Thanks for your posts!
fivebells .:
You imply that you are doing 8 hours of meditation a day. With that much meditation, you may find that after building a sufficient base of attention it is fruitful to make the ache the object of attention. You might try cultivating metta for an hour, then doing a form of tonglen, where you attend to the ache during the in-breath, and attend to metta on the out-breath. This may afford some insight into the physical causes of the ache, but it may also lead to other insights.
Only do this if your attention is stable, though, and don't push it. If the tonglen leads to agitation, go back to building stable attention some more, then maybe try again.
I decided to make Saturday into an at-home 'mini-retreat' day, so that was a lot more meditation than usual. I was going for pure samatha that day. I normally do 1-2 hours of samatha and 45-60 minutes of noting per day, with 45 minute to one hour sits and a bit of walking meditation. My long term goal is to start with working on simultaneously getting practice with noting and attaining the jhanas. Once I get the concentration from some jhanas, I plan to switch to mostly just doing noting.
Thanks for the Tonglen suggestion. I'll plan to do it if my concentration stays. It's felt really good to feel mindful and have fairly stable attention this last couple days, but I don't know how long it will last. It looks like Shinzen has some practices that might be good for dealing with pain on his site too. http://shinzen.org/Articles/artPain.pdf
Fitter Stoke:
It's the same thing in a chair. I always keep my elbows up on the arm rests, because there's too much neck and shoulder tension if I keep them in my lap.
The other possibility is that you're experiencing 3rd or 10th ñana side-effects. Have you crossed the A&P yet?
I'll plan to look for a chair with arm rests, it seems like this could help. Thanks! I am fairly certain that I crossed the A&P about 8 months ago. Could be part of re-observation?
Dodge E Knees:
Hey!
I have the same koala pic as my work ID!
Five hours sitting with an incorret posture would certainly create some tension, but it is worth considering Fitter Stroke's suggestion that you are experiencing side-effects of insight. The 3rd nana can be full of pain, but also that kind of neck/ shoulder tension is exactly how the DN manifests for me....it feels like a blockage at the base of the neck and lots of pressure pushing from below until the release of EQ.
Are you sure you are doing pure samatha? It is easy to think you are concentrating when you are actually investigating, that's what happened to me. Tell us a little bit about what you are experiencing during meditation.
Cheers.
Most days I do 45-60 minutes of noting, in addition to samatha, so that could have caused me to progress through the DN since my A&P. During Saturday's samatha practice I didn't experience anything too out of the ordinary that I recall. I mostly payed attention to the sensation of the air passing in and out of my nostrils. Sometimes I would focus on sensation related to the breath in general, such as the abdomen moving up and down or the feeling of air moving in my throat. I typically felt content. I felt like I could sort of 'sink into' the moment and whatever I was feeling while doing my walking meditation. I tried to follow Ajahn Brahm's guidelines in his book on jhanas, and focus on letting go of the past, future, and inner talk. Responding to restlessness and with contentment and loving kindness toward the breath.
One thing comes to mind. My out breath would tend to be very long, then at the end there would be a moment where it would 'turn around' or 'stop', then the in breath would typically feel hurried. My assumption was that my breath was 'trying' to slow down, but the in-breath would go faster because I wasn't getting enough oxygen. Perhaps I ate too much bread for lunch? That tends to make me short of breath when I run.