This looks like a good place for some meditation practice notes.

Intentions [2025-09-12]

I feel that my meditation practice is fruitful right now, due at least in part to a clear, consistent routine.  So, I'd like to share that routine, as well as some goals related to it.

I'm mostly practicing Goenka-style vipassana, and I'd also like to share some reflections on the Goenka meditation instructions, which are simple but not necessarily straightforward, especially as one refines body sensation awareness.

Eventually I may post some EEG recordings of practice sessions with comments, but that's less of a priority for me right now.

Routine snapshot [2025-09-12]

I try to keep the Goenka course daily schedule in mind.  I don't expect to copy it in my non-retreat life, but I do want to maintain a high-enough level of "meditative fitness" to ease into it comfortably.  (I think of this as analogous to training for a marathon.)  At the same time, I try to keep in mind the foundational self-care habits required for conventional health and wellness: sleep, exercise, diet, socialization, etc.

My current routine includes the following:

• Daily formal meditation practice: 3–4 hours/day.  I practice 1 hour in the morning, 1 hour in the afternoon, and 1 hour in the evening.  Sometimes I'll add another hour in the morning, either immediately after the first or after a break.  Goenkaji requires 2 hours/day as the minimum to maintain practice.  I have found that 3–4 hours/day is enough to gradually deepen and refine meditative experience.
• Weekly group practice: Also, I try to attend a one-day (9 am–4 pm) vipassana course every weekend.  This is generally possible in the Bay Area, because there are two local centers (one in Berkeley, one in Santa Clara).
• Sleep: ~8 hours, between 10 pm–6 am.  Goenkaji claims that 2 hours of daily meditation practice will replace 1 hour of daily sleep; I was initially skeptical of this, but it seems to be true for me.  Adding more meditation does not seem to further reduce my need for sleep, however.
• Exercise: 1 hour/day, 6 days/week of cardio, alternating jogging and some other activities (battle ropes, jump rope, biking, etc.).  Take a walk at least once/day.  Try to do 30 min./day of low-intensity yoga in the evening.  (I have a hard time committing to yoga, but appreciate it whenever I do it.)
• Diet: large breakfast, snack after exercise, medium-sized lunch, no dinner (maybe a small snack).  (My second retreat convinced me that I feel better without an evening meal.)  Eat simple vegetarian meals.  Minimize caffeine: a little black tea is okay sometimes, but keep coffee decaf.
• Other:
  • Do some work, sometimes.  (At the moment, I'm fortunate not to have to worry about this too much.)
  • Set aside time for cleaning and throwing things out.
  • Spend time with friends and family.

Goals [2025-09-13]

• Meditation:
  • Register for another 10-day course to attend in December 2025 or January 2026.
  • Maintain the routine outlined above until the course.
  • Continue to practice the Goenka anapana-vipassana medatiton exercise, but experiment more with varying external conditions.
    • location: practice sitting outside (at the park, at the beach, etc.), and in different rooms.
    • posture: practice while walking, standing, sitting, and lying down.
    • duration: mix in some shorter and longer practice sessions.
• Morality:
  • Volunteering: Set up a weekly (say, 2 hours/week to start) volunteering gig.  It could be tutoring, animal shelter work, meditation center support, etc.
  • Keep practicing the Five Precepts.

Meditation instructions [2025-09-13]

I follow the bare-bones instructions here.  I do an hour of anapana in the morning, followed by a mix of vipassana and anapana.  I tend to do more anapana than officially prescribed.  (In my experience, a single complete body scan tends to bring a lot of body sensation into awareness; some anapana practice after each scan is useful to let the nervous system stabilize.)

Untethering interoception from proprioception in the body scan

Introduction

The difficulties of the body scan are physical, psychological, and perceptual.  The physical difficulties are the most obvious to anyone who has tried to meditate: it is uncomfortable to sit in one position without moving for a long time.  Likewise, the psychological difficulties are clear: one experiences a wide range of uncomfortable emotions, such as boredom, irritation, and frustration.  Remarkably, one can overcome these difficulties, sitting comfortably and blissfully in adhiṭṭhāna for an hour—without having addressed the perceptual difficulties of the body scan exercise at all.  I know this to be true, because I have experienced it myself.

I'm writing this note to clarify an essential perceptual difficulty of the body scan: to untether interoception (felt body sensation) from proprioception (the sense of the body in space).  I hadn't taken this issue seriously until my first Goenka retreat.  The Goenka instructions insist on felt sensation as the proper object of meditation: the sensation of the breath in anapana, and body sensation in vipassana.  Also, before the retreat, I had never been sufficiently concentrated to perceive interception and proprioception as distinct fields of body awareness.

