I and my Skype partner have been doing the following practice daily for several months now. My partner developed a program that rings a bell and then announces what we are going to do that segment. Each segment is 8 minutes long. It goes like this: 1. Bell, 4 foundations noting. 2. Bell, variation of mahamudra where the choices are "accepting" when phenomena are the foreground, "listening" when the void is the foreground and "openness" when void and phenomena are both in the foreground. 3. Bell, thoughts only with qualifiers such as "not useful". 4. Bell, binary noting saying "imbedded" or "not" as in not embedded. 5. Bell, self inquiry. 6. Bell, binary noting with "accepting" or "aversion". Here we are trying to get at deep aversion we might miss otherwise.
The above excercise has been very useful to me and moved my practice ahead significantly. This is not our main practice which for me is shikantaza. We change the segments from time to time. Any suggestions on other segments we could try? Comments?
Jack
