This is a continuation of my first and second log.

Spring Retreat Report

Eight days of eight 90 minutes sittings (see schedule and set-up towards the end of my second log), 20th to 27th of March 2021.

I had yet another great and productive retreat, very different from my New Years retreat, which had a lot of joy and sheer physical pleasure. I had none of that this time (in the sittings, that is – off cushion I was quite joyful). Once again practice managed to throw something quite unexpected at me! This is a lengthy report, so I’ll start off with an brief summary if you just want the headlines, then a table of content, and then dive into the details.

Brief summary
I had some insights relating to the way attention works. There were some vibratory phenomena and some deep and calm jhanic states (though not as deep as I have gone before), but no cessation experience or anything similar. But most importantly, I had some (to me) qualitatively new experiences with ”energy” being moved around inside the body.

Mood in off cushion periods of the retreat and even more so post retreat: Joy, gratitude, amusement, faith in practice, a further lessening of striving.

Table of content
Insights & vibratory phenomena
                Attention working by itself
                Meditating on the written thought stream
                Vibrations, rotor, calm states
The energy stuff
                What I mean by ”energy”
                The fourth vedana: ”intense”
                Energy related sittings in chronological order
                An alternative image
                Dream & hypnagogic episode related to anger
                Concluding remarks on energy
                Four questions on the energy experiences 

Insights & vibratory phenomena

Attention working by itself
In some of the sittings, there was some mind related or insight related stuff, mainly with regard to how attention works. This felt like a continuation of my practice just before the retreat, the main thing being an insight into the anatta caracteristic of attention: There is no ”I” paying attention, or moving attention from one object to another, attention is moving all by itself.
                My fellow traveler Pepe described it very well in his log:
                ”At some point, you will observe that the process of attention (that fast sensation of going towards one object, and then jumping to the next object) works AUTOMATICALLY. Observe that consciousness arrives a fraction of a second late to each event (be it going towards the object, jumping to another or landing on it). That Consciousness/I-Self adopts this movement of the mind as its own will and action.”
                ”Surfing the Attention,” as he calls it.
                I had a lot of these surfing experiences on this retreat. Even several occurences of a meta-level experience: ”I” decided that now that things were calm and clear, I should do some attention surfing. Only to find out that the attention surfing had already begun a fraction of a second before ”I” made the ”decision” that this should happen.
                Hence the other insight that there is really no difference between meditating and not meditating. I especially experienced this in the breaks when I was reclining and couldn’t decide if I should a) stay with the breath as to calm down, b) monitor the movements of attention and arising thoughts, or c) just rest. Only to find out again and again, that ”I” didn’t or couldn’t decide, and that it would be for instance b, then a, then b, then c, although I found it hard to define what ”rest” would be, if not some form of a or b – or the giving up of chosing between a and b and c.

Meditating on the written thought stream
Like on earlier retreats, I had some visits from a visual experience of handwriting. It usually takes at least four days of retreat before it shows up, I guess it demands a certain level of concentration. What I see is a distinct handwriting style, the same every time, like you would recognize the hand writing of a parent, for instance. This I do not recognize, though. It is definitely not my own. In the beginning it is only in the center of the visual field, but as concentration grows stronger, it expands. It can be seen with closed eyes, and also sometimes with open eyes if I fix my gaze at a point. When concentration is very strong, it can be there on the walls and the floor, even when I walk around.
                This was the case at the Goenka retreat where I had my spiritual emergency back in November 2019. At that time I was extremely fascinated with this handwriting and very impressed about it (and about the mighty yogi who managed to produce it J). It could be in Danish or another language I know, or it could be in a language I didn’t recognize, and I was very curious and put a lot of effort into decoding it, as if it might contain some important secret message. Because the thing is, that this handwriting isn’t stable, it morphs and changes imperceptibly like writing often does in dreams: You think you can read a word or a fragment, but as you read it, it changes to something else. Very captivating.
                Well, on this retreat, on Day 5, fourth sitting, somebody decided that the sitting should begin open-eyed. So I just stared at the wall in front of me (white wall paper). And after a couple of minutes, I was in an absorption state, and the handwriting appeared. My attitude to it has changed a lot since the Goenka retreat, I now have no sense that it contains anything important, but I got curious as to how it actually works. It is not the content, but the process that is important. So for some 10-12 minutes the writing on the wall and I played together: It kept mutating very fast, I managed to decode a word now and then, but the word(s) changed in the same instant. Often there were misspelled words (my own name in different incorrect spellings, for instance). It occourred to me that they might not be misspelled, but misread, that I was the one committing the error. So was ”I” the entity writing or the entity reading and interpreting? These thoughts kind of entered the handwriting as well. This little game was fun and difficult – and extremely conductive to concentration. So when I had quite a strong absorption, I closed my eyes, and the handwriting disappeared. – It kind of reminds of a written/visual version of what shargrol calls meditating on the (auditory) thought stream J.

Vibrations, rotor, calm states
As usual, the first two days were a mixed bag of boredom and back pain, but when concentration got stronger, I also – apart from the insight stuff just mentioned, and the energy stuff that I talk about below – had some experiences of calm and peaceful mindstates, mostly what I in my previous log referred to as ”outer space”. I passed through these for maybe ten or twenty minutes, I even got some glimpses of the starry night that I spend so many hours watching on the last retreat. What was new was that there much more often were vibratory phenomena in the calm and peaceful mind states. These phenomena took two forms: 1) A flickering of light in the visual field, around 10-12 hz, usually only in the periphery of the visual field, sometimes expanding to towards the center. The flickering was there when I was on cushion with closed eyes, but some times it would also show up as I was settling on the cushion, open eyed, getting into pusture, or continue for a while when I got off cushion after a sit. 2) The Rotor. To me, the rotor is a helicopter sound like experience, also around 10-12 hz (ta-ta-ta-ta-ta), but 80 percent tactile, 20 percent auditory. It is usually located at the middle of the spine, but at the same time somehow difficult to locate. Mr. Rotor came by several times a day (from Day 3) and stayed longer and was more steady and distinct than I have experienced before. A few times there were both flickering of light and rotor at the same time. Then a few times a flash of a nonverbal thought, ”I might be close to Stream entry”. No cessation experience or anything similar, though.

The energy stuff

What I mean by ”energy”
The word ”energy” is terribly unprecise, used in so many different ways. I would prefer a more precise term, but my knowledge is much too limited to pick one: Chi? Kundalini? So I will just try to describe phenomenologically what I experienced, and what I mean by ”energy”. Maybe a more knowledgable person can point me in the direction of more precise terminology.
                To me, ”energy” is a tactile experience of the body that is different from the conventional, mostly mental, anatomic experience of limbs, organs etc. Energy can be air or smoke like, when it is very light and loose, and it can feel more liquid when it gets heavier and tighter. This liquid can have different levels of viscosity, from quicksilver and water through syrup to wobbly gel or pudding. What I in my old log have called a ”bottom of the ocean” feeling, for instance, is the feeling of gentle semi-viscous waves, passing slowly back and forth in the body, mainly the torso.
                Earlier in my practice I have had energy experiences that were very blurry, unclear, chaotic. Especially on my second Goenka retreat in May of 2018 I had a lot of this: A boiling ocean, the self/observer being in a little boat thrown hither and dither, under and over, through the foam of the violent waves. Extremely intense and exhausting experiences.

The fourth vedana: ”intense”
The word ”intense” keeps showing up in my mind when it wants to describe some of these more hectic energy experiences. We usually operate with three categories of vedana, which can be considered to be a spectrum: plesant - neutral - unpleasant. ”Intense” doesn’t really fit in, in this spectrum. But imagine that we bend the spectral line of vedana as to create a circle, and then place ”pleasant” at nine o’clock, ”neutral” at six o’clock, and ”unpleasant” at three o’clock. Up there at twelve o’clock, where the very pleasant and the very unpleasant meet, far away from ”neutral”, we have the fourth, apocryphal vedana ”intense”. Everybody knows the experience, in fact it is trivial that pain and pleasure have a common border (or border zone), just think of getting a good massage or an almost painful orgasm: Was it pleasant, neutral, unpleasant? Well, no and yes, it was … intense.

So I had some intense energy experiences on this retreat. And they were very different from the ones I have had before in two ways: 1) that they were much more clearly and calmly perceived, and 2) that there were some very distinct movements of energy taking place within the entire energy body. Not all of the sittings had this energy work going on. In many of sits, it was completely absent. I did nothing to cultivate the energy or manipulate it, but just observed it when it arose to the best of my abilities, although I had to bail out from time to time when it got too intense. Here are some of my …