Definitions

Interoception is felt body sensation: tension in the shoulder, pressure in the palm, vibration in the knee.  Interoception tells us if we're uncomfortable, hungry, or have to go to the bathroom.  Proprioception, on the other hand, is the sense of the body in space: the sensed location of the shoulder, palm, and knee with respect to each other, to the body as a whole, and to the external environment.  Proprioception helps us to walk around without looking at our feet, and to avoid swinging our arms into the wall.

A description of the problem

A simplified version of the Goenka philosophy is that interoception is running the show of our lives, often subconsciously; it is thus to our advantage to pay more attention to it.  Therefore the Goenka body scan exercise emphasizes interoception, not proprioception.  This is difficult, because—remarkably—our proprioception overwhelms our interoception.  Hence, the interoceptive awareness developed in meditation can be disorienting and even unsettling: see for example descriptions on this site of "balloon head", the homunculus, and "body distortions".  (From the perspective of the body scan, it is really our proprioception that's distorted, not our interoception.)

In my body scan experience, the tendency to confuse interoception with proprioception has manifested itself in two main ways:

1. Looking for body sensations by moving the gaze, instead of feeling the body sensations directly (for example, gazing to the right when I'm trying to feel sensations in my right hand).
2. Confusing the sense of movement through the body (which is proprioceptive, or, worse, a visualization) with the felt body sensations.  (This is especially a problem during "sweeping".)

Strategies

Some of the strategies for addressing this confusion are well-known, and involve physical stillness:

• Keep the gaze still.  You can (and should) feel sensations in any part of the body without moving your eyes.
• Keep the body still.  Any body movement brings proprioception into the foreground.

Less well-known (or, at least, less publicly discussed) involve simplifying the body-scan mechanics, so that any confusion is easier to catch:

• Concentrate on individual points of sensation, not on lines, areas, or volumes.
• Move from one point of sensation to another by discrete steps, not by continuous movements.  In particular, don't sweep.
• Practice sensing larger steps before smaller steps.

Drills

One drill I practice before taking on the full body scan is to jump between the sensations in the left and right index fingers, making sure that the body and eyes are relaxed.  (MCTB has a similar exercise, but emphasizing speed of perception; I'm emphasizing correctness of technique.)  One can perform the same drill with any two points of sensation on the body.

I wonder if Daniel's description of "speeding up perception" isn't the same thing as "slowing down of thoughts" because that's more how it feels to me. I can see how you could view it either way and get the same result. The benefit of the latter to me is it doesn't introduce an element of the "effort" involved in "doing" something (speeding up perception.) or maybe I'm over thinking it. lol. 

Brian, I appreciate this comment.  I believe that the Goenka instructions are also intended to decouple perception from conceptualization, and to minimize the latter.  In my experience, the body scan still requires a lot of effort, though it is not of the weightlifting type, or even of the conventional perceptual training type.  I'm going to write more about this next.

Perceiving without conceptualizing

Introduction

For the vipassana body scan, Goenkaji instructs the meditator to feel a body sensation, and to observe that it is changing (the characteristic of anicca); once this is done, one moves to the next sensation, and repeats the process.

Anicca and nippapañca

Goenkji says that the body scan trains the meditator's awareness and equanimity.  In my experience, this is true, but incomplete.  The body scan is also an exercise in nippapañca: conceptual nonproliferation.

The observation of change, and change alone, develops nippapañca.  Implicitly, the meditator should not conceptualize the structure of the sensation.  Change is the only characteristic to observe: the type, intensity, pleasantness, and other dimensions of the sensation make no difference.  Also implicitly, the meditator should not develop an elaborate taxonomy of change.  If I notice that the sensation in this moment is different in any way from the sensation previously, then I have observed change, and can move on.

Comparison to other perceptual training exercises: the risk of papañca

The opposite of nippapañca is papañca, conceptual proliferation.  To those of us who identify with our intellects, papañca is an immense psychological danger that wreaks havoc with our time and energy.  In many other types of perceptual training exercises (including some other meditation techniques), the risk of going down the papañca rabbit hole is much greater.

