Inspired by a recent thread, I thought I'd give some aspects of my story here. Not to say it needs to happen like that for anybody, mind you, but to illustrate what I meant in that recent thread by "struggle" and core wound stuff during the middle paths/late in the 4 path model. 
And to maybe show how much variety there can be in the unfolding of this practice. It would be cool if other people that maybe have or have had similar (or vastly different) experiences as the path progressed also shared some of their stories here. 

After my third big insight cycle, what changed was that there suddenly were many moments of "Ah, so that's how this is gonna resolve itself, this is how permanent walking around non-duality might even work." Because until then, it was fruitions on the cussion, and the rest of life what basically dualistic perception with disco effects (somatic flow, increased visual vividness), cycles, jhanas, and gnarly but shortish DN phases. 2nd was like SE but warmer, less sticky and finer grained (warmer BECAUSE finer grained, like 1st to 2nd jhana, only for sensate experience per se), and fruitions tended to cluster differently. After the third shift, there often was direct appreciation of the observer pixels also fluxing, of being immersed in a sensate volume, all these gradations and aproximations of non dual  states. That was suddenly becoming obvious in daily life. The impression was "I seem to have penetrated into the last layer of mind to be deconstructed. But this is a fricking continent, and non-duality needs to percolate into every village and cottage here. This will be the biggest part of the path  - by far." 


And here comes the core wound stuff: I come from a very reactive childhood, years of alcoholism and domestic violence that I had a front row seat to. 
Until what I think of as 3rd path fruition, a few month after hitting that, actually, I thought that what that did to my bodymind conditioning will forever by my glaring disability, something that I can't get at, because it has affected me my whole life and seems unshakeable. Trauma. "This will still be there, even were I to ever hit 4th. I'll only be an enlightened, reactive, procrastinating idiot." That Bruce Lee quote, a quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough, that could be my middle name. Volatile. Not violent, but quick to go hell realm inside and avoid conflict. 

As the weeks went by, however, it became clear that wading these deep wells of ill will was the way forward, going around them worked less and less. It still is going on plenty, but it's so much more... vibratory obvious now. And I found that I now had the chops to actually investigate these states, let them vibrate through, sit among the wailing and gnashing of teeth, at least in chunks, some of the time.  And every now and then, that seemed to work through parts of it. Suddenly some problem situation, something triggering, wasn't a problem anymore, for the first time in my life. Small steps of maturation, or healing, if that lingo does something for you.

And I guess that process will go on for a while yet. Shargrol wrote somewhere that unless a lot of cleaning up has been done, the clear states are pretty unstable.  Something to that effect. That has been my experience. There was the definite shift to the nowness, to these sensations right now, that this will resolveTHIS EXPERIENCE HERE, that this is indeed samsara and nirvana both at the same time, a transient pixel show in wich you can bump your head and bleed, and it has been over a year of roller coaster of deepening of what I think of as Anagami stages, going back and forth between all of this clearly being a pixel cloud without center and then contracting into subject/object, of doing small steps of personal work, that then propel the insight stuff, as that distinction also is not really there anymore, unsurprisingly. There is a long attachment style drama that recently played out its last act with a woman who has been in my life for years, there are all sort of flavors of procrastination (my other big genjo koan, or the flip side of the hell realm one) slowly being lived through episode by episode now and then instead of being completely pushed away. Sense of agency has lessened considerably overall, but that also seems to be largely bound up with contraction around core wound stuff and it's a constant back and forth. 

So yeah, the struggle for more meditation fancyness (what Bahiya Baby referred to in that other thread), what there was largely fell away with the Rubik's Cube now being the present moment, but maybe because I'm not that young anymore (recently turned 48), it's been this interesting thing where the meditation journey generally happened really quickly (I'm not even three years into it and never been on retreat and never been in contact with a teacher), but it's almost like that was a preamble that I got pretty much for free to get to where I can now chop away at this huge ice berg of ill will or dysfunctional bodymind conditioning with a small spoon, and that seems to be intimately bound up with the last stretch of the insight path. At least, in so far as I can see it from here. Wich is interesting to balance with my deeply seated conviction that sooo much stupid BS needs to be called out in the meditation world. You've probably all seen me missing the mark there, going too far into anger with my tone. 


