Hello sweet dharma pals, 

Imma try a practice log, though it will probably include lots of non-formal practice because it's hard for me to separate out those things. 

Not sure if I'll keep it up, we shall see. open to feedback and questions!

 

11/1-11/2/2025
Before going to sleep, the heart sutra mantra came into my head and i let it happen. i heard a strange voice say a mean thing to me and it scared me a lot, because i know schizophrenic people with mean voices in their head and i was scared i would end up like that. it was good to be reminded of how spooked i can get of my own mind, as I contemplate doing a solo fire kasina retreat, despite duncan barford’s suggestion on his podcast not to do such a thing unless very confident. i did what he mentioned daniel ingram suggested to him when he was spooked on retreat, and i just attended back to my mantra and paid no mind to the scariness. fell asleep. 
Dream wave 1 was all surfacey, inadequacy, etc. with some waking into spiritual presence and accompanying fear. i voice recorded that dream only because i knew it could help further dreaming.
dream wave 2 was more interesting. became lucid enough to try to use the opportunity to attempt maximize sexual pleasure, of course this didn’t go that well but i had various experiences with dream sensations mixing with sleeping body sensations which gave small insights into the power of mind to create whatever sensation regardless of what is actually happening to the body. getting through that phase i then talked to various teachers, one of which i asked “what should i do with this opportunity (of lucid dreaming)” in asking i remembered i didn’t need to do anything, just be aware. and so the dream took me with it from then on. i was no longer moving my body, just floating through space or space floating through me. i had some more intense fear being porous to spiritual presence etc. and remembered haku from spirited away how he was dauntless in the face of ubaba’s anger, all because his heart was steady with love. and so i cultivated that in myself but this lead to waking.
my sister had her first lucid dream and told me about it. 
my whole day was marked by a sense of vague confusion and off-kilterness. the fact that the clocks had suddenly changed an hour was exactly representative of this slight offness. strong resistance to meditation. very caught in the “what should i do” type of suffering, mildly throughout day. stayed quite kind and good natured to myself on the surface throughout, even as there were battles of not-enoughness going on deeper down. 
45 min seated, 15 laying, 15 minutes asleepsat under the tree in the woods. i had no method, just doing nothing, being aware. i struggled with sleepiness. at some point i stuck a fallen maple leaf in my nostril. i liked looking at the sky and kept opening my eyes. I was very unfocused, and feeling a general uneasiness throughout. decided to lay at some point. i really don’t know what i was up to out there lol. 
35 min seated fire kasina with heart sutra mantra
in evening i was typing up some notes from my first retreat over a year ago and then i went on DhO for first time n a while and then decided to start this log. all that made me suddenly interested in meditating…first 15 minutes had comfortable body sensations and some ok concentrarion following the dot until it was a pretty clean dark eye shaped aperture, had never actually seen that dark shape so clearly. ive rarely worked with a mantra so im just playing with it at this point and it often distracts from the visual. also noticed some thoughts, kinda selfish ego-y stuff. this was very normal but was interesting is that i had only noticed these thoughts clearly for the first time in that first retreat. in reading those old notes i had wondered “did i stop noticing these parts of myself or did i just get to know them so well that they arent even noteworthy” 15 minutes of meditation proved it was more so the latter. anyways the next 20 minutes were a slog. couldn’t focus on visual, decided to drop mantra at some point. was uncomfortable physically, mentally avoidant of the practice and eventually got sleepy. there was some little peek of equaniminity in that agitated time, like a little glimmer of full soft acceptance, like a deep breath, and then it was gone as soon as it came!

