I am traveling in India and Nepal for the next few years, focusing entirely on meditation. I take a 10 day Goenka course every 1.5-2 months, and then spend the time between courses focused on daily practice, simplifying my life, and enjoyment. In a typical day I do about 3 hours of sitting practice and a few hours of active sensation noting (during walking, eating, sitting in a park). I find both practices beneficial.

Since I have this time to focus entirely on meditation, I would like to accelerate my progress on the path. (I am pretty early on, perhaps around mind & body, but not sure.) To best progress, should I be doing more sitting practice and less of the informal noting, the reverse, or something else?

PS: This is my first post to Dharma Overground. I've been a lurker for a while and already gaines some great insights. Thanks to all of you.

PPS: I tried to select the right category for this post, but wasn't sure. I won't take offense if you move it to a better category.

Hi Chris A,

Welcome to the DhO and out of the lurk.

This (below, excerpted) is your current practice?

If this has been your recent practice, how is concentration going? How is concentration practice effecting daily mindfulness?


If the above excerpted is the practice you intend to begin, then kudos for setting up a path of practice and study for the near future. The 10-day retreats will surely raise some specific practice questions.

In my opinion, each person doses practices differently based on their current experience.

If the mind in quietude/stillness has not yet been known, then I would dedicate more practice time on concentration practice , and I prefer anapanasati as mindful breathing can relax the body even while the mind is making difficult thoughts.

Do you want to share some of the details of your practice and motivation? This information could help people pitch in specifically to your experience.

Katy,

Thanks for your response. I wasn't clear--I've been doing this travel and meditation routine now for about 2 years.

To your question about how concentration is going, I think it's going well enough. As I understand it, I should be able to hold my attention for a minute or more at a time in order to do the vipassana work. In retreat, I can sometimes go longer than a minute, focusing on the area of mustache (which is what Goenka has us do). Out of retreat, it varies. Sometimes I'm fighting drowsiness and I have to stand up or breathe very intentionally. But on an average out of retreat day, I probably can maintain for about a minute once I've calmed my mind. If my mind feels jumpy and I see thoughts leading me away from watching sensation in vipassana practice, I will do anapana practice until I feel the mind quiet. I don't feel my concentration practice is strong, I've just been assuming it's good enough.

In terms of daily mindfulness, I've seen a lot of change in this area over the last two years of serious in and out of retreat practice. Sometimes it feels like my whole day is practice. I walk to breakfast, and the whole time I'm focused on sensations or noticing when I'm not. I've become much more mindful lately of the sensations I don't want to feel or focus on, and so I often focus on those and just try to notice change.

Often the best parts of my day are when walking or sitting and doing this mindfulness of sensations or thoughts. The sensations may not change, but I feel a deep peace as my mind lets go and stops fighting the sensations. I'm also aware at that time how many of these sensations are basically neutral or only milldly annoying, and yet when I first started feeling them they were strong or even overwhelming.

This practice of just being with what I want to resist I find so fulfilling, and it feels very powerful--almost like I'm taking the noble truth of suffering and putting it directly into practice. I think it's what I need right now, so these last few days I've been doing just two hours of sitting practice, and devoting the rest of the day to "experiencing problems" at a sensation level. I've always had a problem-generating, anxious mind, and this feels like a wonderful practice for me now.

I wonder if this sort of eye open awareness to resisted sensation practice isn't as useful as say, sitting and doing formal closed-eye body scanning practice. My intuition say that I need to trust my intuition and just go where the practice takes me, rather than have a formal "this many days of sitting practice required" thing. But I was hoping to get this intuition reinforced by some of the DhO folks, to get rid of the doubts in my head that get in the way of me following my intuition.

I notice that my whole day is getting simpler. Sometimes I'll play a computer game or read a book for entertainment, but I often notice it not being all that engaging. I often find that the most engaging parts of my day are just alone with sensations. I used to listen to podcasts whenever I'd be on a long train or bus ride. The last 24 hour travel stretch I had, I spent almost all of it just watching sensations. This was what I *wanted* to do. Strange changes.

I still enjoy talking and interacting with people, and need that in my day, but I often notice the parts where the conversation just feels filler, or where my mind has taken over and I'm saying things that I only mildly care about, or I'm talking to build up my ego, or where the conversation's usefulness ended a while ago, but we're both too polite to end it.

So a lot of mindfulness. And I'm often mindful of the gaps, when mindfulness returns and I realize I wasn't mindful for a period, sometimes a long one. But it seems upside down from where I started--now I'm aware of the gaps in mindfulness, rather than the gaps in mind full of thoughts.

Regarding practice-specific questions, what I notice most from the 10 or so 10 day Goenka retreats is that my life has changed a lot. Some on the surface--for example, I've got my finances in order, something that my mind was just too mixed up to figure out and it stressed me constantly. Now I know I've got the money to continue devoting myself to this meditation journey, for the next few years at least. My heath behaviors have improved dramatically. My relationship skills have improved. The strangest thing about these changes, is that they are areas I was always trying to force, "to-do" my way through--and one day, each of them just started moving, the changes coming almost organically, in a process I didn't expect and often not with the results I thought I wanted.

I've lived my whole life with a mind that loves to generate problems one after the other, and I feel the mind relaxing a lot on this. Often I come out of practice with an insight into my "real life" and when I apply it, it makes a distinct change in either the things of my life (like wealth and health) or more often, in my experience or ability to think clearly about those things,. In practice, I haven't yet had an experience of full dissolution (a few almost's, but always still some bits of back pain or such remained), or anything that resembles a jhana from Daniel's book. (I'm pretty certain I haven't experienced an A&P event, and if I had to guess, I think I'm starting to really see mind and body, because I notice a lot now when a sensation feels "real" as I'm looking directly at it, and when it feels like it's just a "dull" sort of impression.) So even with no progress yet on the jhanas, I feel like I've gained *so* much from the last two years.

Katy, what do you mean about the mind in quietude/stillness? As I've said, I've had times in retreat where I've gone for minutes without losing the awareness of breath or sensations. But I don't know that I've had some specific "moment" of say no trace of thought at all. Is this a particular event or jhana you're talking about?

I've tried to give the more details you asked for (hopefully not too many!) about my practice and experience. I would appreciate any thoughts.

(I will be serving a retreat from 4/30 to 5/12, then returning to my daily "out of retreat" practice. I'll check for responses then)