Btw, I stopped counting after six "small" insight cycles after that third big one. Thought it'd be fun to count them on the side, but it just became ever more difficult and also quite beside the point, although it would have made an interesting autobrigraphical data point. This thing progresses week by week, it seems, had a larger shift ten days ago, but cycles, when apparent at all, mostly don't do all that much other than bring about incrementally... more nowness.
I only ever had two fruitions off cushion, and since what I think of as hitting 3rd (last August), they have become super uninteresting. Sometimes they happen, but mostly this seems to unfold without them now. Whereas after SE and 2nd, I did the review thing and fruitions were the bees knees (Although I am useless at 3 doors phenomenology. Only ever clear fruition was that of 2nd path, where that side colapsing into this side was the dominant aspect). 

So basically these past 12 months or so, strong jhana and investigation of ill will has been most of the practice. I have not yet begun to work with 6 realms and 5 elements specifically.  

You can call that 2.5 path, 2nd path, you can worship at my lotus Anagami "3/4 saint" feet, you can call that Pilates Instructor Level 1 for all I care, after that third cycle it became about direct experience in a way that it just wasn't before. It suddenly was sensorially obvious that something in the everyday, in this here now, was trying to resolve itself or figure itself out. And the big, underlying tendencies to contract, the "core wound stuff", seems to impede that, and these things seem to highlight each other. As Ken McLeod writes, reactive patterns erode attention. 

I will also say that often these days, there is the impression of seeing the primary contraction at work during sits, the process of trying to make sensations appear more than they are, and it seems to be something that I would describe as fighting for its life. Like there is some very pure, animal fear at the core of the selfing process that keeps it going in it's tautology treadmill. The selfing thing afraid of dying, kind of. 

So maybe that's helpful for some people, as I have found very few accounts of the "varieties of 3rd-path-ish experience." But I also don't feel like starting a log at this stage and among all you weirdos here. ;)  

As mentioned above, if other people would tell something about their experiences with "core wounds (that) show up late in the 4 path model", as Shargrol once wrote, I think that would be really cool. Or maybe it went down completely different for you and you had no big genjo koan to crack. That would also be interesting as a contrast.  
 

Nice, y'know it's great to have you hear. I will think up a mmore thoughtful response visa vie core wounds.

It's probably best to keep discussion of Paths separate from discussion of wounds. 

For Paths, counting cessations rarely is the best way to go, especially if working alone. There are way too many ways a non-event can occur and only some of them are cessations and only some of those are paths. It takes a lot of fine scale diagnosis to figure out what is going on. And ultimately it is the steps along the way that are what really map out where someone is --- and that takes a log or frequent conversations with a teacher. 

If someone really really needs to figure out what path they are at, then the slightly-less-than-perfection version of the fetter model can be helpful. 

Wounds really have their place in psychology rather than meditation. Not that they don't apply to meditators, but rather the mapping of wounds doesn't line up with nanas or jhanas or paths. It's a different framework. Lately I've liked the maladapitive schemas in schema therapy as a good overview of the classic ways wounds continue to manifest as adults. E.g.,. Schema therapy - Wikipedia  and  18 Early Schemas Defined 

The important thing about wounds is that they continue to be re-enacted because at the heart of them there is a non-verbal "assumption" about the world that isn't necessarily true. This can be very hard to tease out, because the wounded person is living from that assumption. It often takes other people, including mental health professionals, to point out the ways someone is bringing anxiety, worries, beliefs into a situation that simply are not there, which leads to over-reacting or under-reacting to a situation. I call them assumptions, but from the lived experience of it, letting go of an old and familiar assumptions feels a bit like being lost or even dying. Letting go of an over-reaction feels like being vulnerable because it doesn't seem enough. Letting go of an under-reaction feels like being vulnerable because it feels like we're doing more than we should. 

One way to think of it is that wounds can limit meditation development, but meditation development doesn't necessarily fix wounds. Sometimes assumptions limit the letting go and accepting process that is the heart of meditation. But achieving a particular nana or jhana or path doesn't mean there isn't aren't wounds still there. 

