Hello! I've been meditating for about a year and a half, predominantly taking advice from MCTB2 and the surrounding community. My go-to practices are fire kasina and freestyle vipassana, but I also experiment with different practices or invent my own, depending on what seems useful or interesting in the moment.

I've been logging my sits for quite a while, mostly keeping the logs private or just shared with a few friends. At various times, I had considered posting my logs publicly to get feedback from the wider community as well as contribute (in a very small way) to building a knowledge base on meditation experiences and progress. I had held back as I feared that public posting would encourage an unskillful performativity - deliberately trying for impressive sits or forcing insights so that I'd have something cool to write about.

What shifted was that, recently, I've been experimenting more with imaginal, tantric, and devotional practices, as well as working on core psychological patterns that had been unearthed during practice. As I engage with increasingly content-heavy territory, especially psychological territory, there were times when I started to lose touch with technical insight work - or, indeed, started to lose touch with basic sanity. So, I decided to leverage that performative streak in me for good, posting my log on a forum that encourages insight work to help keep me anchored.

I'm hoping I will persevere with this log long enough that it grows into a resource, whether to provide inspiration, or to spark conversations that might benefit other readers. Comments, advice, questions, etc are very welcome!

Mini meditation profile:

I'm vipassana-heavy by inclination, with sensations (especially visuals) going vibratory at low doses of meditation or even in walking-around consciousness. This makes visual-based meditations pretty fun and even addictive - hence my love for the fire kasina.

Concentration tends to be low-moderate except when I'm deep into a retreat. I have fairly predictable access to soft, vibratory forms of 1st - 4th jhana (some messy mix of jhanic factors tend to arise spontaneously when I sit), but have only reached strong jhana on rare occasions. I tend to use broad, spacious, or less defined objects, as they feel more easeful than narrow objects.

My best attempt at diagnosis is that I'm early-ish on 2nd Path. This is based on having completed some number of full insight cycles with textbook phenomenological markers (A&P -> DN -> Eq -> Fruition) on and off retreat, but also knowing that I am a long way off from the kind of perceptual change that I've heard would characterise 3rd.

I average about 10 hours of formal sitting per week, but tend to meditate in bursts (clocking many hours on retreats or on a free weekend day) rather than a steady daily schedule.

Current goals:

• Work skilfully with the psychological-heavy dark night I'm currently in - leaving this goal broadly defined, as I'm learning by trial and error what I'm supposed to do in this DN
• Develop better access to nourishing mindstates, including more stable jhana, metta, and skilful fabrication with imaginal work
• Somatic and energy body work to soften chronic tension, reduce nervous system activation, and enable longer periods of pain-free sitting in formal poses (useful for working with jhanas and tantric practices)

2025-07-19 (Sat)

1h fire kasina + freestyle vipassana
semi reclining, eyes closed then open

My first fire kasina sit in several weeks, using a little LED light. Started with 3 dot reps one after the other to stabilise attention as well as to check out the nature/quality of attention. The dot was reasonably clean and bright and the visual field already bilaterally symmetrised (ie the dot was equally easy to nudge to either side of the field). Drew some circles, figure-8s, etc with the dot, which produced mild release of body tension.

For the rest of the sit, I spaced out the dots to about 5-10 minutes per refresh - that is, staying in the second screen for up to a few minutes between refreshes. The second screen was very simple, just muted single colour static, sometimes with very subtle patterns, like gentle arcing/blooming motions. The screen came with a sense of quietness and intimacy. This was reflected in the body sense also - a very mild, diffuse, full-body piti and sukha.

I made minimal attempt to concentrate on visuals, instead regularly dropping in the question, "What's foregrounding?" (ie What is in the attentional spotlight at this moment, and how broad or narrow, strong or weak, stable or flickering, etc is this sense of attention? What is the periphery doing?) Attention was flickering fairly rapidly and unpredictably between different sense doors, including often flickering to background stuff (memories, imagined scenarios, etc). I also found myself unintentionally flipping between techniques - sometimes noticing the breath and its energetic qualities, sometimes broadening visual perspective for a more panoramic view, sometimes trying to draw shapes in the visual field. I guess that's my mind relearning how to do fire kasina after several weeks of playing with other things. Valence was mostly neutral.

In the last ~15 minutes, I did a couple of dots with eyes open. That's when I discovered that I had evidently been visually placing the dot very "near", as my eyes were crossing and holding the dot very, very close to my face. So I played around with sending the dot nearer and further. Open eye visual vibrations were simple, mostly grainy, with some very subtle arcing/blooming. Towards the last few minutes, felt a mild sense of impatience as I began imagining how I would narrate this sit - I was quite self-conscious that this would be my first post!


1h fire kasina
semi reclining, eyes closed

Decided to check out my concentration by doing a classic FK dot rep sit: generate a dot, watch it with close attention until it fades, generate another dot, and so on. Gently repeated a mantra mentally.

The second screen seems to have woken up since my last sit - it was higher resolution (the pixels much more fine-grained), with smooth pixel flows, water ripples passing through above the flows, and more vibrant, changing colours. The dot was still fairly clean and stable, though holding attention to it was a bit difficult.

After some minutes, I began to feel some uncomfortable upper body tension (primarily neck/shoulders), as well as what seemed like mild nausea. The sit was feeling increasingly effortful and annoying, like I was struggling against something - I don't know what.

At the half hour bell (I usually set my phone to chime at each half hour to get a rough idea of how much time has passed in a sit), I let go of the dot + mantra concentration attempt in order to reduce the growing aversion. Allowed attention to gently rest on the second screen. Soon fell into a slightly dreamy headspace, sometimes slipping into discursive thinking, other times just vague and dreamy. Had a couple of "startles" (one from a sudden sound, the other without obvious cause) that sent waves of moderate piti down the body.

Came out at the hour bell with the body relaxed and soaking in moderate bliss. The tension and nausea was mostly gone, but felt slightly sluggish.


40m walk
walking outside

Went for a walk around the neighbourhood as a counterbalance to the closed-eye sits. Visuals were crisp and vibrant (likely a consequence of the earlier fire kasina), and I was naturally tuning into the sense of open space.

Within a few minutes, low-grade anxiety began to creep in, which generated a continuous background commentary of slightly anxious discursive thoughts (the content varied, but the common theme was anxiety). It corresponded to a slightly uncomfortable sense of fullness in the torso, from neck down to low belly, and a return of the neck/shoulder tension. This lasted until I returned home. Vedana strangely mixed and complex.


45m guided meditation on the energy body and the breath by Rob Burbea
semi-reclining, then unsupported sitting

Started semi-reclining, very quickly feeling full-body piti and gentle relaxation. Then occurred to me that this is an opportunity to practise relaxed backless sitting (ie cross legged on floor), so I sat up. But the familiar tension patterns crept in - the tautness at the top of the shoulders, the constricted breath, the hips and lower spine either collapsing or held in unnatural tension. It seems that when I'm seated in "formal meditation posture", I can only oscillate between tense holding and collapse - I have no state of open, upright relaxation. Lost most of the energetic sensations as there was so much physical constriction to work with. Found myself working out the constrictions in an effortful, piecemeal way, trying to relax one location then another then another ("ok, I'm now going to breathe into the front of the right shoulder to induce some release...") At times, thoughts wandered off to other things, mostly unpleasant thoughts.

​​​​​​​
30m freestyle vipassana
semi-reclining, eyes open and closed at various points

I had vaguely planned to do another "what's foregrounding?" sit, but soon found myself preferring to expand awareness to notice as much of everything as possible (all visuals, sounds, somatics, thoughts, feelings, craving/aversion...), so I switched to that.

After a while, got interested in exploring perspective and centrepoint. I hear a sound which seems to be "over there" - what makes me think it's over there? And what makes me think I'm hearing it *from* somewhere else - why is there a sense of perspective to the sound? So I spent some time trying to locate sounds in space. Didn't get very far, apart from noticing that the location of sounds is quite ambiguous when I actually try to figure out where the sound is, independent of other thoughts that associate it to a particular location (lazy associations like "this sounds like a car, I know the road is about 10 metres away from me in that direction, therefore this sound must be about 10 metres away from me in that direction...") The sound itself, devoid of these assocations, is rather difficult to locate - the car sound can feel like it sits just outside my head, or maybe even inside my head or somewhere else inside my body. Am left feeling slightly confused.

Welcome !!

Welcome, Kailin!

I'm looking forward to reading your log.

 Thanks Bahiya Baby, Boris!

2025-07-20 (Sun)

1h vipassana, observing vedana -> craving junction
semi reclining, eyes open

Started with a couple of fire kasina dots to check out the mindstate. Dot was bright, clean, centred and the visual field already symmetrised. The second screen had returned to that quiet, simple, muted single colour with subtle flows, as of yesterday morning. Once I began resting in the second screen, long strings of discursive thought began and continued for almost the entire sit.

I had roughly planned to "just observe experience", perhaps lightly using a framework, like noticing the links of dependent arising (especially around the vedana -> craving/aversion/indifference junction). I ended up doing this in a very haphazard manner and often falling off because attention was sucked into the discursive thoughts.

Those thoughts, while they varied in content (narrating my practice, to my theoretical knowlege of the dharma, to observations about human psychology, or grand philosophies about life and the world, blah blah) were all geared towards constructing a certain desirable self-identity - as if proving (to myself? to an invisible audience?) that I'm a very sophisticated/reasonable/enlightened/admirable person. I'm recursively aware, as I write this, that what I'm writing here is also one of those identity-constructing narratives, proving what an introspective person I am. Welcome to samsara.

Later, it occurred to me that while craving and aversion were pretty easy to notice because they were big and blaring, I wasn't really noticing the things I was indifferent to - I didn't care enough about them to notice them! So I applied slightly stronger technique, deliberately tuning in to the stuff that was indifferent, that was just okay.

Almost as soon as I noticed a thing I was indifferent to, it ceased to be indifferent. I'd spin up a whole big story between "the me" and "the thing being perceived". Hear a bird chirping - immediately think, isn't it a beautiful morning, how fortunate I am to have this indulgently free morning to sit here and meditate, cue basking in my own good fortune. Hear another bird chirp, and off I go thinking, yesterday I had started investigating the spatial location of sounds, maybe I should have continued doing that today, cue anxiety and second-guessing my practice. It seems like a sound doesn't want to just be a sound. The proliferations really want to proliferate, and almost all of it is claustrophobically self-referential. Welcome to samsara.

Experience: "Welcome to the train of dependent origination. Next station is: Grasping."
Me: "Noooo, I had meant to get off two stations earlier!!"
Experience: "This station is: Grasping."
Me:

15m vipassana, vedana -> craving junction
semi reclining

Repeat of the previous sit, with an intention to apply stronger technique to reduce getting sucked into long thoughts. Mindstate was noticeably quieter, got into a slightly dreamy state, including getting brief, nonsensical, whimsical multisensory hallucinations that occur in this sort of mindstate. Very mild body bliss.

Sit abruptly interrupted as I had to attend to life stuff.

1h walk
walking in the backyard

Was feeling rather stressed and irritable after attending to life stuff, so went walking back and forth in the backyard to restore a bit of ease. Irritable thoughts were flying at furious speed. I explored that feeling of irritation in the body. It felt like a paradoxical combination of heavy lethargy and restless urge - the entire torso from neck to chest to belly felt full and sluggish, but the limbs were pulsating, almost as if they wanted to quiver or shake. The jaw was clenched so hard that my facial muscles ached. Felt like "hurry up and wait", felt like everything was wrong and I was trying to push everything away, even though I couldn't quite pinpoint what was wrong or why. I had an urge to go for a nap, not because I was tired, but just to knock myself out until this annoying and unproductive mood had passed.

I decided *not* to take the bait of sleeping away the mood, and instead tried encouraging that restless shaky feeling to express itself physically. I allowed (and even somewhat induced) the limbs to shake, twitch, bounce about as I walked - I would have looked like a nutjob to anyone peeking over the fence. That felt somewhat relieving, and after several minutes, I returned to regular walking. That high energy restlessness had settled somewhat. Discursive thoughts were still roaming wild, but they had less of that annoying, high-pressure feel to them, and were more neutral in tone.

Found myself thinking about those thoughts in a rather conceptual or analytical style, and I recognised that they related to "unfinished business" across various areas of my life - financial, interpersonal, work, etc. Realised there was an underlying assumption that I won't have peace until those things had sorted themselves out one way or another. Once the assumption was stated so baldy, the response came naturally: there will always be unfinished business, at least as long as I'm alive - life itself can be considered one continuous series of unfinished things. That acknowledgement itself brought a bit of peace.

50m vipassana, vedana -> craving junction
semi reclining, eyes closed

Started with heavyhanded technique: look for an instance of craving, then look for aversion, then look for indifference, then back to craving, rinse and repeat. That quickly settled the mind into a quiet and mildly pleasant state. I let go of the strong technique to attempt a more freestyle noticing. Mind soon went a bit foggy and confused - especially confused about what I was looking for. Found myself often noticing that a complex thought or emotion had been unfolding, and retrospectively trying to find the right label for it - eg recalling a nostalgic memory accompanied by a mix of sadness and savouring. There's obviously some powerful attachment in there, but where to "tease out the craving"? Am I over-dissecting? Confused confused.

30m vipassana, "what can I notice without reacting to it?"
semi reclining, eyes open

I read part of an old conversation in George S's log where he was working with craving. That thread inspired me to simplify the "vedana -> craving junction" practice I had been doing today. Instead of trying to figure out what "counts" as vedana vs craving vs grasping etc, which had gotten me all confused, I turned it into a single question: "What can I notice without reacting to it?" aka noticing vedana and whether or not it is followed by some form of reactivity.

That reframing was helpful. I could stay with the question a lot more closely than before, which meant a lot less mind wandering. That meant much of the craving and aversion I was noticing were "simple" sensations like feelings of physical discomfort; where I was noticing thoughts, they usually only ran for a second or two before I noticed the reactivity that had been embedded in them or had triggered them.
​​​​​​​
I felt an unexplicable impatience for much of the sit, wanting to end it early to do other, "more productive", things. Some part of me evidently wanted to turn away from this work. I countered by asking myself, "Do you think you're done looking for craving? There's no more craving to be found, eh?" and the absurdity of those questions gave me enough drive to keep looking.   

Hm ... ... 

Not sure Im right in my head but what comes to mind is; 

2 persons dig 10 meters of soil to find water! One person digs 10 holes 1 meter deep and finds nothing. The other person digs 1 hole 10 meters deep and finds water. 

I would suggest deciding to either commit to Freestyle Noting or to Fire Casina. Sure thing, one can start a session with Fire Kasina and then Vipasanize it to death but ... dunno. It sure is possible, especially post SE. 

Also about "what can I notice without reacting to it" is a dark hole! Instead, just NOTE whatever is matter-of-fact happening! I can not stress this enough! Who is reacting to anything? Who is trying to not react to anything? Just note what is unfolding. KISS. 

​​​​​​​Best wishes! 

Thanks Papa! Yeah, I vaguely had the idea of using fire kasina to generate a bit of concentration before doing the "real work" of vipassana, though I don't know if it's making any difference. My concentration seems to be equally bad, with or without FK priming I'll try dropping the FK and see what happens.

I was also carrying an undertone of trying to find The Right Technique that would finally "work" and make it rain insights... I guess that manifested in frantic technique-switching

2025-07-21 (Mon)

30m walking + noting

I had spent most of the day in a frenzy of high-strung productivity, completing tasks like a maniac. I eventually realised how much restless energy was pumping through my body-mind, and went for a walking meditation, doing circles around a small park. Tried to just note whatever is happening.

Noted: discursive thoughts flying at furious pace one after the other, like a bickering crowd, each person jostling for the microphone so they can say their piece. No clear theme/pattern to the content of the thoughts. Attention seems to have shrunken down to a tiny space directly in front of the mouth and nose, which is where the verbalisations seemed to live. My facial muscles were taut, as if to "hold" the stream of words together. Whenever I noticed this contractedness, attention would briefly broaden to take in visual scenery or somatic sensations, and the stream of words would fade a little into the background. But within a few seconds, it shot back into the foreground with ferocious force, and I was back to watching the words.

Concentration was non-existent; mindfulness was low-grade but fairly consistent through the session.

--

While driving home from work, I continued a very gentle noting. Discursive thoughts were still running. The earlier high-strung energy had subsided to a more muted, vague sense of being ill-at-ease, like everything is just somehow wrong, though I couldn't explain how or why it is wrong.

Leaned in a bit more to the inexplicable sense of wrongness, and it occurred to me that there was an underlying pair of contradictory assumptions, and the contradiction was contributing to the "everything is wrong" feeling:

(1) I assume that stories are what makes life worth living. Things seem pointless, meaningless, worthless, if they aren't strung together to form a coherent and compelling story.
(2) But at the same time, all stories seem to be constricting - they are arbitrarily invented, they bind me to a certain way of being, a certain way of perceiving/wanting to be perceived, to certain ways of acting.

And so I'm in a catch-22 where I have an insatiable urge to storify everything (so that they become interesting and worthwhile) but I also hate that I'm storifying everything (because the stories are arbitrary and restrictive). So, it all feels wrong.

Helpful insight!

I wonder if stories necessarily need to bind and blind us even when we live with them. 

Yeah, I'm having similar thoughts now too. I think quite a bit of black-and-white thinking had crept into me yesterday, resulting in thoughts like "all stories bind".

2025-07-22 (Tue)

Early afternoon, 25m walking around the park

Much of this session was also strongly and narrowly focused on discursive thoughts, though they didn't have that pressurised feel of yesterday. Just general mental talk.

A shift happened towards the last few minutes - quite suddenly, attention broadened of its own accord. Eyes raised to see the entire environment and not just lazily gazing at a small point directly in front of me; sounds broadened as well, and "internal" stuff like thoughts felt more like they were located within a bigger space. The experience was nothing dramatic; it was quite natural and low-key, just a switching of the default attentional mode from narrow to broad. No major change in the content of thoughts.

Late afternoon, 1h walking back and forth suburban cul-de-sac

Started in that more spacious awareness, same as the earlier walk. Thoughts were somewhat more transient and choppy, and many were thoughts about the practice, eg "hmm what am I noticing right now?" "aha, noticing X". Interspersed were some random thoughts, mostly neutral or whimsical in flavour.

After a while, the "default spaciousness" fell off, and then attention would sometimes shrink into the more contracted, honed-in-on-verbalisations mode. This expansion and contraction continued quite a bit for the rest of the session. The contraction would sometimes be on the words, sometimes on the sensations of feet walking (which I at times used as a light anchor). Felt a bit like I was watching the changing size and shape of space. Whatever is foregrounding seems to take up the space of the whole universe, especially if it's strongly foregrounding. But even relatively weakly foregrounded stuff seemed very "big" - like when I was anchoring on the sensations of feet walking, the feet, soles of the feet, shoes etc seemed very big. And the stuff I wasn't really paying attention to, like the rest of my body, shrank to almost nothing.

Mindfulness came and went throughout, as 3Cs as anything else...

Evening, at tai chi class

Felt a bit bored and restless, like I'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else, with thoughts like "what's the point of doing tai chi anyway?" After a while, it occurred to me to look into the sense of boredom. I asked it, "what's wrong with what I'm doing here? why isn't this the right place to be right now?" No answer immediately came to mind, and in that no-answer moment, the boredom disappeared - poof! I was just left with "well I'm going to be here and do tai chi, because I'm here and tai chi is the thing being done here" - it felt very neutral and matter-of-fact.

Soon, this matter-of-fact mood was replaced by another mood, which I looked at / asked a question of, and it too disappeared, to be replaced by another mood, etc. So I ended up shifting fairly rapidly from mood to mood, all of them fairly low-key (I guess because they shifted before they had hung around long enough to amplify).

Sometimes, after a bunch of moods fell away one after the other, I'd be left with a feeling of meaninglessness - "why do this? why do anything? what's the point of existing??" I'd wallow in that briefly, before recognising that the wallowing is also a mood, and that made it fall away as well, to be replaced by another mood...
 

2025-07-23 (Wed)

30m walking around the park

Mostly got sucked into emotionally-charged neurotic thoughts, one after the other. After each thought had run for a short while, I would realise that the thought is just an arbitrary story, and that I don't even know what thinking that thought was supposed to "achieve" - it doesn't explain or solve or improve anything, and it certainly doesn't make me feel any better. That realisation would cause the thought to drop... to be replaced by another neurotic thought almost immediately.

Towards the end of the session, this semi-joking thought dropped in on me out of the blue: "The ReObs is strong today." I paused to reflect on this thought - *am* I in ReObs today? When I asked myself that question, suddenly the whole mindstate shifted, much like yesterday's sudden shift in the park. The mind cleared with a mild zap of energy, the visual gaze suddenly broadened, and the rumbling emotions became much smaller in size, like they only occupied 10% of the field of experience.

General comment: In recent days, I seem to have become very interested in noticing and recording what things shift my mood to something clearer and more spacious.

What is the difference between the arbitrary thoughts and the thoughts about reflecting on the arbitrary thoughts? Which of those is more likely to be You or Yours? 

"The thoughts that make me feel better/wiser. Goddamit those thoughts are MINE!"

(ohhhhhh....... oops!)

This led me to think there is some blurring of distinctions in what I'm trying to achieve. I'm trying to "do vipassana", but with at least an implicit (and often an explicit) expectation that doing it will make me feel better, such as by fixing my bad mood or at least making bad moods feel less solid, or that it will clear my mind enough that I can choose a skilful course of action in some conventional life matter. Maybe this is what has been keeping me stuck in this seemingly neverending dark night.

But the above is a story too. I'm mightily confusing myself now... How to do anything (including meditating) without wrapping some arbitrary story around it, a story involving an agentic "I" who interprets situations ("there's confusion between insight practice and mental/emotional processing"), makes decisions ("need to do better vipassana") and takes actions ("notice sensations")? Perhaps this is the deeper tension point - I know that the sense of agency flickers in and out of existence, but feel I must solidify it into an agentic self in order to do anything at all.

2025-07-24 (Thu)

1h walk around the park

Aimed for somewhat stronger technique - anchoring more strongly to the tactile sensations of walking at the soles of my feet, mental notes "step, step, step".

Overall vedana was neutral, with fluctuations mostly fairly subtle. But mindfulness fluctuated a lot. At times, mindfulness was relatively high resolution, with more transient sensations recognised, eg visual image of a woman standing over there with arm raised - pre-verbal mental sense of wondering - mental verbal string forms, "what is she doing?" - mental snapshot construing those three previous sensations as having occurred sequentially over a split-second period. Other times, mindfulness was at much lower resolution, like there was a very tiny mental process observing, at periodic intervals, the fact that most of my attention was absorbed in a string of discursive thoughts.

Partway through, I suddenly remembered that I could "raise vibrations" (turn attention towards broad, multisensory vibrations) which would make it much easier to anchor onto more fine-grained physical sensations, with some accompanying pleasantness and mental clarity - in other words, "being mindful" as commonly understood. That was followed by a reflection on the sequence of events, which led me to correct the statement to "attention turned itself towards multisensory vibrations, and that was simultaneously accompanied by the recognition that this was a skill I had". I chuckled at myself for having forgotten I had access to this skill, which would have made my previous few days' sessions a lot less mentally tangled. Then I wondered whether it was correct to say that I had forgotten this skill and just now remembered it, or whether, in fact, there was no access to that skill until the moment when that skill was accessed. Then realised that this question is unanswerable from the perspective of actual sensate experience. Then realised I had slipped from meditating to thinking about meditating, so went back to "step, step, step".
 

2025-07-25 (Fri)

Yesterday and today: listening again to Sections I and II of MCTB2. As with every re-read/re-listen, I catch new meaning that had eluded me in previous reads.

This time, the aha moment came from Harnessing the Energy of the Defilements:

"If we are going to take on feelings at a more formal vipassana level, we might try identifying a feeling we wish to clarify and get to know more skillfully. We can then acknowledge the transient sensations that make up the image of the object of the feeling and notice the oscillation between the sensations that make up our mental image of that object and the tenderhearted center of the feeling."

