Hi,

I'm relatively new here. I've read some of the discussions and practice reports and I'm really enjoying them. So I thought I'll try my own practice log. It hopefully will serve me as an encouragement to practice consistently and to develop a clear language around it.

Also, I love being in a feedback loop with advanced practitioners. It helps me a lot and counters the uncertainty that I often feel towards my practice.

To provide the context for my current practice, I thought it could be helpful to describe a few of the most significant recent meditative experiences:

For several years I felt kind of stuck, like eternally cycling without clear progress. Until a retreat half a year ago where one experience in particular still stands out as significant. I was heavily "re-obsing" at that time (what I mean: low concentration, being agitated, feeling highly unpleasant but not being able to locate the source of the unpleasantness in the senses, everything feeling chaotic, like being underwater in a stormy sea, all kinds of dissonant sensations pulling all in different directions, etc.). I was investigating a particular sensation that seemed to be a source of discomfort and trying to figure out where/how exactly it managed to be unpleasant. Until some kind of foreground/background synchronization happened. It appeared as if the (aversive) reaction to the sensation had been in the background and now had come to the foreground so that I could see it. When it clicked it felt like I had previously only looked at half the picture and then been complaining about the picture not being right. Now it was the (aversive) reaction itself that completed the experience into something whole and kind of symmetric. In that moment, all dissonance was gone.

Over the next several weeks and few months, lighter versions of that insight would repeat. Also, attentional moves that felt aversive (or craving) towards a part of the field would become more and more objectified. With the lessening of foreground/background separation, I got more and more interested in investigating dukkha as directly as possible, trying to look straight at it. During that time, suffering in a conventional/psychological sense kind of skyrocketed to existential/archetypal scale while, paradoxically, suffering on a more fundamental level dropped to new lows, allowing to stay calm and functional with almost absurd levels of emotional pain. I think the exact turning point was when there was some very intense emotional release followed by relief and calm and then one (or a few) cessations, which didn't seem super significant at the time. But in the days after that it started to dawn on me that something was different. One way I had summarized it a few weeks later: As if the constant push and pull towards experience had gone. Or more technically speaking: It seemed that attention was behaving differently now towards unpleasant experiences. As if the aversive "attentional forcefield" had gone that made it difficult to even look at unpleasant experiences. Looking itself now was not a challenge anymore. Even when there was still a "global" preference for something else, this didn't seem to affect "attention" anymore.

So I was curious to go on retreat again and learn more about what had changed. During the retreat my interest organically shifted away from dukkha towards "selfing processes". So I mostly did noting; which parts of experience appeared as "me", "not-me", or 'does not apply' (which was not really a 'label' like the others). At - what felt like - the edge of selfing processes, interesting things happened. Some experiences felt very emotionally/psychologically significant and healing. Also, it felt like a territory where the rules of magic appeared to apply much more than the rules of physics. And with respect to the noting, at one point the insight dropped how the "me"/"not-me" aspect could never be found in the investigated sensations in the first place. Duh.

It's been a few weeks since this retreat. Before, my practice used to have more of a theme. Like looking straight at dukkha, or investigating aversion, or foreground/background stuff. In a way, all of that is still there and interesting. But still it feels as if I've lost a kind of inner compass for my practice. Maybe I'm just re-obsing, but as I said, it definitely won't hurt to stay in a loop with other practitioners.

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So, after this preamble that became much longer than planned, here's today's practice log:

I sat for an hour. In the habit of the recent retreat I was trying to focus on sensations in the belly. Concentration was pretty low, though. Spent a lot of time with discursive thoughts. A few things that I'm tracking for a sit like this: Today it was easy and pleasant to sit, even with the low concentration. During the time that I was with the object, it appeared relatively clear with soft, fine vibrating details. Awareness remained relatively wide - making it even wider helped to stay with the object without collapsing. Despite the many distractions, there was a calm okayness with the low concentration. Paradoxically, at the same time, a constant background doubt whether practice should be different. Interestingly, during the last ten minutes or so, there was a shift where the idea of "putting attention somewhere" somehow didn't make much sense anymore. Hadn't experienced this before, or at least not like this. Curious if it will happen again for further exploration. 

I'm freezing this topic. If either of the posters with these new accounts, both of whom just joined DhO, one of whom is using a disposable email domain, wants to argue the case that I should unfreeze it, please DM me.

Chris M
DhO Moderator

This topic is no longer frozen. Please reply to Boris' post if you feel inclined to do so. The other poster, a spammer, has been locked out of DhO.

EDIT: The spam post has been removed.

- Chris M

Thank you Chris! 

Hi Boris! What kind of retreat was that? Also explain in great detail what the practice was about? 