While not perfect, the best model I've found that links aspects of psychological development with meditation is something like Cook-Greuter's model. It shows what stages of psychological development can occur over time and it's clear that the latter stages require some meditation insights.  Stage descriptions

Anyway, lastly I do think that people after so-called third path and on the way to so-called fourth path do experience an insight into their core wound. (Note this is singular, one core wound, not core wounds.) It's not anything particularly dramatic, but it is very significant due to its subtlty and pervasiveness. Mine was something like "I need to know what to do and I'm fundamentally flawed because I don't know what to do."  Sounds so minor, but a letting go was simply not possible because in my heart of hearts "I don't know what to do." Heh, it's funny saying it, it really does seem so minor... Anyway, it was a very profound epiphany to realize it was completely true and acceptable and even practically functional to mostly not know what to do most of the time.   I understood the curious statement that "wisdom dawns as confusion" or how a complete experience of the space element (being overwhelmed/bewilderment) transmutes into pervasive intelligence.

The one lesson I learned time and time again in my own practice is to directly address a problem and use the framework of that problem. If you are depressed, which is a psychology framework, then use psychology to fix the depression. (No affiliation, but recently I read this and it was really good: The Depression Solution eBook) If you are dull and blanking out in meditation and it's in the context of 5 Elements practice, then work on the Space/Void element. Embracing Emotions as the Path - Aro gTér Lineage

In otherwords, if you trust psychology enough to diagnose a problem, then use psychology to solve that problem! And if you don't trust psychology, then don't trust it's diagnosis of problems    It's amazing to me how many times people want meditation to solve psychologial problems and psychology to solve meditation problems.

In other words, be very careful about how you diagnose a problem because the framework you use "colors" both the problem itself and the solution. Not everything is a psychological problem, not everything is a meditation problem, not everything is a spiritual problem, not everything is a physical problem... One of the biggest challenge in the modern world is that everyone is trying to convince you to use "their" framework... so it really takes extra thought and conversations with others to figure out our own way that is appropriate for our situation.  

Hope this is helpful in some way.  

+1 for shargrol's commments.

 I think confusing the domains of meditation/spirituality and wounds/psychology can confuse both the practitioner working their way through all of this and those who tune in via that person's comments on forums like this one. This is yet another reason to maintain a regular practice log or diary. By doing that, other folks get to know your practice and can better understand it, offer cogent comments, or even real help. While I was in the throes of traversing the paths, keeping a regularly updated practice log helped immensely as more experienced meditators weighed in with their experiences, coaching, pointing, and plain old encouragement.

Thank you Shargrol. 

This really wasn't about figuring out paths, or asking for help, it was, in a way, tangential to path diagnosis, as there are still so many generalisations around about how paths and psychological development SHOULD align. And I basically disagree with the idea that there will be much tandem development, but clearer sense perception seems to create a potentially (!) better basis to do the finer discernment as to what method - psychology, meditation, etc. might be needed for a given problem and then possibly work within those frameworks better, because of greater clarity. None of that, I think, garantees anything, however. 

So on the one hand, yes, let's keep paths and psychology seperated. But maybe one way to go would be to have more accounts that show how much individual variation there is in the middle path territory, and how meditation basically won't do your psychology work for you - but might help by highlighting your stuff. 

Then again, working in a six realms framework and shining a big light on patterns of craving, aversion and ignorance has some striking similarities to some somatic based therapy approaches. 

So this isn't all that cleanly cut, and maybe personal accounts help. But logs are seldom hashtagged in any way, so there basically is no thread that I am aware of that provides accounts of such variations and late last night I was naive enough to try to start one. 

Lastly, I don't know where the counting cessations idea got into this, it somehow seems to always come up, but for me at least the basic question always was and is wether perception changed after whatever event or non-event and wether those changes wore off or not. And after the switch "to the nowness of the thing" it really seems completely beside the point where on what map one might localize one's practice, as the one to take credit for being a so-and-so appears in a rather interesting light, shall we say, and none of that really matters anymore, as it's about seeing the thing clearly. With all the practice as non practice ideas that might or might not entail for a given practitioner. So path diagnosis is only helpful as a rough guide as to where to look for practice ideas or troubleshooting at that point, I think. 