Energy related sittings in chronological order
Day 3, second sitting: Massive heaviness in the lower torso/pelvic area. Felt as I had swallowed a cannon ball that had doubled my weight. Body sluggish and sore. Accompanied by feelings of misery, disgust, desire for deliverance. Tired of seeing the same striving and craving and aversive thoughts that I have seen so, so many times. These thoughts and emotions were seen very clearly and calmly, though. So was the heaviness. The rest of the body was calm, soft.
                Day 3, third sitting: Continuing in the same vein. Heaviness somewhat contracted to a spheric lump of tensions in the belly just below the navel. More yucki feelings and negative thoughts. I actually had the thought that I should just drop the retreat right now and spend these days doing something nice instead, like read a book. The next split second I literally smiled at that thought, it being so clear an example of ”rolling up of the mat”. – A thought appeared: This is DN seen through the lense of EQ.
                Day 4, fourth sitting: Again an experience of extreme heaviness in the lower torso. Moreover, the energy in the surface of the entire body, especially head and torso, tensed up more and more. It had nothing to do with muscular tensions: The muscles seemed very relaxed and soft, body was immovable, breath very calm, concentration strong, thoughts almost absent. At the same time the surface of the ”energy body” was hard and tight with tensions. Like if you have a liquid in a metal ball and strike the ball, there is this rippled pattern in the surface. This experience (soft inside, ”rippled” tensions in the surface) I will call the ”body suit”. The body suit usually starts off neutral and then either stays there (even getting a bit pleasant in its neutrality), or become more and more intense. The body suit in this sitting got very intense. There were yucky emotions. There were (mostly preverbalized) striving thoughts and aversion against the striving (shame, self blame). Suddenly I realized that my face was turned downwards, and in the angrily mumbling mind, there was this loud and clear and fully verbalized sentence, in English: ”Face the music!” So I looked straight ahead. And within seconds, the extreme heaviness in the lower torso disappeared. But the body suit was still there. Much easier to accept now, though.
                Day 5, seventh sitting. Again the experience of extreme heaviness in the lower torso or pelvic area. I was at this point kneeling on the cushion, usually the most comfortable for me, but had an intuition to shift to burmese position, and so I did, and that seemed to open up something: The heaviness got more evenly distributed, and the body suit came on, covering an otherwise soft and deeply relaxed body. No frustration or aversion, I just watched. And remembered to look up and face the music every time I felt my face had turned a bit downward.
                Day 6, fourth sitting. It began like a regular (i.e. not energy-related) sitting, but after half an hour I switched to burmese position, and then the standard absortion changed into the body suit, at first neutral, but then more and more intense, tilting towards the unpleasant, even painful. The energy got asymmetrical after maybe half an hour: It was as if an additional lump of energy evolved outside of my right overarm and shoulder, somehow loosely connected to my body. Again my attitude was very calm, curious, respecful – and highly concentrated: These intense energy sittings are really conductive to concentration, there are no random thoughts and emotions, no visual or auditory stuff worth noting, just this very intense energy. This continued in …
                Day 6, fifth sitting. More of the same. In a way like an ultrastrong absortion, but not jhanic (I think), as it was definitely not pleasurable. Emotionally extremely neutral and equanimous, though, so you might say Equanimity, 4th jhana, but the more experiences I have, the less these categories seem to fit. During the last 30 minutes the rotor was there in the spine, very distinct and steady. Continuing into …
                … Day 6, sixth sitting, even though I was quite exhausted. And then something new happened: After about 20-30 minutes, within this body suit of now very equally distributed fine hard rippled tensions, a lump of denser energy formed in the lower part of the solar plexus. The rest of the inner body was still soft and calm. But then this lump arose, like a fire ball in the midst of the deep and calm ocean – under the glass thin ice on the surface. Up until this point there had been virtually no thoughts accompanying the energy sittings, once they got intense, but now suddenly a fully verbalized noting or commenting voice arose, kind of like a reporter from a sports event or some political turmoil. It kept on live-reporting during the rest of the sit. I will just give you a resume: ”This lump seems to be spheric, the size of an orange. No, a bit smaller than that. It is spinning or pulsating very rapidly as if it might explode. Now it is moving upwards. Very slowly, as if ploughing through the body. It is now at the center of the solar plexus. Now it is pressing against the point in the chest where the two lower front ribs meet. It is as if it can’t get through. Wait, what’s going on? Oh, it is slowly moving backwards horisontally, just below the rib cage. Now it hit the spine, kind of grabbed onto it. And now it is climbing. Slowly …” It took about 25 minutes from the lump had set in motion until it reached the top of the spine. There it lingered for quite a while. Then it burbed about 1/5 of its mass upwards. The baby lump moved slowly upwards along the back of the head. ”What will happen when it reaches the crown? Will it somehow get out like a fountain of energy? Is this what they call kundalini rising? Don’t speculate, observe! Okay …” It didn’t exlode into fireworks, it distributed itself very calmly and more or less evenly along the inside of the scull. In the mean time the mother lump returned along the same route she had come from: down the spine to the level of the solar plexus, inwards through the body just below the rib cage, to the front of the torso, and then down below the solar plexus to somewhere around the navel. When the bell rang, I was completely exhausted.
                Day 6, seventh sitting. The energy did not take into consideration that I was exhausted. It obviously still had its plans with me: The instant my butt hit the cushion, the rotorlike vibration began in the spine, the body suit started forming, and some 30 seconds later a new lump of dense energy started to emerge at the top of the spine, where the mother lump had lingered before burbing. I did not have the power to go on with this, my concentration wasn’t strong enough anymore, and so I bailed out, changed position several times during the sit, even did some standing meditation, almost fell asleep at some point. I was very surprised that time had passed so quickly when the bell rang.
                Day 7, fourth sitting. Very much a repetition of Day 6, sixth sitting: A lump of energy formed behind the navel, moved upwards following the same route as yesterday, stopped at the top of the spine, lingered there for some time and then burbed healthily upwards, giving off a smaller, more diffuse mass of energy that traveled up along the back of the head, under the crown and then distributed itself evenly inside the head, while Mother Lump went back to the belly to dig out some more. She then repeated her little journey, doing the whole thing once again, though the burbed out baby was smaller this time.
                Day 7, sixth sitting. Another body suit was building up, this time a bit asymmetrical: There was a tiny and very dense lump of energy in the lower right front corner of the rib cage. This was quite painful, and I felt I didn’t have the power to do ”energy work” at this point, so I collapsed the spine and did some long outbreaths (sighing) with open mouth, which made the energy calmer. After some 10-12 minutes, it (both the painful tiny lump and the body suit) built up again. Then I let out steam again. This pattern continued throughout the sit, the energy wanting to do its thing, me saying, ”I don’t have the strength right now”.
                Day 8, second sitting. More than one hour of full-on intense body suit tensions, very equally distributed, even the surface of the fingers were covered. No lumps formed this time. I just sat with it, no aversion, very calm, even though it was quite unplesant. Then I suddenly felt I could not take anymore. I collapsed the spine, let out air through the mouth and stayed in this resting position until the bell rang some 15 minutes later.
                Day 8, fourth sitting. Startet in kneeling position, felt energy building up, changed to burmese position, which seems more suited for energy work. The body suit came on. There was pain around the physical heart (it really hurt, and I got a little nervous since I have a defect heart ventricle). This pain or tension then moved into the center of the chest. Then backwards to the spine. Upwards, you know the story by now, lingering, burbing a baby out that distributed itself in the head (the whole process from the forming until the baby was delivered and spread took maybe half an hour). Mother Lump trotted her way back down the spine, below the rib cage to the front of the torso and down into the belly. Then up again, this time much faster, same route, a bit more forceful burb, resulting a minute later in some vibrations in the crown. Mother Lump on her way down the spine again, and once again I was too exhausted to continue, so I collapsed the spine and rested through the rest of the sit.

An alternative image
I related these energy events to a friend, using the mother and baby imagery as above, and she suggested that another image might be better: Maybe the big lump is not like a mother burbing babies out or a truck transporting stuff up, and then going back down for more. Maybe the entire lump tries to get through the neck (throat chakra?), but the passage is too narrow, so only some of it manages to squeeze itself through, pushing the rest back down. From where it then rises and tries again.
                This seems equally plausible to me, though I am not sure how important it is which image we chose.

Dream & hypnagogic episode related to anger
During all of this energy work, the bodymind was emotionally very neutral, very equanimous, once the body suit was on, and the intensity strong. No thoughts (apart from the one sitting with the reporter). No memories, no image thoughts. No anger, fear, sadness etc. showed up. But since I have read about the connection between energy and emotions, I thought it might be relevant to mention two emotionally charged experiences from the retreat, having to do with anger. They occurred just as the energy work was starting off:
                On the night between Day 4 and 5 I dreamed that my neighbour was visiting me. He is a carpenter, and he was there to help me out with something practical here on my little farm. He kept bumping his big bag of tools into the back of my knees as we were walking across the yard. I told him firmly but kindly to stop. He got very upset, turned around, said he wouldn’t help me anyway if I was to behave like that. I felt his anger, I felt my own anger, but I remained calm and asked him to come back tomorrow so that we could discuss it ”when the tempers have cooled down”, as I said. I felt content with the way I had handled the situation, both the clear saying no and the insisting on dialogue and continued contact. Then I woke up, still feeling the adrenaline from the anger pulsating in my body, and still feeling good about my skills of conflict resolution (they are not always that good J).
                On the night of Day 5, as I was falling asleep, I had several instances of hypnagogic episodes that were a bit like lucid dreams: Something was happening as I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and then I found out that it was a dream or hypnagogic vision, taking place in the bed I was lying in. In one of these, I suddenly felt anger for a split second, opened my eyes and saw a boy of about twelve years of age sitting astride on me in the bed. I did not recognize him. He shouted (in Danish): ”I am so very angry!” His face and body expressed that emotion very clearly as well. I – or the adult part of me, if the boy was also me – was completely calm, not afraid, not angry or in any way agitated. ”I truly understand that,” I said to him, and somehow I really did feel that I understood his anger, even though I didn’t know why he was angry. And then he just disappeared into thin air, and I realized that it had been a dream/vision.

Concluding remarks on energy
This transportation of energy inside the body was quite surprising to me. It was like an alien intelligence operating inside my body – ”intelligence” because there very much seemed to be a plan and some systematic construction going on. It did not seem random.
                I have read a thousand times about people who experience ”energy moving in the body”, but I had never thought that it would be as almost cartoonishly literal as this. Also I have read (and just now re-read) some of shargrols remarks on this subject (in the great collection of his posts that Pepe put together), and he talks about ”rewiring”. First time I read that, I took it to be a metaphore, but this also seems much more literal to me now: It actually felt like there were being drawn some new fiber-optic cables inside my body, establishing new connections between gut (gut feeling), heart (heart felt) and head (thoughts/spirit/intellect).
                I am not sure what to make of it, but I am not worried about it either. Apparently it is something that has to happen by now. So I just let it happen. But I am curious, though. So I’ll finish this energy section by posing …

Four questions on the energy experiences:
                1) I wonder why this energy work show up now. I have been doing a little tantric practices and observed semen retention since 2021 began, having only one conventional orgasm every 21 days, following the advice and excercises from the daoist book ”The Multi-Orgasmic Man”. So that might have influenced something. But perhaps these things would have happened anyway. My question is: How do these energy experiences relate to the progress of insight?
                2) A natural follow up question is: My goal of practice is progress on the path of insight and eventually if possible Stream Entry and full awakening – so should I change anything in my practice, for instance do more or less or different ”energy practice” than this tantric stuff I am dabbling with? Or am I on track, doing what I am doing now, just observing on cushion what happens with this energy when it happens, not manipulating it, and then doing some yoga and breathing and kennel exercises on the side? Any suggestions to change of practice are welcome. My own hunch, though, is that what I am doing is okay.
                3) Are there any conceptual frameworks (involving for instance ”chi”, ”kundalini”, ”chakras” or the like) that reasonably explain what I experienced?
                4) Are there any recommendable ressources (books etc.) connecting the insight meditation tradition with this energy stuff?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Thank you for reading this long report. As always, comments and questions are very welcome.

Hi Niels!

Great log, I really enjoyed reading it thanks :-)

The handwriting stuff is fascinating. I think I recall you saying that you work as a translator, so maybe it's related to that - struggling to translate meaning and establish the right balance between literalism and interpretation?

I've had a lot of intense energy experiences, though a lot less dynamic than yours - usually it's painful waves in the forehead which have lasted months at a time. Actually I've just come out of one such painful period and what I've realized is that for me, "intense" really means "unpleasant". While it was going on I wanted to think of myself as being accepting, so I was reluctant to label it as unpleasant. But the fact that I was getting tired during sits shows that I was resisting or fighting it on some level. At a certain point it got so strong that I didn't have any choice but to surrender, and that's when it maxed out and vanished. Yours are more dynamic and you sound more accepting, but the exhaustion made me think of this.

I think this energy stuff is loosely related to release of trapped emotions, but there's no exact correspondence. I spent quite a while researching it and there's a crazy divergence between systems. Lots of people out there looking for answers => lots of different answers! Once you've got the basic idea what it is then I think looking for further reasons and interpretations is probably counter-productive, just another form of resistance! My suggestion would be to really try and find where you are resisting it. Look for the point of maximum discomfort where it seems like it might overwhelm you ... and then really relax into that, safe in the knowledge that it's not going to hurt you! Beyond that, accepting that it's just one of those things which happens along the path and will work itself out over time. Trust that your body knows best ;-)

Your anger issues sound relatively minor and like you have good boundaries. Oh actually that's another thing which can help with energy (Siavash told me about it from Rob Burbra). Try imagining your "energy body" to be a bit bigger than your physical body, like a kind of loose space suit or something. That both relieves the pressure and also prevents you from picking up unwanted energetic influences from your environment, if you can maintain it during the day (or at least when you are interacting with people or situations you find stressful!)