This pointed out how my previous attempts to "investigate emotions" had gone wrong. I had been very focused on the sensations of the emotion (the sensations in the body, the reactive thoughts pushing away the object) but had ignored a whole set of vibrations - the mental images of the object of those emotions (the "annoying situation/sensation/person/thing")!

I had been deliberately ignoring the object because I had categorised it as an "external event", and thought it would be unhelpful (whether for insight or psychological processing purposes) to attribute my emotions to external causes rather than work on internal states.

But duh, the mental images of the external event that had triggered an emotional reaction *is* internal stuff!!

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, eyes closed

Listening to MCTB2 had also inspired me to put effort into noticing at the smallest, barest, most transient "six sense doors only" level.

It seems that, at this level of perception, there is no such thing as observation, or sensations of observation, or an observer. Observation just refers to whatever sensations are present. There is also no such thing as remembering. I don't remember something - rather, a mental sensation was not present, and then a mental sensation is present. I don't get distracted either - rather, this was happening, and then that was happening. And I don't decide to do something - rather, there is a mental verbalisation "I'm going to do this thing", followed by the thing happening. But the words "I'm going to do this" does not direct the thing to happen; it just precedes it. Direction cannot be felt in experience, like how observation cannot be felt.

(This sounds too simple to be true. I feel like I'm missing something here, perhaps missing many intermediate layers that weave these sensations together to form "the sense of remembering", "the sense of being distracted" etc.)

Mindfulness shifted back and forth between higher and lower resolution. Throughout the session (and throughout the day off-cushion), there was a strong draw towards negative emotion - a heaviness tinged with sadness and even despair that would creep up on me. This emotion crept in at various points during the sit, which was noticed within a few seconds, and upon noticing it was dissected into smaller sensations, which quickly led that emotional quality to fall apart and be replaced by other emotions, like interest or determination or striving to dissect better.

At times, I slipped into a mild, slightly sleepy dullness, which meant less solidifying of simple sensations into stories and concepts, but also less distinguishing of sensations from one another, resulting in a pleasant sleepy haze. A mild, persistent head piti developed. At the 1 hour bell, I tested access to the jhanas. Very soft forms of j1 and j2 were accessible within seconds; the attempt to slip into j3 wobbled and fell apart.

Nice! Keep going! 

2025-07-26 (Sat)

38m guided meditation on the energy body and the breath by Rob Burbea, unsupported floor sitting

I had some chronic pain flare up today, so I thought I would do some energy body work to soothe it, and to help me settle in for my day's worth of sits. Very gentle and diffuse piti throughout. But mind was unruly - drifted off a lot to unpleasant ruminations. Somewhat struggled to follow the instructions to place the breath at various points of the body. Seems like the body-mind has interpreted "follow the meditation instructions" as "hold the body stiff and forceful and make it do what the instructions say", and as soon as I let off this effortfulness, the mind went ruminating.

Wondered if I'm just in too bad a mood today to go for playful, exploratory meditations like this one.

Eventually, I settled on using an energy body technique that predictably works for me - sending the breath up through the centre of the body, then brush down the left side, back up through the centre of the body, brush down the right side, and repeat (so a figure-8 but through the left/centre/right columns of the body). Soothed the body one side at a time, while encouraging tallness in the centre. Produced some degree of relaxation.

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, closed eye

Same as yesterday, trying to notice simple, rapid, transient sensations. A lot of confusion and aversion to practice, often drifting into unpleasant thoughts. Paradoxically, also feeling a j3 kind of quietness and stillness, like an imperturbable calm. Partway through, noticed that closed eye visuals had naturally taken on a fire kasina quality, with very high-res pixels doing circular colour washes in vibrant colours.

For a while, I tried to deliberately discern what observation felt like, beyond the simplistic "sensations are present" that I had found yesterday. "I am observing sounds" can feel like a combination of somatic sensations around the ears, as well as sounds being heard, and came tagged with a sense of agency - as in, I chose to observe sounds rather than some other object.

I got the idea that agency is the nut to crack - it seems to be the big elusive thing that is holding "the doer/meditator" together. So I went searching for what agency felt like. Struggled to find it in the six senses, beyond sequences of mental verbalisations, body movements, attention switching from one thing to another, and so on. Then I wondered if I had done a framework-based sleight of hand. If I decide that there are only six sense doors, I have by definition ruled out any other sense as being a valid sensation, including the sense of agency. It's as if I had decided that sight is not one of the senses, so every time I think I see something, I don't allow myself to notice the seeing, and on that basis I claim there's no such sensation as sight.

Or maybe I've gone off track. Maybe those individual little moments of agency don't need to be deconstructed, only noticed as being what they are.

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, open and closed eye

In an attempt to step away from the question about agency and "me-ness" that was driving me round in conceptual loops, I set an intention to merely observe the natural arising and passing of sensations across all sense doors, without specifically trying to figure out what agency or me-ness felt like.

There was a tendency to drift into a slightly slow, broad and somewhat lazy noticing, which at times I would speed up by observing the flicking between a set of physical sensations and the various mental impressions they triggered. But that kind of high-powered effort doesn't last for more than a matter of seconds before slipping back into slower broader noticing, or into drifting thoughts.

I couldn't help but see myself as an invisible puppetmaster, pulling strings to get certain sensations to arise or cease. Even as I was focused on noticing transience, when an unpleasant memory or emotion appeared, I would "lean into its transient nature", and say to myself, "well, see how it's gone already? it will stay gone unless I choose to bring back its mental echoes and thus continue to create suffering for myself - let's not do that eh?" So it feels very directed, very effortful, like I'm making the decision to see things as transient rather than solid. The effortfulness felt necessary, because if I let the effort reduce even just a little bit, I would drift off into more unpleasant mind wandering - that same heavy sadness that says nothing is interesting, nothing is worthwhile, that searches for things I like or want and finds no answer.

--

Today's sits feel like a desperate attempt to keep my head above the water - like I need to keep striving, with strong effort, to notice that what is happening right now is fine, that nothing is wrong right now. As soon as I drop that effortful reminder, I collapse into those awful stories. It's like I'm trying to pull myself away from the brink of nihilistic despair.

(God bless the chapter on Re-observation in MCTB2, reaffirming to me that I'm not insane. Or that I am insane, but it is a predictable and treatable insanity.)

I'm also starting to see how much I have latched onto the promise of progress as a refuge - striving for the next insight, the next stage, the next path. When can I finally fucking awaken? "Awakening will fix whatever is broken in me, fill that spiritual hollowness that I'd felt my whole life." A part of me realises there's something deluded in how I'm going about meditation and "making progress", but still, I don't know what else to do - especially when I'm feeling as hollow as I feel right now, and nothing seems to bring relief. And so I keep on practising.

Damn, that was dark. I'm going to go do an Avalokiteshvara sadhana. The comfort I can't get from the world, I'll get from a deity.

--

Did the sadhana. It gently softened and lightened that heart-heaviness. It also reminded me not to take extreme views. Perhaps I can relax a bit on that high-effort investigation. Perhaps I don't need to deconstruct agency into nothing right now. I can't find it and yet it seems to be right there. Maybe that's ok.
 
Mood has lifted considerably, colours have come back into the world, I've remembered how to be happy again. It's nuts how a mood can so completely colour my view of the world - and how rapidly that mood can shift to something else, and suddenly bring me a wholly different world.

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, eyes open

It seemed that, with the heavy sadness lifted, the mind became more willing to engage in rumination than before. It's as if that earlier sadness had been a protective mechanism, making it extremely unattractive for me to engage in any kind of thinking that could further worsen my emotion. So, in this sit, I floated between getting lost in thought, and just noticing what is happening, and again at various points trying to crack open agency. It's like this black box that I keep seeing but just can't get into. And then I tried just noting agency as it arose. Then I tried comparing sensations that are tagged with agency vs sensations that are not, and how they feel different from each other. A rather confused and meandering sit.

2025-07-27 (Sun)

sadhana + tonglen + 30m breath / energy body, unsupported floor sitting

Began with a sadhana and a very gentle tonglen to ease my way into the day's sits, then 30 minutes of freestyle energy body work.

Mind was fairly calm, with a gentle natural inclination towards pleasantness, softness and metta for self and others. The energy body sweep (central-left-right column sweep, same as yesterday) brought out pre-jhanic levels of bliss and some release of tension. After a while, I swtiched to a less structured practice, just resting in the somatic and energetic effects of the breath, gentle enjoying the pleasantness it produced. Little momentary urges to investigate and notice dropped in at various points, including questions like "who is generating this pleasantness? who is intending to generate it? who is the meditator?" but they quite quickly slipped away.

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, eyes open

Gently anchored on the somatic and energetic sensations of the in- and out-breath. Mind was relatively subtle, with attention tending to be broad and multi-layered as opposed to noticing many individual sensations in rapid-fire sequence. So "in-breath" = sensations of expansion and pressure in the torso + stronger sensations of pleasant tingling + mental image roughly charting a body with breath entering + verbalisation "in", all woven together without strong distinction as to sequencing, though I was vaguely aware that these sensations were bouncing back and forth.

The question about agency that had so gripped me yesterday had noticeably relaxed. Instead, there was a mild attraction towards finding out what the sequence "distracted from the object ->  remembering the object -> returning to the object" felt like.

Across various instances of watching that sequence, it seemed like the returning to the object (as in, the switch in presenting physical sensations) occurs first, followed by some mental recognition of the switch having happened, followed by vedana (pleasant if emphasis is on remembering the object, unpleasant if emphasis is on having forgotten the object), followed by a verbalisation "I remembered the object, I am now returning to it".

It's like there is a post-hoc narrator running around, generating little "I"s all over the place to claim credit or take blame for stuff that has just happened.

1h freestyle vipassana, walking in the garden

Gently anchored on the sensations of feet walking. Mind less subtle than the previous session, tracking grosser shifts in attention at a rate of perhaps 0.2 - 5x per second. Also had a greater interest in noticing the vedana associated with each successive object of attention. So if a sequence of thoughts arose, the act of noticing might go "unpleasant, unpleasant, pleasant, unpleasant, back to feet walking, neutral".

Also had an interest in testing whether or not it is possible to notice something, especially an action or decision, without attributing it to an "I". Tested interpreting from a cause-and-effect relationship - "this happening led to that happening", or seeing a familiar sequence of events and verbalising, "aha, that's an old pattern playing out again". The latter had a powerful neutralising effect what would otherwise have been an emotionally disruptive mental sequence (eg unpleasant memory -> unpleasant emotion -> self-blame thought... -> oh, it's just a pattern! back to neutral).

30m energy body and jhana, semi-reclining

Attempted to re-anchor in softness and pleasantness. Started trying to go straight for j1, but mind was slippery, so I eased in with energy body stuff. j1 and j2 remained difficult to access, but at some point I naturally dropped into a soft j3, and stayed there for most of the sit. Afterwards, mind clear and calm, with some tendency towards dullness.

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, eyes open

Again, noticing phenomena at a slightly grosser level, with an emphasis on identifying vedana. Seeing how it's possible to form coherent mental narrations of noticing without referring to an "I". Can just refer to things happening in sequential or causal fashion. Often felt a slight degree of confusion, blandness, dullness, mild aversion.

I realised that I had habitually mis-described a familiar reactive pattern: when a distraction arose, especially a very unpleasant one, I would sometimes bat it away by physically tensing up or even with a strong verbalised "no". I used to think of that as over-application of effort and intention. It just occurred to me that there never was an intention to tense up and be angry when I sit - my intention is always to be relaxed and gentle and happy! A habitual pattern of forcefully batting something away is the opposite of intention - it's an intentionless, contracted aversive action.

Towards the end of the sit, a thought randomly dropped in - "I wonder what 3rd Path perception would be like." In the next moment, reality blinked and shifted. Suddenly had much more accessible jhanic bliss and very vibratory senses. Not sure what that was, perhaps a sudden flip into A&P/vj2 (or some fractal form of it).

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining

Started with backless sitting, but it was generating too much restlessness, so went back to semi-reclining. Quickly drifted into a dreamy pleasant haze, with brief flickers of fire kasina style visual hallucinations. Very very quiet, few sensations noticed; at times I was barely conscious. Almost no investigation occurred - mind was too comfortable in its barely-existent haze.

1h freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining

Mild boredom or confusion, wondering what I'm supposed to be doing now. There is no longer any strong dukkha that I'm trying to note into bits and pieces, nor is there any strong pleasure, nor any burning question I'm trying to discover the answer to. The experience is very mild, somewhat quiet, and very vibratory. Vedana is neutral with a slight tilt towards tedium. I feel like there's a trick I'm missing, like there is something I'm supposed to do here, but I don't know what. In the latter part of the sit, tracked the breath more closely, because I didn't know what else to do.

A number of times, a thought or memory that carried emotional charge would drop in, very rapidly, which would be replaced by a reactive impulse, usually a flare-up of anger or disgust. Then it is replaced by a mental impression of, "ah, there's an old reactive pattern playing out", then that too fades, and it's back to neutrality. This whole chain would play out in a fraction of a second. The content of some of these replays were very old trauma responses, and I watched with a mild surprise at the way these usually powerful impulses went bip-bip-bip-gone, just like that.

Looking back, maybe that's what this current mindstate is for - to let me observe with clarity the construction of emotional dukkha at its very early stages.

30m freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, eyes open

Similar neutral feeling as before, and wondering what I'm supposed to be doing, other than "be mindful". Started to wonder what was mindfulness. It seems that mindfulness is a mental impression of some collection of previous moments having contained all the sensations that they are expected to contain, while mindlessness is the reverse - a memory that comes with a sense that there was stuff missing from that memory.

That sounded kind of trite, so I tried a different angle - what is the difference in quality between a period of being mindful, and a period of being distracted by thoughts? Something like the strength and rapidity of craving and acting upon craving - in mindless periods, there is more turbulence, a sense of getting  unavoidably sucked into one thing after another in rapid succession.

This is excellent practice!

Thanks for the encouragement, Papa Che, Martin!

--

2025-07-28 (Mon)

Last night and this morning, I felt like I had been on the brink of discovering something about time, perhaps something to do with how "the present" is fabricated. Whatever it was, it has since completely slipped away from me...

30m freestyle vipassana, seated, eyes open

Mind back to gross turbulence - long, angry, sad, frustrated thoughts about this and that. Probably affected by a rather busy and stressful day (including making a high-stakes financial decision).

--

2025-07-29 (Tue)

Overnight, I felt a mild unnamed unease, and a couple of times had very brief, sort-of-abstract hypnagogic visions that triggered momentary terror.

I guess Sunday evening to Tuesday was A&P -> Dissolution -> Fear, possibly fractal stages within DfD or Eq.

Morning invocation + sadhana + tonglen

Seeing how much my mind was "fighting against itself" when it generated strong emotionally-charged memories and anticipated difficult situations - "I" would argue with, feel hurt by, or run away from these imaginary people and troubles, as if they were real (in a conventional sense). But these are just illusions fighting against each other - a mental me, mental others, and mental situations.

With this thought, mind grew quieter, and was in a gentle, calm clarity by the end.

50m freestyle vipassana, semi-reclining, eyes open

I didn't quite know what I should be doing next, and was reluctant to leave the exploration too open-ended, as I had a tendency to fall into emotional stuff today. So I returned to practising really basic vipassana skills, distinguishing physical from mental sensations: eg when is something seen, and when is there a mental impression of something being seen?

Then tested whether or not it is possible to hold two sensations in attention simultaneously. I tested with seeing the visual nimitta, and feeling a distinct pulsing ache near my right elbow. Did not manage to perceive both physical sensations simultaneously. The most I could do was perceive one physically and the other as a generic, peripheral mental impression.

Tried to estimate the frequency of the pulsing ache (I have yet to develop the skill of distinguishing insight stages by the frequency of vibrations ). It seemed to be about 8 - 12 Hz, but that's a very rough estimate.

Emotionally triggering memories still showed up from time to time, and some of them would grip me for a matter of seconds. But at other times I remembered that these are not real people in the relative reality sense. If a real person said something to me or acted in a certain way towards me, I would need to determine the appropriate response. But when it's just a mental impression, it doesn't need to be responded to at all. Whenever I remembered that, really remembered that, the memory would fade away.

The last few minutes of the sit were spent in a mildly pleasant vj2 kind of haze.

2025-07-30 (Wed)

Off-cushion musing: Seems a question that had rarely arisen for me until now is: what to do when not strongly propelled towards doing something due to craving (whether being drawn towards something, or to avoid/satisfy some sense of lack)? If I can choose anything - if I genuinely feel that freedom - how to not turn that into a sense of meaninglessness, that there's no point to doing any particular thing?

--

2025-07-31 (Thu)

2h perception exercises, backless sitting

I had read Dream Walker's framework of awakening overnight, and got curious about the perception exercises (if that's the right term) he described - eg deliberately practising panoramic visual field that sees both the centre and the periphery clearly, hearing sounds as arising within a space of silence, test and break assumed rules. These also seem somewhat similar to the energy raising techniques described in Ken McLeod's Wake Up To Your Life.

So I tried panoramic vision for maybe 20-30 minutes, then switched to panoramic sounds for 20-30 minutes, back to vision etc.

Attempting to "focus" on the periphery raised strong visual vibrations, which rapidly stole standard visuals as a new central object. Attention ended up bouncing back and forth between periphery (primarily left and right), large central vibrations in the "empty space" in the room, and the visual objects like the far wall of the room. I was a bit surprised at how difficult this was - I'm quite sure I had accessed some version of panoramic vision many times before, at times when vision naturally tuned itself to crispness and spaciousness (j4-ish feel), so I had thought it would be quite basic to deliberately dip back into it.

For sounds, I found myself wanting to test where "individual" sounds are or could be spatially placed. Was especially curious about the sense of a sound cutting into/through my body (I guess what's happening is more like a mild synaesthetic effect where somatic sensations echo the mental impression of the sound). Settling into "hearing all sounds" was difficult, like the difficulty of "seeing all visuals".

I liked this exercise. "Discover the rules, then break the rules" - that seems simple enough that even my muddled cycling mind can do it.

I briefly tested the thoughts exercises (observing the space between thoughts, etc), but soon got confused about what was a thought and what wasn't, and abandoned it

Body was mildly to moderately energised for most of the sit, feeling fresh and quite able to sit upright for 2 hours straight - something of a rarity for me.

After the sit, I wonder if I had gotten thrown off by the combination of reading new instructions ( = awkwardness as I tried to interpret and apply them literally), and sitting in a fairly small room where I couldn't see very far. I suspect I would have an easier and more intuitive time with these exercises in an outdoors space, and "just tuning into panoramic quality" rather than attempting very specific instructions.

1h panoramic vision, walking in the park

Doing the panoramic vision exercise while walking seemed a lot more effective, because I could use the parallax effect to cue me to keep the periphery in awareness. I just had to keep watching the stuff that's moving faster. This produce a gentle panoramic vision within minutes or maybe even seconds. I don't know if this is quite what is being described in that framework, but it has that classic crispness and spaciousness that I didn't manage to get to in the earlier sit. At times when I got distracted by ruminations, eyes would slip back into a defocused gaze downwards, until I remembered to pop outwards again.

--

2025-08-01 (Fri)

Evidently I'm on a DfD trip, because I am reading a bunch of guides and instructions and advice "so that I know how to meditate", and I can't wait for the workday to end so I can meditate some more.

30m panoramic vision, walking in the park

Continuing to use the parallax effect as an aid. Felt fairly easy. The only effort involved was to remember to do this, and to revert to it when mind slipped off into wandering. Visual field had a neutral cleanness to it. At times, I tried to include "soundscape in space" in awareness as well, but difficult to hold both visuals and sounds very wide.

--

At various times during the day when I remembered to (usually when walking from place to place), I worked on panoramic vision again. Feels too easy, which makes me suspicious and wondering if I'm doing it right or if I've fooled myself.

Continued working on this while driving home from work. Became increasingly sleepy, nearly dozed off a few times (oops!) - unsure if related to the panoramic vision exercise.

"At times, I tried to include "soundscape in space" in awareness as well, but difficult to hold both visuals and sounds very wide."

Don't worry about this aspect! This is something easier to do post SE as part of the 2nd Path. Right now, NOTE the "I tried to include .... difficult to hold" aspects! Is it unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral in feeling tone? Is it permanent? Is it I, me or mine? 

2025-08-02 (Sat)

1h metta

I realised I'd been on an avoidant streak over the past few days, looking for feel-good type sits that I could indulge in (thanks for *another* reminder to perceive the three characteristics!!). Went back to working at what is actually at my developmental edge. Decided I would start with a classic metta sit, but if any difficulty arises, look clearly to see what "the difficulty" is made of. (For context: I tend to struggle with metta practice, and often end up generating negative emotions rather than loving kindness. So I was expecting this sit to be an investigation into what makes metta hard for me.)

Entirely as expected, the sit was very slippery. Within a few seconds of setting up the imagined person/scenario (the target of metta), the mind jumped to providing a narrative explanation of what would happen when I tried to send metta and why.

Example: imagined a friend -> began to imagine sending metta -> recalled a conversation with this friend a few weeks ago, during which he said one thing that very slightly rubbed me the wrong way -> narrative forms "Aha, I've discovered that it is difficult to send metta when someone talks or acts in a way that I don't like. Great insight! Job done!"

It was completely absurd - I had just barely set up the scenario, not 5 seconds had passed, I haven't even started trying to send metta - why on earth is there a narrative claiming that I've already tried and failed *and* that I know why it failed?

This went on for the entire hour, with the narrative voice generating with explanation after explanation, each time cutting off the scenario within a few seconds of its arising.

It's like there is an avoidance of discovering how the actual experience would be. My (post-sit) attempt to characterise this is to use IFS language: it seems like there is an "explainer part" in my consciousness, trying to prevent contact with some aspect of experience that really doesn't want to be contacted, and it's doing that by providing what seems like a reasonable and comprehensive explanation, closing the case before any experiential discovery could take place.


50m "catching the explainer"

Intention: to discover the precise sequence of events between "imagine a scenario or a person" -> "the explainer jumps in". See how the explainer spins up, and under what circumstances.

This was the sequence of events across a number of test runs:
spin up a mental scenario -> the imagined other says or does something that appears judgemental or dismissive -> some negative emotion just barely begins to drop in (hurt? sadness? anger?) -> immediate refusal to feel that emotion -> explainer spins up and tells a story -> attention is now diverted away from the negative emotion, hurtling down story lane instead

I had to see this over a dozen times to catch the sequence, because it all happens so rapidly - the flash of emotion, refusal, and explainer spin-up is virtually instantaneous. During the runs where the emotion and refusal were not caught, there would instead be a vague sense that the explanation that arose "wasn't the explanation I wanted to give" - there seemed something a bit off about it.

Next, I tried to run through the sequence again, but to see what would happen if the emotion was allowed to remain. Can I coax out that emotion and rest in it, without the explainer spinning up? How would it feel? I picked the most psychologically painful of the various scenarios I had been imagining (to oomph up the expected emotion), imagined the other saying something, then freeze-framed it at: "how does that feel?" And suddenly mind went into vipassana mode - "the emotion" collapsed into a collection of mental images, a mental voice speaking, some vague pre-verbal thoughts that the other was projected to have, some uncomfortable sensation in the body like a pierce or a punch. That dreadful emotion just couldn't be found in this slow-mo replay, even though the sensations were there ping-ponging around.


1h vipassana

After the morning's weird meditation-IFS blend stuff, I went for a classic insight sit, with gentle anchoring on the breath, and the intention merely to notice things arising and passing on their own.

Fairly simple and uneventful sit, mostly noticing sensations like they were streams of multi-textured data flowing on and on. It felt very low effort, with just enough intentionality dropped in to keep the guardrails on observing sensations, especially to notice if there were any stuff that still seemed very big and solid.

At various points, I slipped into a slightly dreamlike state where thoughts became disjointed and nonsensical - a random non-sequitur phrase or image popping out of nowhere and disappearing again as soon as it was noticed.

