Author: Crazywisdom
Forum: Dharma Overground Discussion Forum

Hi! This thread is just to introduce myself and my practice. I am not realy asking about much in particular but if you have any input I`d be glad to hear it.

I came across Daniels Blook through a tip on thetaobums.com and was blown back by it. I realy apreaceated the way he critiqued a lot of the faulty models of enlightenment. It actualy made me want to become enligthened a lot more than before because the more extraordinary models scared me and felt inhumane and unrealistic and did not seem to match up to the behaviour of enlightened people under closer inspection.

I was not at all aware that the Dark Night was such an expected part of the path. I thought it was a rare exeption. This made me deceide not to do insight practice at all untill several years from now when I feel that I have the personal and energetic balance I think is important for me to achieve now and I judge my relationship with a partner and possible children to be able to handle the me undergoing the process.

Doing yoga has done a lot for giving me the balance I seek personaly but I still feel I have a long way to go and I suffer much more than normal whenever I experience instability of any kind. So my goal for the next few years is to use yoga, mediation and other energy practices for al round personal development not enlightenment.

I have struggled a lot when trying to meditate. For a while I got drowsy and fel into transe like states that did not feel beneficial (my teacher called it mentall falling). After overcoming that I either get way too much activity in the crown or third eye or loads of energy streaming up from the root overcooking my brain.

Author: Crazywisdom

Any one of these messes up my daily life so my teacher and I concluded that I was so imbalanced to begin with that I needed to work on my body first to make things flow where they are intended. I am so much in my head that a few minutes of meditation rushes too much energy there. Doing Iyengar yoga and Pilates seems to smooth these things out very well and I can now meditate a bit without these things happening. Yoga Nidra also works great because it starts with a body scan that distributes my awareness all over the body.

So the goal is to keep doing these things untill I can do anapanisati regulary and for long periods of time without energetic problems occuring. Once I am there I want to work on Jhanas and see where I get. Because the goal for the next few years is balance and personal development I also want to do some other meditations that add something with regards to this and not just focus on getting as far as possible with Jhanas. I want to master the microcosmic orbit because I think it will be a good way for me to work more directly with my energy centers without going deep into chakra meditation. I also want to do Mantak CHias fusion of the five elements because it is great for emotional and energetic balance and does some basic work on opening and controling all the basic channels. Beyond that I am consifering the sceleton meditation as taught by Bill Bodri. As I understand it it very quickly gives you access to deeply concentrated states and in addition it does a lot to more than many other meditations to generate energy and it works especialy well with the bone marrow. As important Taoists consider bone marrow to be I figure that since I have time to spread my efforts a bit it seems wise to use a meditation that gives benefits there in addition to working on concnetration. I already do inner smile and healing sounds and plan to keep doing them. They are excellent for emotional work while also doing good energy work.

Author: Crazywisdom

I am also going to India for five weeks this summer for intensive Iyengar training and undergoing thorough ayurvedic cleanings and treatments.

Beyond this I am also planning to do some body work and otherwise working on my mind and body. It realy feels like the thing to do now and should create a stability and provide a "cleansing" that would make my ride through insight territory a good bit smoother I think.

I am strongly considering doing a retreat in may. First there is 4 days of shamatha which can be taken as a seperate retreat, and then there is 4 days of taoist breathing which also can be taken as a separate retreat. I am feeling that yoga/pilates/yoga/bodyworknidra is harmonising my energy so much that I won`t have an energetic blow out on the retreat. I also think the at a retreat I would have enough time to work arround such problems if they occur. If that does not work the guy leading the retreat has lots of experience qith qigong and taoist practices and they are great at grounding so I think if a crisis occurs that I cannot get arround within my meditation I can spend the rest of the retreat doing qigong to get grounded.