All the best
​​​​​​​George
​​​​​​​

Niels, I am going to need a longer time to read this but I congratulate you on doing a large body of great work and sharin it with us.

Awesome report Niels!

It's so good to read reports with that phenomenological description. In fact, the bodysuit is the exact description of how it feels. And the energy flow you describe matches 100% with taoist teachings.

I wonder why this energy work show up now.
EQ + good concentration + interest in energy flow.

How do these energy experiences relate to the progress of insight?
People with experience in Kundalini would answer better your question. Taoist maps are usually overly complex, and usually Enlightenment is not the goal but energy deployment. Also keep in mind that although taoist masters may have unitive-like experiences (energy related), that doesn't mean that they have the insight realization that buddhist achieve. They lack clear maps on this. The only clear one I know of (the Water Method), his western promoter Bruce Frantzis had to complement it with buddhist methods, and his chinese master already got buddhist SE before jumping to the Water Method. 

Any suggestions to change of practice are welcome. My own hunch, though, is that what I am doing is okay.
Though I'm not qualified to give my opinion on that, you usually work with intention, either trying to rise it up and then make it descent to chest / feet, or direct it to neiwan (middle of the head) or chest and then to the hands. Regarding the "tensing" bodysuit and emotions, in Bagua Zhang all the animal forms are tailored so that those energy tensions bring alive primal animal instincts. Not my taste.

Are there any conceptual frameworks that reasonably explain what I experienced? Are there any recommendable ressources (books etc.) connecting the insight meditation tradition with this energy stuff?
What matches best your description is Damo Mitchell's teachings. He has the best videos available, and for free: Explaining the Microcosmic Orbit. Download all the videos while you can! His best and most detailed book is  A comprehensive guide to Daoist Nei Gong.  
Scott Meredith's Juice Radical Taiji gives a description and practice methods for the stages of energy deployment (mingjing, anjing, huajing). Though it works on a stand-alone basis, if you have Damo Mitchell's neigong foundation stuff already under your belt, then your practice would be much more straightforward. 
Bruce Frantzis' Relaxing into Your Being: The Taoist Meditation Tradition of Lao Tse, Volume 1 (Water Method of Taoist Meditation) is the only meditation method that I found comparable to buddhists' (though with the caveats I wrote earlier). 

Thank you for such a detailed and clear report, Niel. Sometimes I feel like we are in a pen-pal club for travel writers. People write about where they have been and what they have seen, and the world seems a little more knowable. 

Mood in off cushion periods of the retreat and even more so post retreat: Joy, gratitude, amusement, faith in practice, a further lessening of striving.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your great work here, Niels. It's inspiring. Do what you do, man, the orchard is thriving, the blossoms are exquisite, and you can't argue with sweet, ripe fruits.

Great retreat Niles, congratulations.

I think you would be interested in this Shinzen article, it reminds me of your vendana = intense idea: https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/art_ickysticky.pdf

This "relaxation pain" is somewhat uncommon, but common enough that it's not rare.

With energy, I think pretty much all of the metaphysics around "what it is and why it's doing things" (like chakras, micro/macro scopic orbits, etc. ) are pretty much contrivances. I tend to think that energy simply moves because it needs to, sort of like how attention simply moves when it "decides" to. I tend to think the form the energy takes (heavy sludge, light wispy air, turbulant water) is an incidental by product. Like the noise of a lawnmower, it's sort of just a side effect. The whole "intelligence" of energy is that it goes where it needs to and seems to fix what needs fixing. (It's smarter than any of our attempts at modeling it.) There really isn't anything to do except watch it if we want, and as you said it is extremely concentration inducing just to watch it happen.

The emotional/though associations with the energy are important, though. I think sometimes the "tone" of the energy can give psychological clues... and my feeling from reading (which might or might not be true) is a feeling of repression. I have the feeling that the energy was moving around slowly and laborously and cautiously... as if it was working through a basic sense of body repression. But who knows if that's correct or helpful in anyway --- that was just my impression upon reading.

So I guess the "relaxation pain" and the repression vibe seem to suggest your body-mind was slowly being mentally and physically "massaged" at a very deep level. Seems like it wants your body and mind made even more pliable and malliable, more alive.

Seems like a great thing to happen on retreat, which can only support your ongoing daily practice!

(Note: this is sort of like the rewiring that occurs post SE, but the post SE rewiring tends to move much quicker through the body.)

Another thing I forgot to mention about the energy stuff Niels, because I was all focussed on acceptance whereas this is a side step ... I find that the piti (physical energy sensations) tends to get more magnified the more I focus on it. That's fine when it's pleasurable and not too strong, but when it gets painful then I feel like I'm getting stuck in a negative feedback loop where more attention causes more pain etc. What I sometimes try then is to focus instead on cultivating sukha (emotional happiness) in the heart area, or else some brahmavira stuff like gratitude (for being in the present moment), loving-kindness, compassion, joy etc. Sounds a bit cheesy but it actually works! I find Ajahn Brahm videos helpful for this because he's all about cultivating beautiful happy joyful states :-) You do that for a bit and suddenly realize that you've forgotten all about the painful piti!

So first I try acceptance of the painful piti to see if it moves around or passes, but if it looks like it's stuck in for the long haul then I divert attention to something more positive. I don't know whether this is just avoiding the pain which will still have to be experienced later, or whether the pain is just gonna do it's thing and work itself out whether I focus on it or not, so might as well cultivate some more positive mental states in the meantime. I'm a bit ambivalent about it, like it's cheating or something, but maybe that's just a stupid 'tough it out attitude' and I should do it more often! Anyway, something else to try if you're getting stuck ...

It's been three weeks since my Spring Retreat, and even though nothing much new has happened, I feel it is time for an update. But before the update, a little response to your reactions on my retreat. And I'll end with a question. First:


Response
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Thank you so much for the kind, encouraging and thoughtfull reactions. I feel grateful to be part of this community.

Mostly @ Pepe: Thanks for all the info, I have been checking it out and find some of it quite useful and interesting. I still only do a very modest dosis of "energy practice": 10-15 minutes a day with breathing and kegel exercises, still observing semen retention. I do both of these things because I feel they energize or vitalize the mindbody-system, not to master any skill or make progress in energy practice, my only goal being progress on the path of insight.

Mostly @ shargrol: Thanks for the Shinzen thing. Very interesting and recognizable. The only thing I don't recognize is the agitation: "icky, sticky, creepy, crawly": I don't feel that these words describe what I experience in these states, it is not dynamic like that, more static, more a feeling of being held in a tight grip. But his explanation that this "samadhi pain" is caused by a sort of surplus or habitual resistance, that goes on even though there no longer is any pain to resist, really resonates with me. And it seems connected to your other point, the point about body repression: Your hunch is spot on! This bodymind, which is now 52 years old, has been repressing emotions (and hence sensations (of emotions)) up until quite recently, it has had lots of unaknowledged anxiety and sadness for almost half a century, it has been dealing with this by trying to exercise control (hence tensing up), by drinking alcohol and smoking weed (hence fogging (and fucking up) awareness), and it is only now, ever so slowly, learning to relax, accept, enjoy ... Btw: I still find my fourth vedana "intense" useful and accurate: There are feeling tones about which you would say "I'm not sure if it was pleasant or unpleasant or both, but it was definitely not neutral": intense.


Update

Since the retreat I have upped my daily sittings from 2 x 60 to 2 x 90 minutes + a "before bedtime sit" without timer, usually 30-60 minutes, thus sitting between three and four hours every day now. The reason I felt it necessary with longer sits, is that this energy work that began during my retreat, is continuing, and it seems to go slow and thus need time. The level of intensity is much lower now, which is to be expected, but in eight or nine sits out of ten, the energy work takes center stage.
          So the typical sitting these last three weeks looks like this: Most of the experience is tactile sensations. These have become much stronger and clearer since the retreat. The rest of experience is usually taken up by verbalized thoughts, mostly random shit, sometimes practice related, all clearly seen. Absorption is weak, sometimes entirely absent. Nothing much happening in the visual field, nothing much happening with the high pitched tones, nothing much happening with emotions. Except sometimes some aversion and frustration – this happens when the mind gets impatient and wants to go back to high EQ with strong absorption, pleasant or neutral body sensations, vague dreamlike bliss etc. It then tries to do what it has done in high EQ: Surf the attention (as Pepe calls it), do self inquiry, meditate on the thought stream. But that is not possible these weeks, and hence there is frustration until mind again finds acceptance and just sit and watch this energy work. Which can be quite painful. There are no longer these cartoonishly clear transportations of energy along the spine, it is less obvious what exactly the energy is doing, but one thing is quite clear: The activity is centered two places: 1) at the back of the upper torso, i.e. the area of the shoulderblades; and 2) at the back of the head, sometimes also the middle of the head (to be more specific: a pillar from the top of the spine up to just under the crown). In these two areas there is tension, painful soreness, stiffness, slow and heavy waves (these things mostly in the upper back), and there is tension, wobbling, throbbing and throbbing pain (these things mostly in the head).
          There has been only one insight related event worth reporting: In one sitting, for a fraction of a second, the middle of the head – which is usually the place where the un-findable self seems to reside – was utterly "not me", just as anatta as the bird song outside. The next fraction of a second, the feeling of "I" or "me" rushed back in, and once again there was this center of experience. The whole thing lasted maybe a tenth of a second, and I'm not quite sure, but there might have been a sense of "falling". I'm not sure if this was a "near miss", maybe rather a "far miss". So to be absolutely clear: I do not think this was a cessation, but whatever it was, it felt new and exciting and encouraging.
          I still have faith in practice. My hunch is – and this is also what both shargrol and others have said – that this energy work just has to do its thing, its "rewiring" or "purification" or whatever it is. The challenge right now is to be patient and not try to rush through it and back to high EQ. So to put it another way: After more than a year, I'm back to sitting with physical pain again and trying to learn new lessons of acceptance.


Finally, a question

My (and the general) intuition is that this energy work is connected to emotions. But my sittings are emotionally quite neutral (apart from the amentioned frustration/aversion). One or two times there has been hints of sadness. Otherwise I don't really observe any emotions these weeks. Should I make an effort (for instance by a tailor made emotion noting technique) to look for emotions?

Hard to say... I feel --- but don't know --- like things are going slowly for a reason. I'm not inclined to suggest directly dredging up more potentially challenging emotions. It seems to me that ongoing frustration/aversion is enough. In many ways, it's like going through Misery again. The body/mind is frustrated and aversion, "look at the body/mind being frustrated/averse"... and notice how the knowing of the state is something different than the state itself. The knower isn't frustrated/averse, despite our habit of identifying with it. 