At times, something that carried an emotional charge would slip in, but once looked at directly to see what it is composed of, it would disperse into those streams of sensation-data.


50m vipassana

It seems that identifying the explainer part earlier today has been something of a quiet breakthrough, because there is now a lot less fascination with the verbal narratives that form. They seem to form less often, and when they do form, they are noticed for what they are, and once attention is placed on them, they fizzle out very quickly. There's some degree of disenchantment towards them. Some of these narratives used to seem clever or illuminating, or even seemed to be crystallisation of insights. But now they appear more as autonomous mental habits that had evidently developed at some point in my life to divert attention away from unpleasant emotions - not a wise man's voice, just some old defensive mechanism.

Partway through the sit, I fell again into that j3-style quiet stillness that has been characteristic of a number of my recent sits. This time, I remembered to investigate not just the unpleasant sensations, but the pleasant ones as well. So explored what this "j3 feeling" is composed of. It seems as difficult to pinpoint as difficult emotions are. It was something like:

- sounds are slightly less differentiated, have a somewhat distant or muffled feel to them
- sudden or loud sounds no longer have a startling effect like they normally would when I'm sitting quietly
- body sense becomes very light and easeful, with tingling just barely sensed
- waves of apparently causeless subtle happiness would brush through large parts of the torso, especially the heart region
- very little desire to shift position or switch to some other activity - feeling satisfied with what I'm doing now

When narratives did form, they were less commonly the explainer type as of this morning, and more likely to be identity-forming narratives ("I am the kind of person who..."). So not quite the same type of thoughts as the explainer, and I suspect I'd discover different psychological roots if I went IFS-style digging on them. But for now, they seem to be as minimally interesting as the explainer narratives were. All narratives seemed kind of irrelevant and unnecessary, and so they dissipated very soon after beginning to form.


1h vipassana

This sit was started in a more whimsical kind of mood, and was a lot chattier throughout than the previous sits.

Some musing about what is this narrator voice that so easily gets assumed to be the "I":

- Get sucked into some half-remembered daydream = I got distracted
- Flipped back into grounding in the senses = I'm mindful again
- Shift my leg = I wanted to moved my leg
- Crack a joke = I cracked a joke, I'm hilarious

So the "I" is something that isn't in control, but it's also the thing that knows how to meditate, and it's the thing that controls movement, and it's the thing that thinks it's appropriate to tell jokes when it's supposed to be meditating. What a bizarre collection of stuff. Who is this joker who thinks he's running my life anyway?

 

2025-08-03 (Sun)

While lying in bed overnight, feeling into somatic sensations, it suddenly occurred to me that it was unnecessary to call them "my sensations" or "sensations of my body". All the sensations I can feel are "my" sensations (it's not like I have access to anyone else's sensations), which makes it redundant to call them either my sensations or not my sensations. I can drop the possessive marker and just call them sensations.

After a few minutes testing just calling all somatic sensations "sensations" without a possessive label, I also realised this could be extrapolated to all sensations - mental, physical, whatever. There is no mine or not-mine in any of these, because these are all the sensations there are to be accessed. Huh, suddenly no self doesn't seem so scary.

Thoughts soon turned to sticky rumination stuff, which ran for hours and hours, so I ended up getting virtually no sleep that night - just hours of sleeplessness, interspersed with a few snapshots of disturbing-grotesque dreams, like one where I had just started eating a meal, but the food I was chewing suddenly turned into needles, and I found myself chewing down on needles...

Ruminations continued into the morning, as though my mind was stuck watching a horror show that it just couldn't / didn't want to tear itself away from. Finally, I found enough determination to break the cycle and drop in a sadhana + tonglen, which (seemingly miraculously) cleared my head within a few minutes.

1h vipassana

Continued yesterday's exploration of the "I" that pops up all over the place. This flowed into something like a homebrew self-inquiry practice, taking "the sense of I" as object, and looking at whatever seemed to be the I until the actual sensations making it up could be seen. I used the question "What am I doing?" to coax out whatever felt like I in the moment.

"What am I doing?" -> "I am enjoying pleasant sensations in my leg" -> Look at this I that is enjoying pleasant sensations -> Notice there are no sensations of I, just somatic sensations and pleasantness and mental image of a leg
"What am I doing?'" -> "I am directing the course of this meditation" -> Look at this I that is directing the meditation -> Cannot find an I, nor direction, nor a meditation
"What am I doing?" -> "I am talking to an imaginary person in my head" [this one is a particularly suffering-producing I] -> Look at this I... etc

I was surprised by how many conceptual I's were hiding in experience. In my previous sits, my focus had been on observing sensations that I already felt pretty confident weren't an I (here's a sound, here's a visual...). But it hadn't occurred to me to deliberately hunt down the sensations that *did* feel like an I - or, to put it another way, to track the formation of I across various levels of fabrication. Perhaps there is no strong sense of I hiding in a sound, but I do seem to think there is an I directing the meditation in such a way that sounds are heard - and it is this I at a higher level of abstraction that tends to get overlooked.

1h vipassana

Same as above, but a little less heavy-handed with the technique, no longer dropping in questions, just checking in at regular intervals to see which clusters of sensations seemed to be glued together by an I-concept.

Often felt like I was chasing the I as it popped from place to place:
The I is responding to some imagined other -> The stream of verbal thoughts gets noticed -> The I is now an observer who was noticing the stream of verbal thoughts -> The observer gets noticed -> The I is now the analyser of the observer, reciting that this sensation is not I, that sensation is not I...

I also noticed that the most suffering-producing I - the one where an imagined me is talking to an imagined other - seems to spin up in this sequence:
A mental image or voice of the other -> a tender somatic sensation somewhere in the heart, accompanied by an emotional quality -> an I spins up to own that feeling, or perhaps to disown that feeling, to protect or defend against that feeling...

It seems like the heart area is a previously-overlooked place that is particularly fruitful for generating emotionally-charged, attention-stealing Is.
 
(ADDED ON EDIT) 1h vipassana

Ended the day with a much gentler, quieter, integrating session. Just allowed sensations to arise and pass on their own, quietly, without much sense of effort. Every now and then, washed over the field with words like, "These are just sensations, they are not me" to encourage that perception to settle in. The whole body-mind-state was simple, unobtrusive, quiet. Verbalisations didn't run for long before naturally being noticed, and upon being noticed, naturally the thought "that thought is not mine, it's just a thought" would arise, as well as "the noticing is not mine, it's just a noticing", and also "these narrations are also not mine, just narrations", then the words drop away.

When the seed of an emotion dropped in, again, they were noticed as sensations, noticed as not me, and dissipated quickly. Sometimes there would be a gentle investigation, what makes up this emotion for which a label has arisen like restlessness or sadness or uncertainty? Then a gentle search takes place, which finds little to nothing, and in the lack of finding, the emotion dissipates.

Ended the sit in a neutral, calm clarity.

I think what allowed for this mindstate is that when a verbalisation, an emotion, or a response to an imaginary other arose, it wasn't long before it was caught by attention and cut by the act of attention. But also, upon noticing that it had been caught and cut by attention, there wasn't any congratulating myself for having caught it, or berating myself for not having caught it sooner. It was just a matter-of-fact acknowledgement that recent practice of mindfulness has created the conditions that allow mindfulness to arise more readily, and so, naturally, these things are caught and cut sooner. And if there was some identification with a thought or feeling, and then that was noticed, again, recognizing that the identification is an old habit, but the catching and cutting of it is also a habit, a more recently created habit that's bedding in.
 

If you want you can try to recognise which experience feels to be "outside" and which feels to be more "inside". We can all agree that the sense of  "I" seems to be more "inside" hence easier to pinpoint it as it's not going to be "outside" (of this body) 

Not sure if this is helpful. It came to mind. 

2025-08-05 (Tue)

Today I learned: apparently it is possible to receive pointing out instructions from a forum post!  (only semi joking)

As I was walking back to my car after work, I read your comment and thought, "hmm, outside-inside, interesting, I might try that in a future sit". Then I looked up from my phone, and suddenly, something changed about everything. The change cannot be described in terms of the physical senses - it's more like a feeling, like a cognitive overlay that has shifted. The change feels something like this:

- Objects seem slightly less solid than I'd normally give them credit for. They don't *look* any less solid (it's not about vibrations getting stronger), and if anything, objects look a little more 3D, and the colours a little more vibrant. But they seemed less solid - I could almost believe that if two objects came together, they wouldn't collide into each other, but could have occupied the same space simultaneously.
- The sense of distance or space is also subtly skewed, in that things feel a lot closer than they should be. Again, there's no change to the visual perception of distance, it's just a feeling.
- Sounds have a location, but don't seem to be tagged "here" or "there" - their location just didn't seem to reference some other point (so no "I am here, listening to a sound that is over there"). They also seem a lot closer.
- Something subtly different about somatic sensations too, but I can't pinpoint what.
- The whole environment has a quality of aliveness, like it is surging into being. I don't know how to describe this other than in poetic terms, but it is a felt quality.
- No obvious change to thoughts and emotions - those are still by default referenced to "me".

The difference is subtle but pervasive, like a very mildly altered state of consciousness, and the effect was a little disorienting - like everything had just gotten slightly brighter and closer than before, though not in an unpleasant way, just a bit strange.

I'd experienced very brief periods of this sort of mindstate before - when in a very calm meditation, and the mind relaxes enough that it starts to forget it was trying to meditate, and *pop* (it almost feels like a soap bubble popping) something falls away and this mindstate switches on. But this is my first time encountering it spontaneously off-cushion.

Whatever this mindstate is (an attempt at non-duality within an A&P frame??), I'm pretty excited about this development. Will continue experimenting with inside-outside distinction and see what happens, on- and off-cushion.

This state "fell off" back to regular consciousness after some seconds, but when some version of the thought "inside-outside" occurred to me, the state would switch on again. And so it came on and off a number of times for the rest of the evening. Thankfully it was off for the entirety of the drive, as I would have been a somewhat distracted driver otherwise!

Later in the evening, this state began to take on a slightly more confused quality - it turned into something more like a very mild dissociation/derealisation.

Oh, this may or may not have any relevance to putting me in the mental climate to have experienced this mindstate today: last night, I had the best night's sleep in many weeks, falling asleep within minutes, staying asleep for a full 7 hours. This is in contrast to the moderate-to-severe insomnia that had largely characterised my past 3 months. I also had my first long, unfragmented, highly coherent dream in months. In fact, the quality of the dream (ambience, visual appearance, emotional/aesthetic tone, symbolic/archetypal elements, and narrative depth) was so remarkable that it felt more like I had fallen into some impossibly beautiful, slightly surreal magical realm. It even came with a gorgeous musical soundtrack.

 

2025-08-09 (Sat)

Did very little formal meditation this week, though I did listen to a few talks by Michael Taft while driving, including his 4-part series on his 4-stage vipassana map. This gave me some fresh perspectives, and even more things to explore on cushion, especially about observing the changeability of "the stuff that feels like me".

The sensate level (for external sight, external sound, and body sensations) was more easily accessible this week, with an accompanying rise in sensate clarity, vibrations and pleasantness.

My overall mood off-cushion is considerably less dominated by those really contracted, loopy emotional states that had characterised my life in earlier weeks. I think re-anchoring in meditation has been a major contributor, including the recent realisation that I had been doing vipassana with an ulterior motive - trying to dissolve those solid moods so that they would be less solid and annoying. Turns out, if I wasn't so caught up being annoyed at how solid they felt (and how badly I wanted them to dissolve), their impermanent nature reveals itself quite readily.

Am still pretty confused about how to work with the psychological/content track vs the insight track. Like, where would it be useful to apply skills learned on one track to work with the other (eg somatic awareness and detached observation, developed in meditation, is a gamechanger for therapy; gentle self-help type reminders can ease me into an otherwise-irritable meditation), and where I need to make clear distinctions between them (ie don't get lost in content while trying to do insight, or bypass content while trying to do therapy).

 "Am still pretty confused about how to work with the psychological/content track vs the insight track."

I'm not an expert in the insight track but I wanted to share what helped me with psychological content. I avoided Metta for the first 5 years of my practice as I thought it was "flowery bullshit." Ironically that statement should make it clear that I had an aversive and judgemental mind. 

Around year 5 (which was 7ish years ago... yikes), I started doing Metta about 20 minutes a day, mostly based on Ajahn Sona's talks (he has a series on youtube) and one by Ajahn Pasanno called Gladdening The Mind. I also listened to those talks quite frequently while going for walks, playing video games, working out, or doing chores; since it was generally better that the garbage mental talk I had going on haha. The short version of what happened, is that this unlocked some pretty crazy concentration experiences (Jhana in particular, but I didn't know what it was at the time) and some personality changes for the better.

There were two processes that helped:
- When I would establish the mind in some kind of Metta state (more samatha/shamatha kind of approach though), memories or past trauma might would up sometimes and often get re-examined within the context/mood of Metta. That tended to take the emotional charge down in the memories; sometimes just a bit or sometimes quite profoundly. I think of this very much in a "what fires together wires together" sense, where one is rewiring the trauma by overriding the past emotional charge with love/equanimity. Can't say that is a scientifically proven statement though.
- Having Metta as a tool on demand whenever I felt uncomfortable or down was super useful and had the side benefit of making me a person that people enjoyed being around. It basically melted away 95% of my social anxiety once I realized that getting out of my head and being in a good mood is 95% of what a person needs to be good in social situations.

I don't know if you've ever done Metta, Tonglen, or some equivalent practice, but the main thing I am saying here is that this style of practice was life-changing in terms of dealing with content of thought. If it sounds appropriate and you haven't explored that, it might be worth looking into some day. We might have different internal problems going on though so I don't know. For me, the angry/averse/judgemental mind was the elephant in the room but maybe that's not the case for you.

​​​​​​​Best of luck! 

I don't have an answer. But I think these are very good questions.

Thanks Ryan for your thoughts and for the recommendation - I'll check out those talks! (I have a long commute, so plenty of time for listening )

Your experience resonates so much with mine.  I also have an aversive and judgemental mind, and for most of my meditation "career", I've struggled to do metta, partly because of aversion to the idea of metta practice, sometimes even aversion to the idea of becoming a kinder happier person. (I think because some part of me thinks kindness = being a doormat)

Recently, I finally discovered a metta-substitute that seemed promising for me: vajrayana practices in which I visualise myself as a deity, most commonly Avalokiteshvara the bodhisattva of compassion. "I AM awakened compassion. What does the world look like through these eyes?" It's like metta (or I suppose karuna) cranked up to 11 with ritual and mythology. I suppose it works for me because identifying as a deity cuts through all those doubts and anxieties about misplaced kindness - "little me" might be confused and weak and vulnerable, but a deity sure knows what he's doing.

I'm too early with this practice to have seen massive life-changing differences, but I've definitely noticed that it can ease the frustration, sadness, self-pity type thoughts. It also helped me to see that when someone is "behaving badly" towards me, it's a reflection of their limitations rather than malice (and even if they were behaving maliciously, the malice is itself a limitation). And that shifts me from feeling angry or hurt to feeling a gentle compassion for their inability in that moment to create happiness for themselves and for others. It blew my mind the first time this shift happened - I didn't realise I was capable of generating positive emotion in the face of someone's bad behaviour, let alone having that positive emotion arise on its own and dominate the experience. I can't explain it except by saying that Avalokiteshvara did it.

Long story short, I have a nascent metta-ish practice, which does shift my mindset in the moment. It's pretty heartening to hear you say it has been life-changing for you - I'm now feeling encouraged to keep it up and see if it creates more lasting change too.

  
"(I think because some part of me thinks kindness = being a doormat)"

I can relate to that very strongly; it is crazy how these core beliefs can condition outcomes in life. Mine was a bit different in that I thought you had to be stupid to be happy. This was partly a reflection of my own unhappiness and insecurities around intellect. In fairness to my younger self, the happiest person I knew (in terms of just generally being in a good mood) was to this day, one of the worst life decision makers I have ever known. Like the only thing they had going for them was the ability to be pretty blissful and ignorant while avoiding any form of responsibility, self growth, or practical adversity.

It took a long time to unpack that but eventually I realized that my aversion to happiness was mainly just a poorly formed childhood defense mechanism. I also have the view the "Metta", particularly translated as "Loving Kindness" does have a marketing problem. If someone had explained to me that it was the brain teaching itself to create an internal source of well-being, or what having such a thing can do, I probably would have started doing it right away. "Loving Kindness" is one of those terms that is going to either really resonate with certain people (I know the types well as I grew up on the West Coast of BC, Canada) and really not do well with others.

​​​​​​​Best of luck with your practice! 
 

around 2025-08-08 (Fri)

A curious experience occurred two nights in a row - something strange about the way memory reconstructed the sequence of events prior to waking up from sleep. Both nights, I was in bed, trying to fall asleep with a Youtube talk playing in the background. I had apparently fallen asleep for some short period, then woke up when a loud sound occurred in the talk. I would have expected my memory to consist of listening to the talk until the sense of listening faded out (because I fell asleep), then suddenly being awake and aware that a loud sound had happened.

But that wasn't how the memory went. Instead, I recalled listening to the talk, then at some point I was just hanging out in silence for some extended period of time, then out of that silence, the loud sound happened. As though I woke up to silence, listened to silence for some minutes, then heard a sound. That was so strange that I scrolled the talk back and forth to check if there were audio issues - did the talk go silent for a while before coming back on with a sudden sound? Nope, the speaker was talking all the way through to the end. I was apparently asleep enough that I didn't hear it at all, but simultaneously awake enough to know that time was passing.

--

2025-08-10 (Sun)

40m vipassana, backless sitting

Spent the first few minutes doing a body scan from toe to head to encourage relaxation. The legs and hips released quite easily and rapidly when I tended to one leg at a time. Upper body was more difficult, as usual. But it's quite a win for me to have learned how to relax my legs and hips.

I spent some time observing change in sounds and sights, which got things vibratory very quickly. Then moved on to exploring the inside-outside distinction.

As has been common lately, the location of sounds was ambiguous once I dropped the naive concepts linking certain types of sounds to certain places because that's where I expect them to originate from. For example, there was a mild electrical humming sound, and naively I would say it came from where my computer is, because I recognised it as a computer sound. But if I dropped the concept tying the sound to the computer, the location of the sound was a lot less clear - it seemed like the sound pervaded some rather broad expanse of space that is roughly compatible with where the computer was, and where "I" was, and also beyond where I was. So the sound felt like it was both outside and inside - and when it feels inside, it feels more like a somatic vibration of the sound. I'm starting to think that there are overlaps between sounds and somatics as sensations - when they feel closer to me they are somatic, and when they feel further from me they're auditory.

It was pretty hilarious when, after a while, my heater switched itself off - and that's when I realised the hum didn't come from the computer at all, but from the heater, which is located in a different part of the room. Goes to show how much my sense of spatial location is constructed or distorted by concepts about where the sound *ought* to come from, instead of where it actually comes from.

After a while, I switched to checking whether visuals were outside or inside, allowing vibrations to mess with the naive concept that "seen things" are obviously outside. My first impression was that it looks like vibrations are outside, swirling about in the air between me and the objects in front of me, and that the vibrations sometimes mingled with the objects and mushed them up. But are vibrations inside or outside of me? If I close my eyes, the same vibrations keep running! The concept-generating mind was hard at work, coming up with one explanation after another to try to explain what's actually happening. eg generating a mental image of the "I" as a projector projecting visuals out into space, or generating a verbal explanation of how "outside" is actually better termed as whatever I imagine to be consensus reality, and "inside" are things that I think are outside consensus reality.

3h combined sadhana + homebrew ritual thing

Fairly content heavy work. Experienced an emotional release, not in the sense of any strong surging emotion, but increased clarity and groundedness.

--

2025-08-11 (Mon)

I had been rather busy and feeling a bit restless most of the day (this has to be done, and that has to be done, and don't forget that thing, etc etc). But upon arriving at the airport for a domestic flight, I noticed I was suddenly in an unusually good mood, like mild euphoria with heightened sensory clarity - visuals very crisp and clear and broad, colours vibrant.

20m at the airport, seated, "just dropping into phenomena"

Vibrant and vibratory open eye visuals. Sounds were slipping in and out of existence. Sometimes I'd catch a word or two, but more often just heard talk as a hubbub of sounds. Body noticeably relaxing and getting pleasantly tingly. Started checking the location of sensations again. Somatic sensations, when I don't conceptually constrain them to "they happen within this thing that looks like a body", seem quite diffuse and not clearly "within me"; it's almost as hard as sounds to pinpoint to a location. The sense of visual depth also degrades when visuals get as vibratory as this - it's more like there are swirling splotches of colour everywhere.

Tried to locate "where" intentions were (if I intend to move my leg, is the intention in the leg, or somewhere in the head, or...), and where meaning-making occurred (when I hear talking and understand the meaning of what was spoken, does the understanding occur "out there" or "in here")? I couldn't tell

1h tantric practice

Preceded this with a few minutes of just sitting and allowing the body to relax. Continued to have rather heightened, vibratory senses. Following the ritual text stirred my heart a little, at times. But more noticeable was that I felt myself anchored, grounded right here, as this swirling mass of colour and form and vibration. This is me, right here. I felt something very strong and empowering about it.

--

2025-08-12 (Tue)

1h guided meditation - Boundaryless, timeless stillness by Michael Taft

The instructions said to begin with shamatha (any object of my choosing), and I meant to lean into somatic sensations to generate relaxation and pleasure. But I found myself inexorably drawn into investigating the sensations, probably primed by my recent vipassana-heavy work. I noticed that if I paid attention to somatics alone, distinguishing them from other sensations (visuals, concepts etc) as best I could, then somatics were neither "outside" nor "inside" the body. It's not as if there is a space where there are somatics and other spaces where there aren't, which is what is needed to draw a boundary between inside and outside. There is only awareness of somatics when I'm only being aware of somatics. That sounds like stating the obvious, but I swear I'm trying to say something meaningful.

As to where they are in space - there is a sense that the somatics are happening "somewhere in space", but it's not very clear where in space they are, relative to each other, or relative to "me". They are just sensations that come with some quality of space.

The next set of instructions were to feel into the sense of self, and then look for it closely to find out where/what it is. The sense of self moved about, locationally and in terms of the dominant sense door - sometimes it seemed to anchor itself to a fullness around the heart region, other times to a mental image, but if I looked closely at the heart region or the mental image, the sense of self fled elsewhere.

Eventually the instructions said to look for awareness itself. I was pretty relaxed into the sit by then, with things very vibratory, so it seemed quite doable to expand my focus towards awareness. With this move, it seemed as if there were all these sensations happening here and there - they were sort of happening "in a space", but not in the usual sense - space is a somewhat metaphorical description, like there is this happening, then that happening, then more happening, then even more happening, and the happening sort of occurs in dimensionality. The "happening" could be a somatic sensation, or a sound, mental image, etc; often it's a combination of several sensations mixed together. There were repeated attempts to conceptualise or reify this type of awareness, as if I'm trying to describe it to myself. This drive manifests as a mental image that looks like a photo of outer space with a cloud of stuff here and a cloud of stuff there.

At some point, it suddenly dawned on me that it was absurd to go looking for "awareness itself". That's like the ocean asking where do I go to look for water. It became obvious that I don't need to do anything to make contact with awareness, as awareness is all that there is and ever has been. Again, this sounds trite in words, but that thought had hit with some power.

There continued to be lots of sensations of the sort of "I am being aware of something", or "I am trying to notice something", or "I am trying to distinguish the sound from a mental image that conceptualises what that sound means", and so on. But all of these thoughts seemed to be more arising sensations. The idea that I am really here looking for things or investigating things became less dominant. Every time those thoughts came up, they came flavoured with the same silliness of the ocean looking for water.

In a sense, this was a very ordinary sit. It was just body sensations,  sounds, mental images, image-type thoughts and talk-type thoughts, the usual stuff. But there was a slightly different inflection to the experience - like a shift from anchoring in "all the things that are happening" to "the happening of the things".