The teacher is a guy called Ram Chatlani. I don`t realy know much about him. THe apeal was the combination of four days of purely shamatha meditation and the 4 days of just focusing on getting a stable 30 second breath. This is the retreat:

http://www.fire-horse.org/html/breathing.htm

http://www.fire-horse.org/html/retreats.htm

Author: Crazywisdom

The last thing to add is that although my attempts at meditation has had little success I am extreemly energy sensitive and have an ability to see minute things in my body. During meditation I have felt a lot of activity in the chakras and I often feel the microcosmic orbit and sometimes the macrocosmic orbit run by htemselves and I can quite easily activate accupoints just by bringing my awarenss to them. So I do think when I get my energy in balance and a reasonable level of concentration I can progress quite fast.

First, sounds like you are very into these things in a committed way. Second, you have lots of energetic experiences. Third, you seem to have run into issues of instability and are now hunting around sites like this one for answers. All of these point to having accessed the A&P and now being some sort of Dark Night meditator, in that you seem to have crossed the A&P at least once.

As to chi-gong/energy practices, all very interesting. Chelek on this site is the guy who did the most of that sort of thing that I know of. It will be interesting to see if he chimes in here, or you might send him a message.

As to how to proceed, there are many good paths, but it is basically that the more you do the more the various side effects may show up, though perhaps your attempts to mitigate them will be successful.

Let us know how it goes, as a perennial debate is how to get people through the Dark Night skillfully, and more data points help.

Author: Crazywisdom

Thank you for the input Daniel!

What you say makes a lot of sense with regards to what I have written. However, I am very certain that I have not crossed the A&P and that I am not in the Dark Night but that my problems are connected to my body being realy screwed up and full of psychosomatic issues that make my energy run the wrong places and that for the most part my feelings of instability are realted to this rather then the Dark Night. Yoga teachers, bodyworkers and accupuncturists that have looked at my body can explain to me fairly easily how my bodily issues translate into energetic issues. Working with the body the right way, doing Iyengar and Pilates for structuring it correctly, rolfing to get the fascia in place and bodyscaning to disperse the awareness evenly realy gives results and seem to do what is needed. Just the last few days I have been able to meditatie successfully. Because of what I have been doing my awareness is not so constricted to my head and so the energy does not flow only there and that prevents the crown and third eye from going nuts. That combined with placing my tongue at the rooth of the mouth and using the "zen" mudra with thumbs touching holding the hands in front of the Dan Tien, and working hard to keep my awareness in the stomach area has alowed me to have realy succesfull meditations in the last two days. Now my awareness is much more centered in the Dan Tien and that feels great in daily life as well. I`ve also started to understand more about regulating drowsniess and wakefulness by opening and closing the eyes and adjusting my posture. I still struggle a bit with what to do with my eyes but it still seems to work okey. Do you leave your eyes to do what they pleas or place them in certain positions. I was thaught to try to forget about them.

Author: Crazywisdom

The problem is they then tend to move arround a bit during different phases of the meditation and will often start looking into the third eye or up to the crown and this activates those areas a lot and gives me prolbems. Now I take care to eiterh have them stare down and forward or just straight forward. Down and forward seems to help with keeping the energy down but increases the risk of drowsiness. Forward is very awake and clear but can create some tension and makes more energy go towards the head but not so much as staring into the third eye.

Crazy Wisdom:
You make a number of references to energy imbalances at crown center and third eye and there is concern about these acting up. You note directing awareness to lower dan tien is helping to stabilize things. In my experience the back channel opened first – causing energy to build up in the head. Front channel lagged behind and remained a problem for some time. You seem to have found a solution (what I would recommend as well) so that's good. You might try slowly sweeping your hand from your forehead down to lower dan tien as a prop to help move energy down if it starts building up.

My own take on this comes from a Taoist meditative chi gong practice. At the heart of this practice is simply the cultivation of stillness (not the same as jhana practice). All the energy practices were techniques to assist in this central effort.