Also remember that the mind can become quite mundane and even sloppy in late equanimity. This is like a combination of Dissolution and EQ, you could say. The mind is soft and allowed to range and even daydream... and when you ask yourself, "Am I lost in this daydream?" the answer comes back "No, I may be daydreaming, but this is lucid. Even though the body/mind daydreams, the knower still knows. I haven't really lost mindfulness."
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight/30-the-progress-of-insight/11-equanimity/

"From this point, awakening is likely to occur quickly as long as the meditator continues to simply practice and very gently fine-tune awareness and precision, paying gentle attention to things like thoughts of progress and satisfaction with equanimity. At some point even this becomes boring, and a certain cool apathy and even forgetfulness arise. Most won’t notice much about this phase.Around this very mature part of Equanimity the feeling that we are not really here can arise, or that somehow we are completely out of phase with reality. Conducting our ordinary business may be difficult in this phase if we are out in the world rather than on the cushion, but it tends to last only tens of minutes at most, though rare reports involve it going on for somewhat longer. The sense that we are practicing or trying to get anywhere just vanishes, and yet this may hardly be noticeable at all. We sort of come back, with clarity again becoming more predominant. Then we get truly lost in something, some strangely clear reverie, vision, object, or flight of fancy. By really buying in, we get set up to check out. When understanding is completely in conformity with the way things are, this is called …"

Regarding emotions... I would stay open to the idea that not observing emotions is somewhat curious, so be open to being led into a greater wisdom about emotions. If you are led there, then simply notice what is being experienced. If you are not led there, I wouldn't push it there, at least not for now. At least, I can't blindly recommend pushing it to focus on emotions.

What's your instinct on this? You are probably in a good position to figure this out for yourself. I'm not in your head

Niels, I just wanted to say that I've changed my view on the energy stuff since posting above. I've gone back to focusing on the breath and I'm finding that the energy is working itself out better. It's always tempting to focus on the energetic effects, but I find that causes it to get stuck and take on the stance of a painful problem which needs to be sat out. If I actively ignore it and return to the breath, the energy actually increases because more is released but it seems to flow better and find a way to settle itself down, resulting in more time in a calm mind state not worrying about energy :-) I don't know if that will work for you or not, but I just wanted to correct some of the stuff I said above about focusing on energy. I guess my view now is that the body naturally knows how to let its energy flow and anything I try to do with my rational mind just gets in the way of that!

@ shargrol & George: Thanks for sharing your thoughts. My instinct is that it wouldn't make much of a difference if I tried to go searching for emotions – that they will show up if they need to show up, and stay hidden if that is what is best for me now. I might have some hidden trauma, some things that will show up at some point, but I am not afraid of that, on the contrary, I welcome what ever might come to be purified. I have at this point been through so much emotional turmoil (in my entire life, and on the path these last three and a half years), including a complete so-called psychotic break down, and I have gotten through it all and seen how necessary and healing it was for it to come up, so nothing emotional really scares me. I feel that my equanimity and wisdom are well developed enough that I can handle what ever might come.

But all this being said, I do find it odd that I am so emotionally neutral during the energy work. So I try to stay curious and open. And I have begun setting an intention at the beginning of each sitting: "May I be able to see any emotion I need to see at this point." My faith in practice is strong. I can consider this and that option, set an intention, maybe even try noting for a while, but at the end of the day, there really doesn't seem to be two ways of me doing it. Because, at this point, it does me. What ever happens just happens.

Obviously some small part of me still thinks it possible to control things, and it keeps trying again and again. But I trust it will run out of steam eventually. Why should I be different than so many other practioners who have been in the EQ nana before me? It might take some time, though, 50 years of conditioning could take some time to break down. But I trust the process.

Hi Niels, I would leave emotions aside but focus on the fleeting mindframes that ocurr during the sit. See if these pointers are of help:

* Check if the mind is discriminating in any way (a non-conceptual 'this sensation is good/bad/meh', 'this perception is good/bad/meh', 'this absortion is good/bad/meh', etc) and just accept that it's what ought to be at this moment
* Watch the stream of micro-aversions happening, when pleasant sensations are not pleasant enough or tensions pass away not fast enough, etc 
* While pleasant/unpleasant/neutral sensations may be predominating, you may be ignoring the other varieties. See if you could perceive the three kinds simultaneously at all times 
* Inquiry yourself when everything looks fine yet you acknowledge there's impatience in the back burner: "What is it that I would want to change what I'm experiencing now?" ;  "Why any change would make it better?" ; "What is the definition of 'better'?" ; "Do those 'better' metrics 'improve' 'me' in any way or push me aside from what is happening right now?" 

I think that's a great attitude Niels - open to whatever needs to show up, whenever it needs to show up :-)

Just one other thought. I went through periods of thinking that the next insight/path couldn't show up until my energy situation "resolved itself", but in hindsight that was a false assumption. There might be a loose connection, in that it's hard to maintain an equanimous mental state sometimes if the energy is too distracting, but beyond that I think it's more helpful to assume that they are independent (a bit like the relationship between insight and samatha - actually depth of absorption seems closely linked to energetic-emotional settling). I guess what I'm saying is, SE could wink at you tomorrow and you would still have the energetics to work through, or you could work through the energetics first and then get the wink from SE ... and ultimately it probably won't make much difference :-)

The insight/paths are helpful for giving you confidence, but you are very committed and solid in your approach anyway with the confidence of having weathered some heavy storms. Maybe they gave me more ability to dig into deeper stuff later on, but in terms of the quality of day to day life and the experience of the sits themselves, the energetic-emotional-psychological process dominates. Like you say, you're on the ride and you trust that the process will work out for you in just the right way it needs to given your conditioning. It's easy to get impatient sometimes, but when you step back and see how those decades of conditioning are actually unwinding relatively quickly, it's amazing really. 

@ Pepe:

Thanks, those are excellent pointers. I am applying them in my sits now. I findt it hard to keep pleasant, neutral and unpleasant vedana in mind simultaneously, though. I can make attention jump back and forth between pleasant tingling in the skull, unpleasant tension in the upper back, neutral movement of the abdomen, for instance, but I can't focus on them at the same time. But perhaps you mean zooming out, like keeping the entire body (and the entire range of vedana) in awareness? (I am using the terms attention and awareness a la Culadasa: attention = spot light; awareness = flood light).

And another thing: I am not sure what you mean by "fleeting mindframes" – could you expand on that?

Niels, I wrote you back in my practice log. 

It’s time for an update, but this time it is not going to be that much about meditation, but more about (my) emotions, psychology and personality traits. I do end by asking a question about practice, but it takes a while to get there: This is a very long post, so be prepared J.

I see The Progress of Insight as part of a broader personal development, and right now the insight aspect and the psychology/ personality aspect seem tangled together. Hence this long post.

In insight language it could be dealt with swiftly: Doubt has arisen. Note ”doubt” and move on. When it arises again: Repeat.

Tl;dr: The doubt in a nutshell
But this particular doubt is very insisting in my sittings and continues off cushion. Is has to do with emotions. With the fact that I mostly experience emotions very lightly and fleetingly. And I’m not sure if it is because of repression or because of my being in the EQ-nana (pre-SE). In other words: Is this a sign of emotional immaturity or a sign of progress on the path of insight? This is my doubt in a nutshell.

I haven’t told much about my upbringing or earlier life in this blog, but I feel it is necessary to provide some background to why I am feeling this doubt now.

Personal background
I grew up in the lower middle class, no siblings, didn’t really have friends, learned how to read from an older cousin before I got to school, and spent most of my childhood alone in my room, reading, writing, daydreaming, mostly about space (stars, planets etc.). My father: hypercritical, neurotic, constantly dissatisfied with me, rarely in any articulate/verbal way, mostly in body language, facial expression, sighs etc., and the occasional slap in the face. My mother: depressed, afraid of my father, trying (with moderate succes) to protect me from him, able to give me physical care (hugging, caressing, tucking in at night), but often with a distant gaze, emotionally absent. Emotions, especially anger, were very much taboo. I don’t recall having been angry once during my entire childhood and adolescence.

This childhood gave me a strong inner life and a fragile and insecure social life. Even though I met a woman, got two kids quite early in life, had a divorce and two subsequent romantic relationships, I have always been and still am an introverted person and a loner. This is also reflected in my work life: I am a poet, writer and translator, working from home, so all my work takes place within me. I have much less exchanges with other people than the average person.

Six years of jungian therapy, ending around ten years ago, and about one year of a still ongoing, more mixed method psycho therapy (reparenting, among other things) has taught me a lot about my unhealthy patterns. Only after I began meditating (in november 2017), though, have I been able to begin changing these patterns.

A brief description of these patterns could be: I have always fallen in love with very extroverted and emotionally expressive women – who were also emotionally unstable (borderline personality, bipolar, depressed etc.). I was the (on the surface) calm, caring, endlessly patient partner, providing them some form of emotional (and sometimes financial) stability. Looking back on it, I can see that under the surface, there was unacknowledged anxiety and repressed anger. In return for what I gave, I got admiration, gratitude and a sense of being worthy and ”good”; also they helped me understand (and feel!) my own emotions, the common understanding between us being that she was emotionally more intelligent than me. So as you can see, these relationships were to some degree transactional, and there was dependency and codepency.

After my two first breakups (in 2007 and 2014), I was miserable. Even though I am a loner, I did not thrive without a romantic partner. I coped unhealthily by having a lot of sex, drinking too much and smoking too much weed. I desperately wanted a steady partner to share my life with, it felt as if I couldn’t survive (emotionally) without it.

I broke up with my latest girl friend in September 2020 and have been living on my own since then. It was by far the best breakup of my life: I was and am not miserable at all, none of us were hurt or angry, only a little sad, and we remain each others best and most intimate friends, speaking (phone or skype) often several hours a week, still sharing each others lives, still loving each other, actually, but knowing our dysfunctional dynamics well enough to understand that it is not right for us to live together right now.

I quit alcohol around two years ago and weed a little more than a year ago, shortly before I transitioned into EQ. And I feel more happy and healthy than ever before in my life. I don’t miss having a steady romantic partner at all. I don’t miss alcohol or weed the least. I’m in good shape, no illnesses, no medications, I run and workout and do yoga. My finances are better than ever. Having had earlier on an addictive relationship to sex, I am now slowly developing my sexuality in a healthier direction (taoist tantra) with a partner who just like me has absolutely no need to live together and be a ”couple” in the regular sense.

So as you can see, I really don’t have anything to complain about. I thrive, and I feel very grateful for that. Very priviledged. Compared to my life pre meditation I would say that maybe 80-90 percent of the suffering has gone. At the late age of 53 I have finally begun to become an adult. A sane person. Though still very much a loner, an introvert and a bit of a weirdo J.

In a way you could say that I have been in the Dark Night for most of my life, even though I didn’t really recognize or acknowledge difficult emotions before I began meditating. From the first retreat onwards I have had quite a rollercoaster ride with several A&P’s, followed by DN’s, going back to really weird and scary A&P’s etc. Especially the last 5-6 months before I transitioned into EQ were tough, and at that point I really recognized and viscerally felt my fear, misery, disgust etc. There was anger, hatred, self-hatred and despair. And then, much to my surprise, over a couple of weeks, it all dissipated. All the reasons for having the difficult emotions were still there, nothing in the external circumstances changed, the mind just, by it self, found out how pointless it was to loop around in these unpleasant emotions.