Something else that caught my curiosity: I noticed that the surreal, fire kasina style closed eye visuals that sometimes popped up when I was sufficiently relaxed doesn't actually feel much different from the more ordinary type of mental image I get, such as when I feel a body sensation, and that comes with a mental image of "my left shoulder", which gets stitched together to form the concept "there are sensations in my left shoulder". The mental image that arises of the left shoulder doesn't really seem different in terms of how it appears and where it appears and the way it appears and then disappears again from these so-called visual hallucinations.
 

Yes! I struggled with "loving kindness" as it came with negative connotations for me, something like a social obligation to be a good person or to act happy regardless of how I actually feel. Childhood conditioning indeed. Your description of metta makes it sound way more sensible.

The tricky thing is that these core beliefs are (by definition, I guess?) distorted views about something that is good and healthy. No matter how metta gets described, or what technique is taught (metta phrases, tonglen, whatever), it's going to hit somebody's core beliefs and trigger a negative reaction from them. I'd love for there to be more awareness that there are many ways to develop metta, and that different techniques will work for different people. I guess it'd be a pragmatic dharma approach to metta - use any technique and any object that teaches you to generate wellbeing, and it's not about turning yourself into a saint, it's about making your own life better.

2025-08-13 (Wed)

Welp... that gloriously grounded, clean, high-clarity phase I had been in for the past few days evaporated this morning over a triggering incident (the actual incident was an almost-nothing, but it triggered memories of an extremely unpleasant thing from a few months back). I was plunged straight back into neurotic thoughts piling on each other. I managed to mostly escape the thoughts during the day by keeping busy with work stuff, so that instead of feeling the raw emotionality, it got blunted to some kind of world weariness. The neuroticism came back in the evening after work.

Did a self-led IFS session in the evening, which produced a shift back into clarity. Again, like the recent shifts, it was abrupt and very noticeable: at the moment that I was visualising a purification by burning, the senses shifted into heightened clarity, as if vision suddenly became crisper, brighter, more vibrant, as if all the senses were suddenly taking in more data. The clarity continued to grow and grow over a period of about 30 seconds. The body relaxed, the voice grew deeper and calmer. I couldn't really think of anything except, "wow, wow, what is happening, this is great, wow..." Felt very grounded, very clear, very good.

The thought pile-on, that sense of desperation and urgency and weariness that I had felt for most of the day seems to have entirely gone. I could bring up memories of things that would have been triggering just a minute ago, and they would have lost their charge.

--

My past several weeks have been characterised by these abrupt shifts, which feel strongly like ReObs -> Eq shifts, then fall back to ReObs, then learning to shift back to Eq.

The part of my brain that loves to map things and come up with tidy stories is saying that "how to cross from ReObs to Eq" is the lesson the current insight cycle is teaching me, by making me do it over and over again, in different contexts and with different approaches.

2025-08-14 (Thu)

25m vipassana, reclining

Just seeing what is happening. Rather choppy "this side" stuff - strings of thoughts, mostly about practice, and describing practice, what techniques to use, etc.

At some point, I got interested again in the question, what is the sense that there was experience that wasn't contacted? (i.e. failing to be mindful of something) In a way, that statement is absurd - if it was experience, then it was experienced. If it wasn't experienced, then from the vipassana point of view it didn't exist. And yet, I have a very strong intuitive sense that there are things that happened but weren't experienced.

I worked on it again, but didn't get any further than the last time, which is to say that this sense is composed of a memory that didn't include certain sensations, along with the idea that those sensations should have been present. This felt kind of obvious and not very illuminating.

This meditation as a whole was stuck on quite a conceptual level, and an unhelpful kind of narrowing. Even my attempt to drop into more sensate territory were largely concepts about dropping into sensate territory rather than the actual thing.

1h guided meditation, The silence within thoughts, Michael Taft, reclining

Switched to a guided meditation for a bit more anchoring, and to see if it could give me a new perspective on those conceptual loops.

The audio was rather muffled, so I didn't catch all the instructions. We were observing the end of the out-breath and the silence, the openness that may be momentarily present between that and the next in-breath. After a while, we switched to doing the same with thoughts, noticing the end of a thought and the openness that might be present before the next thought arises.

I generated a mostly conceptual idea of a still turning point - rather like how, in a walking meditation where you walk back and forth in a straight line, you are moving until you reach the end of the line, then turning in place for a short while, before you start moving again in the other direction. That's roughly how it felt to me - in that stay-in-place, turn-around moment between the end of one thought and the start of a next, there was sometimes a very momentary sense of "uninterruptedness".

Documenting my thoughts on the relationship/distinction between psychological work and insight. These are field notes based on what seems to be working for me right now, and I reserve the right to revise or totally reject these at any future time  
  
My current interest is in that split-second reaction chain between stimulus and response. Conventional psychological approaches like CBT or standard mindfulness basically follow that adage "between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is the power to choose our response". So, catch the stimulus, pause, and choose a new, wholesome response rather than let an old unskillful reaction jump in.  
  
I'm starting to think this is a form of bypassing, whether viewed on the psychology or the insight level. Because that "space" between stimulus and response is not a blank gap. There is experience in there - perhaps a nascent emotion, whispers of an old memory, an aborted reaction... to "pause and choose" is to turn away from whatever was going on in that in-between space, to choose to ignore it.  
  
Meanwhile, turning to that in-between space is to see it with clarity. Maybe that nascent emotion was a somatic sensation of shame. Maybe that old memory was a mental image of some childhood event where that emotion had been felt. Maybe that aborted reaction was the first inkling of an inner critic jumping in to mock that child.  

At that point, if I want to work on them as insight, I can see them for what they are: a somatic sensation, followed by an inner image, followed by inner talk. They're just sensations, they have no power to cause harm. They can be seen, they can be accepted, they can be allowed to arise and pass away as all sensations do. And with that recognition, the whole reaction chain loses steam and dissipates.  

Or, if I want to work on them psychologically, perhaps I can explore that somatic sense of shame. Perhaps I can revisit that childhood memory. Perhaps I can dialogue with that inner critic. They are empty sensations, but they have rich and potent associations, and I can dive into those associations as deep as I want - but all this is possible only after I have first allowed them to be seen.  

It could be interesting to see if there are patterns that are independent of content, but not random. There are sensations that arise and pass away. Is there a mechanism that mediates the arising and passing away? Does that mechanism operate in the same way, even if the psychological content or the specifics of the story are different? 

Interesting idea! It led me to realise I've mostly been observing reactions to the knottiest, most emotionally painful stuff, which tend to have similar kinds of content, so it's been hard to distinguish content from pattern.

I'll try observing reactions to a wider range of everyday stuff (like very minor annoyances, or maybe even happy/positive reaction chains) to look for patterns.

Woah!!! Ajahn Sona's metta talks are fucking amazing (thanks Ryan for the recommendation). I have never heard anyone explain metta like that. I'm only two talks in, and he's already helped me unblock some of my longstanding blockers to doing metta.

These are the talks I'm listening to right now - a series of talks on metta, apparently given during an 8-day retreat in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxh9h__4Fcc&list=PLCXN1GlAupG1o9fJBruNaEjNCy7LVdZaN

He really starts with baby steps and explains methodically, which is great for someone like me, who will misunderstand anything that could possibly be misunderstood about metta.

Example: instead of diving straight into "let's generate metta for so-and-so", he starts with this: "What is present in the mind that is not loving kindness? The five hindrances. When they come up, there's a lot of activity and interest and investigation. Just turn your mind inward on yourself, see what's your emotional tone right now. Give yourself a mark if it's non ill-will... the absence of aversion is already very good. We're heading in the right way."

It seems stupid obvious when stated like that, but I had never thought of "dropping ill will" as a first step toward metta. I would try to "force" metta to come while ill will was building and building in the background... duh, no wonder it wasn't working...

Yes! There's a lot of ways to do and experience and establish Metta. You might have also gotten to this part already, but at some point he explains how Metta does not at all mean you are a doormat. 

It makes me happy to hear that recommendation was useful.


 

A Zen master's Kyosaku strikes you hard with loads of Metta! 

2025-08-16 (Sat)

I have a whole weekend free for solo retreat! Yay! Will be aiming for about 20 hours of formal meditation, primarily vipassana, especially observing reaction chains.

Started Saturday morning in a mindstate that was fairly neutral, with a very slight blandness - a mild tendency to detach/dissociate from stuff.

1h push-pull, semi-reclining

Yesterday, I had tested something like "looking for patterns within the content" off-cushion, but found that I tended to fly into long conceptual analyses about the reactions rather than observing them. So I decided that today, I'll start from the opposite direction: look the simplest building blocks. Just look for push-pull at the subtlest level that I'm capable of seeing them in, then perhaps work my way up to see what the chain of push-pull might look like as a pattern.

The mind-body settled readily into a calm pleasantness - no fireworks, just a very gentle, relaxed background piti-sukha. Applied just enough effort to approximately stay on course with the intent of the exercise.

A lot of what I caught ended up being push-pull about practice itself, and the desires and identities that form via practice. eg During a period of relaxedness, there was an organic expansion of the sense of space, and then a gentle pull towards indulging in it, a desire for the expansion to continue, which became a pull towards wanting it to stabilise as 5th jhana, then a pull towards an identity as a meditator capable of formless jhana. Then the thought arose that this was prideful and undesirable (push), then a recognition that noticing the pull-then-push wobble was precisely the practice I had meant to do, so pride forms again about having caught aversion rather than feeding it (pull)...

After a while, the sit ended up being some organic combination of observing push-pull and a kind of Do Nothing, because observing push-pull allowed stuff to drop away.

Thoughts about sticky real-life stuff arose from time to time, but (perhaps I was in a much gentler mindstate), they took on a much gentler flavour, tinged with compassion rather than defensiveness, and eventually got noticed and labelled.

1h push-pull, same as before

In this sit, there were more and longer drifts into narratives and imagined conversations than the previous. The thoughts were mostly neutral or slightly pleasant vedana, and would run for a matter of seconds, a few for as long as a minute, before the noticing mind caught it and labelled it as "pull". At times, I attempted a stronger technique of deliberately labelling things as push/pull to stay anchored in the practice.

Felt like I bobbing up and down, up and down on the push-pull seesaw, but in fairly fine-grain fluctuations. The micro-wobbles were the most obvious upon noticing the push-pull sequence itself, like: notice getting sucked into something (pull) -> notice that as unmindful and undesirable (push) -> notice that there is accurate noticing of push-pull (pull) -> notice that it is superfluous to recursively notice the noticing (push) -> settle back into enjoying the pleasant mindstate (pull)...

Started wondering: when is enjoyment of a pleasant feeling just enjoyment, and when does it tip over into craving? Can a clear distinction be made?

1h push-pull again, reclining

This sit had even more and longer drifts into imagined narratives. The push-pull noticing became more like a small background process that made a gentle note every now and then.

Saw that a chain of narrative thoughts was not merely a series of pull-pull-pull-pull-pull getting bigger and bigger. There were micro-flickers of push in between that kept propelling it. It's like:

something sucks me in -> a very momentary aversion (perhaps a pre-verbal fear or doubt or suspicion) -> something else sucks me in even stronger -> another very momentary aversion...

It's like the "sucking in" is a way that attention diverts itself away from those micro-flickers of unpleasant things.

I started wondering what makes something sticky - what makes it "worthy of craving", for lack of a better term. It's not necessarily pleasantness. If the mind was oriented towards craving whatever was pleasant, it should have gotten sucked into the body bliss, which was fairly persistent throughout the sit. Instead, it would often get sucked into narrative thoughts that were neutral or even unpleasant. What on earth? What makes these unpleasant thoughts more attractive to the mind than pleasant body bliss? It seems like craving doesn't run on pleasantness so much as it runs on something like self-preservation or self-aggrandisement. It's like craving is a social act, trying to invent an acceptable self to present to (imagined) others.

Also continued wondering what the act of attending (paying attention to something) is. It feels intuitively obvious what attending is, but I'm not sure how to describe it in terms of sensations.

15m wuji standing (for energetic/somatic release)

First time doing this in weeks. I briefly reviewed the key alignment points (feet - knees - kua - etc), then stood for 15 minutes, cycling through each the locations sequentially to check for alignment. There was some relaxation of the shoulders and lower back, some heat (but no sweating), some trembling in the legs. No major release. I could tell when alignment was present, as the energy body would "connect" and chi/piti/energy would flow through the body.

1h push-pull, reclining

Became quite relaxed, investigation became dim. At some point, the mind suddenly cleared. Not that it was clouded before, but it suddenly hit an unusual level of pristineness that is hard to describe except with vague things like "breathing felt freer". After that, investigation drifted off even more, with minimal motivation to go noticing or labelling things. I tried to apply myself to push-pull labelling for a while, but it kept slipping off, so eventually I dropped it to an even simpler framework of just noticing urges and wishes, like the urge to shift my head or the wish for a tension point to release.

After the sit, I felt very fresh and pleasant, but slightly vague, and wondering whether I should keep going with the push-pull exercise, or whether this drifty sit is a sign that it's run its course for now and I should explore something else for the rest of the day.

1h guided meditation by Michael Taft, Looking for the looker, backless sitting

Switching to something different. I felt a bit turned off by the mantra recitation that Michael led at the start (unsure why), and in that aversive headspace, some unrelated unpleasant thoughts/emotions slipped in again. It was as if aversiveness came first, then it looked around for content to be averse to, and it is indiscriminate in what content it uses as fuel to generate more aversion.

The core of the practice was a self-inquiry question: "Who is having this experience?" then look. This produced the results I had expected - mental images, memories, other sensations flashing in and out. Felt obvious and trite, I was clearly still in aversive mindstate. Body was somewhat tense throughout, especially the shoulders.

Visual vibrations were prominent and often jittery, with the entire visual field sometimes freeze-framing, and sometimes accompanied by a sense of gravity shifting, as though I'm sitting in a vehicle that is tilting.

1h mixed vipassana - imaginal - brahmaviharas, semi reclining

The aversive thoughts and emotions were still heavily flavouring the mindstate, so I started with just labelling "aversion, aversion" when I saw them. The mind cleared after a few minutes of sustained labelling.

I then returned to the question "Who is having this experience?" When an aversive thought slipped back in, I tailored the question to look at it directly - "Who is feeling sad?", "Who is having this conversation?". I discovered that this was another way to open the mind to more spaciousness and clarity. Those thoughts, once I asked that question, became some idea floating in some imagined space, losing the stickiness of their content. And looking for the thinker of the thought producced an image of an arrow or a bird whizzing about the imagined space, looking around for a thinker. These were slightly cartoonish images, but created a sense of spaciousness. And when the bird failed to find a thinker, the thought also faded away.

After a while, I got curious about how mental images could create a felt sense of spaciousness. So I recalled a scene from some years ago, when I was standing at the top of a mountain tall enough to pierce through the clouds. It was sunset, so I was looking down at a thick layer of gold-lit clouds spreading out in every direction as far as the eye could see - a glorious sight. I stabilised this mental image, then sent it to "fill the entirety of the mental space" (whatever that meant). The result was a quiet but exquisite pleasantness, of satisfaction and peace and vastness. "Spacious" wasn't quite the right word for it, because it wasn't space in the ordinary measurable sense, but rather a felt sense that there was no boundary to this experience - whether visual, emotional, or somatic. There remained a sense of an "I", which was never found, though the little bird was whizzing about looking for the recaller of the memory.

I spontaneously got the idea to do the brahmaviharas, so I recited the Tibetan phrases, and had them pervade the entirety of this multimodal image. Then I soaked in it with a gentle warmth and wonder. 

2025-08-16 (Sat) (continued)

30m do nothing, semi reclining

Background body bliss, lots of drifting into neutral or pleasant thoughts, often about practice.

1h body scan - space, boundaries, inside/outside

Returned to exploring space, boundaries, and the inside/outside distinction, specifically focusing on somatics. I eventually realised that I had been drawing an distinction between somatics that felt inside, and somatics that felt outside:

- piti, pain, and other somatic sensations that were obviously vibratory were "inside"
- sensations of contact with the floor, my clothing were "outside"

In fact, these "outside" sensations were so poorly investigated that, mostly, I didn't even notice them vibrating. They just seemed like solid conceptual objects - "this is the feeling of the body seated on the floor", etc. It seems like I use vibrating vs non-vibrating as a shorthand for inside vs outside somatics.

Upon realising this, I spent the rest of the sit working on this apparent boundary - observing the "outside" sensations until the vibrations became obvious, oscillating between inside and outside somatic sensations to blur the boundary.

2025-08-17 (Sun)

I was thinking about this overnight: when an imaginary conversation arises, there is an intuitive sense that there is a real speaker and real listener. Their "dialogue" is what propels the conversation and creates suffering. At times, I would remind myself that there is really no listener - no inner critic to defend against, no inner witness to impress, etc. That relieved some of the compulsive urge to respond to the listener, and relieved some of the suffering. But what was left was a vague sense of loneliness, like I was shouting into the abyss - I was talking and talking, but there was no one on the other end to receive what was being spoken.

But I just realised that this was only half of the puzzle. I had turned the flashlight in one direction ("where is the listener?") but not in the other direction ("where is the speaker?"). I turned the flashlight around - and the sense of loneliness vanished! There is no speaker. There is no one shouting into the abyss. It's just a thought, floating in nowhere.

1h looking for listener and speaker, semi reclining

Decided to modify the self-inquiry practice to look both ways, per my realisation from this morning. When a narrative thought arose, I asked, "Who is listening?" and looked. Found no listener, then asked, "Who is speaking?" and looked. Found no speaker. Then the mindstate opened into a broad and settled ease.

Some seconds later, while still in that easeful state, a strong, strange somatic sensation ran through the body from top to bottom in a wave - something vibratory, queasy and unsettling. It also felt as though the body was falling downwards, or perhaps the ground was giving way beneath me. But once the wave had passed, what remained was a palpable sense of relief.

I continued looking for the listener, then speaker, then resting in the resulting openness for the rest of this sit. That strange queasy vertigo-like sensation occurred several times more, though with reduced intensity. The mindstate became so quiet and dreamy that I suspect I fell asleep at some point.

1h, same as above

Started this sit feeling rather gushy gratitude for the precious dharma, teaching me how to cut suffering closer and closer to its root. Far surpassing whatever little self-regulation strategies I might have tried before.

Then continued a gentle sit, just hanging out until the mind drifted into an imagined conversation, then looking for the listener. This time, I specifically hunted for whatever sensations were the closest thing that could be conjured up to pretend to be a listener, like an image of a person, or a voice, or a "sense of being watched". Then look for speaker, then rest in the openness that remained.

The openness was even more pleasant than before, and sometimes I'd get that strange somatic sensation again. It's even milder this time, and hit at the upper to mid-chest region, like a flash of vibratory queasiness, which would then send a brief somatic echo down to the belly and groin, then it's gone.

30m, same as above

That hit of brief, mild queasiness came many more times, but it now seems to be higher in the body, hitting at the neck, face, and top of head region.

Then one much stronger hit, more like the original vertigo/lurch sensation from this morning, except that instead of running top to bottom, it ran between front and back - like my body was simultaneously lurching forwards/outwards and backwards at the same time. Weird and queasy. Suspect it was a fruition near-miss (suffering + no self?), but not diagnosing it as the real deal as I didn't see a complete discontinuity.

Afterwards, felt clear-headed, but with reduced inclination to continue sitting, and I cut the session short at the half-hour bell.

1h, same as above, lying down

Pleasant and dreamy the whole way through. At points, thoughts became quite disjointed and surreal, including what would normally have been narrative thoughts - eg thoughts in which the sense of who the listener would be, or what I am trying to say to them, became quite nonsensical.

Lots of micro-releases in body tension, so it was really quite nice and spacious. I alternated between a very gentle looking for the listener and speaker when a narrative thought arose, and otherwise gently observing push-pull, or even just enjoying all the sensations.

There were no more queasy/lurchy/vertigo type sensations.

This double-inquiry technique may have run out of steam for now? I might switch to something else for my next sit.

15m wuji standing

Rather distracted throughout - thought the practice was boring, wanted to switch to something else, though I didn't quite know what I wanted to switch to. Difficulty focusing on the alignments, kept losing the alignment points. Reminded myself that "this is boring" are just words, and do not need to be some real emotional state, which enabled me to get to the end of the session.

2025-08-18 (Sun) (continued)

1h guided meditation, Dissolve All Thought in Space, Michael Taft

Rapidly drifted into a soft, clean quiet state, then drifted a bit more, and lost track partway through the sit (may have fallen asleep?) Came back to a deep layer of body tensions relaxing - very viscerally relaxing, like a layer of stuff was shedding from the body head to toe, with a simultaneous clearing of awareness. Then some very rapid, almost rhythmic pulsation within the body, like dancing pulsations.

1h "why are some things more impermanent than others?"

I wondered why thoughts felt so ephemeral, whereas physical sensations seemed more solid. It's as if some things are more impermanent than others?! Then I questioned whether that was true. I was thinking of thoughts as something that disappears as soon as I notice it happening. But that's not how it works, is it? Rather, a sequence of thought-sensations runs, and its ending co-arises with a new thought,  which is the noticing of the ending of the sequence. And that noticing tends to have quite a specific quality, an "aha!" quality.

From this perspective, thoughts are no more or less impermanent than (say) sound sensations, except that upon the ending of an apparent sequence of sound-sensations, there does not arise the same "aha!" quality of having caught the ending of sounds.

Then I wondered what it meant to get sucked into a string of thoughts, and why it is so sticky and what that stickiness is. So I tested deliberately thinking thoughts while keeping some attention grounded in physical sensations (visuals - sounds - body - space), and comparing how that felt to being sucked into thoughts, where it seems like physical sensations fade away.

1h repeating the Michael Taft meditation from earlier

Somewhat bothered by stronger body discomfort than before. Some wondering of what "simple presence", "resting in awareness" (and similar phrases) meant. A bit confused. Eyes got dry and droopy, so I closed my eyes, and without the visual anchoring, broad awareness became more difficult.

Evening, over dinner

Feeling that vague, background loneliness again. Actually, I don't know if that is the right description - it's more a sense of "this isn't quite where I want to be, this isn't quite what I want to be doing", and the mind is conjuring up memories or fantasies of other things that seem more appealing than what I'm doing at the moment. And the memories/fantasies are not of things that I "really" want to do (like meaningful/fulfilling activities), but just stuff that come with a more obvious dopamine high than the bland mood I'm in now. I guess the mind is being a kid and wanting instant gratification.

In the briefly transition period between dinner and my next sit, the emotional negativity rapidly escalated - from a vague sense of "X would be more interesting than what I'm doing now" to thinking about whether X was a good or bad thing, to thinking about the consequences of X, and the consequences of the consequences of X - BAM BAM BAM the mental proliferation snowballing and catastrophising. Within about 5 minutes, I was imagining myself losing my shit at my next counselling session, tearfully begging my counsellor to fix me, and her telling me I'm wasting her time and kicking me out. (wtf, brain)

Part of me wanted to end the weekend retreat here, and switch to something else to change my mood (like read a book); another part of me wanted to observe this mood on cushion. The second part won out - it came as a thought along the lines of "I wanna see this through to its core - I wanna deconstruct the hell out of this!!" So, back to the cushion.

1h watching the papanca machine

Yup, mind was very speedy and chaotic. Expanded awareness to include vibratory visuals, sounds, somatics, as well as whatever thoughts or "this side" sensations could be included. Saw the thought-chains proliferating at very high speed - not one storyline but a whole series of storylines pumping out within a few seconds, bip-bip-bip-bip-bip-bip-bip. They'll arise, be seen, dropped, back to physical sensations, then a few seconds later, another chain, bip-bip-bip...  Even the vedana was all over the place - some of those individual thought-bips were unpleasant, some pleasant, some were just random thoughts on random things. It's like there is a craving machine running and running, which doesn't care what kind or flavour of content is involved. Watching it was like watching a train wreck over and over and over, in a different place each time.