" no thread that I am aware of that provides accounts of such variations"

I'm not aware of any source that does a comprehensive accounting of personal variations in the meditative path. Too vast, I think.

Would have to read and index thousands of of practice logs.

Hmmm... there are many practice logs available on DhO and in the archives at AwakeNetwork - it might be a nice project for someone to compile a directory of them all with links and keyword references to specific topics or occurrences in each log.

You two, yes, too vast. Definitely. But my thought was that maybe at least a small sample of variations in how meditation and psychology do or don't interweave might appear below my initial draft. Just a small experiment. As such it might work, not work or set the lab on fire. Those seem to be the traditional options in mainstream movies. ;)

Could I ask for more structure to help me both understand and then hope to obtain the kinds of responses that would be helpful? Maybe a question like one of these:


"When is it appropriate to rely on meditation to resolve questions, conundrums, and problems that occur in daily life and during our meditation journey, and when is it appropriate to seek psychological help from a professional in that area?"

"Is there a series of classifications we can apply to the issues that arise in our spiritual practice that indicate that the resolution is in the domain of meditation or in the domain of psychology?

"How do meditation and psychology compete, cooperate, or exist in entirely different domains? Can they intersect to solve similar human problems or is it best to separate these two things entirely?"


This issue arises here on DhO often, as I believe folks are confused about the differences between spiritual practice and medicine/psychology. It's not uncommon for someone to come to DhO and ask for help which is clearly due to a psychological problem, but want help from this meditation practice-based community. They will sometimes receive well-meaning but misguided, and potentially harmful, advice from DhO. I've talked to several deeply experienced meditators who are also trained psychologists about this very issue and might be able to coax one or two into this discussion.

Helpful?

To Olivier: Is there anything available from the EPRC in this regard?

@shargrol the idea of seeing a "core wound" seems to come up for a lot of pactitioners, it seems to me it could also be framed in terms of "insight into the core motivator of seeking behind the spiritual/meditative quest", the assumption driving the whole existential-personal interest in this whole thing, putting an end to that interest/question. 

There is a project I'm involved with currently that is looking at the commonalities in the overall trajectories of practitioners from across several traditions that report having reached "the end of the path", whatever they might call it. Can't say too much about it, apart that I think the results that are starting to come up are interesting and might shed some light to the whole discussion, sort of invites a move away from an idealized four paths format which I find quite refreshing... 

Also, I wonder if the best way to approach a problem is always to adress it directly. For instance, staying in the realm of contemporary psychotherapy, you have things like EMDR, Ideal parent figure protocol, solution-focused brief therapy, hypnosis, etc., all of which don't really tackle the problematic manifestations heads on (e.g., emdre just makes you move your eyes in strange ways, IPF makes you visualize yourself as a kid under the care of parents that meet your every need, etc.) Perhaps saying "adressing the causes of the problem directly" is what you meant? Sometimes psychological issues have simple physiological causes, too, like simple electrolyte deficiencies and the likes! Not that I'm trained in these specific techniques or as a psychotherapist btw. 

This guy thinks he knows what the universal mechanism of psychotherapy (for problems not caused by causes like I just described, e.g. urinary tract infections (can cause hallucinations), poisoning, deficiencies of various kinds...) is memory reconsolidation (kind of like the schema-therapy Shargrol mentioned). Edit2: I haven't delved into this too much but the neuro-bent I see in this sort of annoys me from the get go (o, prejudices). However the centrality of memory, and its relationship with time and space, and then psyche, is definitely a key, in my opinion. 

The whole "path" seems to cross with psychotherapy from this perspective in that it involves the exploration of various mindstates and experiences (and ideas!) that invite corresponding modifications of our worldviews, beliefs, schemas. To me, "realization" has qutie a bit to do with seing through worldviews in profound ways and often incrementally, in cycles of gradual refining. It goes both ways: seeing/changing worldviews affects perception directly. So perhaps the overlap with psychotherapy is that psychotherapy is about what we usually consider to be beliefs/schemas having to do with the "relative" psyche (ego, superego, id, relationships, defense mechanisms, maturity, character...), whereas insights in the spiritual/contemplative/meditative sense is more about "absolute" views (duality, nature of phenomena including self, ontology, etc.). 