So I know how it is to feel emotions. But I very rarely feel emotions now, and when I do, it is in a light and and fleeing manner: They pass through the system in a matter of seconds.

So why this doubt?
Why do I suddenly think that my relationship to emotions – especially difficult emotions, and most particularly: anger – might be a problem?

Two reasons:

1) I have been in the EQ-nana for 14 months now, all the way through with a very consistent 2-3 hour daily practice and with three 8-10 days retreats, totalling more than a thousand hours on the cushion, and still SE has not happened. I am more patient and less striving about it now than six or eight months ago, but I am beginning to get puzzled: What is lacking, what is missing, what is it that the mind hasn’t solved yet? Could it have something to do with emotions?

2) There are some things happening in my life that give me good reasons to be angry. It is an inheritance issue following the death of my father in December 2020, too complicated to explain in any detail, but the basic thing is this: My father has managed, from beyond the grave, to fuck me over, stealing quite a lot of money that my mother – who died back in 2001 – wanted me to have in her will, but the money are now going to my father’s new wife/widow. I should be furious. And I sort of see or think or know my anger. But not once have I really felt it in my body, my jaw hasn’t tightened, my fists have clenched, I haven’t slammed doors or shouted obscenities. I just very calmly think that he, even in his grave, is a mean old motherfucker. And then this happened: I spoke with my ex girlfriend (as mentioned my most intimate friend) about it on skype, and she got angry on my behalf: Her tone of voice, her facial expression and words articulated the anger, and then – only then – did I feel it in my body. And only for maybe five or ten seconds, then the system calmed itself down again. My ex girlfriend noticed this. And we had a talk about my apparent lack of ability to feel emotions on my own. She suggested that I might be repressing my anger. That I am still not very good at recognizing my emotions. And I was not sure what to think.

Spiritual bypassing? Embodied metta?
So I have spent some days thinking and researching. Am I doing a form of spiritual bypassing? When I read about this concept, it seems to only half way fit my problem. During the research I reread some of shargrols posts from the compilation and came across this video which I saw. It made a huge impression on me. Martinez’ way of rethinking the four immeasurables really resonated with me: Feeling rather than just imagining the difficult person when you do metta. As he says: ”Get angry! And only then forgive and send love.” That really made sense to me. I have never really connected with the metta practice, and now I can see that I have stayed too much in my head, not embodying metta, as Martinez so brilliantly explains.

Another thing happend to me during the video. At the Q&A, a woman is asking a question about being betrayed, and she becomes overwhelmed with sadness and begins crying. Martinez then asks her: Do you want to be sad, or do you want to be angry? ”I want to be angry.” Okay, so what is he [her former husband who betrayed her]? ”He is,” the woman’s tone of voice changes remarkably, ”a motherfucker!” And exactly at that point, I got tears in my eyes and felt very moved: This woman (who like me with the inheritance issue got betrayed) got into contact with her anger, and it was obviously empowering her. And the thought came: Maybe I need to get into contact with my anger?

So to rephrase my question:
When I only feel like a whisper of bodily anger, even though I have good reasons to be angry (righteous anger, as Martinez calls it), is it then because A. I am only feeling the tip of a gigantic traumatic iceberg? Or is it B. because my mind through three and a half years of practice has made so much progress on the path of insight, that the whisper I feel is just a residue of my old way of reacting? In other words: Is it a problem or something to be grateful for? Should I try to dig into difficult emotions, for instance by doing some embodied metta practice a la Martinez? Or should I just continue my many months of practicing ”do nothing” and trust that the mind will lead me through what ever I need to be led through (as it has led me through a whole range of very different experiences these last 14 months in EQ)?

I can already hear shargrol asking: What is your own hunch? Well, my own hunch is to trust the mind and just continue my ”do nothing”. BUT! There is lots of doubt in the system (and thoughts about this has taken up a lot of space in my sittings these last days), so I am eager to hear what those of you who mananaged to get all the way to the end of this post might think?
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 Hey Niels,

I read your long post!
And I'm glad I did, it's very interesting question you're asking here. I'm also glad that you're doing well these days! I felt moved by that whole background story and how it's gotten to look so nice at the moment

I can be very unfiltered and I don't know if the following sounds callace or rude??... But just know that this isn't my intention at all! But I just wanna spit out my thoughts here, in one big un-edited and un-sorted manner.

I think it's a good thing that you're not angry with that whole issue with inheritance. If you're really not angry, why should you be? Being angry doesn't really feel good and in this case it would add nothing of value (Although I like Shinzens description of anger being kind of like an emotional massage. I recognize that it can be, but propably not if it's anger in a steady-resentment kind of way which often would be the case in such a case...). It's obviously a really fucking stupid situation, but also it's kind of a whole new chapter, you know with your father being gone. Perhaps it's just a refreshing new chapter and you can just say fuck it to the inheritance and just kind of leave it to be stupid on its own...

About the emotional massage - I LOVE being angry! hah! Perhaps you should try to practice the anger a little bit, who knows? Not like..flip off strangers and get into fights ofc (unless you wanna have a brawl - i need a sparring partner), but just whenever it's there try to really focus on it and let it do whatever it wants.
I started loving being angry after I learned to put it down once the physical reaction was out of the system. You know, you can get angry and then hold a grudge (not so nice), or you can get angry and then just say "ahhhhh" after having released all that energetic buildup like it was a sneeze or a good yawn. It does take some practice tho, because getting angry is a little bit of a taboo, as you know, and a lot of us probably tend to mind our anger due to that.

We're also looking at potentially something that could be investigated in your practice here: The sense of confusion or lack of..something? - are you investigating that properly? Perhaps, if you looked closer, you'd see that the confusion was kind of gnawing at you?? Does it feel good? Bad? Neutral?

Thanks for the read, Niels. And thanks for allowing me to spit my thoughts out there, although they may not be worth much.

Best of all!
 

My take Niels is that you are afraid of being angry at your father and are asking for permission.

Niels, I cannot speak from an acomplished meditative side, but from an experiental point of view, expressing repressed anger was a game changer in my adolescence, but eventually I run into (medical, psychological, social) trouble because of that. Bringing back joy to life was the key to regain health, peace and valuable human bonds. In your case, you can access meditative joy and social joy (as Covid has diminished in DK nowadays IIRC). Joining a sport group may both vent indirectly repressed anger and make bonds with new people. Just an idea, of course... In my case, it was social dancing: making peace with my goofy side, having fun while also learning the physical/mental/emotional dialogue that happens with each partner (in only a 5 minutes time-frame), making a new group of friends in my 30s, etc. So there's a lot to learn there while having fun too. 

Hope this helps bro!
Pepe

hey, Niels, thank you for sharing this deep, thoughtful post. Your process is so interesting to me, as your practice has long been an inspiration.

I feel like putting a warning label on this, something along the lines of, I've been going through a particularly intense and prolonged spell of dark night and depression, my own peculiar double whammy of darkness paradigms, so anything I say should be considered with the crucial grain of salt. I'd hate for a subliminal evangelical vibe of misery loves company to leak through here, lol. I rely on the remarkable resilience of your equanimity, in that light.

That's the first thing that comes to mind here, actually. We talk about chronic dark night yogis, you were one for a good long time, but you are the first person I've encountered where it even occurred to me that you might be called a chronic equanimity yogi. Fourteen months of more or less consistent EQ sort of makes the relevance of pretty much every map a little less urgent, to say the least. And it's not been a static condition at all for you, there have been quiet and undramatic wonders happening recurrently all along the way, things that someone other than a deadpan Dane like yourself might have made a much bigger deal out of. Your equanimity, practiced unrelentingly, has ripened a lot of quiet fruit in your life, as you say in this post, in review. Whatever else is going on, this is not a dead end. It's dynamic, interesting, engaging, and fruitful. If none of us had ever heard of stages of insight, or maps, or multiple paths, or stream entry, we'd have to say that what your meditation practice is "doing," however quietly and mysteriously and without fanfare or much in the way of breakthrough phenomenology, is pretty damn good. There are whole schools of philosophy (Stoicism comes to mind first, of course) where what you're calling EQ is as good as they aspire to. And to anyone who is really experiencing the cluelessness and fathomless abyss of the dark night, the cluelessness and fathomless abyss of equanimity are the promised land, and the quiet of EQ, when it dawns in even its most remedial aspects, is the difference between the calm and the storm. Or the eye of the hurricane, lol, for chronic dark night yogis like me. But you've been at the eye of the hurricane, metaphorically, for so long that you've fixed a lot of the storm damage already. The eye of the hurricane is starting to look like a climate, not a weather event. You've had time to plant crops, and harvest, and replant. That's fucking weird, and it does seem to call for the occasional review such as this. You'd hate to somehow bypass the rest of the hurricane altogether and miss out on all the fun and glamor and drama of re-achieving peaceful survival, right?

Niels: I can already hear shargrol asking: What is your own hunch? Well, my own hunch is to trust the mind and just continue my ”do nothing”. BUT! There is lots of doubt in the system (and thoughts about this has taken up a lot of space in my sittings these last days) . . .

It would be crazy to say anything but go with your own hunch and trust the mind and just continue your "do nothing." In a way, it really is that simple: if it ain't broke, don't fix it, as we say in the American south. The doubts here are theoretical and speculative. This is not to deny the reality of suppressed anger and trauma as an invisible shaper of lives, nor the potency of ancient parental dynamics in the psyche. George S is of course a great example here of someone who recently, after a lot of meditation practice, found his way into the psychological deep mud of primal trauma and pervasive parental failures, in trying to finally unwind his syndromes. It was revelatory, and deeply visceral, and seeing him go through it was inspirational, you could really get it that this man had tapped into shit he needed to see and expereince, that he hung into the encounter, and that healing began in a way it never could have other than through that authentic visceral experiential immersion in all its overwhelmingness and even terror. But I think the timing of his revelation was also crucial, for what it's worth. He honestly came to feel the failure of his meditation practice to do anything about the compulsive misery-generation of his psychology. He did conclude that he had been spiritually bypassing this stuff, and faced it.

I don't hear the same note from you at this point. It is certainly possible to go a long way intellectually in exploring deep anger stuff, parental stuff; I once took a weeklong seminar on accessing the parental fuckups that have made us who we are, or something like that: a week of exercises and making lists and journaling and dredging. It had no effect really. It was only when my father had a stroke near the end of his life and I spent some weeks tending to him in rehab (he had broken his hip too), that I had the experiences I needed to really open the can of worms there. So I am a believer in the mystery of timing. There's no need to go looking for trouble, or trauma, they know where to find us, and will, if they're going to. You'll know it, when it's time to deal with that shit. You won't be any more ready to deal with it then than you are now, but you will have to, then. I don't see any other way to confront this stuff in its full force except when we have to, honestly: kicking and screaming in resistance all the way. You certainly shouldn't do it just to have the line item in your spiritual resume, because you "should." It's only a required element when you're backed into the corner you can't get out of without facing it. It ain't pretty. You'll feel as grateful to get through it as you are with any ordeal. But you can't deal with the dragon until the dragon shows up. And everybody meets different dragons. There are indeed people who seek the dragons out, spiritual professionals, as it were, dragon-slayers by trade. That's its own vocation, and they pay their own price.