11/2-11/3Dream wave 1 was anger but turned more into a fear of rejection/abandonment by the group, the sense that I had fucked up and now no one would like me. Part of continual message that I have built up a story of morality as means to be accepted, that i have to be good to be loved. i was very childlike and reactive in the dream, giving me more ready access to these emotions which are under tight control when awake---Dream wave 2 was another lucid mishmash, so mishmashy that when waking i thought it might be good to get a good book on dream yoga since lucidity is happening so much and maybe i could make better use of those moments. there was a similar  sexual stuff, then what to do?, then “letting go” and some strong vibratory experiences but all in all on waking i didnt really know much of what had happened. ---30 min seated michael taft, “deep non-dual investigation”
caught the beginning of a michael taft video. i have kailin on this forum to thank for knowing about him. ive watched a couple of his videos and like him. so thanks kailin, if you’re reading this! the beginning was partly movement excercises which were nice way to start the day. then some mantra and then the very beginning of this meditation. he does a good job of guiding into a very laid back non-doing type meditation which i feel very drawn to at the moment. its nice to have a teacher lead it though because often im pretty undisciplined in my non doing (you may recall me sticking a leaf in my nostril for example). anyways, it was nice to be walked into a more empty, non-thinking, non-grasping space for a brief time and start exploring the body and “who feels the body” etc. when doing this i suddenly hazily recalled i had had some fruitiony type experience in my lucid dream. only could remember the feelings, no particulars. had to stop meditation to get ready for work. 
——
no more formal practice today. spent the day mulching beds and listening to podcasts. passport to hades podcast by duncan barford and alan chapman, where they ostensibly discuss the work of aleister crowley but much of the time its just them hanging out and talking about various ideas. alan chapman has a teaching called magea which he is always offering bits and pieces of. notions that we are in an underworld, in hades, that there is another more perfect world. there’s a lot alan chapman says which i sort of can’t make sense of. in general its nice to enter into their world for a while, one which is spiritual and magical and non-dualish, it awakes those qualities and perceptions in me. I feel resolved to be sure to cultivate those perceptions, those experiences, that aspect of reality. questions arise like how alan chapman’s teaching does or does not align with gotama’s teaching in the pali suttas. i often wonder if when people teach of forms of union with the divine or in particular when chapman says that we have a choice at some point between annihilation and continuation of consciousness, i wonder about that first pali sutta i read, i think its called the root of all things, where the buddha basically says people will identify or delight or separate from anything but they haven’t seen through to the end of it. what appeals to me in gotama’s teaching is a sort of non-choice, a way in which we can stand nowhere and take no sides, etc. but i think its quite likely im misunderstanding chapman because he uses very strange words sometimes to describe things. one thing that duncan barford mentioned was in his meditation now he felt no distinction or hierarchy between consciousness and unconsciousness. something in that struck me. i don’t know what to make of it. --also listened to ram dass talking over the years about love, the path of the heart. i feel very drawn to that path. i listened to the podcast after quickly searching and sending it to my sister when she listened to a dream i had where i encountered a being like maharaji that personified love. and she expressed wanting to learn more about that love. so i figured ram dass was the guy for that and found that podcast. so i listened to it today. it was nice. particularly his post stroke teachings which are very slow and old and wise and he’s just saying, “love everything, love it all”, and he just is so pure in that attempt to do so, you can feel it in his words. --i do wonder again, thinking of a pali suttah where sariputta helps a brahmin get to the divine abodes before death, and then the buddha says bro there was still work to do there, why’d you not bring him further along? and it sounds really amazing to dwell in love, and its hard to imagine a higher attainment, yet it seems there is. --and then duncan barford’s podcast occult experiments in the home. i listened to him talk about his journey of awakening. it was nice to hear his description of first fruitions and what he took as stream entry, it gave me a sense that no matter what attainment i may think i have, the fruition experiences ive had are so purely wonderful and i am so grateful for them. i felt like i could just rejoice in those experiences without the usual puzzling over what they were or what they meant on the path etc. --i also feel curious about the devotional and magical practices he and chapman used in their spiritual awakening processes. i just find magic so fun and exciting, id love to weave it through my vipassana. --and he also talked about christina feldman saying to him that he underestimated awakening (he was on daniel ingrams model) and that she defined it as the “implosion of all sanskaras”. this is much more similar to goenka’s way of talking, and for the first time in a while i felt happy to embrace a higher bar for enlightenment. its not to say i dont want to realize the non-dual type four path daniel ingram type realization. it seems very beneficial and so far it has been wonderful, but theres something intuitively powerful and important about that uprooting of deep mysterious karmic formations, many of which might not be touched on that non-dual journey. --today in general i seem energetic, resilient, curious, with some extra spaciousness. was playing music with my dear friend and he was being quite judgemental and critical in a way he often is and it was unpleasant but there was a surpising amount of space around it. like i felt so much lack of confidence and not-enoughness at times, but i just was able to be with that and kinda feel outside and around it while feeling and the suffering was greatly reduced and the time in general was very smooth and good and i could see how much of this not-enoughness was coming from him, and it all just moved along. and the love really shone through. same later when we watched an old video together with my partner and it brought up lots of wrought feeling from our childhood and i kept laughing in weird forced ways and i could feel how this pained me, how i was laughing, and yet i just let myself laugh, and it was all ok, and love shone through it all. these were not profound feeling moments at all, but its nice to write it out and notice what was happening in this background sort of way. and then before he left i was making him laugh doing funny voices and that is the BEST--but this is all rather non-practicey. please moderator let me know if this is not okay type of journaling for this forum! its been good so far to have this context for putting my experiences into words. 
all the best to all y’all!
-bubby soup

