emotions long enough, which in my experience follows a process of investigation leading to the mind naturally relaxing its grip around phenomena.

My point is about how Alex gets there. You seemed to be describing operant conditioning in your previous comment, which I was commenting on: ​​​​​​​



I advocated using vipassana or some other investigative method in order to deeply understand his reactions to his emotions. I believe there is a major difference, so I wanted to explain that. ​​​​​​​

Maybe I misunderstood you, but what I quoted from your post sounds like conditioning, not investigation. I'm not really quite sure what "fluffy" emotions are, but I know from personal experience that reducing the pull and/or weight of emotions came from an understanding of how they are generated/what they are.

Wouldn't it be more life-affirming to grow in capacity with emotions and not try to make them be something they aren't? Perhaps capacity to let emotions be felt would make feeling them less upsetting, emotions would not put forward so many other emotions, so to say. (I guess this is what many here have pointed towards with different wording.)

It's not about moving hand but using different consciousnesses which deal with handling hand.
Nervous system cannot sustain activity in one place for too long (neurons have limited resources like ATP, neurotransmitters, have to keep balance of Na and K and the way they do it to get up to speed isn't by itself enough so further activity to just keep right amount of these is needed, then you have issues like heat, general wear down due to electrical activity, etc.) or as I call it "tired neurons" for short. So we have multiple copies for each and every faculty and shift them over time. Jhana is merely rather than having one copy having multiple pathways and their associated consciousnesses active at the same time with different jhanas being different ways to synchronize them, activity patterns, etc.

So if you learn it with hand - which is much simpler to work with than practicing these things on whole mind or especially emotions - you will have an idea what are the indicators for actions which break jhana and which actions can cause jhanic experiences and sustain them. If I do jhana in my hand but start trying to move it 'normally' then jhana will quickly end. Kinda like when you practice shamatha concentration and you end your session and start to move your body the way you did before meditation you will quickly experience jhana to end and even the so called jhana hangover. That is why I recommend to NOT move body or mind (think thoughts) and just sit there trying move while keeping jhana going if that wouldn't work just stop doing it and try to figure out how to accomplish that. If you can move body in way compatible with jhana then you could just get up and not experience any jhana hangover.

Nothing of it is related to emotions.
Emotions are just a type of an activity in the brain and generally should obey the same rules. There are some caveats but this is why practicing on them directly is much harder. Besides if easier to perceive and control body cannot do jhana and breaks it then it would be harder to accomplish that with emotions.

That said thing to note is that good positive emotions are jhanic. This is because negative emotions indicate issue so mind focuses for doing them like solving an issue. Moving body itself, solving issues, etc. rarely are experienced as jhanic because why do you move your body anyways? Something to do, some issue to solve, something you must do now and it preferably was already done and you wouldn't need to do it etc. Jhanic experience of body can happen when you really relax and your body movements are not because there is anything to solve but its done for fun. No real need to do it but you do it because you might just as well - it is useful to engage nervous system (neurons do need to have activity run through them from time to time) and this is best accomplished with jhana.

Now practicing jhana in the way of refusing to do it in non-jhanic way will naturally lead to being more relaxed because then you kinda prevent yourself from thinking of anything as some kind of immediate issue to resolve and performance isn't reduced because you give yourself time to think about actions and even using more resources. It is really this "need to resolve all issues ASAP to go to sleep" attitude (inside mind) that causes non-jhanic states and for all intents and purposes these non-jhanic states never feel all that natural. Also mind can very quickly refocus to act on life or health threatening situations anyways so if someone wonders if they will have good reaction times in case eg. they need to move their hand to e.g. not get crushed - no need to worry. I (not deliberately ofc) tested this scenario and all my fingers are intact

-----
Actual Freedom
Its kinda dharma with different wording and focus and wording does matter to bring mind to right tracks e.g. "in every moment you are alive" has very specific vibe to it.
Emotions and their total elimination - I call BS on that.
Its like elimination of dukkha - it does work but on low intensity constant suffering. For strong pain all the methods which do work can reduce lots of pain but never all. Still pain is pain, its unpleasant and we don't like it. If you add to it all the other dukkha (read tired neurons) it gets much worse so any attainments people get that enables them to automatically not make things worse will in most life situations mean no dukkha and in critical situations can remove lots of it but not remove all pain.
One can say pain is not dukkha but dukkha is itself a pain.