That doesn't seem to be your path. Fourteen months of EQ is probably enough time for insane ambition and hubris to surface on its own. I think this current high tide of doubt is of that ilk, more or less: a species of ambition, a big abstract "should". Your own gut is telling you that. In equanimity you live with the most profound mortal mystery: peace, at the eye of the storm of samsara. You know how you got here, via the dark night of exposure to the storm's full effects and implications. To be at peace with that is a miracle, and the condition of that hard-won peace is the paradoxical dynamic acceptance of your ongoing practice of "do nothing." This question of striding forth to conquer anger, the abstract ambition to expose the whole of the hypothetical iceberg, in my take at least, seems like a big temptation to do something, to stir up a little heroic action. I'd say trust your own hunch here, as always, and keep doing your nothing.

My hunch is it is underdeveloped emotional maturity. The more emotionally grounded way of experiencing emotions is to feel things deeply but fleetingly. In this mode you get all of the information of the emotion, but there isn't wallowing in it. It's similar to having thoughts but not becoming obsessive. In healthy thinking you have the information of the thought, but there isn't wallowing in it.


This lack of nurturing is extremely unhealthy. Basically, if you were a normal emotional kid, you would lose access to the limited nurturing your parents were willing give. Not good.


My advice would be to learn to separate these two things.

If you look at your life, you can see how you have dealt with emotions by packaging them together with thoughts/strategies: 

In your childhood it was a strategy of "if you have no disruptive emotions then you get your parents acceptance" instead of allowing emotions to be what they were and learning to live with their natural dynamicism.

In your relationships it was "if I'm brave and calm, I get to experience her raw emotionality and be appreciated" so you got to experience emotions but, again, only through a strategy.

In the same way, I feel like combining 1 and 2 is another sort of attempt at packaging.  "if I get angry at your dad then I might get SE" or "if I do not get angry, I am keeping my EQ and might get SE".  I feel like you are binding yourself up again with how you are framing this.

Emotions don't need intellectual framing.


No one knows, but it's probably something in between. Not necessarily a gigantic traumatic iceberg, but almost certainly a dead-spot in your heart/mind that would benefit from reviving.

There are probably a lot of emotions waiting to finally be felt... but again there is no pre-emptive strategy than needs to be adopted.

When emotions arise is when you interact with them. That's how emotions work best.  So perhaps you can set the intention "if it will benefit myself and all other beings, may emotions arise so that they be fully experienced and give me useful information" or something like that.   


 

It almost feels like you might have transferred some of that anger/frustration onto SE - the immovable "object" blocking your way!

Hey Niels, thanks for your beautiful post... I value your opening to your private life even more because I don't do it myself!
I wanted to pay a visit since your retreat but I said what I had to in the other thread (more or less -maybe using intention to move your attention around your body might be a welcome change from open awareness from time to time if you are feeling like you are on a plateau, because your subconscious might not want to go everywhere-).

I can definitely connect with your reflections on emotions, and I wanted to share a few more thoughts that will address this topic...
So let's give it a try:
There are several possible courses of action with anger/pain/whatnot...
- to indulge in it, and thus feeding the multiplication of what I interpret as "sankharas" (the feeling as reaction to an input) and which is already all pervasive in our experience (our experience is built on that).
- to (try to) eradicate it. For this there are several ways, but broadly, this is the path of meditation (ok, we don't 'try to eradicate it', we just observe it equanimously without trying anything... but in the end, don't we want to get rid of unwholesome contents?):
- repressing it. That's what we do with an unwanted thought or a pain at the beginning of a retreat (like, we try to ignore it but we're not that successful), and this results in burying it more or less deeply under the surface. There is a pressure cooker quality to the situation.
- ignoring it. That's what a mature concentration practice does, we are truly not attracted to what's happening outside our field of attention. It takes practice, but this may lead to eradication from our conscious experience (note 'conscious').
- investigating it. This is Vipassana. Through repeatedly witnessing the dissolution of the object, this leads to detachment and finally eradication of everything! It is said to bring a more thorough liberation (from the Self?), meaning there is more resolution involved in the process, but it's still not therapy. By the way, is therapy that efficient? What we project on meditation, does therapy achieve it? questions, questions...
(Of course, I oversimplify the dynamics of concentration and insight as they go hand in hand...)

You and I and countless others have witnessed that eradication works to a certain extent... but is eradication satisfying? My hunch is: well nope! Not if we want to keep on developing ourselves and becoming better human beings int his world... Not if we want anything else than total escape from the wheel of samsara!

Also, I want to take side here: with Tim, and against Shargrol and George S... To praise your path and practice and dedication, and not to point to your weaknesses (you do that very well yourself). There is no such think as perfection when it comes to emotions and everyone has shadows (even Ken Mc Leod, the main Shargrol reference these days. I was moved a few years ago by an account from a woman who fell in love with him, and some details she gave (nothing horrible, just the portrait of a man with more flaws than he admits). The lack of answer from Mr Mc Leod was also telling for me. Well, here it is... http://patriciaivanconnections.blogspot.com/2012/09/my-story.html)

So, what I want to point out is that there is no perfection in this world, regarding emotions or anything else... look close enough and you'll find movement, hence tension. That's why I don't find that helpful to state you have 'this' blindspot or 'that' unresolved issue... making you believe that you could some day (with the right practice) attain to some emotional perfection... evolving, growing, yes! arriving anywhere nonono...
Also, I suspect that what happens to us with emotions happens to others with their sense of self...

That was a bit of a rant...

About practice, I would be really interested in you expanding on your breathing patterns (long/short, deep/shallow etc.) on retreats, now but also around your psychotic episode... Did it go crazy a bit or did it stay subtle? how subtle? Was there restraint or hyperventilation? Feel free to ignore that, of course! I'm kind of looking for confirmations about some ideas I have on the matter, and I find the topic endlessly fascinating...

with metta, wishing you the best with your practice and with your life, and hoping you will get in touch with what escaped you so far...
smiling stone

Dear fellow yogis!

​​​​​​​It's been around a month since I updated last. Lots of things have happened, both in my practice and outside practice. To mention just one thing, I feel a much stronger connection between practice and life than ever before. It's gonna be one of those long updates, so I will start off with a tl;dr-version and then dive in.


Tl;dr

After reading shargrol's wise answer to my last update, I had a minor crisis. Then within a week, several big things happened, and now I feel revitalized and with a renewed enthusiasm for both life and practice. I have spoken with a teacher and am currently in the process of a radical change of practice.


Response to last update

Thank you for all your comments. I am equally grateful for the ones that praise and encourage my practice, those that point out weak spots, and those that suggest alternative understandings. Tim's comment helped me feel more happy for where I am and what I have achieved so far on the path, "permanent EQ-yogi" is perhaps not the worst thing you could be. This was a nice balancing to the comment that struck me the hardest: shargrol's razor edge sharp analysis of my predicament, my conditioning – my emotional immaturity and my tendency to strategize around emotions (scroll up and read it, it's excellent).

My initial reading of shargrol's words turned out to actually demonstrate his point: I felt sad and shameful, miserable, discouraged, this lasted for 2-3 seconds, then the intellect came rushing in to "save me" from feeling emotions, blocking this initial reaction with lots of thoughts: "Oh, I feel sad because I identify with my conditioning and reify this emotional underdevelopment into me being a helplessly flawed person, and I feel shame because I project this unto shargrol and feel that he condemns me for being a flawed person, although that's not what he is doing, and if I write this in my response, he will see how clever I am and therefore like me again, oh, wait, I am projecting again, blah blah blah ..."

A couple of days later I was making breakfeast and coffee, listening to some cheerfull groovy music, and literally caught my self singing along and taking a few dance steps in the kitchen: A little impulse of joy, 2-3 seconds, immediately killed by reflection: "Wait a minute, I shouldn't be happy, I should be miserable because of my lousy emotional conditioning, so this joy must be a mistake ..." It wasn't, of course, but it was gone, killed by reflection. And since that, several times a day off-cushion I have observed something similar: an emotion starting to rise, starting to be felt in the body, and then verbal thought rushing in, analyzing, "protecting" me. I will try to keep observing this, as I suspect that loving (even cheerfull, playfull) observation of this pattern might help it loosen its grip on me.

One sentence in shargrol's answer has really stayed with me. It sums up the point about not strategizing in a kind of simple instruction that I feel have set me more free: "When emotions arise is when you interact with them. That's how emotions work best." – So I don't need to worry about it! It's not my responsibility. I just need to be mindful not to let thought bully emotion, or a least observe it when it happens.


Big life decision

Back in September last year, I decided that I would move to a little cottage in the Swedish forrests. Right now, I live on a farm in a village in Denmark, sourrounded by agriculture, but with a nice meadow, a strip of wood and a huge garden. I moved to this place back in January 2020 with my then girlfriend, and the decision to leave the place came shortly after she and I broke up. Somehow it was (supposed to be) our place, so it couldn't be my place, I would be living in the empty shell of a broken dream. And I felt I needed silence, isolation, loneliness in order to develop my practice further. BUT: Around a week after my last update, I suddenly changed my mind. I was talking with my therapist, still kind of sad and shameful for being such a flawed person, and we discussed my plan of moving to Sweden. She said: "Moving deep into the forrest seems like returning to the womb. Are you going up there to die?" This was a bit shocking to me. But even more shocking was the answer I then heard coming from my mouth: "No, I am not going up there to die, it's more like going up to my room." After which I literally said "shit" out loud, because I in a split second understood what had driven me to this plan, and in that same split second changed my mind: As I child, I would go up to my room to be safe from my father's anger. That was probably a good strategy at the time, but my father is dead now, I no longer need to isolate my self to stay safe. On the contrary, what I need is to connect more with people – which is kind of difficult out in the forrest. So, on the spot I decided to stay where I am: Outside of the city, somewhat close to nature, but not isolated. And the next days and weeks I sort of fell in love with this place again, saw how I had neglected it (never washed the windows since my girlfriend moved out, didn't weed the garden at all this spring, so it is truly a jungle now) in an undetected state of slight depression or indifference (uh! the near enemy of equanimity – I didn't see it before now). I saw how it could be my place, not just (a shell of) our place.


New teacher, new practice

In the same week as I made this huge decision, I also, due to a sudden impulse, got my self a teacher. As you know if you have been following my log, I have felt kind of stuck in the nana of Equanimity, and one afternoon, on some weird hunch, I went back to Kenneth Folk's website which I have visited several times when considering getting a teacher. Each and every time the site has announced that he does not take new students. The announcement was still there, but so was his e-mail address. And without giving it any further thought, I just wrote him eight lines, telling him that I have been stuck for 14 months in EQ pre-SE. Literally two minutes later, I got a one line answer: "I will speak with you." 