At first, I attempted to find some phenomenological labels for the thoughts, or at least to describe the overall emotional atmosphere, but found that a fool's errand - the thoughts were too all-over-the-place to be described in terms of theme, vedana, or any other such content-inclusive label. The very attempt would create frustration. Then I tried to at least trace (in a post-mortem kind of way) the pattern behind the thought-chains, but found even that was undoable - the thoughts were just running too fast. So I just went with seeing them all as vibrations, with minimal attempt to further categorise or pattern-hunt. That made the sit much more workable.

The upside with such speed and chaos was that it was actually possible (in fact quite easy) to watch when a thought chain began, and not just watch when it ended or how it played out. Usually, a chain of thoughts arises when attention slips momentarily, so "by definition" I don't know how it arose - at some point I just become aware that it's been running. But right now, with thoughts jumping in so chaotically, I could see the moment of flipping - I would go from observing vibrations, to giving myself an instruction or reminder (like a word, a phrase, or even pre-verbal thought) about how to practice, then that reminder would get coloured with some thought association, then BAM that associated thought would be picked up by the craving machine and off the chain runs. It's like my practice instructions to myself were launching pads for the reaction chain.

I guess the power of a sit like this is that it really quite ruthlessly deconstructs the idea that I am in control of the meditation. It's just stuff flying about everywhere. I can't even pretend I'm observing it, because the sense of observation is flying everywhere. The less I pretend I am controlling/observing, the less tension there is.

At about the half-hour mark, the thought chains began to slow down, and lean more obviously towards the pleasant. It became easier to stay anchored in vibrating physical sensations for longer. So I turned on the meditator-self directly, asking, "Who is speaking?" At times, that would generate that very mild body queasiness that I had this morning, mostly in the lower part of the torso, especially the groin, sort of like "wobble legs".

Towards the end, I wondered how powerful the mind was right now, so I tested a jhana run - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, found that I could land in a soft version of each jhana in the space of about 30-60 seconds each. Then switched to metta, and found that it generated quite easily. So for the last few minutes, I was happily well-wishing the whole world, and the stickiness and chaos felt like it was a million years ago.

1h just hang out, then do nothing

Same as before - gently anchor in vibrating sensations, then see what happens. Semi-autonomously dropped into j3, which with some gentle intention broadened into j4, before I recalled I meant to do vipassana, and allowed it to fade away. Mind was still flitting about rapidly, but this time it was more flitting from one meditation technique to another, like I was meditating on autopilot - eg dropping in a self-inquiry question, then watching vibrations, then recognising thought chains, etc etc. I allowed that to happen.

After a while, switched to do nothing to see what would happen. Quickly got into a quiet and gently pleasant mindstate. The mind wandering slowed a bit. It felt like mind speed slowed down with do nothing. Still noticing urges, thoughts, etc and dropping them. Towards the end, noticed that my nimitta was very bright and strong.
 

2025-08-18 (Mon)

Woke up this morning with that restless dissatisfaction again - that unbudgeable sense that things aren't right, though I can't explain how things aren't right. Lying in bed in the morning, mind was still speedy, thought associations were rapid and often quite bizarre. One thought jumping to the next to the next, with no coherence to them whether in terms of content or valence or intent or anything.

During the day, the thoughts began to cohere again, mostly in suffering flavours - self-blame, resentment, anger, etc. At some point, the story would be noticed and labelled as "just a thought, doesn't need to be taken seriously, doesn't need to be believed in", and with that noticing, the story would dissipate, and I'd be back in a more neutral mind state.

Big, existential thoughts dropped in too. "What is my life about?" Just a thought. "I don't know what I'm doing." Just a thought. "Something is missing from this experience." Just a thought.

There is serious power in having the ability to dismiss content as uninteresting, even though this ability has its limitations too, when viewed from the perspective of holistic human development. It's like bailing water out of a leaky boat - it may not be a very fun way to sail, but it keeps you from sinking.

On the insight front: I guess I used to have the idea that "investigation" meant pinning down an experience onto the corkboard and taking a microscope to it to see it clearly, see it in detail. What a silly notion. By the time a thought is noticed and "caught" for investigating, it has been and gone.

1h just checking out what the mind is like

Evening sit. Found that mind had slowed back down, perhaps due to a full day's work. I tried to stabilise in jhana, but was tired and lazy and kept slipping off. Eventually, eyes felt tired and dry, and I closed them. Rested in a mildly pleasant, dull, rather stale state for the rest of the sit.

--

In the evening, I had (again) the realisation that I take some thoughts as being more serious, more real, more worth paying attention to than other thoughts. I haven't quite figured out what determines how "real" a thought seems. Self-critical thoughts seem more real than happy thoughts. Deep philosophical thoughts seem more real than mundane thoughts. Thoughts that appear to have societal approval are more real than thoughts that go against the grain. Wonder what's the pattern behind this distinction that I intuitively make. Perhaps the pattern, whatever it is, will reveal the self-identity I have constructed? Like, "these are the thoughts that make up who I am". 

This could be a good time for Shargrol Tonglen! Just sayn! 

Imagine if there are beings around you experiencing this same discomfort because of these thoughts and misery! You then decide to take all that experience away from them, to experience it fully in their stead, so they can experience relief and easily attain to full awakening! You imagine their happy faces and you come back to experiencing their negative experience without resistance, fully and taking it all in for the benefit of others, so they can attain to full awakening! 10 minutes of such practice is very powerful! 

Only practice if it resonates with you at this time! 

Thanks Papa Che, I'll give it a try! (I'm willing to give almost anything a try )

2025-08-20 (Wed)

Decided to spend some time cultivating concentration and related pleasant states.

Reading Ajahn Brahm's Journey to the Heart of the Lotus.

1h 30m LED light fire kasina

Intention was to practice concentration with fire kasina dot rounds. But after a few rounds, the light that I was using (an LED light) felt too bright for my eyes. Aversion building. So I stopped refreshing the dot, and just rested with eyes closed for a while, resulting in a vaguely pleasant, dull state with some background aversion. The bodily discomfort (I have a cold) didn't help.

At the one hour mark, found myself starting to track the breath.

1h 20m candle flame fire kasina

Switched from LED light to candle flame, which was much gentler on the eyes. I added a guru yoga mantra to generate positive emotion, along with gently repeating an intention to relax the body, especially the eyes, face and jaw. Lots of aversiveness was still around, so I switched to labelling mental inclinations - "worrying, expecting, relaxing, striving..." as a way to guide the mind toward stillness. After a couple of minutes' labelling, the aversiveness quietened, and I dropped the labelling.

After a while, there was a natural inclination to shift to resting in bodily delight - faint and quite refined piti-sukha, almost ticklish in a strangely pleasant way. I hung out in that state (no more candle flame refreshes) and restarted the guru yoga mantra. It later blended into soft j3 - calm, peaceful, quiet stillness, like being at the bottom of the ocean. Started to track the breath gently again.

45m shargrol tonglen(TM) + sadhana

Found tonglen difficult, as the mind kept slipping off the object. I even forgot which suffering thing I was trying to take in! So much for nearly 3 hours of concentration practice today!

Switched to the Avalokiteshvara sadhana instead - it has a set text to chant to, so it's harder for me to totally lose track of what I'm doing. I could feel the mindstate softening as I did it - the same memories that were creating feelings of anger, grievance, fear, etc were softening into compassion and gratitude. My mind gently cleared as I switched from contracted thoughts about my own situation to imagining myself as Avalokiteshvara, receiving the suffering of the world and offering the blessings of awakening. While chanting the heart dharani, I felt tears wanting to flow, and I couldn't tell whether those tears were sadness for myself, or compassion for other people.

Hey! Pretty new to this space, Just started reading your log. Wanted to say thank you for posting your experience . I might go do some who is the speaker and listener inquiry inspired by you  

wishing you a sweet and precious day ! 

You take on the suffering which you already are experiencing! Matter of fact. Nothing new just the difficult experience already at play. 

Also ok to just practice Tonglen as long it makes sense. If it's irrelevant after a minute or two, fine, go back to Noting. 

Basically Tonglen helps you to get out of your own ars and realise that you are not the only one suffering and having the desire for true happiness! What is my happiness worth if the rest of the beings are still trapped in Samsara. 

Softening the attitude aroun "my" suffering is another positive from this practice. 

Experiment with it! Make it your own! Feel free to create your on Tonglen. Read on it. I would only suggest to always use the experience/difficulty already present to work with! 

Hi Joseph, welcome to this virtual sangha! Glad that you've found my log interesting. Wishing you great practice!

Thanks, I gave it a couple more tries last night (haven't posted logs yet) and got better results. I think my mind was just squirming around on my first attempt

But yes, I am extremely interested in practices to help me get out of my own arse. I realise that most of the things that seem to be causing me so much suffering are super minor in the grand scheme of things, and on an "objective" level (to the extent we can say there is such a thing as objective suffering ) far less than what many people suffer day to day - violence, starvation, serious illness, etc.

In fact, even in my own life, I've noticed time and again that I suffer more from minor incidents than major ones. E.g. when my father nearly died, I was basically "emotionless", I just did whatever I needed to get him help and keep the family going. When he began to recover, I celebrated. There was basically NO SUFFERING on my part at any point during or after the emergency. Meanwhile, if "somebody says something mean to me", I might stew over the insult for days. It's nuts, I latch onto the most silliest of things to suffer about (who installed this shitty software in my brain? )

2025-08-20 (Wed) (continued)

25m tonglen -> fire kasina, backless sitting

I had typical body discomfort from backless sitting, and decided to use that as tonglen object. I imagined a group of complete beginner meditators attending their first meditation class, shifting about restlessly in their unfamiliar cross-legged position, and I imagined taking away enough of their discomfort so that they felt like they could sit well and that it was a nice experience. That made me really happy in a childlike way. Yay for encouraging (imaginary) people to meditate!

Later tried to switch to fire kasina, but found that attempting to maintain posture + attempting to focus on the dot were interfering with each other, so cut the sit short.

1h 30m fire kasina -> breath / tonglen

Started with fire kasina again, but eyes felt very dry and tired, so closed my eyes and switched to the breath. Lots of mind wandering. Midway through the sit, I switched to tonglen again. Returned to that class of beginners, imagined that I was taking away their distracting thoughts, so that they would feel like they had a really good sit and feel motivated to keep meditating. Again that gave me a brief burst of happiness. So for a while, every time I caught a distraction and returned to the breath, I would imagine that I had taken on the distraction for someone else's sake.

2025-08-21 (Thu)

Hmm. Off work today because still sick, which means I have a whole day to practise. Wondering what to do with so much free time. Part of me, inspired by reading Ajahn Brahm's book and listening to his talks, wants to explore Ajahn Brahm style concentration (from what I can tell, it's something like: rest on an object until a nimitta appears, then rest on the nimitta and let it clarify and brighten until you get absorbed into it; I get nimittas very easily, but have rarely attempted to clarify them or use them as concentration object).

Another part of me wants to go back to vipassana - checking out boundaries, self/other inquiry, and intentions (where and how do intentions arise?).

I guess I'll plop myself down on the cushion, start testing stuff, and see where the mind wants to go. "Hands off the wheel!" (says Ajahn B echoing in my head)

2025-08-21 (Thu) (continued)

1h vipassana-ish

I was all sniffly and sneezy, so figured that this would be an aversive, uncomfortable sit, bouncing all over the place. I started with labelling mental inclinations. To my surprise, within a couple of minutes, mind grew quieter and quieter, and gently latched onto the breath which grew very faint, and a subtle but deep pleasantness began to suffuse the body - that strange ticklish delight again. So I allowed the labelling to fall away and rested in that quietness. The sneezes and sniffles had disappeared.

Every now and then, a mental dialogue would drop in, and then I would turn the flashlight to look for the listener, then for the speaker, and then back to resting. Spent most of the sit like this.

Feeling bright and quietly refreshed afterwards. The sneezing resumed as soon as the sit ended.

1h resting in the nimitta (or bootstrap kasina?)

The nimitta was quite noticeable at the end of my last sit, so I decided to test Ajahn Brahm's protocol for entering jhana via resting in the nimitta. Eyes closed, rested the gaze on the most beautiful and vibrant part of the nimitta, with the guru yoga mantra gently running in the background. Gradually it grew in vibrancy. Sometimes it was a blob or a mist, sometimes more of a circle or a triangle or some more distinct shape, slightly fluxing. The guru yoga mantra encouraged a gentle, almost reverse cultivation of the nimitta, seeing it as something of an object of devotion - not trying to shape it, but following its lead.

As I continued resting in the nimitta, enjoying its beauty, it took on additional colours, until it became a visually impossible combination of purple, green, blue, yellow, etc - a very lovely omnicolour. Then it started to break out into a flowing rainbow arc, which I continued resting in. If attention fell off the visuals, it would grow dimmer in reverse order, from rainbow back to the omnicolour, back to the single colour, then lose vibrancy. And then when I returned attention to it, it would slowly build up again.

I don't actually know whether this sit was Ajahn Brahm-like at all. It had much more of a fire kasina feel to it, albeit without having looked at an external light source.

No distinct body bliss, although the general atmosphere was quiet.

Glad you dad got better! Best wishes to you and yours! 

2025-08-21 (Thu) (continued)

1h labelling mental inclinations

Mind has been in a lethargic, grouchy fuzz for the last couple of hours. Decided for this sit just to label mental inclinations. Again, within minutes, the mind softened into a quiet neutrality with the first inklings of that ticklish delight arising. I'm calling it ticklish delight because I'm not quite sure what it is. It has some of the characteristics of j2-style sukha, but isn't identical and doesn't appear in the same place in the body (not in the central chest area which is where j2 begins, but more diffuse). It has a bit of the flavour of a strong j4 (that paradoxical, ultra-refined bliss), but I'm pretty sure I hadn't reached enough concentration for that to arise. In any case, it is subtle but exquisitely pleasant. I hung out in that state for most of the sit.

I was more sensitised to the somatic sensations of push-pull than usual - I could tell there were certain kinds of experiences that I am instinctively defending myself against contacting. The most obvious instance was when a car honked outside - a sustained honk for several seconds - and for that entire time, there was a subtle but very persistent (ie rapidly repeating like a machine gun firing) inclination in the body-mind to cringe away from the honk, to protect myself from whatever danger that signified, even though my rational mind was saying that it's just a car honking outside and nothing to be afraid of. The body-mind made a similar instinctive "cringe" move at other points when something like an unwanted pre-verbal thought dropped in. It's like something in me jumping to my defence, "Don't let this thought/sensation in, bad things will happen if you let it in!!"
 

2025-08-22 (Fri)

50m drifty sit

Had meant to begin by stabilising with the breath, and perhaps attending to the nimitta, before moving on to observing the impermanence of the mindstream, especially intentions and other pre-verbal inclinations. But relaxing into the breath soon made me sleepy and I drifted into a pleasant sleepy haze with a lot of snoring-like sounds, though I don't think I fell asleep, it was just my airway collapsing between breaths. Mind stayed neutral to slightly pleasant. The tension of this morning seems to have gone. Didn't get around to observing impermanence in any intentional manner.

1h compassionate witnessing / letting be

This sit was inspired by recent discoveries of how much I separate myself from myself by not allowing myself to contact unwanted experiences (like yesterday's car honk or those unwanted pre-verbal thoughts - the whole body-mind shouting NO! and trying to cringe away from those sensations).

This was a different kind of vipassana sit to what I normally do, low technique and low effort, just allowing experience to happen and to be, allowing contact to be made. Dropping the striving to gain insights or improve technique, dropping the trying to push away or change unpleasant sensations (though if such striving or trying arose, they were allowed to arise). Just allowing things to arise and be known by their very arising, mildly flavouring the mindstate with being gentle towards what happens, which means sometimes dropping in thoughts like, "This is allowed to be." In other words, witnessing, not in a clinical way, but in a compassionate way (compassion / mahakaruna as something like "intimately being with", not its near enemy of pity-filled "let me fix you" which so often creeps into my sits as well as general mentality).

When I noticed myself yet again being drawn into a conversation with an imagined other, I asked, "why are you responding to this imagined person?" and the answer came, "out of kindness - because they spoke, and I didn't want to leave them unanswered" (that answer kind of surprised me). Then flashlight on the empty listener, flashlight on the empty speaker, and back to sitting.

I guess the sit ended up being an informal kind of push-pull sit, allowing the push-pull see-saw to wobble less and less, not through deliberately noticing or labelling them, but just by allowing things to settle.

Afterwards, I could feel gentle tenderness in the heart, and tears just beginning to fall. Feeling very soft.

50m compassionate witnessing + self inquiry

The same as above, but sometimes dropping in a self-inquiry style question. It opened up some sense of space at times, especially the question "Who is having this experience?"

More sleepy compared to the last. It's late at night. So there was less active noticing, but a very gentle tracking of the state of sleepiness, that blurriness of attention. 

2025-08-23 (Sat)

1h 45m various guided breath / body scan meditations by Reggie Ray, to acclimatise to comfortable backless sitting

The guided meditations did their job - I felt several very gentle releases, like adhesions unsticking around the lower back and pelvic area, which enabled a reasonably comfortable sit the whole way through. Shoulders still very tense though. In fact, my arms and hands weren't just lightly resting against my thighs, but pressing into my thighs, like I was trying to hold my shoulders up.

When I got up after the sit, I noticed that a chronic tension point that had been flaring up for the past few weeks (and which didn't get fixed by yoga, tai chi or acupuncture sessions) had fixed itself. (It unfixed itself later in the day... damn...)

1h self inquiry

Meant to start with some concentration on the breath / nimitta, but attention quickly dimmed, and so the first half-hour passed in a pleasant haze with apparently very little happening. When I came to, I began dropping in self-inquiry questions, blended with noting to keep the question fresh and interesting each time.

eg: hear a sound -> "hearing" -> "who is hearing?" -> look for the hearer -> rest in the non-finding -> notice doubt -> "doubting" -> "who is doubting?" -> etc

Often, when I turned around the look for the "I"', that mild body queasiness would arise. I'm starting to get a grip on what this feeling is - it's like jelly legs, like stage fright, like being put on the spot and being embarrassed and not knowing what to do. So when I turn the flashlight on myself and look at myself, I get stage fright! How curious.

1h self inquiry + sense of control

The mind was quite crowded with noisy, aversive, self-referential thoughts. So when I noticed a thought, I would pop out to ask, "who is the speaker?" and go hunting for the sensations that felt like the speaker. That soon quietened the mind, so I switched to hunting for any sensations in the moment that felt like an "I" (like control, intention, movement of attention).

Spent some time specifically looking at the sense of control, checking which sensations come with a sense of control and which don't. It seems like a "distraction" is something that doesn't come with a sense of control, but I felt like it should.

After a while, with the mind fairly calm and simple and just noting/noticing sensations, self-doubt started creeping in - "am I doing self inquiry right? am I doing meditation right? am I wasting my time? should I switch techniques? maybe I should go back to push-pull..." (My mind doesn't give me a break! When it is turbulent, it wants to calm down. When it's calm, it thinks nothing is happening and wants a change.)

1h 20m sneaking up on discursive thoughts + self inquiry

Started with labelling sensations, especially mental inclinations ("this side" type sensations), at the rate of 1-2 labels / second. After a while, dropped the verbal labels and just noticed stuff. Discursive thoughts began to creep in with the non-label noticing, and I got curious again about how "the self" and "the other" are generated in discursive thought, so I allowed the thoughts to run, and tried to sneak in just enough meta-awareness to check what self/other sensations were involved. This sent me into a dreamy, hazy, liminal state with slightly disjointed and sometimes surreal thoughts. Caught a number of pre-verbal, unclear "others" - where the imagined verbal thought clearly had the sense of being spoken to someone, and there's a fairly distinct felt "profile" of who that someone was, but that profile didn't come with any words, images, etc. So now I am curious about where that profile comes from, if not built from sense data.

Every now and then, I would drop in "who is speaking?" again, and that would often propel me from that dreamy state into a sudden moment of heightened clarity and spaciousness, somewhat startling, like the startle from a bell suddenly ringing during a very quiet sit. Maybe the dreamy state made me more prone to being surprised by an unanswerable question.

Side note: I'm not very practised at "creeping up on thoughts unawares" (or background processes, or anything else that dissipates under the direct light of strong attention). I tend to swing to either extreme of strong attention or losing track. This was one of the few sits where I had somewhat been able to sneak up on thoughts. I guess I should practise doing this more.
 

Immediately after writing this log, I read shargrol's post in another thread:

"Restlenssness covers all of the psychological and pretty much all of the physical experiences of unease, wanting-to-rest-but-can't-fully-relax, wanting-to-do-something-but-don't-know-what... We can notice "oh, there the body/mind goes again, it's feeling restless, yet I can sit here in this safe room with nothing to do. What is this restlessness?"

(Thanks to shargrol for responding to someone else but helping me in the process )

2025-08-24 (Sun)

25m guided body scan, Reggie Ray (backless sitting)

Not the same obvious relief as yesterday, mind wandered quite a lot, but was still able to sit for the full period with fairly minimal discomfort.

1h looking for the audience of thoughts

Discursive thoughts were present but not overwhelming. I tried, like yesterday, to find out what made up the sense that there was an audience/listener of these thoughts. Didn't get much further than yesterday. At times, mind grew rather quiet and calm, though the discursive thoughts continued in this quieter space.

Fairly refined energies running through the body, though a bit difficult to classify in terms of vedana - some of it was that exquisite, ticklish delight, and others were closer to that stage fright queasiness. Sometimes it was difficult to know when a somatic sensation was delight and when was it stage fright; they somewhat blend into each other, or perhaps they coexist.

1h 20m same as above

Continued hunting down this elusive sense of an audience. It would have been easy to slap a common label on it, like "the inner critic", but I think it has a lot more nuance in that. The profile of the audience shifted from thought to thought. Sometimes, the thought was speaking to a neutral observer, and other times to a motivated influencer; sometimes sympathetic, other times suspicious or hostile; sometimes an expert, other times a beginner in the field. The tone and content of the thought would be crafted to be an appropriate response to someone of this profile. At times, when a chain of discursive thoughts had built up for a while, the audience might appear with the image or voice of a real-life person who fits the profile; when the thoughts were more nascent, the audience was not associated with any physical sense data.

Tried a few perspectives:
- Assuming that the audience is empty (duh), what are the qualities of the thoughtstream that creates the sense that there's an audience? The tone of the thoughts, the way the words are directed, and so on.
- Feeling for what makes up the sense of there being a speaker-listener relationship in a thought
- Focusing on the (apparently continuous) process of an audience, and look for impermanence within it - check when the audience is present vs absent.

The last technique was the most usable, so I stayed with it for a while. The audience-sense became a lot less prominent than earlier; realised that quite a few thoughts had no sense of being spoken to another person.

In the last 20 minutes, I let the audience question go, and just rested in pleasantness. Often had a a somatic rumbling/rocking sensation.

--

Off the cushion, my mind feels more clear - I mean that the crowd of discursive thoughts that often accompany me isn't pressing on me as heavily as usual. Perhaps it came out of the impermanence practice right at the end (deliberately looking for where the audience is absent), or perhaps from the entire morning's exercise of hunting for this thing.

2025-08-24 (Sun) (continued)

1h aimless vipassana

Labelled mental inclinations for a while, started to feel that this was pointless. Shifted to observing the thoughtstream with peripheral awareness. Then decided to return to my original intention and label for the rest of the sit. A lot of doubt about what technique I should be doing, which ones work, whether or not I'm doing them right. Thoughts like: is it any use to just label label label all the things, or do I need to investigate them more closely? The whole sit was underpinned by a moderate pull towards unpleasant ruminations.

30m locations of sensations 
​​​​​​​
Switched back to exploring location and boundaries, in an attempt to shake off the meh from the previous sit. In a set of sensations that create a subject-object story, eg "I heard a sound and it startled me", pick out the centre of each sensation involved - where is the sound, where is the hearing, where is the startle, what creates a connection between sound and startle (the latter apparently temporal more than spatial).