For example, my music education and subsequent professional work emphasized ear-training and transcription (notating recorded music).  While transcribing, if I wasn't careful, I would try to capture every minute musical detail in writing.  There was a certain intellectual seduction in applying finer and finer distinctions of dynamics, phrasing, tempo, and so on, but this was generally a distraction from the work of producing "good-enough" transcriptions for flesh-and-blood musicians.  Similarly, after I returned to school to study math, I had to be careful not to papañcify every math problem.  Again, refined analysis was interesting, but essentially a waste of time and energy, since my main goal was simply to solve the problems correctly and turn in the problem sets on time.

So, take the meditation instruction seriously: perceive body sensation, observe change, and starve off your concepts.

"starve off your concepts", I love this. Thank you!

Thank you for reading, Tyler!

To add some context, Goenkaji himself uses similar language when discussing the causal link between reactivity (saṅkhāra) and consciousness (viññāṇa).  The Goenka tradition emphasizes this link as the focal point of fruitful meditation practice.  One may cherry-pick "saṅkhāranirodhā viññāṇanirodho" ("When choices cease, consciousness ceases") from the Paṭiccasamuppādasutta in support of the argument, keeping in mind that dependent origination is a can of worms.

Introduction [2025-10-27]

It's time for an update.  Here's my plan:

• To follow up on the notes about routine and goals from 2025-09-12/13.
• To reflect on social support, including discussion board interactions through DhO and NeurotechX.
• To jot down some notes on meditative experience, now that the field of experience is more stable and familiar.
• To pin down some thoughts on EEG analysis that have been floating around for a while.  (These remain conjectures and descriptions of challenges, but at least they're informed by some conversations with meditators and neuroscientists, as well as some more personal experiments.)

My goal is to write about 1 h./day for the next week.

Routine update: practicing while traveling [2025-10-27]

At the beginning of this month, I took a three-week trip to East Asia (Seoul, Qingdao, Beijing and Hong Kong) to visit some friends.  I had never been to Korea or China before.  I wanted to be flexible enough to enjoy the novelty of travel while also maintaining enough self-care to avoid dysregulation.  (I've been acutely depressed in the past, so I take this risk seriously.)  Finding the right balance is more of an art than a science, especially when traveling somewhere unfamiliar.  Still, it's pretty obvious from my past experience what combination of bad habits (inc. lack of good habits) will lead to suffering.  So: I tried to keep up the meditation, exercise, and sleep as best I could, while doing my best with everything else.

Fortunately, maintaining a meditation practice in an unfamiliar, busy environment is not too difficult if you're willing to look a little strange to others.  Just sit down, close your eyes, and get to work.  In Korea and China, at least, no one will bother you.  On this trip, I didn't have my usual gear (seiza bench and big zafu), but it's probably good to mix up one's sitting arrangement anyway.  Big East Asian Buddhist temples are not great places to meditate, because there are too many tourists (including local ones); also, the public-facing tradition emphasizes devotional practice rather than contemplative practice (completely analogously to what one experiences in a Western cathedral).  Smaller temples are a better bet.  On my last day in Seoul, I found a spare, quiet zen meditation room on the first story of a two-story temple complex.  Meditating there felt very good indeed.

(Long airplane rides are a good opportunity for a mini-retreat.  Taipei airport even has a cute Buddhist meditation room.)

I was generally able to pay my Goenka dues by maintaining 2 h./day of practice while abroad.  Now that I'm home, I'm back to 3--4 h./day.

Diet [2025-10-28]

Habits are more interesting to me than conceptual frameworks and abstract philosophies.  It's easy to talk about enlightenment, but how does one actually eat in an enlightened way?  What sort of food, and how much?  How many meals, when, and with whom?  How do you balance ethical, nutritional, and social concerns. . . especially when you're hungry?

What sort of food?  I grew up as an omnivore in an omnivorous family.  I'm from the West Coast, so we ate some veggies with our meat, but meat was definitely the main course.  About ten years ago, I started a gradual transition to vegetarianism, first giving up red meat, then white meats, then seafood.  Earlier this year, I gave up eggs.  It had gradually dawned on me that mindful vegetarianism is better than a meat-based diet for health, the environment, and for the wellbeing of animals.  The more dietary changes I make, the more clearly I can see this.  I have been surprised by how easy it is to adjust to each new, reduced diet, showing that old, ingrained habits can be due simply to lack of imagination.

I aspire to veganism, but I'm not there yet.  I'm now at the point where the dietary changes actually feel like sacrifices; thus, adjustments continue, but have slowed down.  Up until this year, I was ovo-lacto.  I like eating eggs, but giving them up wasn't too hard.  Giving up dairy is harder.  I've started to switch from cow's milk to plant milks, but I still often use cow's milk for tea and coffee.  Yogurt and especially kefir are hard for me to give up.  I hope that my renunciation of dairy will continue, inspired by others who have made similar changes (including one of my co-servers on a Goenka retreat earlier this year).