Regarding emotions we most often have them because our nervous system gets tired and emotions are easiest way nervous system knows to shift activity elsewhere. It can and often go out of hand in especially case of negative emotions but typically not that bad and what emotions were to accomplish they can do. It is better visible in children as they have no so entangled mind to make thing not seem obvious. They will feel good, then look tired, then cry or get angry or whatever and then out of the blue feel good and energetic again for a while, rinse and repeat.

Using jhana and other good ways that avoid brains getting tired will by itself eliminate most need for emotions. All emotions though? you can know all about mechanisms, can good if not great internal perception and ability to manually shift activity and there will be moments where the only way to deal with emotions is forcing nervous system to really reroute signals out of tired part to somewhere new (as in its not even pre-trained to handle given faculty) or force cessation leading to faculty being not present - which is not possible in all situation life can throw at us and in extreme cases emotions will still creep in. If you are very set on this topic and not experiencing emotions even then you can manage to deal with it and stop emotions from being needed but I doubt its possible to eliminate them completely as in never ever experience them arising ever and never having any need to deal with them arising or even pre-arising as something to do prevent them - even if them arising isn't the same as just getting swept away by them its still unlikely to happen. Maybe if you live in a sealed bubble... but even then its not bullet proof.

As for the so called Actualism I typically don't care for emotions that much and certainly don't subscribe to Actualism as in their dogma or community. Therefore I wouldn't say I am Actually Free but I did figure out what they mean by it and it isn't that hard to achieve that state so in fact I can claim that.

Imho they didn't invent anything and dharma itself already covers everything, just with emphasis on different things which changes the vibe of it and in some sense focus. There is specificity to AF but its something artificially chosen and actually the development of faculty that is related is expected development in dharma too - just specific badge you wear (strange way to put it but it kinda fits) is then different.

Overall I would not claim any "mastery of my emotions" and more like knowledge of "they happen because of..." and perceptions and skills which make such knowledge mean anything. I mean if you cannot feel your mind and then cannot act on it on the level which make knowing what is the cause give you immediately a solution then such knowledge is kinda moot... and if you had the required perceptions and skills you would probably have the required knowledge because duh! There is however that gray in-between zone where things are fuzzy and unclear and you kinda see or feel and kinda can do stuff but you are not sure what you can and cannot do and on what you act, etc. and in this case descriptions can be helpful and this is the purpose of talking about this stuff.

That said I do claim some mastery of jhanas. At least enough so I can use new and improved 8th jhana based perception for my waking experience. And before someone (it did happen in the past) says "how is that supposed to work if person cannot possibly have normal perception in 8th jhana..." the simple answer is "exactly, that is why you can have different perception in 8th jhana "

Anyways, hopefully some sentient being find sacrifice of my keyboard key caps (they look very tired...) of some use or even just for entertainment purposes


definitely not moving hand is bad idea so yes


this is actually optional
motion is fun so might as well experience it


usually I didn't move my hands when doing the practice in question
more precisely it was really like searching for jhanic experience of hand that was NOT the consciousness which was already doing the hand
searching in this context is the same as "meditation" read: automatic optimization of nervous system reduce loss function - in this case the less jhanic it feels the higher the value of loss function (I know it sounds very romantic to use computer science terminology for meditation!)


hmmmm
never thought of that
never tried to apply motion to emotions but it makes some lectical sense


that's spending idea!


to make results even easier you can apply increased learning rates
its that kinda electrical feeling and one of the aspects of fruition afterglow
can also arise in meditation - I am pretty sure most people experience at least some amount of it
generally correlated with times when things seem very malleable and easy to change
interestingly enough I found skill to decrease learning rates much harder to grasp and master than skill to increase it... as you can imagine that was fun few years

Thanks!

I find Tonglen (as suggested by Shargrol) to be a very good practice to turn heavy emotions into fluff with a bit of compassionate sadness-gladness behind it to soak in. 

Hot link for those who want to party down and relieve the suffering of all beings by making contact with their own dukka:

​​​​​​​Shargrol's Posts Compilation (shargrolpostscompilation.blogspot.com)

These are some good questions and got me thinking. 

So yes, it appears I only want stuff like anger and stress to be cloud-like. Big caveat is that this is to the best of my knowledge. I'm probably wrong about how I actually think/work. I'm not sure whether I much cling to happiness or not. It seems moreso that I'm possibly just averse to stress and anger. Including the anger of others. I want to say that happiness just flows out of me. And I can conjure it up, sometimes. I don't know how much attacthment there is there, to my happiness. 