​​​​​​​--

2025-08-25 (Mon)

2h at the airport and on the plane, exploring inside-outside

Got hit by a whammy of neurotic thoughts again this morning, so I went looking at the way rumination (especially when super sticky and emotional, totally sucking in my attention) feels like "inside" stuff and physical senses feel like "outside" stuff. This is one of the more dramatic inside/outside boundaries - when I have gotten sucked into a chain of thoughts, it really feels like I have dropped out of the world and entered some completely internal territory. I tried to compare how the two states look and feel, and whether or not they can be "blended" to some extent (eg can ruminations run while some attention remains grounded in "outside" sensations? what is the portion of an emotion that stubbornly feels "inside" and can it be popped outside, the way that the somatic portion of an emotion easily pops outside?)

Found the experiment difficult and slippery - the mind flips between the two extremes (super mindful of outside sensations, or super sucked into thoughts) but doesn't seem to want the two to coexist.
​​​​​​​
--

Wondering if this exercise (trying to observe sticky thoughts on the fly) is a bit too hard. Maybe I should go back to post-hoc self inquiry (asking "who is the speaker?" after a discursive thought has already ended and its ending noticed - this naturally gives some distance to the thought). Clearly the doubt and restlessness is still running strong.

2025-08-28 (Thu)

1h sense of control

Trying to pick out the sense of control in fine detail - where does it arise, where does it not. It mostly ended up being an observation of body movements - which ones feel controlled/controllable, which feel automatic/unconscious.

Spent a short while testing that game of "trying to do something other than what happens", but don't know if I'm doing it right. For instance, I would try to move my arm but without having my arm actually move, which then created a mild tension in my arm, and perhaps a mental image of the arm moving, and so on. But that's not trying to move my arm - that's trying to simultaneously move and not move my arm. So I suspect I got the instruction wrong.

Towards the end, it occurred to me that natural language could be a starting point for exploring what things feel like control and what things don't - eg I would say "I move my leg" (feels like controlled), but I wouldn't say "I beat my heart" (feels automatic). Then I can zoom in to see if that same language still works within on higher resolution - eg is there a mental impulse to move before the first movement of the leg occurs? When does the narrative voice pop up and start narrating the moving of the leg?

This practice also seems to have softened the idea that I am the meditator doing a technique. I guess, because I'm specifically zooming in on the sense of control, all the times when I was not in control of the meditation (ie when I forgot to apply the technique) became very obvious.
 

2025-08-29 (Fri)

55m sense of control, walking up and down the carpark

At times, I was breaking out the sense of control into components, like remembering, intending, deciding. Noticed that there tends not to be a sense of control embedded in the more granular movements (like lifting the foot, swinging it forward, setting it down), but rather there is a general intention set to walk in this direction, stop when I get to this point, turn around and walk back in the other direction. That general intention (which feels controlled, feels like "me" ) gets translated into a bunch of more or less automatic movements.

Also had lots of urges to switch techniques or switch object of investigation, because I wasn't sure what I was doing or if it was achieving anything. I'm really trying to do meditation well, wondering if I'm doing it right, wondering if I've gotten the technique completely wrong and just wasting my time. Confusion, doubt.

At the end of this session, when I stopped walking, space seemed to be mildly pulling away from me like some cinematographic effect.

--

There's a part of me that realises I'm trying too hard to capture meditation experience (and especially insights) into words, as if the only way for the mind-body system to learn something is if I can verbalise it. I realise this isn't true - I mean, you don't learn to ride a bicycle by coming up with detailed verbal descriptions of the experience of pedalling. I think this is some form of try-hard desperation sneaking in, thinking that verbalising something is the same as metabolising it.

--

2025-08-30 (Sat) / 2025-08-31 (Sun)

Off-cushion: Mind was heavy with rumination, circling over and over the same old territory.

1h breath and body scan (Reggie Ray style), backless sitting

Opening at the pelvic floor at the in-breath, opening at the face, jaw, throat and chest at the out-breath. This had a mildly relaxing effect, but jaw was still very tense and very prone to clenching. And mind was almost uncontrollably sucked into neurotic thoughts.

1h 20m labelling mental inclinations, semi-reclining

Considerably easier to relax in this position. Mind was drifty rather than high energy, slipping between labelling and forgetting I was meant to be labelling. Soon felt a gentle pleasantness in the body, with mild waves of sukha. Then the familiar side-to-side rocking arose, and this time I started to recognise that the feeling is not so much like there is "stuff moving inside the body", but more a vestibular sense, like I'm gently being tossed left and right. What had me confused is that there is, of course, no external movement - the sense of motion is internal.

(I had noticed this yesterday, after my hour-long walking meditation, when after walking, the world looked and felt a little like it was moving away from me. Today, after the sit, it felt like the world was swaying side to side a little bit, and I wondered if this swaying is related that internal rocking motion.)

1h 15m looking for the speaker

Mind is more sticky again, with impatience and anxiety, and various emotions that all fall under the umbrella of "I want something to be happening other than what is happening here". When I recognise that's what all of those emotions are saying, the emotions tend to dissipate; when I forget, they re-form.

The verbalisations, as usual, ended concurrent with the noticing of them, and then I would turn the flashlight around to look for the speaker. At times, that would again create that very soft version of mild nausea.

1h metta phrases

Decided to allow this to be either metta-shamatha practice or vipassana practice, whichever way it falls. That is, set an intention to gently anchor in the phrases and whatever feelings they generate (especially in the heart region); but if ill will or other hindrances arise, investigate them.

The sit turned out surprisingly pleasant in a very soft and gentle way. I was mostly able to anchor in the phrases. Sometimes I'd lose track when an imagined object of metta (a person or situation) continued to run on past the bounds of generating the metta, and into dwelling in the imagined object or generating some other emotion instead (like sticky attachment). But once the run-on object was caught and named, I gently dropped in the question, "Why dwell on this thing? Does it provide more happiness than dwelling on the brahmaviharas?" I just allowed that question to hang, because the answer was self evident. Then I would return to the metta phrases.

At the end of the sit, mind is calm in a slightly bland way, with far less stickiness than before. That's a dramatic improvement over the maelstrom of ruminations that have characterised most of my weekend. I should do this more often.

--

This metta sit may have been the first time I'd gotten the metta phrases to do something other than generate aversion. I think it's because I was going about it in a subtractive rather than additive manner - not trying to "generate metta", but rather to identify all the things that weren't metta (distractions, ill will, etc). All such things, once identified, fall away - and when enough non-metta things fall away, the metta starts shining through.

2025-09-01 (Mon)

Deliberately doing "micro-hits" - very brief bursts of practice throughout the day, whenever I have time - like when I go to make a coffee, wait for food to heat in the microwave, walk to my car. I'm finding that is a pretty fun and low-investment way to experiment with different techniques. Instead of sinking hours of cushion time into trying some random technique that someone mentioned in a podcast once (and that I have to try out because of course I have to - the joys of having an ADHD brain), I'm just sinking in a couple of minutes of otherwise dead time.

It has also led me to generate various vaguely-practice-related thoughts:

• Catching mindstates has been like trying to grasp at a mirage. They play and play on and seem so obviously real and present, but as soon as I try to grab them to take a good look at them, they vanish. Then as soon as I withdraw my hand, they resume playing.
• Noticing when "getting distracted" is actually not carelessness, but an unconscious strategy to turn away from something that is generating mild aversion.
• How to distinguish between true metta and its near enemies: when I notice a feeling, see what that feeling gives rise to. If it tumbles into craving and then into clinging and then into all that jazz, it's not metta. Keep looking for the feeling that doesn't tumble along into suffering.
• A realisation about the "lonely" feeling that has been on-and-off haunting me for a while. What seems to be happening is this: seeing people, or recalling memories of fun times spent with friends, creates craving. A craving for human company, left unsatisfied, creates loneliness. Then when narratives start spinning up (narratives about friendship or loneliness or whatever), the narrative wants an audience; it wants to be told to someone. And because there is no one to hear a mental narrative, the loneliness amplifies. But if narratives don't spin, because they're not fuelled by craving, and the craving doesn't arise because it's not fuelled by memories, there is no loneliness.

1h vedana-tanha junction, walking around the park

Observing vedana, trying to catch as early as possible when it flips into tanha. Moved quite a lot between relatively subtle (like catching a momentary mental flinch) and relatively gross (like realising a sticky thought had been running for the last 10 seconds) levels.

Every now and then, dropped in a self-inquiry question, or turned a label into a self-inquiry question - like "Who am I? Who is hearing this? Who is recalling this memory?" Sometimes, dropping in the question would produce a temporary change in spatial quality - subtle but pleasant and grounding. It would last less than half a second before I started clinging to that pleasantness, and it would disappear.

Mindstate was simple and unremarkable. Many tiny wobbles into proto-unpleasant moods, but probably because I was deliberately trying to notice them, they tended to be caught very early, and dissipate upon noticing. I also deliberately noticed their dissipation and noticed if any unpleasant reactions arose because they dissipated. This was a shift for me - realising that, instead of getting frustrated that an unpleasant thing arose, or getting frustrated that I couldn't catch the arising of an unpleasant thing, I could catch the frustration instead. Duh!

1h metta + insight, walking outside

The phrases felt a bit wooden, and sometimes I lost track of which phrase I was up to. At times, tried to look at something in the environment that would generate some positive feeling, but found that this easily slipped me into unrelated discursive thinking. But I was fairly at peace with the mind wandering, and could gently wish metta to the distracting thoughts and to the moment of return. I occasionally dropped in a self-inquiry question just to see what would happen.

Towards the end of this session, I discovered that I could gently imagine the metta phrases spreading out through space in every direction, "pervading space" as the suttas say, and that this created a fairly palpable feeling of wellness.

2025-09-02 (Tue)

30m self inquiry, at the bus stop

Repeatedly asked "Who am I?" This morphed into noticing a sensation (especially an "internal" sensation) and asking, "Am I this intention / this choosing to look at something / this getting lost in a thought?" Looking for the "I" tended to lead to noticing somatic sensations around the head and torso region. Towards the end, this sometimes morphed again into "is this mine?"

--

Off-cushion: I've started sometimes randomly asking a self-inquiry question while going about my business.

After asking "Who is seeing?" a number of times through the day, I started getting a slightly strange feeling that I instinctively described as "my vision is stuck to the surface of my eyeballs!" or, perhaps more descriptively, the "outside world" started to look like a simulation seen in VR goggles - there was just a slight wrongness to the way depth/perspective was portrayed, as if I knew that the visuals were actually much closer to my face than they appeared.

I guess it's because asking "Who is seeing?" leads to attending to sensations around the eye area (in an attempt to find The Seer in/behind the eyeballs), and after a while some tangling occurred between eye sensations and seeing.

2025-09-03 (Wed)

1h metta phrases -> catching the beginning of thoughts, walking outside

Started with about 10 minutes of metta, then switched to objectless awareness, allowing verbal thoughts to arise and run freely, but trying to notice the thoughts as early as possible. For the first half-hour, I was mostly able to catch them quite early stage (within a split second of arising), including when they were early enough that the words were still fuzzy. In the second half-hour, attentiveness began to slip, and sometimes thoughts would run for a few seconds before being noticed.

2025-09-04 (Thu)

1h 5m self inquiry, walking around the park

Had naturally high visual clarity all day - the whole visual field looked crisp and vibrant. Mindstate was fairly neutral. Took a few minutes to settle on a technique. Went for self inquiry at a gentle pace, pausing after each question to check what was happening in experience and was there anything that felt like it was me. After a while, this naturally morphed into noticing this is just a thought, that is just a thought, and the thought that these are just thoughts is also just a thought. The whole session felt quite ordinary, with a fairly simple and neutral-ish emotional tone.

At the end of the session, I added a 5 minute drill - noticing verbal thoughts or proto-verbal thoughts as soon as possible upon their arising.
 

I read the first paragraph and I thought, "Wow! That is great practice. This person is instinctively looking in just the right place." Then I read the second paragraph and I thought, "Wow! We all go through the same thing, even when we are nailing it."

2025-09-05 (Fri)

My question about insight vs psychological work came to mind again, as well as the (earlier abandoned) attempt to look for patterns behind chains of emotive reactions. I decided to start familiarising with the six realms / five elements framework to give me a more structured way to look at this stuff.

While driving to work, I allowed thoughts to run - memories, reflections, imagined scenarios playing the way they normally do when the mind is left to roam. When the thoughts started to feel sticky, I paused to label which realm I've entered, and whether I could spot the elemental reactions. Mostly I was working on a very gross level, mapping an entire train of thoughts onto a realm, or a repeating urge of a similar kind to an element (eg "imaginary argument with someone to prove I'm right and preserve my ego" -> titan, "urge to disperse to hide myself and thereby go unnoticed" -> water). At various points during the day, when I remembered to, I would pause and note which realm I was in.

(morning) 1h guided meditation by Michael Taft - six realms, backless sitting

This guided meditation was a tour through the six realms, one after the other, with brief breaks in between to rest in open awareness. The realms that I brought up were mostly quite pale and weak, almost intellectual and perfunctory rather than "felt". Hell realm (anger) was the only realm that roused any real emotional affect. Surprised at how comfortable I managed to get with the backless posture though - clean and easeful.

(evening) 1h guided meditation by Michael Taft - five elements

Guided tour through the five elements. Low energy unpleasantness for most of the sit - a kind of scrunched-up-face aversiveness, with a lot of jaw tension in particular. Perhaps mind is too tired to engage in this sort of imaginative work. Had some ability to engage with the first two elements (earth and water) but got very drifty from the third element onwards - struggling to stay on topic, to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. The only part of the meditation that I could engage with in any real sense was the final section, just being awareness, which I interpreted as a mild form of "drop the ball" - unfixating from whatever attention fell onto.

Haha thanks for the encouragement! I am constantly doubting whether or not I'm "practising right" (maybe this doubt is the only non-impermanent thing in experience :| ), so it's helpful to hear that I'm poking in the right places.

2025-09-06 (Sat)

I'm already starting to see how the six realms framework gives a little more nuance and a little less reactivity to the way I view "annoying" stuff.

This morning, I had a short period of rumination. Previously, I might have written it off as "I got caught up in neurotic thoughts", and focused on how I can avoid getting caught up in neurotic thoughts in the future.  But looking at it from a six realms lens, I could see that I had started in the animal realm (lazing about, wanting physical comfort, then wanting emotional comfort). As I dwelt on how much my desires were unsatisfied and unsatisfiable, I shifted into hungry ghost realm. Then I started getting resentful and angry at situations that seemed to stubbornly refuse to satisfy me - hell realm. Then I recognised that I had unfairly characterised those situations, so I started developing a more balanced and compassionate internal relationship towards them - human realm.

Being able to break down the "episode of neurotic thoughts" like that, I guess, is a step towards getting to know reactive emotions, rather than flopping between being sucked into them and scheming about how to avoid being sucked into them.

I have another free weekend, so I intend to spend a fair bit of time exploring each of the six realms in turn - soaking in the archetypal descriptions, connecting it to my personal experience, and seeing the tautological, self-reinforcing nature of them.

Resources used:

• Ken McLeod's Wake Up To Your Life (ch 4 on the six realms, ch 5 on emptying the six realms)
• Domyo Burk's 3 episode series describing the six realms
• various DhO posts

2025-09-06 (Sat) (continued)

Went through three realms in a semi-reflection, semi-visualisation exercise, interspersed with brief periods of body scan to stabilise attention. I jotted some notes to capture how each realm felt to me in its essence:

Hungry ghost: must have and consume! Tune into the sense of hollowness, of constant dissatisfaction, and see it translate into desperate striving - like being trapped in a well, clawing upward toward the light. The world is grey and lifeless, offering no nourishment. What little I get doesn't satisfy, but only accentuates what is missing. Even when surrounded by luxury and privilege, I can see only what I am lacking.

Titan: must surpass! Tune into the sting of inadequacy, and see it translate into competition and comparison. I matter, I count, take me seriously - or else. I feel satisfied not by what I have, but by comparison with what others have. The world is divided into those who are better than me, and those who are worse than me. I can never belong or connect - I am always thwarted by disdain or insecurity.

God: must stay pure! Tune into pride and exclusivity, and see it translate into wilful blindness to the pitfalls. I'll win, I'll live forever, I'll always be surrounded by people who will validate me - as long as I share their values and beliefs, and look down on the people they look down. Contempt or pity for those less fortunate - and, privately, a terror of ending up like them. Blind trust, ignoring red flags.

--

Distinguishing titan from hungry ghost: Hungry ghost wants to satisfy cravings - having for the sake of having. Titan is less about satisfaction, more about reputation/identity - having for the sake of being one who has. More calculated/scheming than hungry ghost's mindless urges.

Distinguishing titan from god: titan is about what I wish I had. God is about what I have and am afraid to lose. Both have a flavour of insecurity, but with god the insecurity is a lot more hidden; with titan it is oozing and often aggressive.

--

Off cushion through the day, I tried to notice moments of reactivity and, every now and then, pause to diagnose what realm I was in. Realm labelling is mostly a slow, clunky, and analytical process, and sometimes I suspected I was overthinking it ("ok so if I recall a memory where I was boasting about something, is that god realm because I was recalling the feeling of superiorirty? or titan realm because I was trying to prove how superior I am?"). Wonder if realm stuff is better practised when I'm in a more obviously emotionally coloured mindstate, rather than when I'm fairly calm like now.

But the extra attention paid to reactivity is paying off - there were a number of times where I caught a moment of emotional reactivity, then in the next moment I realised that I was reacting over an almost-nothing and it became kind of humorous. Like noticing a flash of some reaction (impatience? annoyance?) when I went to switch on a light and realised I had flicked the wrong switch, then in the next moment, "look at this thing getting annoyed by something so inconsequential, that's kind of cute".

I mostly didn't try to label the reactions with specific emotion-words. When reactions are caught at early stage, they don't really have an emotion attached yet, and trying to give it an emotion-name solidifies it beyond what it would otherwise have been. It seems more helpful to just leave them as "reaction", potentially with a description of the kind of somatic energy it came with, like "flashing" or "dampening" or "blocking".

2025-09-06 (Sat) (continued)

Closed the day by returning to technical practice.

1h exploring the sense of control

Deliberately dropped in thoughts like, "I am controlling" or "did I do this?" to see how that felt. Especially paid attention to moments when those statements felt absurd, like feeling head piti -> "I did this!" -> absurd, it just arose.

Later, this became a gentle, slow-sweeping check for control, dropping in the word "control?" now and then, to prompt me to check whether or not there was control involved in what just happened.

Occasionally, mind wandered to something eomotionally reactive. When that happened, I leaned into the emotional sensation, especially its somatic feel, until it wore out on its own. It actually feels quite nice to fully inhabit the emotion somatically until it faded out.

2025-09-07 (Sun)

Overnight, I had long, meandering, repeating dreams of matters that might have been a big deal, except my reaction in-dream was very dampened and repetitive, almost like clockwork. The same weary, repetitive feel continued through into early morning. The whole thing had quite an animal realm feel to it - just wanting ease and comfort, without much thought or planning or foresight involved. This was great - it gave me a much more visceral feel for the realm than yesterday's more structured explorations.

Honestly, I found the instructions in WUTYL for reflecting on the six realms (spend 15 minutes stabilising on the breath, then about 30 minutes visualising the realm, then another 15 minutes resting in open awareness) a bit artificial, and also maybe a bit unnecessary. Artificial because this kind of reflective, imaginative meditation feels so different from what I normally think of as meditation. Unnecessary because I already have a fertile imagination, I don't really need a big setup and packdown. For today's reflections I'll just let my mind sit on a theme and let it crystallise.

Animal: must stay comfortable! Tune into stupor - the pleasant hazy stupor of indulgence, or the feverish stupor of productivity for productivity's sake, or the convenient stupor of going along with everyone else. Want good stuff, avoid bad stuff. Bob up and down a muted wave of desire. Resignation and passivity. Just get through - what else matters anyway?

Human: must become! Tune into yearning and fear, love and loss, dreams and sorrows. The greatest fear is not to be. Look into the mirror to see if I'm reflected. Operating from half-blind, half-known desires and urges, tossing myself about the world, looking for something/someone to fulfill them. Confused compassion projecting needs onto others, so I can feel satisfied in having satisfied them. Man is the measure of all things. Spinning up private worlds made up of my wants, building empires to defend against suffering.

Hell: must defend! Tune into helpless rage - rage against a world turned against me, rage against myself turned against me. Standing in a field of thorns, every step brings pain. Words are swords, emotions ammunition - I'll destroy you before you can touch me. Building walls to defend myself against opposition. Or anger turned inwards, swords pointing against self: blame, victimisation, despair. Other people's happiness is a thorn in my side, their laughter is mockery to me. It's blind rage masking blind fear - inside is the terror of annihilation.

--

Distinguishing human from animal realm: Both operate on desires but human realm includes higher order thinking.

--

There's a blindness in each of the six realms, as well as a mutedness - an inability to see what is happening, and an inability to understand or communicate what one really desires. Each realm is a prison.

2025-09-07 (Sun) (continued)

Phew, finished my speedrun through the six realms! (WUTYL had recommended spending two weeks on each realm, not doing them all in a weekend like I did Oh well, I'm more of a spiral learner than a linear learner, I'm sure I will get back to the realms later to learn them better)

Before moving onto five elements, I took a break by doing more typical meditations:

1h body scan -> drop the ball

During the early minutes of drop the ball, I fell into a gently calm state. Partway through, verbalizations began to slip in, and they carried me away for longer periods before I noticed and dropped them. Mostly human realm stuff - enjoyment and loss, complex emotions.

30m backless sitting, body scan

Slightly difficult to relax. The throat chakra region (jaw, neck, throat, shoulders, upper chest) very tight and congested. Legs were holding a little. Lots of discursive thoughts.

1h untangling "I" from attention

Intention was to explore the sense of control. I had started by noticing individual sensations and trying to see which ones came with a sense of control. But soon I got interested in the sense of attention moving about from object to object, and whether or not it felt like I was controlling the movement of attention. Then I tried deliberately dropping identification with attention - I reminded myself that attention is just a metaphor referring to some sensations being prominent while others fade into the hazy background. No "I" is needed to describe that.

Noticed that when attention is placed on a certain set of body sensations, that's when it feels like there is control over those sensations. eg Place attention on my knee, now it feels like I am intentionally relaxing it or rousing piti there. Or place attention on my hand as it is moving, now it feels like I am deliberately moving it. Whereas if piti just arises or hand just moves without attention placed on it at that moment, it feels uncontrolled, almost mindless. So I wonder how much of "I" is tied up with the feeling of mindfulness. I AM when I am being mindful.

1h bring up triggering thoughts and feel the emotional reaction - easing into five elements stuff

Intention: to deliberately conjure up emotional reactions, feel deeply into the reactions, and try to identify their elemental nature.

Conjuring up and feeling into emotions was pretty easy. I brought up memories, imagined scenarios, emotional climates, and individual triggering dialogue soundbites. Could feel the early flashes of an emotional reaction - like a sudden hollowness around the right side of the chest, or a crumpling/collapsing inwards - and sometimes a flash of something else that came before (like a momentary stomach churn). But I didn't really know how to map these to the five elements chart. Only some of these correlated to a specific item on the chart (eg hollowness is associated with earth element), and even then, it wasn't at all obvious that the entire elemental reaction chain was at play. I may need to go through each item in the chart methodically to familiarise with the sets of feelings and make them feel real to me before attempting to use them to map my reactions on the fly.

After a while, I gave up trying to pin reactions to elements. Instead I played a game of "staring into the face of the emotion". Pull up a strong emotional reaction, get that feeling really running hot in the body, have it grow as strong as it wants, then stare straight into it - not even exploring or accepting or dissolving it, just stare at it. It's a staring competition between direct attention and squirmy emotion. Eventually the squirmy emotion dissipates and the resulting feel is nice.

Nice! 

2025-09-08 (Mon)

This morning, while driving into work, I was wondering what I wanted to explore today. Labelling past-present-future? Labelling inside-outside? Investigating agency again? Blaaaah. I decided to do a guided meditation instead, because evidently my own mind was too indecisive and needed someone else to lead it for a bit.