A couple of days later, we had a 25 minute talk. I told him briefly about my practice, and he asked some questions. I told him about my daily practice, and that I do home retreats now and then. "Tell me about your two latest retreats," he said. So I spent less than an minute telling about my New Year retreat with all the bodily bliss and joy and deep jhanic states, and less than a minute telling about my Spring retreat with the weid energy transporation experiences. Then he asked: "Do you do any tantric practices?" I hadn't mentioned those at all, but then told him about my semen retention and 15 minutes of bandha-excercises a day. "There's the smoking gun," he said. "You have awoken the energy. You need to work on that." And then he told me a little about the energy channels and the buddhist understanding of them, and he basically suggested that I drop my vipassana practice and switch to buddhist tantra. He recommended the book Introduction to Buddhist Tantra by Lama Yeshe and advised me to buy an audio book version of a specific translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra. And then he recommended that my practice from now on should simply consist in listening to this sutra again and again and again (it's quite long, five and a half hours listening time). Three to five hours a day – in one stretch. I was very confused. How could that be a practice? "So do I sit on the cushion?" "You can sit, if you like. Or stand or recline. Or take a bath or be in the garden. It doesn't matter. Just make sure you are undisturbed. There might come some weird sounds from you, and you might flip in to some yoga postures." "But what about Stream Entry?" I asked, "don't they have that in Tibetan buddhism?" "They don't care much about that. Perhaps it will happen somewhere along the way. Don't worry about it." I remembered that energy practices often on this forum are considered more advanced – something you do after Stream Entry. So I said: "I don't think I'm qualified. I don't think I can do it." "You are not doing anything. You don't meditate. The text will meditate you." And then he explained that the text was a "coded message for your energy system", that I didn't need to understand it, since it worked on a much deeper level than intellectual understanding. "Your bodymind will get it, don't worry about it. And just let the bodymind do whatever it does in the meantime." He made an analogy to self driving cars: "Take the back seat. Let the google car drive. Especially if it gets intense. If you are going through a hairpin bend at 80 miles per hour, you DON'T want to grab the wheel." A few minutes later, he ended the conversation by saying "Let me know how it goes."

After the conversation I felt mindblown. On the one hand, it sounded woo-woo and kind of crazy. I have never heard of a practice consisting of just listening to a sutra. And the idea of a coded text that would transmit some secret knowledge to my energy system sounded far out. But at the same time, I felt a weird, but strong confidence in Kenneth. He was very kind, his questions was to the point, and even though I only gave hime very little information, I got a clear impression that he understood me and my practice on quite a deep level. Kind of like an experienced doctor who has seen thousands of patients and don't need that many pointers to give a diagnosis and a treatment.

For instance, I think he saw my striving, even though that word was not mentioned, and then gave me practice instructions that make it very hard for me to strive, since there is no perfection in practice to strive for: Sit, stand, walk, whatever. It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't even matter if I don't understand the text. I can't do anything wrong. But I also can't do anything right, let alone perfect. Because I am not doing it.

So I intend to follow Kenneth Folk's advice. At least for three months, as an experiment. And then evaluate. I have bought and studied the book on buddhist tantra. And I am working my way through this excellent ressource by the Michaels Taft & Owens: 24 hours of lectures and guided meditations around Vimalakirti Sutra. And in a week or so I will switch to this new practice.

Oh, one more thing: "What about my sitting practice?" I asked. "I have been sitting consistently at least two hours a day the last 3,5 years!" "You can keep sitting, if you like," he said. "We don't want to do anything traumatic to you." So right now I am in the process of planning my daily practice and considering if I – on top of three hours of "listening to sutra-practice" – should do a little regular sitting, for instance before bedtime.


From arhat as ideal to bodhisattva as ideal

I have been reading a bit about mahayana buddhism, which until recently has been almost unknown to me. And now I see my decision not to isolate my self in Sweden as somehow strangely in harmony with this shift in practice, going from the theravada ideal of personal awakening to the mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva. Strangely enough, the universe has cooperated this shift: Within the last month I have gotten into much more intimate relationships with my ex-wifes (yes, plural, I have three of them!). They have each there own life crisis and have chosen these weeks to turn to me as an intimate friend who knows them. And I feel much much closer to all of them than I have ever been before. Also in other relationships, there seem to be more intimacy these last weeks. And I haven't even fully switched practice yet.

So, what about the EQ nana and Stream Entry? you might ask. Well, I still want to wake up. So the goal is the same. The motivation has changed as to emphasize even more that it is "for the benefit of all sentient beings". I don't want to leave the Progress of Insight behind. Rather, I hope to combine these things somehow. Maybe return to more regular vipassana at a later point. But in this moment, it feels right to try out this new practice – a text and energy practice, really weird, never heard about it before – and see how it goes.

Thoughts and comments are very welcome.

[Edited for typos and a little clarification]

Three ex-wifes! You do believe in love  I never felt much attracted to Mahayana's teachings, actually felt that they were more interested in siddhis and perceptual enhancements despite their bodhisattva speech. But that began to change when I learned more about some specific practices, like Tonglen.  

Just for fun, I tried hearing the Vimalakirti Sutra while working and in the first minutes of the sit, trying to visualize not specific images but big pictures/landscapes. That triggered A&P energy! Perhaps I was just scripting myself. But the effect did happen. I guess it helped that I was on cushion, at the usual timeframe. There's some momentum in the body/mind: whenever I try to change the hour of practice or add a second sit, the body/mind needs some consecutive days to adjust. Funny that with SE, adherence to (most of inner-outer) rituals should vanish, yet sitting in the same place at the same time every day works better than a random practice. So this tantra attuning shouldn't be dismissed as a practice. 
 

Time for an update!

I have dropped the Vimalakirti practice, and Kenneth Folk is no longer my teacher (cf. my post above).

Here’s what happened: For a month I kept up the practice Kenneth Folk had suggested, sitting three hours a day listening to the Vimalakirti sutra. After a few days I had a feeling that nothing much was happening. The practice was supposed to ”recalibrate” my energy system (that has been quite active for some months), but my experience of energy did not change. I kept at it, though, as the disciplined yogi I am. Maybe I just needed to be patient. After around three weeks, still nothing happening, no changes at all in the experience of energy or anything else, for that matter, and still dissatisfaction with practice. I noticed that I more and more tended to just do my regular Open Awareness practice, ignoring the text in my ears, or reducing it to just one random object among others. So I decided it was time for another talk with my teacher. Until then we had had one audio talk and exchanged some e-mails.  Now, I wrote him a short e-mail, telling him that nothing much was happening with the practice and requesting a new talk. He did not answer. One week went by. In the mean time I dropped the Vimalakirti practice entirely and returned to my regular practice. I then sent Kenneth Folk another e-mail, kindly reminding him of the last e-mail. No answer. I thought maybe he was off-line (on retreat, vacation, whatever). Maybe fallen ill. I then checked his Twitter. He seemed to be online and thriving. Another week past and I still didn’t get any answer. And so I gave up and let him know that I regarded our teacher-student relationship as ended.

It is of course totally okay that Kenneth Folk wants to stop being my teacher, he doesn’t even have to explain why, he could have just written me one line saying so. I trusted him. I felt he let me down. So there has been some disappointment and anger in my system.

The experience made me reflect. One of the issues that I am struggling with is that I feel it is difficult to surrender, to let go of control. I wish to do it, but I don’t know how to. I have considered getting a teacher for a very long time, but have always hesitated. It is part of my self narrative that I am very independent and do things my own way (that’s why I like Dharma Overground and the pragmatic approach so much). When I finally decided to find a teacher, I explained it to myself as an attempt to question that self narrative, and when Kenneth Folk suggested this practice to me, I decided that even though it seemed quite foreign and even a little crazy to me, I would … surrender to it. Because perhaps Kenneth Folk knew something I didn’t. Perhaps he saw something in my practice and my conditioning that I didn’t see my self. And if I followed his lead, something might happen that I could not have achieved on my own. That’s what teachers are for, right? But now I see that this was NOT surrendering. It was – once again, argh! – overruling my own intuition, my own feeling, my own instinct, in the hope that I would make progress. In other words it was – once again, argh! – strategizing. Trying to figure it out.

Because when I think back, I had a sceptical feeling about this strange practice all along. Just didn’t listen to that feeling. Kenneth Folk also told me that he was himself doing the exact same practice these days, and since he is much, much more advanced on the path than I am, perhaps I should have questioned whether that practice would be suitable for me, being a total newbie in comparison.

Anyway, it has been a good lesson. No harm done. I have gotten another reminder not to overrule my intuition, not to strivingly strategize. A reminder to own my practice. And I have learned that surrendering is NOT the same as overruling my own intuition.

​​​​​​​So after this little crisis, I am back with my Do Nothing aka Open Awareness practice, even throwing in some Self Inquiry, inspired by Angelo Dilullo’s teachings. Sitting four hours a day, I have re-found enthusiasm for my practice. Which is, by the way, going well. I’ll write about that in a later update.

I'm sorry for your troubles with Kenneth. I don't think he is fond of teaching anymore. May I suggest Abre again? I'm sure you will find everything you need with her. 

Maybe that was the lesson!

Yipes, sorry to hear all of that but perhaps it was the easiest way for the universe to teach you to trust your intuition. And you didn't need to become a full-on cult member to learn the lesson the hard way.    

It strikes me that if you are practicing for 4 hours a day, you're solidly in EQ and could pop at any time. I give you full permission to relax into conformity and pop.

My go-to practice is to notice subtle ill will as it shows up in the moment and to feel into it like a friend that just needs someone to listen. 

Best wishes!!

Best wishes Niels! 

​​​​​​​Niels, this is classic Kenneth Folk. He's a bit odd, and sometimes totally so. You can't rely on Kenneth to follow through with things. Trust me, as I've had years of experience with the man. He was my teacher for about a year and then we broke up over this very sort of thing, and his constantly changing idea of practice, how to do it, and so on. He would ask me to do something with him, we'd work on it for a few months, and then he'd just quit. Stop cold. No excuses, no explanation, just... quit.

He knows this about himself.

​​​​​​​It's not about you - it's him.

Oh. It seems like it might be helpful for him to metacommunicate that, so that people would know what they are getting themselves into. I wonder why he doesn't. 

Thank you so much for the encouraging remarks. As I mentioned, my practice is going well. I sit 60 + 90 + 90 minutes a day, and I do some "energy yoga" (bandhas) for twenty minutes every morning. These last two weeks it has been more or less like this:

There are often quite large gaps between thoughts, and in those gaps something is happening that is so subtle that it is difficult to put into words: Movements in, or rather of, space, or vague shifts in perspective, the observer is no longer a point, but not yet something else that can be defined. There is a sort of transparency. The usual experience of the body (image thoughts, usually unrecognized, but now seen in fragments) is dissolved into areas or zones of energy that with some difficulty can be reconstructed as "thigh", "chest", "scull". But these energetically perceived body parts are halfway non-localized. It feels weird and strangely enough quite ordinary at the same time. It doesn’t feel like deep absorption. It’s very panoramic. The high pitched internally generated notes are loud, and not inside, not outside. Sometimes ”external” sounds are like that as well – shortly, until they are ”recognized” as ”external”, then they get that quality.

All in all, my guess is that I'm in High EQ. Or in Angelo Dilullo's terms: touching unbound consciousness. I don't feel there's anything I can do when I reach this frontier – which happens a few minutes into each sitting. At that point, thoughts are usually rare, usually wispy, often not verbalized. "Striving", "reporting" (from the experience it self). That usually gives rise to a Self Inquiry question: "Where is the one who is striving?", "Who is reporting?" The "answer" is a movement of attention, scanning the head, body and surrounding space to find what the question requests. But nothing is found, and thoughts are silent again. The energy is usually homogenous, often centered around a pillar from crown to root chakra, some times more chaotic, rarely uncomfortable, rarely truly pleasant, just pleasantly neutral, interesting, mostly active in the head, less so in the chest, and even less so in the lower torso and extremities.