all my spacing just disappeared on posting. sorry if thats hard to read one big block of text

Glad you're enjoying Michael Taft! I've found his non-doing style a nice complement to hardcore vibrate-the-world-apart MCTB style vipassana. His typical guided meditation structure is move the body -> build concentration -> main meditation (usually some nondual/vipashyana/inquiry practice). I've gotten a lot of inspiration from the techniques he teaches.

 

11/4Didn’t keep track of dreams. 
50 min seated michael taft, “deep non-dual investigation”
started this one again. it seems good to keep gently urging my mind towards realizing emptiness. i hadnt looked directly at thoughtstream in a while which was inspiring i may do that more. i think i identify a lot with my thoughts accidentally so its good to witness them directly and watch them kind of fall apart and know that in those moments i cant pretend its thoughts that are experiencing stuff because the thoughts are what im experiencing. i would say overall this meditation was quite humbling and disappointing, feeling such a gap between my experience and non-dual realization. good of course to be humbled and disappointed in this regard. 
Not much to report from this day other than noticing some classic egoey jealousy type things coming up in morning. Later noticing classic friction in day to day relating with partner but in awe at the spaciousness surrounding the friction. Discovered an old piece of paper where I wrote out what i was doing with my life. this was pre-dharma path. I was almost brought to tears with how much more peaceful I am inside now. I can remember the feeling of writing things like that. I was so completely bought into the doing of things while at the same time having a deep vague sense that there was something wrong with how I perceived all this doing. I am so grateful for the path, for dharma.


11/5Dreams were not especially interesting. 
50 min seated Noting Vipassana etc. 
Felt inspired, maybe by writing this blog, to get back into some more classic moment to moment high powered vipassana. I kinda even forgot what that was or how to do that, I’ve been kind of chilling and allowing so hard since mid-summer. I read some MCTB chapters and perused some random Daniel Ingram content to get more oriented in that approach. Then I resolved to note as best I could. First 15 minutes was pretty straightforward. Oriented myself around breath sensation, remembering the rising/falling beginning instruciton. I’m a Goenkan so I’m not that experienced with noting so I sometimes get tripped up on what exactly to do, but yeah I just kept trying my best to notice sensations as they arose. Things were quite vibratory, and when this happens I just follow the pulses as my “notes”. I think this is normal? My mind was not very concentrated and would wander intermittently, with me only noting it a second or two after and not really being clear on the sensation of the thought. After that 15 minutes the question arose, what is mind wandering? What does it mean to not be aware? This prompted me to abandon my noting and instead I tried to let my mind wander. I tried to wander it. I couldn’t do that, and additionally if it did wander, my attention would snap out of the wandering, even though I was supposedly trying to let it wander. I think it was this point, that I was supposedly trying to wander, yet was instead pulling myself back into not-wandering, that started to prod a very strong anatta vibe into me, the sense that whatever it was that brought attention back away from wandering was not me. the weight of this was very strong, so much so that I believe there may have been a fruition a-coming. there was this kind of satisfying unwordable knowing forming, but it gave way to a kind of fear and desire combo, something gripped and held and another yearned and grasped and so no fruition.  I kept playing with attempting to not be aware, and to wander my mind. At some point the thoughts came that mind wandering is just not knowing that you’re thinking when you’re thinking. I had literally just read Daniel Ingram talking about mindfulness and the noting technique as knowing what phenonmena are occuring, so it was kind of funny how obvious this was, but I hadn’t really ever articulated mind-wandering in this basic sense to myself before. Dreams are like mind wandering, and lucidity is the mindfulness, knowing it is a dream. At some point I got restless, At some points sleepy.