 Sure. The retreat was two weeks self-organized in a Buddhist retreat house. I sat for like six or seven hours a day. In principle there is always a teacher available but since the teachers change and vary significantly in competence and background I didn't took too much out of their sporadic input. Overall, my focus for the retreat was to investigate the three characteristics. This time, exploring the no-self characteristic was particularly interesting. Like I wrote above, I spend a lot of time noticing "me"/"not-me" and tracking the parts of experiences and times when/where it didn't fit to apply these tags to sensations.

A second theme that developed during the retreat was working with the brahmaviharas. Bramavihara practices had never really resonated with me so far. I know the approach where you repreat certain sentences to evoke their qualities but that never worked for me. Nor did any of the exercises that involves visualizations/imaginations (because of my strong aphantasia, I guess). But during the last retreat I found a way of working with the brahmaviharas that's working for me. I'm picking some somatic sensations on the level of vibrations (preferrably sensations that appear to have a certain "stickyness" to them). Then I "apply the brahmaviharas to them". That is, first I see which of the brahmaviharas seems to resonate most with these particular sensations, or the other way round. This increases the clarity around the brahmavihara qualities as well as the sensations. When I have one that seems to be particularly fitting for these sensations in this moment then I try to fine-tune the quality of that brahmavihara. In particular the "selfless" aspect. Often, the moment when it seems like I found the self-less quality in a pure enough form, the stickyness of the sensations disolves. So I did this a bunch during the retreat.

Third, I had my ongoing side quest about concentration. I feel like I've never developed a sense for how concentration works, how to build it up. I've always been drawn to insight practices. I have some experience with the jhanas, but it usually felt like I was just stumbling into them, not being able to repeat it. So during this retreat too, I was looking to find a balance with the insight work and "taking some time to just build up concentration first". Which mostly produced more questions for me about what this concentrations is about and how it's supposed to work. Maybe I'm just having serious misconceptions there? In any case, this retreat, no stumbling into jhanas at all. Still, there were a few times when concentration seemed to indeed to have built up. Like when I had a tiny spot of fast vibrations in laser-sharp focus for like one and a half hours so I was able to do my brahmavihara exploration there under the microscope. Otherwise, long stretched of the retreat felt terribly unconcentrated - where I was looking for a balance of either trying to build up more concentration - or using the low concentration for insight, like, gently looking for something like background processes that I'm overlooking. Stuff like that.
 

Thank you for replying, Boris! I'm looking forward to following your log here at DhO!

22-26.05.2025

Almost no formal pracitce as days have been pretty busy. But there was an interesting (no-self) insight last week. There is a paritcular kind of suffering that I was dealing with for a long time. Hard to tell when it started. Probably in childhood already - although the further I go back, the more the issue was incorporated into worldviews and personality - not being an object of investigation. In any case, one way the issue was driving me nuts was that it seemed to defy my attempts to investigate it. Like it could never be defined by any property, not matter how hard I tried. As if "no defining property" was its defining property.

Last week, the question arose "What would you be without it?" (I think I had picked that up from Gabor Maté). And it clicked that the "it" here was not so much "the issue" (the object without defining properties) but rather the (until then) background process of desperately needing to understand what's going on. The desperate need to understand was very uncomfortable, which created an even stronger need to understand what's going on. Like a dark jhanic feedback loop. It turned out that the desperate need to understand what's going on didn't have much of an object that it was trying to understand. It was feeding on itself. There was no other side to it.

In the days since then, more and more memories are coming in, revealing how much this desparate need to understand what's going on has shaped my life. It feels like an ancient spell has been lifted.

Really nice Boris. That "it's characteristic is that it doesn't have clear characteristics" is a very good observation/idea. A lot of times "problems" start off as vague and unclear and become clear over time... but sometimes they stay vague and unclear. Not everything needs to be resolved into total clarity. Sometimes things in our mind/psychology are vague and uncertain and that's simply the way they are. We can fight it... or accept it.

This is probably why many meditation teachers emphasize getting comfortable with uncertainty. It's probably the hardest and most mature human "state" to live within. Humans crave certainty and simple explanations for "how things are". Usually, humans alternate between happiness "things are going well" and sadness "things are going poorly", but the wiser the person is the more they are able to suspend going through wild mood swings and just go with the "uncertainty" of things while being a good, responsible human. So easy to say, so hard to do!  

We desparately want to understand everything, but accepting uncertainty is definitely part of the path too.