Maintaining a balance between energy work and stillness is important. They revolve around each other similar to insight and concentration practice in Buddhist tradition. Too much energy work can make you pretty wacky (Taoist technical term:-). You can bring up lots of stuff (karma, energy blockages, whatever you want to call it) that leads to mental agitation, emotional storms, etc. One of the great values of all these traditions we have is that they understand this dynamic. If you start throwing in lots of different techniques from different traditions you can really mess things up. In your posts you mention a half dozen or so different practices. So this is something to be aware of – too many cooks in the kitchen with the kitchen being your body and mind.

One thing for you to ponder is this: What are you looking for in these practices? What is important to you? At least some of the practices you are involved in - are not oriented toward 'all round personal development' – but rather to set you on a wild ride – worth it in the end but not always pleasant.

-Chuck

absolutely agree. doing more with less practices really helped my practice mature. it's a lot easier if you aren't having visions every time you try to go to sleep.

Author: Crazywisdom

Thanks for the advice Chelek. It is reasuring to hear that you would advice someting similar as what I am doing. I will try the slow hand thing. I definitively have a closed front channel. Getting energy up the back is easy, up the front works sort of and down the front takes massive concentration. This is one of the reasons I want to learn the orbit at some point. But for now is seems right to work on some even more fundamental stuff. Getting the body in order and getting a stable working shamatha meditation.


I was very intrigued by what you said about stilness being different from Jhana practice. Can you explain that a bit more?

The lack of balance between energy work and stilness seems to be one of the big faults in Mantak Chias system.

Author: Crazywisdom


I see your point about amount of different practices but i don`t think my aproach will actually be a mish mash of too many and incongruent practices. The way I want to do it is to keep Iyengar yoga as my practice for the body. I do pilates in addition now because it is quicker in building core muscle and training you to move from the center but this is a phase until I have gotten some decent core strength which will then be put to use and further enhanced in asanas. My core meditation will be Vipassana. Insight meditation for enlightenment once I embark on that but shamatha only for some years. The orbit is a prerequisite for Fusion of the five elements. My teacher who used to be a buddhist monk also teaches fusion and finds it works great with vipassana. The way I will do it is get the body solidly in order and get a fair amount of depth an concentration through shamata, then when it feels right I will set aside time to do fusion properly for a year or to in addition to some shamatha. Once mastered you can do fusion in 5-10 minutes and once you have done it thoroughly you don`t need to do it all the time. My teacher goes months before he feels he needs to do a little fusion to maintain the old effects. Fusion is very balancing psychologicly.

Author: Crazywisdom

At a certain point I might again cut down on shamatha with the breath and do sceleton meditation. I don`t and neither do my teacher see any reason why sceleton meditation should not mix well energeticly with my other practices. Because it does stuff for the bone marrow that other meditation does not it can make sense to do it for a while, then stop and sometimes do it again shortly to regain the full effects. Depth in my practice should not be suffering because of sceleton m. since it trains concetration just as well or better than breath based shamatha. So I will always maintain a core 80% effort on shamatha/vipassana and 80% or more on Iyengar yoga but will periodicly add stuff for particualr benefits that can be maintained with little effort later. I might for example reduce my yoga somewhat to make time for a period of iron shirt to build a realy strong root and then only do it from time to time. This is the model my teacher follows only that his core body practice is qigong. Yoga Nidra I only use now since meditation has not worked well and I needed to distrubute my awareness better. With the possible exception of the sceleton meditation I think these practices will give a lot of balance and personal growth although I am sure there will some wild rides as well.

Jhana involves a certain amount of 'doing'. We are directing our attention to the solidity side of things and then working at developing skill at moving up and down through the various levels of jhana and learning how to work with and deepen them.

The stillness practice may begin with activity – various types of energy work like microcosmic orbit, broad body sweeping practices, etc. or just by itself like the standing at stake practices. But in any case, we aren't trying to do anything other then simply be present with the energy at that particular location (which might be upper dan tien, lower dan tien, the whole body, etc). This might lead people to think that this is a vipassana practice – but there is no investigation here – no attempt to see into anything or take anything apart.