How much food, when, and with whom?  Inspired by Goenka retreat insights, I've been experimenting with two meals per day plus a snack after exercise.  In the Goenka retreats, old students abstain from the evening snack.  In my second retreat, I was initially extremely resentful about this, but eventually I figured out how to eat a correctly-sized midday meal (too small and I'd be too hungry during the evening sits; too large and I'd feel sick in the afternoon).  I also realized that my evening meals in everyday life were generally eaten out of habit or for social entertainment, and not for sustenance.  I generally feel fine without eating in the evening.  My weight is stable, though lower than I'm used to, and my energy is relatively stable as well. 

(Speaking of energy, a side note on caffeine.  I gave up caffeine before my first retreat, assuming correctly that the Goenka coffee would be lousy.  I endured several days of nasty withdrawal headaches.  I had several useful insights in my subsequent post-retreat and caffeine-free state.  First, I'm naturally anxious, so I should be cautious about even relatively mild stimulant use.  Second, if I'm feeling tired, I should probably go to bed earlier and get more sleep.  Third, a lot of my infatuation with math, programming, and other fiddly technical stuff is tied to my caffeine habit: it's "fun" to get buzzed and then tinker.  Better mathematicians than I have been addicted to coffee and worse: consider Erdős, who had an amphetamine habit.  Fourth, Goenka-style anapana and vipassana meditation are much more pleasant without the mind racing.  The goal of the practice is not to experience pleasant sensations all the time, but one should be aware of the price to pay for unskillful consumption choices.)

Briefly (since I'm already over my time quota for today), some notes on diet during recent travel.  It's hard to be strictly lacto-veg in Korea and China without putting in more effort than I was willing to make as a first-time tourist.  I compromised by moving my dietary goalposts to pescatarianism, which is an easier target.  Even so, strict pescatarianism still requires some effort, especially in China, where tofu and veggies are often braised in meat sauce; I was even loose about this.  In addition to the challenge of finding "vegetarian-enough" food, I had the social challenge of eating out regularly with friends who are all meat-eaters and generally eating for pleasure.  For me, setting boundaries in social eating situations is difficult: I want to advocate for myself and find options that are acceptable to me, without feeling like I'm a killjoy or a complete pain in the ass.  A goal for any future East Asia travel is to be a little stricter about diet---to go further out of my way for a stricter veg meal, and to feel OK being a bit more of a pain in the ass when dining with friends.

Social support [2025-10-29/30]

My goal today is to discuss two forms of social support for meditation practice: first, weekly sits; second, discussion boards (including the DhO).

Weekly sits: I'm currently trying to attend a one-day (9 am to 4 pm) Goenka vipassana course in person every weekend.  It's worth it.  One day of serious practice on Saturday or Sunday has a positive effect on my perception, mood, and ability to absorb stress during the workweek.  The social aspect of the one-day courses is a little odd, especially if one is used to meditation centers as community centers, with tea and conversation and such.  In the Goenka one-day courses, meditators are unlikely to hang out and chitchat afterwards unless they're friends; most just come for the practice and then disperse.  Sometimes I enjoy the complete lack of pressure to socialize, and sometimes I'm motivated to reach out to vipassana friends in the neighborhood.  (I'm not yet sure how I feel this week.)

Discussion boards: DhO.  I started exploring the DhO more seriously after my second retreat, especially after reaching out to Daniel through the EPRC to discuss energetic phenomena in EEG recordings.  (We had a conversation in September.)  I've never used discussion boards consistently, so this has been an experiment for me.

General observations so far: broadly, the DhO seems to serve two very different purposes for its members.  On one hand, it's a forum for community support and encouragement, focusing on the details of day-to-day meditation practice and experience.  On the other, it's a site for meditation theory, amorphously defined.  Many of the DhO members are proficient meditators, write well about their own practices, and give good practical advice to others.  They are generally not also proficient scientists or scholars (and they have not trained as such), which is evident in most theoretical conversations.  This situation reflects Daniel's particular attributes: MCTB is a rich, idiosyncratic biography of meditation practice and experience, but it is not a work of science or scholarship.  (And Daniel himself is not a scientist or scholar, though he collaborates with such professionals through the EPRC.)