Uncertainty: The Spillway for the Mind | Abhayagiri Monastery

27-28.05.2025

Before falling asleep, my mind often habitually continues to do a lot of meditative moves that often have quite a different dynamic during these half-asleep states. Yesterday, some emotional unease and rawness that I had felt during the day culminated in a half-asleep state that felt globally and uniformly bad. Then it popped and the journey continued to clear hypnogogic fractals that seemed to react well to being hold and related to very lightly. After that, memories are more vague because I was even closer to sleep. But I remember a fascination with the observation that unpleasant experiences seem to carry a hightened potential for insight and I was trying to figure that out in more detail. Followed by intense dreams that felt wholesome and meaningful.

Today I felt even more raw than yesterday. There's this weird paradox experience with suffering sometimes that feels like I'm in some kind of limbo state. Where like +90% of the resistance and identification with the experience are gone. Where even an experience that gets tagged as "almost unbearable" still happens in wide-open, quiet spaciousness. I really don't like that state, even though on some level it's all totally fine, but I also don't like how paradox it is, although I would never want to trade it back for how it used to be... *argh!*

Anyways, when I sat down like this and gently oberserved all the related sensations in more details, things got quite light and calm again.

Well said. In genreal, I think, uncertainty doesn't bother me too much anymore (relatively speaking). But when it is unplesasant and uncertain, that can still suck a lot!

Since encountering his "Small Boat Great Mountain" many years ago, I have loved almost everything Ajahn Amaro writes. An oft-overlooked source of wisdom in the Theravada tradition, and one who speaks with a huge heart.

Boris, I think you will really like this:

https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/art_ickysticky.pdf

https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/art_ickysticky.pdf

Hey shargrol, thanks a lot for pointing to Shinzen's article! I really like it! 



I had exactly this like two years ago and it is nice to be reminded that it was only temporary. Now it feels less physical, even less tangible, more emotional but in a vaguely archetypal, elusive way. But the framework itself still seems very appropriate:



Yep, that's how it feels!

29-31.05.2025

In the last few days I had moved past that unpleasant "limbo state" described above. Which was a good timing because I was at a small festival with friends. For me, a high-stimulus, socially dense setting like a festival is usually very challenging due to sensory overload and stuff. This time I was equanamous enough to observe a stream of tiny little fear and shame reactions that were constantly running through my emotion-body as a reaction to the dense social input. It was a very informative samskara field trip.

During the last few days I also had a certain fascination with noticing "past"/"future" - especially during napitations or before falling asleep at night. That is, picking a part of experience that has some solidity to it, slash appears as an object - and see if there's a quality of "having a past" or "having a future" to it. Or to put it another way: Does the solidity/object seem to remind of something or seem to imply something...? Besides noticing these qualities themselves, I've also tracked ambiguity around these qualities as well as the degree in which they could and could not be applied in the first place. At times there appeared to be an oscillation going on (on a scale of several seconds): The solidity seems to remind of something ... which seems to imply something ... which reminds me of something ... which implies something ... I suspect that this kind if self-reinforcement is one of the (many?) mechanisms how solid objecthood is established and stabilized. 

1-15.06.2025

My investigation into "past"/"future" transformed into a focus on phenomena "happy" and "satisfied" and made me investigate them more closely. I noticed how pleasant sensations in particular made me contract / made the field collapse in a way that I hadn't noticed before (background: for a long time I had mainly investigated the collapses around unpleasant sensations). After some days of investigation I got more curious about cultivation. So my current practice is to repeatedly relax and go wide & soft with awareness while gently leaning towards piti as a central object of attention. One night in bed I actually reached a 2nd jhana (and some of 1st & 3rd too). I was wondering if I had every experienced 2nd jhana so deeply and purely (let alone off-retreat -- let alone in a way that felt like actually navigating the terrain). And while I haven't reproduced the experience yet, in the background it still makes an impression as a reference point how happiness and love are actually possible to feel (it has been a while, the last years have been very rough). I'm continuing this cultivation and it regularly brings me into a terrain that feels pre-jhanic. I'm planning to simply spend a lot of time there because being there seems to slowly melt the body armor that has been accumulated over time and makes joy, happiness, and satisfaction feel so taboo. 

Fantastic! I'm also a big fan of investigating contraction around that which is pleasing. It's much easier to investigate contraction around the unpleasant because there is a natural urge to be distanced from it, but we tend to buy into pleasure and so it is much harder to observe mindfully.  In the early Buddhist tradition, the lion's share of attention was given to the contraction around/identification with pleasant things. At the time, there was a cultural tradition of asceticism that made such investigations more natural. Within that tradition, people saw pleasure in a negative light, or at least they saw it as a danger. That was very alien to me when I started practice, so I have had to work on paying attention to pleasure. 

Jhana is the optimal tool for this investigation. It's like a laboratory for positive vedena and one of the best chances we have to see how joy, happiness, and satisfaction can happen without clinging.