| It's funny, I really don't see a HUGE difference between practicing with TMI maps or MCTB maps -- whatever is going to happen during practice is going to happen and we all have to travel through our own personal pathway. I admit I bite my toungue when people say TMI is going to save me from the dark night... I really doubt it. I think the language of TMI is less likely to promote using too much effort in meditation versus MCTB, especially the first version of MCTB.... but, that said, I've read a few meditation journals, including one report of someone on retreat with culadasa at chochese stronghold itself, where it was clear that the person was struggling in a very dark night way, but simply didn't use those words. The shadow side of TMI is a kind of denial that dark night-like experiences "couldn't be happening since I'm doing TMI".
The truth is somewhat paradoxical, although having the tranquility/concentration as a goal tends to induce that kind of practice, oddly enough tranquility practice often brings up unconcious/repressed psychological or traumatic experiences (it bubbles up). And while noting practice tends to induce a kind of dry objectivity/mindfulness, it often induces momentary and actual concentration/jhana states. Practice is much more of a mess than the maps would have us believe. This is why working with a teacher is so helpful. A good teacher understand the sloppy way progress actually gets made, rather than being literal/dogmatic about stages in a map.
One of my favorite quotes is:
"You can't plan the way your practice is going to go. The mind has its own steps and stages, and you have to let the practice follow in line with them. That's the only way you'll get genuine results. Otherwise you'll turn into a half-baked arahant."
Monk Fuang Jotiko in Awareness Itself
In my way of thinking, TMI and MCTB describes two sides of the same coin. TMI is all about adjusting attention/awareness to minimize distractions. MCTB is all about recognizing the flavors of distraction that often corrupts attention/awareness unless it is seen objectively. TMI talks about the nature of attention/awareness, MCTB talks about the nature of distraction, all meditators need to learn to objectify distractions and adjust attention/awareness -- how they choose to abstractly describe that process is a choice.
For what it's worth, I think the balance between the two approaches is keeping attention on the breathing sensations, using that to become settled, and then after that point "noting" whatever is the distraction from that attention on the breath. This is from something I wrote for another yogi:
"When you get distracted from the sensations of breathing, look at your mind and notice some aspect of the distraction and simply label it with a word. The classic types of distractions are: 1) body sensations (discomfort, pleasure, pressure, tingling, itchiness, aches, interesting textures etc.) 2) urges (attraction, aversion, the urge to ignore or overlook) 3) emotions (joy, curiosity, sadness, frustration, confusion, depression, excitement) 4) "proliferation of thought" which is really how our mind just kind of creates a whole series of thoughts without really "thinking/analyzing" but rather just "work today was stupid I had to make that call and he wasn't there and now I need to send an email and..." What we do for that kinds of distraction, for example, is we just label the whole string of thoughts as one thing "work thoughts".
So to put this all together... You sit and let your body get settled for about 5 or 10 minutes. (Don't worry about how long, just let you body and mind calm down from all the stress of the day.) Then transition into mindfulness of breathing. Do that until you feel ready for the next step, maybe 5 or 10 more minutes. Next, keep doing the same thing, but now whenever you are distracted, notice the nature of the distraction, and just label one aspect of it, a sensation, an urge, an emotion, or a category of thinking. Make up whatever label makes sense to you -- there are no rules here. The point is to be able to more clearly see and understand what distracts you.
And here's the interesting thing: you should have no worries about how many times you get distracted. In fact, you should even think "I hope I get distracted a lot, so I can have lots of opportunities to clearly see what distracts me."
(Adding in: and I do really recommend the 5 minutes of sitting without using a method at the end. Oddly enough, this seems to really catalyzes progress.)
So that's what I would recommend as a next step. This practice does two things. It adds in "vipassana" or insight practice to your breath meditation which is mostly a "samatha" or calming practice. But the coolest thing about it is it allows you to use distractions as fuel for practice, because you turn all the things that distract, frustrate, confuse, depress, worry etc. into things that you note and label with a word and use to make your mindfulness practice stronger."
Hopefully you can see that there are ways to tweak practice to fit the individual yogi and that having an intentional structure really reduces the tendency to kind of be lazy during big parts of hour long sits. It is often better to do a good 45 minute sit rather than sit too long. All a longer sit does in this circumstance is train the being-lazy behavior.
So for example, during your tranquilizer dart sit, if you spent that sit doing mindfulness of breathing, but then noted all the sensations, emotions, and thoughts which made up the overall sense of being tranquilized. Noting something at least as often as every outbreath, or even a little more frequently to ramp up the energy of attention. That's the gateway to either moving from dissolusion to misery (in the progress of insight stages) or your dullness would turn into the airy, tingly, and cool body tone of the third vipassina jhana. You don't need to change anything about those kind of sits, except ramp up the mindfulness of the experience, so that it becomes an intimate object of investigation. In otherwords, you change a dull trance into mindfulness of the experience and the inimate mindfulness will induce further concentration. If you never quite break out of the dull trance after 45 minutes, end it there. No sense training yourself to be in a trance. If it happens again, then practice in the standing position.
You see, a yogi has to learn how to adjust both effort and method to the conditions that arise during practice. A teacher can definately help, but so much of this is true trial and error on behalf of the meditator. We all need to learn how to meet our own experience and intuitively learn to use different "tools" to break out of trance and cultivate mindfulness. Sometimes I think meditator aren't given enough of an endorsement to make the practice into their own art. But it really is an art, not a formula.
And it's very subtle, because mindfulness of a trance-like state looks and feels a lot like being in a trance, but the attention/awareness has a definite flavor of "knowing" the trance. So every state is workable, we just need to get the energy of attention higher that the intensity of the trance. The trance doesn't need to completely go away. In fact, you kinda want it to stick around so you can really investigate it -- why is it so seductive?, what lies does it tell about itself?, what does this numbness want to hide or protect?, how is this trance a confused form of compassion?, what if I had compassion for the natural instinct to go into trance but looked at what is happening objectively?, is this trance really going to relieve tension, resistance, suffering, problemness, etc? If you get interested in the what and why, even "difficult" sits are very very engaging!
Well, that was a long post --- thanks for slogging through it! |