DW: "To say that I've totally failed is limiting, every awakening I have had has been great. My personal understanding of awakenings is that of deleting vs creating. Less seems to be more."

- Makes sense to me.

DW: "I cling to EQ.".

-When I first read this it was like a koan and confused the shit out of me. Feels like meditaiton sometimes. I love it though. And it seems like there is some tendancy to do a non-conceptual perceptual state in response to it, to "solve" it, maybe. IDK. That's what's happening.

DW: "Most people I know who have improved emotional well being quickly have done so by some sort of therapy(official or self guided), "

- Alright, good news. I've pretty much worked on meditaiton and therapy equally over the years. Daniel's instructions early on helped, keep them mostly seperate. I've had 3 different therapists, and many more hours of me doing personal therapy. Also working in the "real world", has been a sort of a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. I sure got a FUCK load of milage, out uh' that shit. O.O

DW: "(maybe, who knows without a redo)" I wish we could run that experiment. Only god knows. In my case, my fuck up is quitting meditation for 5 years. However during that time is when I got a job in the realworld like I said above, so in my case that's the experiment god needs to run in a paralell universe. I don't mean literally though, just shootin' the shit, using verbal poetry. Which the phrase "verbal poetry" in and of itself seems like an oxymoron. But it is I who is the moron, because I looked up the definition of oxymoron and it aint it.

Anyway Dream Walker, your repsonse was the most fundamental. Talking about craving and aversion. So far dukkha is the least worked with of the three C's, for me. When I have read other people discuss craving and aversion, it's amazing how complicated it can get, from something so simple.

Hey Shargrol. First sentence. "fluffiest things in the universe". That makes me fucking laugh. It tickles me. Like a cat's little fluffy paw, or like a parrot when it fluffs up all it's down feather. Unbreable CUTENESS! Ugh. It kill me. That's why I have a jungle chicken as my picture. They're so cute!

Ok. Go right >>>into<<< right at the tippy top of their arising. Got it! Fun. Ok ripe emotions = enjoy their energy. Stale ones enjoy your energy. Ok, Ok.

https://arobuddhism.org/articles/embracing-emotions-as-the-path.html

I appreciate you nerding out on this. This whole thread has been helpful to keep this guy (me) in scholar mode, against my default tendacies. I read through it, and it was though at first. I used to go to a buddhist school and all the element and tibetan stuff was confusing at the time. As was with this article. However something indeed did land. When I got to the air element. Like ungrounded crazy paranoid anxiety. And transmutting it, into like unwavering, spreading out, confidence. I actually worked with this a little at work. It feels a little fucking insane to think that I'm "paranoid" in social situations but I am. Anyway, I noticed the compassionate thing to do was sort of rationally recognize it, and sort of objectively notice it. Nurture it. And watch it blossom. The whole non-conceptual perceptual shift thing, helps with this. And does the various levels of working with "god", whatever that is to mean at the time.

AroBuddhism: "This option is one in which we neither repress, express nor dissipate our emotional energy. But one in which we let go of the conceptual scaffolding and wordlessly gaze into the physical sensation of the emotion."

-Oh my fucking god. I've never heard this before. That makes so much fucking sense.

I also noticed the the "Shargrol Compilation Page" was shared. If any one new to this is reading this, it is the single greatest reading material, second to MCTB, I have ever read, that has helped me with this stuff. Probably equal to MCTB. Really it's a sister reading material. Im judging it based on precise, pragmatic, usefulness. Not that other stuff isn't just as good. I'm mostly talking in terms of how direct MCTB was.

Absolutely. It's promising.  I've already noticed some improvement since making this thread. I'll just continue to get used to trying to notice them as they pop up during daily life.

"There isn't a magical switch you can flip to turn things into clouds"

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of lacks of magical switches.

" Keep paying attention and the things dissolve eventually by themselves." Yep. : ) Just keep er' goin.

Update to post:

To provide some context. What has prompted this is working in an increasingly dumb and stressful work environment. I work with the public. And lots of staff. And lots of new staff. I have to deal with disgruntled people. This is a seperate skill I'm infinitely better than before. But I wanna bring my meditaiton skills to basically both anger and stress. The anger is short lived. I'm not a very angry person in general. But that's why it's sort of taking me by surprise. I'm not used to this much anger. Stress seems like something halfway between emotions and physical sensations. Emotion wise it probably sometimes contains varrying proportions of several subtle emotions.

Therapy wise, I'd rate myself about 7/10. I don't feel like I'm doing terrible here. I already went through the flood gates opening with the A&P, and psychedelics early on. I don't anticipate that happening again, this path. And I'm not going to take any psychedelics.

