Hi

So i'm starting this thread with hope it will motivate me to better practice and of course i hope I will receive some advice or clarifications from you, experienced practitioners here. I'm good at reading in English, worse at writing. I hope this skill will improve nearly as much as my meditation . I'm here because I've read MCTB, but let's start from beginning.

Three years ago I started practice anapanasati (after reading a book "Mindfulness in Plain English") and probably crossed Mind and Body, Cause and Effect, Three Characteristics and maybe A&P. I had no idea about insight maps. I remember very well when i was seeing mind and body separated and that they "worked" on they own, without any "self" with them. I saw a "self" as separated mechanism in my mind, which grasp to sensations and produce suffering. I was seeing dukkha in positive, negative and neutral feelings. I started to see cause and effect chains in my meditation and in my daily life. I also remember quite a few extraordinary experiences, like a very bright light flashing in my closed eyes and causing me to feel great happiness, like in heaven. I also had lucid dreams often. Similar light appeared when I stated to meditate in lucid dream. I stopped meditating because it got worse and I was afraid I was doing something wrong. My motivation dropped. I remember panic attacks during my sittings. They were incredible strong. They were forcing me to stop my sittings. I ran from my house few times, because the fear was so strong and i wanted to be with people in the street. I haven't meditated since 2 years.

I started meditating again a month ago. I practice anapanasati few hours a day. I'm a bit worried, because an insight has not occurred yet. Today I tried noting technique first time in my life. I heard this method can be more effective and faster than anapanasati.

I started feeling movement of my abdomen and started noting "wznoszenie", "opadanie" which means "rising", "falling". My breath was very deep, so my notes were very long: like riiiiisiiiing, faaaaaaaaaling. While I was noting, I noticed that my attention was switching from feeling a sensation of the abdomen, to seeing text images of my notes in my mind. So I stopped doing my notes as long as my breath, and started doing short notes in the center of each breath. I also switched to English words, because they are shorter, so it helped me observe breath sensations for longer periods of time.

My attention changed to itching or listening few times during a half hour of my meditation. I noticed again that i can't see a complete period of a sensation, because my attention jump to the act of noting. This made me little angry and doubter in technique. I noted it, but again act of noting instantly stopped emotion of angry or doubt. Am i doing this right? With anapanasati method, when i switch from breath to emotion i stay with this bare experience until it naturally vanish. Three years ago I was experiencing impermanence this way. I could see dukkha and no self at the same time. Now it feels like noting take to much attention from my sensations.

I continued noting for next half hour. My attention was jumping between images of noting and sensations. Then i decided to switch to anapanasati for a moment. I also changed my object to nostrils. Almost instantly my perception changed. My breath vanished somewhere, and my attention jumped to my hands. My hands became very warm and pleasant and i felt them in the distance of me. Also I didn't feel my body. After five minutes i opened my eyes to see if my hands didn't fly to far away from me (I was little scared) and this state started to dissolve. Then I stopped my meditation.

Should I switch my technique? Is noting worth it? If you have any thoughts or advice please share

That's the classic pattern! Strange how predictable these things are and yet how poorly that standard pattern is known to most people...


That sense that it takes something away is a common complaint. Just keep practicing and see what happens. Play around with more or less attention on the notes, or strip the notes way, way down to something very quiet and very short and subtle, like "bip" or "dat" or something like that, and see if that helps.



Keep going. Sounds like fun. Just watch and see what happens, regardless of what it is. Don't worry too much about the strange stuff, just pay attention, note, see what happens and then what happens after that. Many strange things may happen. Many boring periods may happen also. Regardless, stay on the data stream and you will learn something from it.

Noting seems to improve concentration to me. I don't get it in context of vipassana. It's like counting breaths or like mantra. To me It's easier to stay with breath with noting, but harder to observe sensation accurately. I should give it more time probably. I'll try silent and shorter noting. Thanks

Two suggestions:

1) give much more attention to the objects: if the noting is making it hard to see them, then give the object more of the total mind-time

2) avoid hypnotic or mantra-like noting: only note when you perceived the object, and not if you didn't.