Edit to add: so in a way it might be itneresting to think of things in terms of process vs stages (I didn't invent this idea). The process in insight meditation and psychotherapy might be the same in many cases, just involving different "targets"?

@Chris, I like these questions, and I don't know of a definitive resource on this, there has been work at EB/EPRC on a project that asks questions much like what you just did, to various experts like the ones you mention, i.e. having experience in both worlds, though I don't think the exact question of determining when something is best adressed by meditation and when it is best adressed through therapy is included in those terms. Might be worth adding to the project, maybe you could email Daniel about it Current constraint is funding, mostly. 

I think such questions also really depend on culture and individuals... Some may say it is perfectly appropriate to solve any and all questions of psychology and relationships by becoming a renunciate monk, right? 

Edit:

Some musings about the process:


 

Hm...


1) My draft was a late night, spur of the moment thing after once again reading someone's opinion on what should or shouldn't be a problem at what stage of the path, something that I find difficult to generalize beyond perceptual ability. And then there is the descriptive fallacy to deal with. 

2) I don't think providing Q&A type resources are all that helpful. I think many people learn best by example. "Hey, that' sounds similar to my situation." While there may be many, many logs here that may have useful passages regarding mediation and psychology and their intersection, overlap, and the general high variability of what may work in what order for this or that person, they are not really that available unless you happen to read the log as it grows. You, Chris, might know several logs that might be interesting to check out for their contrasting ways the path unfolded for the respective persons, but unless I know what handle to look for, and in what part of the log, all this stuff is basically "lost in the archives." With a few notable examples like your log and Nikolai's and a few others over on the Hamiltonproject blog site. 

3) More on expert opinions. These are, of course, super important. But I think every expert will be cautious with general advice and basically say "It depends on the indivudal case." For example, general idea is that you should not go for neglectful spiritual bypassing. All good and well, but how many may be out there for whom that was not a straight path, but a roundabout way of GETTING to where you are in a position to do less bypassing, and they only got there through going into strictly meditation techniques first? Who is to say what is a general approach as to the order and balance of the three trainings?

4) So my rough idea/thought, and we may debate the efficacy of my execution on that thought, as I am not a writer, and much of seeing my thoughts clearer still happens after writing a draft, was to try to invite people to give summaries of how that played or plays out for them in their practice. In one thread. Different stories about how the path had hardcore practice, bypassing, then psychology, and even all these intermingling, because there are also good examples of people basically getting through much of the path by basically working with the avoidance behaviour directly, wich would be characterized as psychology work by many people, but also does seem to work on the self/other boundary in the larger context of a meditation practice. See the Sasha Chapin interview Wystan Brayn Scott did. But Chapin also seems to be a sensible adult who can read and reason. Wich is a very rare coin these days, it seems. 

5) Again, the basic idea was to invite case studies/stories of different ways this played out for different people. Posts elaborating on, dunno, "I tried to mediate around my psychological issues and it was a disaster." "I tried to mediate around my psychological issues and it ended up showing me my issues as these were the some of the last major contractile patterns." "I don't know what you guys are talking about, for me it was cycles, DNs and nothing but that until the mind untangled itself." "I startet to meditate because it called to me and I found I had to work through my issues along the way and I used X, Y, and Z approaches for that." "I started to practice and the whole path unfolded without ever reallxy intersecting with my stuff." Etc. Who knows how many weird flavors there are of this and how many ways beside mine above are there to describe this. But maybe, by collecting such stories, some general themes would become apparent that would be a good resource, where people can find like cases to their own in, and others can see the wide variety and be less hasty to take the way their path unfolded to be representative for others. 

6) The internet is not comparable with one on one work, neither with a meditation teacher nor with a psychologist. One of the absolutely worst ideas in recent years (I think) is the one where people try to produce LLMs for meditation advice so people don't need to do research anymore. I think it is the ability to make better inferences that should be fostered, and outsourcing the need for that is the direct opposite direction. You give people street naviagtion apps, and they loose the ability to remember their way through town. What we could do, I think, is provide theme based case study collections. And that phrase just popped up after writing all of the above, and maybe we can take this core idea and apply it better elsewhere and close this thread. Who knows. It was an experiment. 