While I like the cloud analogy, I'm just using my metaphor from the realm of verbal-thought sensations. What I want to do here, I supposed, is "vipassanize" them. Whatever the emotional equivalent of turning a thought into a cloud is. A bunch of really helpful insight into this has been given thus far. Thanks folks.

I do notice that when I'm with friends and family, I'm actually really really good at emotional type stuff now. It's just at work. When I'm alone there are no problems, except decompressing after work sometimes.

Nice! 

I think in my own life there was BA and PA -- before Aroter and Post Aroter   The tantric idea of fully experiencing emotional energy and arriving at the wisdom of emotions was a really big one in my own path. 


By the way, the other big one was when I was working with Kenneth Folk and was describing how practice had got me to this wordlessly perfect state of presence and he said "that's the _state_ of Equanimity, keep going!" And I was like "wow, this really is just ultimately a state, somehow "I" am not this, there must be more!" And I got really excited about Stream Entry, especially the description in Mahasi's Practical Insight Meditation (available free somewhere on the net...):

How Nibbna is Realized
Path Knowledge

The ups and downs of insight knowledge occurring in the aforesaid manner are comparable to abird let loosefrom a sea-going ship. In ancient times the captain of a sea-going ship, finding it difficult to know whether the ship was approaching land, released abird that he had taken with him. Thebird flew In all four directionsto look for the shore. Whenever it could not find any land, it came back to the ship. So long asinsight knowledge Is not matureenough to grow into path and fruition knowledge and thereby attain to the realization of Nibbana, it becomes lax and retarded, just as the bird returns to the ship. When the bird sees land, it flies on in that direction without returning to the ship. Smilarly, when insight knowledge is mature, having become keen, strong, and lucid, it will understand one of the formations at one of the six sense doors as being impermanent or painful or without self. That act of noticing any one characteristic out of the three, which has a higher degree of lucidity and strength in its perfect understanding, becomes faster, and manifests Itself three or four timesin rapid succession. Immediately after the last consciousness in this series of accelerated noticing has ceased, path and fruition {magga-phala) arises realizing Nibbana, the cessation of all formations. 

I really like the soap bubble analogy. 

On the harassers: Damn. That's crazy. And yes I can aboslutely sympathizie. Someone going berzerk because another person mentioned relaxtion meditation is the most insane thing I've ever heard. It's funny in a perverse way. I definitely relate to being "an east target" and feeling like it contradicts right-speech. The personality disorders are a bitch. It's a crash course education sometimes.

I'm familiar with Shinzen's "concentration, clairity, and equanimity". I havn't read up about it a ton, however I keep it as a list, like those found in MCTB.

Jim: "I am really describing three approaches, relaxation (relaxation = letting go, develop that as a skill), understanding emotions, ending emotions by seeing how they are caused by a dubious image of the self. You can pick one or more to use separately but I think they work best if you do all of them."

Good three bullet point summary. It helped to go back as an overview of your post. I'm definitely a bullet point type learned.

The insight I've gained from reflecting for a second, is that I need to spend more time specifically understanding anger. I could always get better at relaxation but I can't magically turn it on. This is a lifelong process. The third one is the one most apparently available to me now. I can practice doing it at work when I get stressed.

Thanks Jim.

Yes, I can see how Aroter, or this emotional tantra stuff can help. 

Everything indeed does seeming to be coming together nicely. I can see this as a powerful adjunct. Everything seems to fold together nicely into my norther star of consciousness, which I'd either label as God or HGA.

That's a very nice story with kenneth. I can relate a bit, to various points in my progress, but a bit more spread out over many dozens or hundreds of moments. I think.

That sea-bird/ship analogy is absolutely top notch. It goes well with the black hole and satellite analogies.

I think I like it better because I can relate to it as a human being on an adventure. There's something romantic about piloting a ship, and having a trained intelligent bird. And the risk of death.

I really need to read Mahasis practical insight. Ive known about it forever. I downloaded it once and skipped to the good bits. Its crazy ive never read it.

Sorry for anyone I didn't get to yet. This shit is fucking tedious for me. But it's a good thing. It forces scholarly me to activate 

Here's a thought - you do not have to reply to every comment individually. I don't think it serves us all that well and, frankly, it kind of mucks up the flow of your thread.

​​​​​​​ (Take this with a grain of salt, just trying to make you feel better about nor spending so much time replying.)