45m guided meditation by Michael Taft, self inquiry

Looking for where thoughts begin, where they end, where they are, and who is the listener of the thoughts.

I found it somewhat hard to keep attention on the questions - lots of drifting, lots of attention going into postural adjustment because I was sitting backless. The only ease I had was during the early section, building stability, when I was resting in easeful awareness.

10m microhit, observing attention and agency, walking around the office

Mind is present to the walking and the movement of visual space - walking is happening.
Mind is thinking about whether or not it is mindful - walking is happening.
Mind has drifted off to an imaginary conversation - walking is happening.

Evidently, the walking is not dependent on or controlled by the mental process that does verbal thoughts.

There is a puddle in the walking path - feet naturally sidestep the puddle. There was no verbalisation or even pre-verbal thought that directed that to occur. Instead, there was awareness of a sidestep occurring as it was occurring, and then gladness arising that I didn't step into the puddle. Where is the control in there?

Hmmm. Feels like I'm trying to shift from identifying with that busy little thoughtspace crowded around my head to identifying with the bigger messier preverbal intelligence that actually does most of the work.

Feeling spacious and calm.

1h "I am in control" + bullshit detection, walking in the park

Continuing to tease out control/agency. I set a slow, sweeping background mantra "I am in control" running, as I noticed various things happening. Just allowed the background bullshit detection process to fact-check that statement against what's actually happening.

I am in control -> Am I in control of the fact that I heard a sound? (no duh)
I am in control -> Am I in control of that memory that sprang up upon seeing this thing? (no duh)
I am in control -> Am I in control of feeling the soles of my shoes beneath my feet as I walked? (no duh)

I just allowed the absurdity of the "I am in control" statement to reveal itself.

At times, when my instinctual answer was "yes, I am in control" (example: "yes, I am in control of making my feet walk"), I would pause the mantra and retrospectively dissect and describe that thing until I found a way to view it without having to refer to an I who was in control.

At the start of the sessions, it felt as though most "internal" things were in control, including where I "chose" to direct attention. By the end of the session, it felt like many things were not in control, and I had to hunt to find things that did feel like they were in control.

25m same as above, walking in the carpark

More mind wandery than the last walk. I am definitely not in control of discursive thinking!!

Realised again how big a role attention plays to the sense of control. If I change my walking speed when attention is not on walking speed, the change feels uncontrolled. If attention is on walking speed, there's usually some concurrent thought like "let me slow down" or "let me speed up", and it feels controlled.

But if I take it as a truism, take it on faith that no sensation controls any other sensation, then the verbal thought "let me slow down" does not control the slowing down, nor does the pre-verbal instinct to slow down control the slowing down. Nor does the recognition that I had unconsciously sped up lead to the slowing down. Slowing down occurred, and a thought occurred describing the slowing down, and attention was on both these things. That can be described without talking about "I" or "control". It feels kind of counterintuitive to think like this, but it's possible.

--

The question of agency drives me nutty if I try to think about its implications, which sometimes I do while walking. "Did I set this intention? Wait, was there a sense that I had set this intention a while back? Wait, if I am not in charge of intention setting then how is this meditation occurring? blah blah blah" No, no, no! Back to THIS! Back to THIS moment and the sensations happening HERE! The sensations happening here are clear, they are clean, they are non-confusing. But as soon as I try to extrapolate into past or future or create theories, the agency question drives me mad.

1h "What is in control?", walking in the park

I had started with the "I am in control" mantra again, but it was starting to feel a bit forced and tired. So I experimented with a few tweaks, and eventually landed on a much gentler version, where I was mostly just noticing all sensations or as many sensations (physical and mental) as I could in a broad, easy kind of awareness, and every now and then dropping in a whispered question, "What is in control?"
 
After dropping in the question, I would look to see if I could pinpoint some cluster of sensations that appeared to be in control of some other set of sensations:

Did the seeing of birds in front of me produce the hearing of the birdsong?
Did the memory of feet stepping in the immediate past control the stepping of feet in the present?
Did the feeling of rotation in the body make the visual scene rotate?

I was just attempting to connect dots within the current field of sensate experience, to find controller and controlled, and of course, every attempt was absurd.

The overall feeling was calm, broad, very spacious and easeful.

--

I also realised this: when a thought or an emotion dropped in, or maybe an unpleasant feeling, or a hint of craving, I don't need to shrink away from it. I don't need to be annoyed at it. I don't need to be frustrated that it had happened. It's just an arising in experience. Early on when I started meditating, I discovered that there's no need to be frustrated when there are sounds, because sounds don't disrupt my meditation - sounds are part of the experience that my meditation is trying to encompass. Now I see the same is true with mental objects. None of them are a problem. They just show up.

When thoughts slip in, they are just another chance for me to see that they are not-self, that I am not in control of those thoughts, that those thoughts aren't in control of other thoughts. They just show up, and it all felt really natural. It's like they show up on stage, flit around for a bit, then disappear off stage again.
 

Really liked these realm descriptions! 

Thanks! It was a pretty fun exercise.

And, I suspect, it helped me settle into the less reactive, more curious headspace that I've been in the last couple of days. I think deliberately bringing up the realms as mindstates to investigate them (especially their more pathological manifestations) was an exercise in disidentification/objectification of reactivity. It put me into an attitude of seeing reactive states not as problems to be solved, but as interesting objects to explore.

tl;dr immersing myself in pathological mindstates has made me equanimous :'D

"Mind is present to the walking and the movement of visual space - walking is happening. Mind is thinking about whether or not it is mindful - walking is happening. Mind has drifted off to an imaginary conversation - walking is happening."


hm ... why do you think that walking is happening outside the Mind? Is only thinking "the mind"?

Isn't the mind also "just happening" like the walking? 

O_O !!

​​​​​​​Mind is recalculating furiously

2025-09-09 (Tue)

45m where do intentions come from? walking around the park

I started specifically exploring the intention aspect of the sense of control -  how they lead or don't lead to actions, and where they come from. Found it difficult to place attention specifically at the juncture where (wordless) intention arises, as it was such a small thing, and attention was rather vague and drifty today.

Casual off cushion fun - hearing all sounds

During an hour-long meeting at work where my physical presence was expected but mental presence was optional ( ), I attempted to widen my hearing to include all sounds, rather than automatically tunning into the speaking and ignoring everything else as attention likes to do by default. Tried to include sounds of people shuffling in their seats, the A/C, sounds from outside the room, etc. Also tried to hear the words as sound vibrations rather than listening for meaning. With continual effort, I was reasonably able to keep including broader sounds.

55m where are thoughts? where are intentions? walking outside

So, I realised I had apparently been splitting off experience into 3(?) segments. It was some weird thing like (a) attention + intended actions ("me!"), (b) apparently non-intended movements of body and mind ("agencyless me!"), (c) the "outside" environment.

I tried poking at this split from a number of angles, none of which seemed particularly to work well. Eventually, I went back to looking at whether thoughts and intentions were inside or outside, and if they were "inside" just how inside were they? If I intend to lift my leg, where is the intention - inside my head, somewhere near my leg, way out there, or nowhere? And if I see words, does the "reading" of the words take place in my head, or where the word is...

This was also very slippery, don't know if I got very far.

Towards the end, I started lifting my legs in a slightly unnatural manner, which made it feel very intentional and deliberate, and make it easier to feel where the intention was. It felt like the intention was in the leg... maybe??

--

While driving home, I tried yet another approach - I "just chose" see the field of experience as not having any boundaries. Let the environment, non-intended actions, intentions, and thoughts flow about without boundaries, without resistance, and without attempting to map them spatially. Might have had some slight success, or might have been scripted / wishful thinking.
 

Yeah that makes sense !

 Welp... so I went on a rollercoaster ride over the past week. On Wednesday, I started an impromptu mini fire kasina retreat, inspired partly by wanting to spend some time working on concentration again, and partly because I was soon to head off on a Tibetan tantric retreat and figured it would be useful to get back into the habit of visual-heavy meditation.

My original plan had been to meditate full days whenever I could (eg weekends) and 3-5h / day during working days, from Wednesday until the following Friday when the Tibetan retreat began. But work got unusually busy and somewhat high pressure, so my mini retreat got abruptly cut short.

Also: emotional ups and downs driven by work pressures, personal life stuff, and no doubt amplified by the power of high dose fire kasina.

--

2025-09-10 (Wed)

30m LED light, reclining: Took several dot reps to symmetrise the field. Lots of little body releases, especially on the left side, while doing the symmetrisation. Low-level calm and happiness seeping in. Towards the end, got a couple of rapid flashes of hyper-realistic images, including one of some beautiful glass object, where the transparency and contours of the glass were breathtakingly vivid.

2h candle flame, semi reclining: For the first few dots, I was fairly able to stay with the dot and notice and appreciate the visual detail. While looking at the flame, visual focus was subtly but very rapidly shifting, like frame jitter; the more narrow the attention, the more noticeable the jitter. After the first few dots, they became slightly blurry, and seemed to move straight from initial dot to black dot (virtually skipping the spinny j2 step). Attention often bounced between observing visuals, and checking for intentionality and for unnecessary contractions like gripping in my face and jaw. Thoughts sometimes strayed into hell realm stuff. For the last half hour, I stayed in the 2nd screen, gently observing the growing, circule purple cloud, which began to take on more vibrant and different colours.

1h 10m LED light, reclining: Attention was more drifty. Dot was rapidly disappearing in a matter of seconds. Lots of reactive thoughts, hell realm again. Midway through, I did a mini IFS intervention, and the hell realm stuff dissipated again, with thoughts taking on a more neutral tone.

--

2025-09-11 (Thu)

2h candle flame, semi reclining: Remarkably restless mind, constantly hijacked by discursive thoughts - hell realm for the first half, human or titan for the second half. Eyes open, vaguely looking at the candle flame, but thinking about something entirely unrelated. For short bursts only, I could pull myself together to place closer attentiveness, which then led to seeing what's going on with the visuals as well as the elements that make up the process of looking at an object - looking, evaluating if I'm looking, intending to look, verbal subvocalising that I'm looking, attention bouncing to an environmental cue, etc. Also invoked devotedness and trust - what's happening right now is a thing that needs to be happening, that there is something to learn from it - and when I recalled this, it helped me to anchor in the moment and release some of that restless tension.

1h 30m candle flame, semi reclining: Still restless, but thoughts have taken on a more human realm quality, a kind of yearning/longing. Lots of micro-switching of techniques, like how long to stay in the 2nd screen, which mantra to use. 2nd screen getting more colour washes - blooms and clouds of purple - which grew in intensity, as well as hints of omnicolour, faint rainbow, very faint shape control, a bit of colour control. Looking far and intending to see a photorealistic image sometimes produced a faint ghostly version of such an image for a fraction of a second.

Went for a quick massage with a foam roller to get the worst of the knots out of my neck and shoulders that had developed over the morning.

30m LED light, reclining: Mind still very drifty and vague. Sit was interrupted to run a small errand, and that was when I realised my throat was parched and pulsing, and I was unusually warm. Drank some cooling tea to counteract the heat and dryness.

1h LED light, reclining: Dot still very blurry, and turning into black dot within seconds of closing my eyes. Since my mind was so intent on wandering, I decide to deliberately observe that act of pulling away from the intended object (the visuals). So this sit turned into a push-pull exercise, where I dropped in the intention "watch the dot" then, instead, watched the mechanism of aversion from the dot towards some other thing. When watched closely, there were several push-pull urges per second. The side effect of this exercise was that I actually followed the dot a lot more closely than before, as the urges to pull away were being caught at a much earlier stage.

2h LED light, reclining: Beginning to stay longer in the 2nd screen. Sometimes tracked the movement of attention (the push-pull from the last sit), sometimes just resting the gaze. Produced some ease - the mental fatigue has mostly disappeared. Screen continues to be very simple, with pale to purple billows of colour, sometimes subtle rainbow, sometimes fiery shimmering at the top of the screen. Dots still dim and blurry. Occasionally wondered at why it felt so obviously like the screen was "an object in front of me" and that "I" was interacting with it, when the entire fire kasina closed eye field is patently a mental object.

--

2025-09-12 (Fri)

1h 15m, LED light, seated: Dot was bright and clean again, and lasted several minutes. But curiously, the dot tended to sit about 5 degrees to the right of where my eyes were focusing (usually my dot strays left or stays centred). Simultaneously felt a gentle quiet calm, and had a stream of pressurized, high energy discursive thoughts running.

Mood crash in the afternoon, precipitated by work stuff.

1h 30m, candle flame, semi reclining: Attempted to start with a short tonglen for the emotional confusion I was in, but attention kept falling off. So returned to the push-pull exercise. After the first half hour, flavour of thoughts became more neutral and gentle. Noticed the body was subtly holding and tensing, especially hips/groin/thighs, and some pressure building in the head, like energy trying to burst out. 2nd screen pixels becoming very fine grained.

At night, lying in bed: Looking at the closed-eye field produced a bit of calm. Drifted off into some hypnagogic state, where I somatically felt a flapping or jumping or buzzing at my left thigh. Then a second or two later, I "realised" it was my phone buzzing - it had been sitting around here. Slipped straight from this to wakefulness in which I discovered my phone was actually on my bedside table, not by my thigh - with no sense of having woken up from sleep/dream.

Mused about how sleepy states slowed down fabrication - the somatic sense of buzzing in a certain location came first, with no tag as to whether it was me or not me, inside or outside, and the intellectual recognition that the somatics related to an external object (a phone) came later.

--

2025-09-13 (Sat)

2h candle flame, semi reclining: Started with a short tonglen again, which I still struggled to stay focused on. Lots of contracted, self-referential, anxiety-driven thoughts. Eventually I relaxed visual focus - as if the entirety of the visual field was in background awareness, and the foreground was just a sense of resting and ease. A gentle stillness and mild happiness began to seep in, though still many discursive thoughts.

2h 5m candle flame, semi reclining: Swapped the mantra for the metta phrases, which produced more gentle ease, enabled the pixel flows and colour washes to be more vibrant, including a bit of the omnicolour again. Played with visual / spatial stuff, like trying to "look" at the visual field above my head or behind my eyes or to the far left or right, without turning my eyes but just setting the intention to look there. At times, the apparent distance between "me" and the visuals grew a lot closer as though the stuff was happening right in front of my face. Drifting thoughts, which had started very discursive, became less coherent and more surreal, like mental images or reasonings that flit by and have no reference point in reality.

1h 40m candle flame, semi reclining: Less surreal stuff, more suffering-inducing rumination.

2h LED light, reclining: The first couple of dots were bright and clean, then after that it was back to blurry dots again. I'm starting to think that the transition from bright clean dots to blurry dots is close to physiological - maybe something like mental fatigue or habituation. The mind is no longer surprised by seeing a bright light and an afterimage, so it doesn't produce such a strong, clarified image. Continued to drift into neurotic thoughts. Towards the last half hour, it suddenly occurred to me that last weekend, when I was doing six realms practice, I had practised cutting into reactive patterns with attention, or at least some homebrew version of it - ie pick out something that was emotionally charged and stare it down, point the directly sustained light of attention on it, rather than flinch or hide or fight or distract. Stare it down, fully feel it and be with it until it dissolved. It occurred to me that I could do that again, so that was my practice for the last half hour of the sit. Within a couple of "cuts", I was back to a much clearer headspace and with more neutral thoughts.

My mindstate was completely different afterwards - lighthearted, jokey, spontaneous, interested in things and people again.

I'm starting to think that attention - direct, sustained, uncompromising attention - is the most powerful solvent in the world.

1h LED light, reclining: Mindstate is now neutral to whimsical. I have mild colour control, mild shape control, can see various kinds of full-field tessellations and Aztec style patterns. Calling up the bodhisattva Tara sometimes produced a vaguely humanoid, seated, meditating figure, though often with an over-large head like an alien. I took up the Om tare tuttare ture soha mantra again, but this time it organised itself into something that had a melody.

I followed this with a short Green Tara sadhana.

1h 30m candle flame, semi reclining: Visuals became simpler again, tessellations were rarer. When I defocused gaze from the visual field, I saw a translucent and and crisply realistic 3D visual of a large, man-made rectangular tunnel, its ground entirely filled with water. By very gentle mental inclination, I could travel along this tunnel and even choose to make a left or right turn when the route forked. It wasn't a fully immersive experience, but rather felt like I was playing a first-person video game, with some distance between "me the controller/gamer" and the world moving in front of me. So I guess a crossover between 2nd and 3rd screen? This tunnel lasted for maybe 20-30 seconds. It was very cool.

--

2025-09-14 (Sun)

Insomnia overnight, during which I dropped into a brief dream in which I was standing outside an old mansion/castle - one that I had once visited or perhaps even lived in, but now it looked deserted. I walked in. A cold wind was blowing, and it looked like some of the walls had crumbled down. No one was there. I went out to the backyard and was met by a swarm of angry insects, like messengers of death and decay.

1h LED light, reclining: Mindstate was angry/resentful/defensive, hot hell stuff.

--

2025-09-15 (Mon)

50m LED light, seated: Mindstate was in heavy sadness. Visual field had desymmetrised; the dot kept drifting leftwards, and after a while I dropped the attempt to symmetrise it because it felt like too much mental effort and giving me a headache. Then I just relaxed my gaze and allowed watching to occur; at some point, the heavy sadness lifted, and the field symmetrised by itself, though I was left with tiredness and headache, as well as a dry throat and mild cough.

--

2025-09-17 (Wed)

Off cushion: While driving home, I looked at the visual space in front of me, then "traced back" the vision to the space behind the eyes (some visual version of self inquiry). Doing this a few times suddenly turned vision vast - I became very aware of the vastness of the sky, which looked majestic, and it seemed as though everything was happening in front of or within the backdrop of this glorious sky. "I" was still the thing behind the eyes though

The week of fire kasina amplified emotions gave me the chance to keep exploring and cataloguing what gave contracted emotions their stickiness, and which techniques offer relief to which emotions.

My latest map is as follows:

Some emotions can be dissolved by staring at them with strong, direct, unflinching attention. The best candidates are the intense, fast-arising, high energy ones that are strongly somatic - like primal fear, sudden heartbreak, humiliation. I guess these are some of the most primal, pre-verbal emotions. These feel amazingly good when they dissolve - I guess it's that sharp contrast between being steamrolled by an intensely unpleasant emotion in one moment, and finding myself in a slightly buzzy, clearheaded, pristine mindstate the next.

Some emotions are better off dealt with by anchoring in sensate experience - such as asking "what's happening?" or tuning into multisensory vibrations. The best candidates are the self-protective emotions that are mostly head-centred and fuelled by discursive thinking, like irritation, argumentativeness, defensiveness. Direct staring doesn't work as well on them, perhaps because they largely live in intellectualisations rather than in somatics? Instead, anchoring in sensate experience tends to reset attention to somatics (and other physical senses) and thus reset the mindstate to neutral, with a moderate lean towards sensory clarity and vibratoriness.

Some emotions are best dealt with by repeated, persistent tuning into a spacious, open-awareness-style state, especially if this is supported by the environment - like going for an outside walking meditation, with a long route and distant views. The best candidates are the low-grade, persistent, background sensations, like a simmering sense of sadness or doubt. With repeated tuning to spaciousness, after some time (anywhere from seconds to hours) visuals would suddenly break out into vast clarity, minimal vibrations but high crispness and vibrancy, and mindstate would be similarly clear, even the body would feel more lightweight.

2025-09-20 (Sep)

On day 2 of retreat, 5h drive away from home, I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. And yet, now that I'm here, I seem completely unable to be present. Mind is just bouncing between:

"This is good, I hope it lasts/deepens"
and
"This is not good, I hope it ends/changes"

at various levels of intensity and on various matters, and then instinctively making some (mental or physical) motion as a reaction to the above. Even though if I pause to think about it, I would realise that instinctive reaction doesn't actually resolve anything.

Like how I paused in the middle of a meditation to write this post. As if writing about my mental state on the internet would somehow fix it (or would get me some kind of comfort from knowing that people have read it... I don't even know what led me to write this, just a compulsive urge)

2025-09-20 (Sat) continused

Keep getting the urge to write something along the lines of "damn, this tour through the dukkha ñanas is brutal", even though the thinking part of me knows that this is actually about the gentlest way possible to touch suffering, given that there is nothing "externally" wrong (I am safe, in good health, have food and shelter, etc).

Feels like there are (at least) two sides of my mind battling it out with each other. One primal instinctive side that keeps blindly rejecting stuff and groping for stuff looking for comfort, and the other dharma-informed side knowing it's all a fool's errand. And these two sides are fighting rather than talking to each other.

Actually, I think there's a third side, some pseudo-philosophical side that is wondering how much of the "lost and miserable" feeling I'm experiencing should be solved by meditation and how much by actually changing external life circumstances. And *it* is also battling the other two sides, but especially battling the dharma side who is fighting back with stuff like "do you really think changing external circumstances would fix dissatisfaction? and what on earth do you think is external to 'you' anyway? and where is the problem you're trying to solve anyway, I can't find it??"

Gonna do some tonglen and gratitude on my way to the temple. (Me: "this is such great practice opportunity to work with dukkha". Also me: "I am so broken plzzzzzz fix me". And me: "these aren't my thoughts, they're just thoughts". Me again: "ok goddamit, self inquiry to the rescue, WHO IS THE THINKER OF THESE THOUGHTS". Me once more: "I am so broken plzzzz fix me")

Sending you lots of love and kindness . I am grateful to you for working so hard in a retreat setting to alleviate your suffering. It's a kindness you are doing to yourself , to me , to all things . 

I encourage you to keep practicing lots of self love and kindness and gratitude for all the effort and mind battling etc , it's all with a good heart and good intention. 

I relate to much of the struggle you shared . I find it helpful to practice a lot of positive loving self talk (even written notes to self ) in those times . It was really helpful on recent retreat . I always thank myself for thanking myself too hehe. A virtuous cycle . All the best ! Keep on trucking'! 

Thanks Bubby Soup, meant a lot to read your message. Actually, reading it led me to have a bit of a cry, and that's when I realised that this mild claustrophobia/nausea I'd been feeling all day was related to suppressed tears. Didn't realise how hard I'd been driving myself, trying to "do something useful" about my mood, whether it's to make myself feel better, or to draw some insight from it.

​​​​​​​Damn, so much struggle, so much resistance, staring me right in the face! I had even done a short metta practice earlier today and wished happiness to the rest of the world, but forgot to wish happiness to myself. Huh.

​​​​​​​Back to the cushion, and will try to be a bit gentler with myself.

I think it's important to understand that everyone fails their retreat and that's the whole point of intensive retreats. We really don't clean up our mind by sitting in pure presence and having 100% mindfulness... instead we keep seeing over and over again how a kind of basic sanity alternates with a emotional trances and busy mind, and over time, the mind naturally learns to prefer basic sanity. So we go on retreat to just get a clearer understanding of what is going on... and it is always some kind of a mess.

In normal life, we really don't get a chance to fully experience emotional trances and busy mind very directly and fully. Instead we're busy acting out the drama as it happens. It's only when we can sit down in a safe place and watch the mind that we see that it bubbles up with dramas on it's own. Which is great! That's how we learn to become suspicious of the emotional and busy mind --- is it really telling us the truth about situations? Wow, look at it go with all these ideas and feelings and worries and hopes! 

So remember that the worst sits are in their own way the best teachers.  

Part of everyone's drama is the desire to fix things. One of the ways the emotional and busy mind "hides itself" is to be the voice in your head that says things like:
"pay attention"
"don't be distracted"
"let it go"
"be more calm"
"show more appeciation"
"practice better"
"find more equanimity"
"find more vipassina"
"find more samatha"
"sit longer"
"don't move"
"for the next practice session, I'm going to..."

To some extent all of these things are fine, but most of the time these just fall into the "fixing thoughts" and "practicing thoughts" and "perfection thoughts" --- they are just individual examples of how our mind doesn't accept what is already happening. And it's a clever way to use meditation practice itself (!) to get emotional and busy because "it's good for me".   So definitely learn to see that whole pattern.