7) Again, I myself am not looking for meditation or psychological advice, practice seems to be clicking along nicely, my whole life of bypassing shit seems to slowly change and I'm not complaining of practice unfolding too slowly, or bemoaning my psychological hang ups or whatever else people come here asking about. Concentration + 3 characteristics and 6 sense doors worked from the beginning, still does, working on my stuff seems to get better with increasing sensate clarity. 

8) To sum up, Theme Based Case Study Collections. Harcore Dharma and Spiritual Byassing. Case Study Collection. "Starting to get heavily into deep meditaiton? Here, besides all the technical stuff, read this, this is a bunch of technical practitoners laying out their dances with spritual bypassing and their psychological stuff." Something like that. It sounds interesting and useful, but I have no real idea whether that will turn out to be doable or really all that helpful once compiled.

Is there a way to make the quote text bigger?

There's a lot going on here so I'll keep my reply short. 

In the context of the thread that spawned this...

I believed the poster was dealing with a meditative issue not a psychological issue, I suspect I was correct, I seem to have been, something I and others here have seen plenty times in our own and others experiences. And the entire context of my reply, though I appreciate it may not have been clear, was really much more about the potential for strong meditators to get a bit over identified with paths, stages and the transient states within. That has psychological components but diagnostically it's more a meditative problem. We really weren't speaking about their wounds or trauma but their attitude towards meditation and their ideas about where they were at. 

​​​​​​​If a case studies thread was created or if I should add stuff here I certainly have a lot and more to say about wounds and trauma and meditation. 

Yes, Olivier, I edited the html to remove all the smaller font commands. Did you copy and paste that into DhO? If so, that will often cause formatting issues. To avoid them, convert all your text to "Plain Text" and then copy it in.

I'm going to start another thread about this. I'll include a (hopefully) clear definition of what the thread is looking for in the way of responses, and I will then post a reply comment using an example from my own practice experiences. I hope that you will all contribute as it seems to be of interest.

A little fyi based on a few comments throughout your writing here... One does not simply show up at the DhO and not get analyzed to some extent. It's just how the Sangha works. It's not about whether you think you should or should not be or whether you want it or do not want it, it's just how we get to know you. It's a peer review type situation. We are wiser with Sangha than without. 

​​​​​​​It's permaculture but from the plants point of view. 

Thanks Chris !! Sounds good. Can't wait to sit down and write about my trauma at length

pixelcloud *



I think you just described this entire site.



Sounds like a lot of work with uncertain likihood of benefit. Isn't it more efficient to have people ask questions about meditation and psychology and then answer those questions?

Well, let's try this and see what happens:

​​​​​​​https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/33287952

Bahiya, analyzing is fine. As is, I think, the attempt, however skillful or unskillful, to call out some perceived difficulties with the way such analyses are conducted sometimes. Like someone seeking teachers and that person getting a "sounds like 1st to 2nd path problem to me" because a few sentences didn't sound like resonating with a personal view of how this should go down. And in that same vein, I expect to be called out in the same manner on what seems like inconsistencies, unclear stuff and plain stupid shit that surely will at one time or another come out of my head and into here. So analyze away!
 It'll at the very least make us better at conversing, ideally more aware of our blind spots. For myself, this is a training ground in many respects, not least getting accustomed to writing after having been away from it since the dawn of time,  working on being a clearer thinker by engaging iin written conversation. I have spent too many years in the strength and conditioning world, wich is not all that sophisticated mostly. ;) I expect it will take a year or two before that skill is honed to some degree. 


Shargrol, yes maybe. I really don't know. But you could also say that for any dharma book out there. Isn't it easier to just ask questions? 

There is no need to hurry. Maybe in a few years there'll be a few interesting accounts that can be paired with EPRC studies, who knows. Maybe it won't go anywhere. I really didn't think that much when starting this thread, seemed like a good idea at the time. ;)

Starting two threads (thank you, Chris!) seems like not too much wasted effort should nothing come of it. 

Thank you Olivier, I really appreciate your perspective and eloquence.