I have found a couple gems on DhO:

1. Smiling Stone has several thoughtful, well-written analyses of Goenka vipassana practice, including the long thread Some views on the technique in the Goenka tradition and the long book review Insight in Perspective by Daniel Stuart: a review.  The interweaving of personal experiential detail and historical inquiry is very much to my taste.  It's a relief to know that there are other Goenka vipassana yogis out there who love the practice, but not the rigidity of the institution.
  
2. I have also benefitted from Kaio Shimanski's Navigating the Electric Stream.  Kaio's extensive journal entries integrate EEG analyses into meditation practice in a meaningful, realistic way.  Kaio is actually sharing real data and trying to interpret it, which is very hard to do (and therefore not actually done that much).  The book includes some practical guidance for EEG meditation metrics and interpretation that I couldn't find elsewhere, and it pointed me to Steffan Iverson's work, particularly the Meditation Monitor App and this AI + EEG + Meditation study.  Kaio's style is experimental is a way that I like.  His work motivated me to buy a Muse (which I should have done before buying a Ganglion earlier this year, but I didn't know any better), to start experimenting on my own.  I plan to contribute some of my own data and analyses, and maybe port some of the code to Python.

More discussion boards: NeuroTechX.  I don't remember how I found NeuroTechX, but I signed up to their Slack page a few months ago.  This is a good resource for nuts-and-bolts questions about EEG signal processing. I've received some helpful feedback from Cédric Cannard about the challenges of EEG infraslow wave analysis, which are substantial.  I've also had to grapple with some deep skepticism from professional neuroscientists about the EEG meditation studies that I find most impactful, especially Paul Dennison's "Jhana Consciousness" research (focusing on infraslow waves and energetics) and Richard Davidson et al.'s work on high-amplitude gamma.  However frustrating it may be, it's important to maintain some communication with non-meditating neuroscientists about meditation research, since they're likely to be more skeptical than proficient meditators.  I'd like to believe that Dennison's work is correct (mostly because I'm convinced that I can feel the infraslow waves directly), but I'm trying to stay open to all viewpoints right now: I just don't have enough data or expertise yet to stick my neck out.  Unfortunately, no one on NeuroTechX seems to have a serious meditation practice.  Also, the day-to-day startup and AI noise is so obnoxious that it's painful to browse the site, so for now I've stopped participating.

Experiential account of my current meditation practice [2025-10-31/11-03/11-04]

Introduction

I wrote above that the Goenka instruction boils down to the following: "perceive body sensation, observe change, and starve off your concepts."  I maintain that the goal of the practice is not to analyze the structure of observed phenomena (and the instruction is designed, ingeniously, to make this possible!).  I imagine a master Goenka vipassana practitioner simply resting in the flow of sensation without the stress of any analytical coagulation.

Well, I'm not there yet: I do notice structures, and I am inclined to their analysis (though less and less during formal practice, fortunately).  I want to share some of these analyses as a record for myself and others, particularly other Goenka vipassana practitioners.  The point is not to suggest that my experiences are "correct" or "good", but to give snapshots of the wild experiential territory that Goenka vipassana has opened up for me.

Brief background

Although I want to focus on what I'm experiencing in day-to-day meditation practice right now, it will be helpful to provide brief descriptions of the practice framework and on my own practice history.

Practice framework: I am committed to the Goenka meditation framework of body sensation as ground-level experiential truth: "One has to work with whatever reality has manifested itself now, whatever one experiences within the framework of one's own body" [source].  So, no mantras, no chanting, no verbalizations, no visualizations.  My commitment isn't for philosophical reasons, but because I've tried various other techniques, and Goenka's works the best for me.

Practice history:

Prior to my first 10-day course, I had an eclectic, inconsistent meditation practice for about ten years.  During the periods I was practicing, I generally sat for 30 minutes to an hour per day.  Meditation was a good habit for me, and I enjoyed it, but I had no commitment to serious practice.

That changed last January, when I attended my first Goenka 10-day course.  I had several extraordinary experiences there.  On the second day, my vision stabilized, and I felt like I was seeing things clearly (in all respects) for the first time.  On the fifth day, I fell into a vibrating tunnel of white light.  On the seventh day, I discovered a knot in my right shoulder that was in a tight feedback loop with emotional stress; upon discovery, the knot unclenched itself in a tremendous energetic discharge.  On the ninth night, during yogic sleep, I felt a 1 Hz vibration in my forehead.  This was more than enough to convince me to practice as much as I could.