Instead, just notice all of these thoughts and dramas --- WELCOME all these thoughts and dramas. And to help stay objective, label them with your own version of labels like "fixing thoughts" and "practicing thoughts" and "perfection thoughts", etc.  Those are just the labels that work best for me for this kind of stuff --- make your own.

So remember, retreats are not about finding perfection. They are about learning about the always imperfect mind. It is very ironic that the more you accept and learn about the imperfect mind, the more purified it becomes. But the purificaiton part is not up to "you". All you can do is gather the data like an objective scientist. Look closely and fully feel what is going on. Use labels to stay objective about it. Label emotional trances, label intellectual busyness. 

Aha Mara, I see you! You are (insert label).

Now, that said, there is a limit to what the mind can learn in the course of a day. If the "dose" of meditation is too low, then the dramas don't become obvious... but if the "dose" of meditation is too high, then we're basically just retraumatizing ourselves. So the whole trick of retreat is to find a way to moderate the intensity. 

It is perfectly fine to study neutral or pleasant sensations instead of hunting for imperfections.
It is perfectly fine to simply enjoy being a human body with nothing to do, a kind of spiritual laziness that is very healing.
It's perfectly fine to do techniques that emphasize metta or brahma viharas.
It is perfectly fine to dwell in any relaxation or centering states that arise.
It is perfectly fine to go for a walk and "not practice" for a while. 

Fine the right balance for where you are. Be honest about what is working and what is not. Don't push too hard. Don't expect perfection. Be kind to yourself.

Many many many things can go wrong with meditation from pushing too hard -- so don't. If you feel like you are trying to accomplish too much, try accomplishing less. GO SLOWER. If you are burning yourself out, then it is better to serously consider quitting. (honestly) Don't harm yourself.

​​​​​​​Best wishes for your retreat and for the decision you make! Be kind to yourself.

+1 to what Bubby said.

Your dedication to practice, to working it all through, your honesty is a real inspiration.

Reading Ken McLeod I found an inquiry that I thought you may find helpful too:

"What would I be without that [current struggle]?"

Thanks heaps for the encouragement and advice - it was grounding. Today (Sunday) I continued to do what I was doing yesterday (some combo of drop the ball and bits of self-inquiry, quite Michael Taftian) but when a "dangerous" thought or emotion started sneaking in, I labelled it before returning to dropping the ball.

A few hours later, I was beginning to feel the heaviness/queasiness lift. Things became more simple, more okay.

I don't know what exactly caused the shift - maybe it was the thought/emotion labelling, maybe it was getting so much encouragement on this forum (one of my recurring irrational sad thoughts yesterday was that I was all alone and no one to help me), maybe because this is the last day of the retreat (it's only a 3 day thing), maybe my mind was ready to move on anyway.

Whatever the case - I can breathe again

I think what had *really* gotten to me yesterday was not just that I was totally identified with my thought-stuff, but that I *knew* I was totally identified with thought-stuff and yet I couldn't stop! It was like watching a train wreck.

It's become pretty clear that I had an unquestioned assumption - if I could recognise that something unskilful is happening, I should be able to stop it. (Or to borrow your words, that I could "do" the purification.) And that assumption got pretty well blown apart on this retreat.

This mini retreat is nearing its end, but I've got a more chonky 2 weeker retreat in October, similar conditions and setting*, so I've got some valuable learnings to take with me to that one (or at least am forewarned of how things might turn out).

*One of the things that had perhaps thrown me off about this retreat is that it's not a silent meditation retreat, but a vajrayana empowerment retreat, consisting almost entirely of empowerment rituals, chants, and teachings (of a predominantly moralistic and devotional nature, rather than practice instruction). Wouldn't necessarily have been a problem on its own (I'm used to more traditional/devotional style stuff) but it meant not getting the practice advice I would have liked when I started getting a bit nutty. The October retreat will likely be the same.

Thank you!! Damn, really feeling community here. I'm dedicating whatever merit came out of this retreat especially to DharmaOvergroundians.

 

Perfect! That's seeing the whole pattern. The thought-stuff, the identification with the thought-stuff, the desire to change the thought-stuff, the inability to change the thought-stuff. It's like a perfect prison.

And yet, you can see it all.

Interesting, right? There is some part of the mind that is free to see this all! That's the precious human birth. 

Hell beings are too angry, their thought-stuff is saying that the entire world is an enemy and they can't help but believe it and act it out.
Hungry ghosts are too greedy, their thought-stuff is saying that the entire world is insufficient and they can't help but believe it and act it out.
Animals are too focused on enduring, their thought-stuff is saying that the entire world is about surviving and they can't help but believe it and act it out.
Powerful gods are too ambitious, their thought-stuff is saying that the entire world is a competition and they can't help but believe it and act it out.
Heavenly gods are too prideful, their thought-stuff is saying that most of the world is to be excluded and their own heavenly home is to be maintained and they can't help but believe it and act it out.

Humans are typically too focused on their desires... but humans can also desire to see the nature of desire --- and that's what makes it possible to escape the prison.

It's funny, the harder you fight the prison, the stronger it is. The more you just let the prison be, as it is, the more it obviously turns into thought-stuff --- mere wisps of fancy in the mind --- and you realize you are A LOT freer than you assumed.

So good job! You saw the whole pattern, the arising of an idea, the identification with the idea, the desiring around the idea, and all the thinking and planning about how to make the desire happen... that's samsara. That's what needs to be seen. And in your practice and future retreats, it's seeing all the different variations of samsara we have. It might seem like it's endless, but us humans are actually creatures of habit. If you start labelling your samsara patterns, you'll find that you have maybe 25 or so total patterns. That's it. Of course, we can have a million versions of "body image problems", for example as one of mine, but they are all an enactment of being critical about the body you have which doesn't change a thing about the body you have! Thought-stuff. So practicing is just like learning the alphabet, except your learning to see and label your own reactive patterns. 

It can be even simpler than that... everything can reduce down to the three poisons. The flavors of samsara are greed (the desire is to make more of it), aversion (the desire is to get rid of it), and indifference (the desire is to ignore it). No need to change greedy thoughts, the point is to just notice -- aha, greediness! same for aversion! same for indifference! These are things that arise, we idenfy with it, we have more desiring around it, and all the thinking and planning. But it was just a momentary flash of greed or aversion or indifference. How interesting!

So basically in practice and on retreats it's just about learning to see this more and more. It's futile to fight it, it's futile to try to change it. But over time, we realize how all this clinging and craving and desiring is so exhausting... and we naturally are drawn to it less and less. Ironically, sometimes we are the last person to notice how we're changing. Inside, we can feel like a mess --- we're so close to the dynamics of our mind --- but outside people will comment on how calm or clear we are these days... It's ironic that we're the last to know.

Nibbana is seeing samsara just as it is... when thought-stuff is seen as thought-stuff, then there really isn't a problem. The samsara _problem_ goes away if samsara is seen clearly. The problemness is what goes away, not necessary the thought-stuff itself.

If I told you that you were a purple bumblebee, it would just be absurd. Most thought-stuff, when clearly seen is that way. Retreats can be quite amusing, if you are willing to laugh at yourself. It can suck to be the butt of the joke, but it's better than suffering.   

There is a special domain where we can be both serious and lighthearted about practice --- that's when the magic happens.

Best wishes!
 
(As you can see, I think three poisons and six realms are really good conceptual frameworks and noting is a really good practice method for this kind of stuff.)

Ohhhhhhh!! *That* is seeing the whole pattern. Wow. I had gotten so zoomed in trying to investigate "individual" thoughts/emotions and their sensations, while ignoring and just getting frustrated by the rest of the pattern (all the thoughts about the thoughts, and the thoughts about the thoughts about the thoughts, etc...)

I thought I had learned this lesson a number of times before, but evidently I needed to learn it again, or rather to apply it much more broadly than I had before. I've already noticed several other whole patterns this morning, just by taking this wider view of various things that I'm frustrated with about myself.

Thanks again for the pointer. This stuff is gold.

2025-09-22 (Mon)

Phew... back home from the (unexpectedly and unusually) gruelling retreat.

My first instinct had been to retrospectively catalogue what had happened. But as I was writing, I realised that I was just spinning a narrative about mood going UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN and on and on and on... which isn't really useful to me or anyone else, and in fact it might send my mind the wrong message (make it think that these fleeting moods are much more important than they actually are).

So instead, I'll document the things I've (re)learned:

• Thoughts and emotions, on their own, don't need to be a big deal. I can treat them like I would treat a random sound or a random body sensation as I am meditating - as something that "just happens" but does not need to bother my meditation at all. If random outside noises don't bother me when I'm meditating, why would I think that random thought-noises bother me and need to be gotten rid of?
• Some of my thoughts and emotions - especially the more instinct/primal level urges - are really "childish" in the sense of being unreasonable, unfulfillable, unfair, etc. I don't need to get rid of them or beat myself up about having them. They're just thought-noises. See above.
• Observing the push-pull of thoughts and emotions includes observing frustration about them, observing failures to observe them, observing the frustration at the failure to observe them, and so on and so on... notice the whole pattern
• If I'm trying to make insights happen faster or happen better, that's just another pattern to observe. Oh, and when I burn out from the attempt, that's part of the pattern too.
• I don't need to observe the hell out of everything and practise in every waking moment - not even when I'm on retreat. I can also just do things that generate positive emotion.
  
  • Over the weekend, I found periods of positive emotion from: (1) listening to a Ken McLeod talk series, which restored my motivation to practice, (2) being a listening ear for another retreatant who was talking to me about her life struggles, (3) looking at the sky during sunset, (4) getting encouragement and advice from DhO, (5) a powerful imaginal double deity encounter on day 2 of the retreat in which I didn't at all try to figure out what was "really" happening, I just allowed the imagination to unfold, (6) listening to music on the drive home.
• Or, I can observe what kind of patterns are associated with neutral and positive emotion. Vipassana isn't just for when things suck.
• Brahmaviharas, tonglen, gratitude, forgiveness, and other heart practices: remember to do them! And when I do them, don't forget to wish myself well along with the rest of the world.
• Some of my "insights" are mostly intellectual/theoretical rather than deeply known/felt. That's not a problem, and won't be fixed by beating myself over the head with the theory. Continued practice will help them integrate.
• Some of my "insights" are forgotten when I'm in a more turbulent mindstate. That's also not a problem. Continued practice will help them stick through good times and bad.

Phew. I'm sure there are more things I've learned, but one pattern I'd like to undo is my completionism/perfectionism, so I'll let the forgotten stuff stay forgotten.

(dedication of merit)
May the excellent bodhicitta
take birth where it has not yet done so;
where it has been born, may it increase
freely, without degeneration.
 

Welcome back from the grueling retreat, and for sharing your insights! These speak to where I feel my own practice pulling me now. I often either forget heart practices and boddhicitta or dedication of merit entirely, and have seen different versions so I haven't memorized one. I like the one you quoted very much, so I shall steal this from you like I stole Aunti Auntei's personal motto, lol!

Thank you for the inspiration and motivation!
​​​​​​​

Oh, and one additional thing that I've just relearned 5 minutes ago:

The Buddha path is about learning to reduce suffering. 

If I find myself doing something that consistently increases suffering, I probably need to pause and check whether or not I've fallen off track.

Off cushion context: I'm going through a fairly high tempo / high pressure period at work, which has unfortunately fallen right in the middle of my planned retreat period. The pressure is leaking into my personal life, including into my practice, my sleep, etc. I was lying in bed in the wee hours of the morning, mind spinning and feeling helplessly oppressed by the pressure, wishing I knew how to take some of that stress away so I could sleep... When it suddenly occurred to me that I know how to meditate in such a way that it cultivates positive qualities. I.e. I had apparently completely forgotten that I can know how to do jhana. So I spent a few minutes brushing energy through my body and am now already feeling significantly better. Duh!

It's insane how much "basic" stuff I can forget when I'm stressed out or tunnel visioned or otherwise in a bad mood. Cultivating jhanic factors was one of the first things I had learned, in fact I had stumbled into it years before I began meditating, and yet I had literally forgotten such a thing existed until 5 minutes ago.

In fact, the mere mental recollection that meditation can be used to cultivate pleasant mindstates has already had a calming effect on me.

Hm. I'm now going to rethink how I approach the 2 week retreat in October. It's approx 6h of teaching and ritual per day, some meal/social time, then free time (meditate how you like, or don't meditate at all) for the rest. For the free time I might do jhana - not gung-ho stuff like fire kasina, but perhaps something gentler like the breath, samatha-oriented open awareness, or even just soak in metta.

Ahahah, I can very much relate. It's funny how so much of the path is like, a spiral...where I'm remembering things from years ago some days that make me go "duh!"

The must stubborn one for me is also the most rewarding, though I don't practice to reduce suffering in the moment as much as I could. It's when I do though, that I often reach the deeper states. There's a real letting go that happens, so I'm slowly but surely looking forward to any and all difficulties in one sense, but being flexible to do just like you describe....brushing energy through the body is a great way to put it. It could be a number of tools in the toolkit. Whatever gives compassion to the mind or the body, the thoughts, sensations. 

It always feels significantly better, but it's so easy to forget! I have an increased workload coming as well, and hoping I can do a Garchen online retreat in October. May we both cultivate that surrender and trust, and find ways to bring the life stressors on the path

The biggest breakthrough I had shortly before finding this space was that realization that freedom from suffering is always available in the moment...maybe not the permanent awakening we want, but tastes of it in the moment...in something as simple as bringing awareness to an itch in meditation, being curious about it, until it's emptied out...just a neutral sensation. If only it were that easy to do with thought trains...lol. But it's doable  

"Freedom from suffering is always available in the moment" - yes, this! Whenever I happen to remember it, it is so true.

The tricky part is bringing it to mind in the times when we need it the most.

Maybe I'll start a notebook to collate little gems like this. Or write a letter from my wiser and more carefree self to my dark nighting self, with reminders for the various things that dark night me is likely to forget.

All the best for your retreat! Hadn't heard of Garchen until now, I might take a peek at it sometime

There is no wiser self or dark night self! Or an awakened self for that matter! But there is a self that must pay the tax!!! 

2025-09-25 (Thu)

Over the last few days, during micro-hits and off-cushion practice (eg while driving), I experimented with labelling thoughts and emotions, and identifying patterns associated with them. I also remembered that meditation is allowed to be pleasant ( ), so I deliberately tuned more into pleasant factors.

Began reading about the MIDL system and allowing it to colour my sits.

45m anchor in breath + label thoughts
Intention: Anchor attention in the subtle pleasantness (sukha) associated with the breath, and observe the non-controlled (anatta) nature of attention drifting off the anchor. I played with how much/little labelling to do. Eventually, I settled for adding a mental label only when the distraction had gotten gross enough that it included clear verbalisations or mental images. Pre-verbal/image distractions are noticed and dropped without labelling. Body-mind state was calm, with pre-jhanic piti-sukha.

2025-09-25 (Thu) (continued)

Through the morning, a cloud of nameless sorrow hung over me, spurred on and re-triggered by regularly recurring little thoughts. After an hour or so of trying to do life stuff, I decided to go for another sit, to get a better idea of what's going on, and perhaps even to get a bit of relief.

1h semi reclining, same as above

Mind was indeed restless and turbulent, more so than the last sit, which meant I did more thought labels - one every few seconds. Rehearsing, reminiscing, explaining, instructing, storifying, fantasizing, self-inflating, self-blaming, other-blaming, other-idealising, comfort-seeking, and on and on. Attention is strongly tuned into lack/insufficiency, often regarding content that has a self-other relational theme. Piti-sukha still present, but even more low-grade than earlier.

--

All the world is a big mess of anxiety and anticipation and expectations and regret and insecurity and striving. And at the centre of this spinning chaos is the ubiquitous "I" (no idea what/who that is, but it presses its case for its existence with great urgency), sitting there in helpless horror, watching the world churn and heave and fall apart, like a puppetmaster whose strings have been cut, but is still frantically tugging at those strings trying to do something.

Heh... apparently the mind is in a metaphorical mood again.

(In case this sounds overly dramatic, don't worry, I'm not going insane - or, at least, no more insane than I normally am. I think I'm just seeing my usual level of insanity more clearly than I do at some other times.) 

​​​​​​​Well done!

+1

2025-09-26 (Fri)

Continued thought labelling off cushion. Really noticing the way stories are spinning up to "explain" past events, rather than just let the past be the past. Once the story is noticed, it would be labelled and cut, but very soon another story spins up. Really noticing how much mental bandwidth gets taken up by this, leaving less bandwidth for other things that actually matter more.

40m thought labelling, walking around the park

The overall mental state today was slightly stressed and tense, compared to yesterday's blues. The thoughts I labelled were often associations triggered by external sensory data (like people or activities I saw in the park). I went for stronger anchoring in the stream of discursive thoughts (including the verbal labelling as part of the thoughtstream), which meant a slightly increased tempo of 1 label per 2-3 seconds, and when no obvious discursive thought was present, I labelled sensory perceptions instead, to ensure the labels were continuing.

Partway through, some piti began to develop in the hands, which is unusual - normally I only get jhanic factors when meditating in stationary positions. At the half hour mark, I decided to test how far I could push "walking jhana". Tuned into the pleasantness, and found myself rapidly slipping into a soft j3 - a stillness and smoothness, with remarkably relaxed body movements, and the world and its sensory data flowing through, seemingly without encountering any obstructions.

Evening

Meant to do another thought labelling sit, but found that I was slipping in to a pleasant dreamy mindstate, and realised that if I had such a relaxing meditation in the evening, I would struggle to sleep that night. So I cut out of technique and instead checked how perception was. Noticed that things were very vibratory and blinking rather rapidly. Wondered if I had slipped into A&P, so I checked, and sure enough, mind was speedy and somewhat powered up.

--

2025-09-27 (Sat)

Last night, lay in bed for some time in some fragmented, vague, slightly unpleasant state - had trouble remembering what happened or whether or not I had even fallen asleep. Then came unbidden mental images of danger and death, and with it feeling afraid and exposed, so I went label label label on those feelings until the fear subsided. Then mind slipped back into rumination blues. Huh, seems like a run through the lower dukkha nanas Dissolution -> Fear -> Misery?

40m thought labelling, semi reclining

I deliberately stayed anchored on the thoughtstream, continuing to use a gentle labelling pace to help me stay anchored. Included the mental process that is catching thoughts and coming up with labels for them. That was interesting to observe and label. Mindstate grew rather thin and dim, but crisp - it was dreamlike, but in a lucid rather than sleepy way. Had a number of hypnagogic visions, including one of a very detailed 3D, fractal organic structure that was slowly rotating in space, perhaps a massive tree with thousands of branches and sub-branches and sub-sub-branches, or perhaps it's a map of the nervous system? The visions were of a neutral and mildly fascinating flavour. They didn't last long as I was still keeping tabs on thoughts. Throughout, the thoughts were proliferating frantically, including the mental processes tracking the thinking, then popping out to track the thinking that was tracking the thinking, but this didn't overly concern me. Came out feeling refreshed.

1h 15m "something pleasant", semi reclining

After some life business, mind was in a pressurised, unpleasantly high energy state. I tried to go straight into thought labelling, but found that this was further building mental pressure, so decided to do something more chill to settle the mind. Did a body scan, then settled into the energy body, then expanded awareness into and beyond the energy body. Felt good. Some brief glimpses (semi visual, semi "felt") of wide open space in front of me, like I was standing at the seashore looking out into the distant horizon. I enjoyed this enough that I just hung out in this lowkey blissy state for the rest of the sit.
 

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!!!  This is the way. There isn't an "always right" practice. Adjust what you do based on your intuition (and notice where you hit or missed the mark). That's the way the intuition becomes wiser over time. At this point, you are a skilled meditator and have a tool box full of tools. Sometimes it works to power through with more effort, sometimes it works to relax more and soften the approach. Test different approaches. Find the ways to keep it interesting and engauging... and ultimately healing.

<3

2025-09-27 (Sat) (continued)

40m self inquiry, "where am I?" guided meditation, Roger Thisdell

Got back into self inquiry, but now in a more chill and curious mood rather than the "desperate self help" mood that I was in last week :p

The guided meditation deliberately encouraged looking for what/where seems to be me or not me.

Intuitively, experience seems divided into three categories: external environment, mine, and me. The somatic sensations making up "the seat I'm sitting on" is external; the somatics of tingling or energy flowing through the body is "mine" (and the body in general is mine); and there seems to be some ill-defined location somewhere in the upper body that is "me". The boundaries can get blurred, like if I tune into the vibrational level then external vs mine gets much blurrier, but that tends to take a deliberate move on my part.

I tried to locate specifically where "me" was in the upper body. Difficult. Tried a few methods, including tracing hearing back to its assumed source (imagining sounds cutting a line back into me), same with seeing. Then tried to imagine someone pointing a finger at "me" - where exactly are they pointing? I could only get as specific as "somewhere in the central-ish region of the head", and even that was quite speculative.

Body-mind felt unusually calm and relaxed afterwards It seems like looking for the spot that feels most like me had an effect of gently relaxing contractions through the rest of the body.

--

2025-09-28 (Sun)

Body scan and self inquiry, at the airport / on the flight

Mind was somewhat high-strung, so I started with a body scan relaxation again, and also sometimes noting mental processes that went into the relaxation (scanning [for contraction], intending [to relax contraction], striving [to relax better], annoyed [that I wasn't relaxing as much as I could be]...).

After a while, I switched to exploring where "I" was, again by attempting to trace sounds back to "where sounds are heard from". But that description doesn't quite capture what I seem to be experiencing. I don't feel that sounds are heard "from" my ears or somewhere in my head. They are heard "over there". But concurrent with the hearing (or very shortly afterwards), there arises a mental process estimating the distance and directionality of the sound to me, like "that voice is a few metres away to my right". The "heard from" thing is actually an instinct that spatially references all sounds back to me. (By contrast, I do *not* instinctively gauge distances between two sounds, or between a sound and some other object that isn't me.)
 

2025-09-29 (Mon)

50m objectify/deobjectify [sensations, awareness, self...], guided meditation, Roger Thisdell, backless seated

Methodically objectifying (noticing that X is an object of experience) then deobjectifying (noticing that X is not a solid object) categories of phenomena.

Doing this with the six sense doors was simple enough, it just felt like noting practice. When I moved to objectifying the self, this sent me again hunting for where the self-sense was spatially - tuning into the aspect of self that is a spatial reference point. Realised that thoughts (unlike "external phenomena") were difficult to pin down spatially because there is no impulse to spatially reference them to myself. And so they float around in some ill-defined attention-created space - by default rather contracted around the head, I guess because by default attention tends to be somewhat contracted, though with deliberate intention I can "send" thoughts further out in space.

In general, objectifying the more subtle stuff (self, awareness etc) was somewhat difficult than deobjectifying them. Perhaps by force of habit, I jump almost immediately to trying to deconstruct stuff.

By the end of the sit, I was feeling a mild but heavy, deep-in-the-body discomfort, like nausea. I had felt that yesterday on the plane when I was also doing spatial self inquiry. Don't know if this is related to meditation technique or if I'm just a bit unwell.

40m noting six sense doors

Went for a simple noting sit, eyes closed and curled up in a very comfy posture, to balance out the weird nausea I was getting. Mind was a bit sluggish and lethargic and reluctant to do stuff, so the noting went rather slowly, and I was often slipping into thought trances for as long as 10-20s before they got noted as thoughts. Attention often drifted unintentionally towards checking for the location of thoughts and "I" again. Felt that mild somatic tug/lurch of "almost falling asleep". At least I felt a little more refreshed coming out of it.

Wonder if this heavy lethargic aversive nausea thing is a stress/anxiety response - knowing I have a busy and high pressure workweek ahead of me, then nervous anticipation about the 2 week retreat I'll start on Friday. 

Yup, mind is in dreamland alright... I ordered a coffee, took out my card... Then walked off without making the payment!! (Thankfully I was still in the vicinity when I realised, so I could awkwardly ask the cashier to set up the payment for me again, and didn't just steal a coffee)