After the first 10-day course, I had a feverish period of practice and study.  I established a more intensive daily practice, committing to the standard Goenka regimen (one hour in the morning and another in the evening).  I started taking advantage of the vipassana resources in the Bay Area, particularly the half-day and one-day courses.  The adhitthana ("strong determination", i.e. fixed posture) sittings got easier.  Physical changes continued, correcting some chronic alignment problems.  Some recurring neurotic tension in my left foot dissipated, allowing me jog again a few times a week, with minimal discomfort.

Although I felt grateful for the transformation I had experienced during the vipassana course, I had some anxiety about being in such unfamiliar mental and physical territory.  I was unsure whether the positive sensory and emotional effects of the practice would last.  Also, although I was committed to Goenkaji's exercise, I was not at all committed to his theory of how it works.  So, I started doing some research.  I learned a little about EEG signal processing and bought a Ganglion.  I found Paul Dennison's Jhāna Consciousness, which remains the most helpful scientific framework for my particular set of experiences (but presented through the lens of a very different meditation practice).  I reached out to some other researchers to get answers to basic neuroscience questions.

In June, I volunteered as a server for a 10-day course.  The vipassana retreats are run by a small full-time staff and rotating group of volunteers, who are there to "develop their pāramīs".  I had been more active with volunteer work during an earlier period of mental health recovery and unemployment, but had gradually fallen out of the habit after I started working again.  At the retreat center, I spent 10 days washing dishes for 90 meditation students.  It felt good to have some simple manual labor after a few months of brain-racking.  I liked the other servers, and I enjoyed helping the community in a simple, direct way.

The volunteering made me happy, but I was fried by the physical exertion.  I took it easy for a couple months, then packed up for my second 10-day course.  It was a smoother course than the first.  Pacing was much easier: I could exercise some control over the depth and intensity of experience (something not discussed at all by Goenkaji in the course recordings).  The second course was less wild, but still provided rich insights, especially related to body energy.  The highlight: on Day 6, I finally pinpointed the source of the 1 Hz oscillation that I had been feeling for the last six months.  It was my heart EMF.  Resting attention in the heart center released a tremendous amount of energy, and led to a feeling of deep integration between brain and heart energetic activity.

Since the second Goenka course, I have been investing even more time into daily formal practice.  I now typically practice 3–4 hours per day.  I am also experimenting with some other routine changes, based on the Goenka course daily schedule (see "Routine snapshot" [2025-09-12] above for details).

Daniel Ingram's work and practice had been on my mind for several months.  I appreciated his openness about weird and wild meditation experiences, and his advocacy work through the EPRC.  He also has some helpful insights into the Goenka vipassana tradition.  In September, I reached out to him to discuss some of my own experiences and research.  To prepare for our meeting, I started participating in the DhO, and exploring the site's posts in more depth.  (See the "Social support" [2025-10-29/30] entry above for details.)  We had a productive Zoom conversation in September (I won't write much about it here, because I am still digesting the details).

That gets me caught up to the present day.

Description of sensations as analysis framework [2025-11-04]

I do want to analyze some meditation experiences, preferably sooner rather than later.  But how should I go about this?  What's the most helpful framework for analysis?  Above (see "Perceiving without conceptualizing", 2025-09-18): I emphasized Goenkaji's use of anicca as a conceptual annihilator.  This is only half the story, however, because he also encourages the meditator to observe the felt sensations themselves in precise detail:

• the type of sensation: pain, temperature, pressure, texture, (electromagnetic) vibration, etc.;
• physical parameters of the sensation: intensity, location, extent, frequency, etc.

So, the meditator learns to decompose sensory experience into its elements, while also observing those elements as constantly changing and essenceless.

A remark on DhO anti-Goenka bias and analysis tendencies: Some on DhO may consider themselves in the "MCTB camp" (open-minded, transparent, and pragmatic), while imagining a radically different "Goenka camp" (closed-minded, obscurantist, cultish).  If you've had a bad experience at a Goenka course, I understand why you would feel negatively about the Goenka institution.  But please keep in mind that the experiential analysis recommendations for Goenka vipassana and MCTB are similar: both emphasize the utility and efficacy of sensation analysis.  To quote MCTB (p. 567): "stick to very simple, straightforward, clear, ordinary sensate terms to describe your practice" (italics mine).  You should be able to describe your meditation sensations without reference to maps and dharma terminology.  (Without pointing fingers here, it would be nice to see more bare-bones sensory analysis on DhO, which tends instead towards rather fruitless philosophical, psychological, and conceptual analyses.)  MCTB and Goenka vipassana's shared emphasis on sensation analysis is not surprising, given that they are both flavors of Burmese insight practice.