There is curiosity, some times low level excitement. There is contentment, contentment with practice, faith in practice, both on and off cushion.

Nice!!

Excellent!

Cool Niels! 

Probably nothing should be added to the practice right now. Just for fun, you could check if you see the difference between being aware of the act of knowing and the awareness of a self that is aware.

Update

I still sit 60 + 90 + 90 minutes a day, and the sittings are still more or less like described in my last post. But there has been a couple of events worth mentioning:

1) There has been two very brief events (less than a second each) that I interpret as near misses or dips into the formless realms. In the first, there was an almost audible ”pop!” and like a jump-cut in perception. This (the experience of frames missing) could indicate cessation, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t that, since there were no other indicators (no feeling of ”restart”, no bliss wave, no feeling afterwards that ”something has changed”, no new acces to jhanas etc). In the second event, there was a sudden short muting of all sound. There was a continuous sound of wind in the trees, so it was quite clear that for around half a second, all sound disappeared. But someone was there to experience the brief total silence, and thus it could not have been a cessation.

2) In 4-5 sittings this last week, the energy has been quite intense and/or painful: Tensions in a very small area on the spine at the level of solar plexus, and extreme tightness in the chest, as if an iron hand was squeezing the entire chest case, and I had difficulty breathing. There is not much reaction to this, equanimity is strong, and concentration becomes extremely focused when this happens.

3) Thirdly and most importantly, there has been two major emotional releases. They were similar, so I will just describe one of them. My sittings these days are usually very neutral with regards to emotions, but half an hour into a sitting, in the midst of a silent (almost no thoughts) panoramic experience of mainly energy and sound, there was suddenly this tiny emotional impulse, a flicker of an impulse to cry. I was surprised at this, there were no thoughts, no narratives attached to it, just the pure emotion. So I held onto it very gently with my attention, collapsed the spine, face down, and then sobbed for a couple of seconds. Tears came. Then the crying stopped. I had an image thought of my self as a child (8-9 years old), sitting, like me, kneeling in meditation posture, just in front of me. This ”Little Niels” sometimes visits me in meditation. He arose during a ”reparenting”/”self parenting” exercise I did with my therapist last year, where I, in a kind of long guided meditation, was told to imagine my childhood home, go in, find ”Little Niels”, take him up, carry him out and bring him back to the house where I live now. So this ”Little Niels” appeared, and there was a voice in my head saying, fully verbalized: ”You are allowed to feel everything you feel. You are allowed to feel it for as long as you want. And you are allowed to express it any way you want. I am here for you, I will take care of you.” I had no idea where these words came from. Then I cried some more, maybe ten seconds. Then the voice repeated its message, and this time it was clear that it was ”Little Niels” who was talking to ”me” (Adult Nielt). This fact made me cry even more. I then remembered the children’s book The Brothers Lionheart, which is very famous here in Scandinavia (not sure how well known it is in other countries). In the touching final scene of the book, the big brother, who is beautiful and heroic, has been wounded by the dragon and is dying. And then the hitherto weak and anxious little brother carries him on his back and jumps from a cliff into death with him, thus crossing over to the afterlife in the fairy tale world ”Nangilima”. I have not thought about this amazing book for many years, but now it all came back, and I cried and cried. Every time the crying stopped, the message was repeated: ”You are allowed to … etc.”, and then I cried some more. I was both Little Niels and Adult Niels, both the strong hero who finally had to give up, and the weak little boy who finally found some courage when he really had to. This emotional release lasted for around 20-30 minutes. As did the other, similar release a couple of days earlier.

So I am still in this broad, largely silent, panoramic all-inclusive territory. Where, apparently, lots of unexpected things can happen.

PS: A couple of days after my last update, I got an e-mail from Kenneth Folk with an apology. Apparently he is in the process of moving from one home to another and had been busy. Here offered a conversation, I kindly said no thanks, not now, maybe at a later point, he answered back even more kindly, saying yes, no problem, wishing me well. So: No hard feelings/bad karma there

I've missed a lot. It was good to go back and catch up on where your practice has been. Great to see the progress that is happenning here. Tons of admiration for your dedication.

That experience with Folk is an interesting one. Grappling with authority and my own intuition has always been tough for me. I've had to deal with this myself with my work with Abre (all on me in this case). She has been good about helping me pivot when a certain approach isn't working, but I've got to speak up about it. She also has a certain idea about where I am in my progress that I either don't get or doesn't feel right to me, so I kind of just shrug about that and have set maps aside for now. Maybe stuff I should be putting in my own log. Ha, ha.

I have been feeling more drawn to the integration of service and connection in my practice as well.  

Update August 23rd 2021

Tl;dr: Basically more of the same.

Still sitting 60 + 90 + 90 minutes a day. This last week I have steered the ship slightly more in the samatha direction (as opposed to the vipassana direction with Do Nothing and Self Inquiry), using breath at the nostrils as object, sometimes through an entire sit, other times until maybe half an hour in. The intention is to get the mind not just quiet but also at least a little joyous. Joy, pleasure and curiosity seems to be the qualities to cultivate at this point in order to get rid of the last striving/ ill will.

Energy has mostly been low intensive, centered, calm. No pain or serious discomfort this last week. When I’m in the zone, the usual, more anatomic experience of the body usually fades more or less away, and then there is just the experience of energy. Also, the observer point becomes fluid, volatile. One time it slowly slid down from its usual position in the middle of the head to just behind the upper lip/nostrils. This tiny area then appeared very big, maybe 3-4-5 times bigger than normal, as if the observer point was slowly entering it. It didn’t, though, but sort of evaporated.

There has been another emotional release, timewise and structurally similar to the ones mentioned above, but this time it wasn’t the feeling of sadness or deep helplessness that was released, it was a mixed feeling of joy (I had a visual thought showing me Little Niels with a completely happy, broadly smiling face, and a verbal thought: He is happy!) and being touched by the fact that this joy has been so hard to find during most of my life, and also sadness about this fact. So I had another twenty minutes or so of crying and repeating my ”mantra”: ”You are allowed to feel everything …” etc. (cf. my last post above).

Lastly, there has been five ”near misses” or dips into the formless realms (three of them in one sitting), cf. above, and two what would then be ”near-near misses” or near-dips into formlessness.

​​​​​​​Off cushion there is contentment, low level excitement, faith in practice. I don’t feel there is much I can do, or do differently, at this point, and I am confident it will click sooner or later, in two days, two weeks, two months, who knows …

If you have the time and the wish, could you expand on the "near misses" and the difference with the "near-near misses"?
what does it feel like?

Wishing you well...and to click soon ;-)

Yeah Niels, I'm interested too in your description of those near misses. In particular, if any of them had some factors that could be related to glimpses of non-duality.

I read today a guy in DhO that came back from a 21 days retreat and states that he attained SE but had no fruitions nor deepening of jhanas and even felt anxious the day after of the so-called SE, but did report some kind of special experience. Previously I would have understood that as an A&P experience, but nowadays I give some credit in that it could have been some glimpse of non-duality. Kenneth Folk said that he experienced I AM in his first A&P, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility.

Okay Sushi and Pepe, I'll try to describe this micro event that I tentatively call "near miss" or "dip into the formless realms" (terms taken from shargrol's compilation):

1) Broader context: I have been sitting four hours a day for more than a month, so momentum is quite strong, and I seem to be consistently in High EQ, reaching my "cutting edge" in almost every sitting.

2) Context: The micro event typically occurs more than 45 minutes into a sit, i.e. when I am at my "cutting edge". Mind is quiet (virtually no verbalized thought), energy is calm, the sense of the "anatomic" body is more or less gone, there is just tactile experience of soft wavy movements, dense-ness, emptyness, neutral to slightly pleasant in feeling tone. Sense of time is also distorted. There are loud high pitched notes, not inside, not outside the head. And there is a low level, but very steady mindfulness, like a pilot light. The mood is dreamy, abstract, peaceful.

3) The event itself: Mind is aware of the continous white noise of the wind in the trees (I meditate in a little forrest with doors and windows open), and then suddenly there is a gap in the sound, like if you press the mute button, 2-3 tenths of a second with no sound at all, and possibly no other sensation (tactile, visual). Then, just as suddenly, sound returns: Button un-muted again. There is almost an audible "pop!" or "chuck!", I am not sure if is when the sound disappears, or when it returns.

4) What I call a "near-near miss" or "near dip into the formless realms" is when sound (and possibly everythings else) fades rapidly down towards silence/nothing, but then fades rapidly up again, without having reached complete silence/nothing. Maybe this is what shargrol calls "brown out".

5) What it is not: It is not a cessation, since someone is there to observe the silence/nothing, the gap. And it is not a dip into sleep, since there is no sleepiness before or after, and since there is no head nodding or jerk – the body is completely still during the event.

Feel free to ask more about and/or elaborate on the diagnosis – or completely disagree with it

Update September 11th 2021
It’s been a while and I’ve got some news to report. Not only has my daily practice continued with 3-4 hours of sitting, I have also a few days ago finished another home retreat. This is once again one of those looong posts, so the tl;dr version is that I experienced lots of emotional release, and that I during that week cried more than I have ever cried before in my entire life, which felt really really good. And here, with all the details, is a report about my …


Late Summer Retreat 2021

The format was the one I have been using in my two latest home retreats: eight days of eight 90-minute sittings, in other words twelve hours of sitting a day, interspersed with some yoga and one daily hour of mindful gardening.

The technique was really a mix, since I improvised all the way. Most of the time it was Do Nothing aka Open Awareness. But also samatha if the mind needed calming down, Self Inquiry if curiousity was too dull and needed some spark, Body Scan (or just attention to bodily sensations) when energy was intensive, metta when that felt required, etc.

From time to time there would be some internal conversations that seemed more like self therapy than meditation. It happened more and more as the retreat progressed. Though I hadn’t planned it at all (it happened by itself when I did Do Nothing), this part turned out to be the most important, since it led to a series of emotional releases. Hence I will elaborate:

Emotional releases and internal dialogue
For quite a while I have had this figure ”Little Niels” inside (cf. earlier posts), and during this retreat he became much more vivid and came to play an important part. Also (again: not a choice, it just happened) I had Michael Taft as an internal meditation teacher. I have been watching some of his guided meditations on YouTube, and not only do I like his verbal guidance, I like his calm and joyful, even playful attitude, his warmth, broad smile and lightness. In short: I have internalized him as a Father Figure or Mentor Figure. So Michael would give me instructions and advice (”drop the breath as object, focus on the energy”), and Little Niels would let me know his emotions and needs (”my back hurts, can we lie down?”). The three of us were the main characters, but lots of others showed up in supporting roles: friends and family and also some more abstract and faceless characters such as The Pusher, and The Skilled Yogi. I’ll get back to those.

Here is how these emotional releases progressed and some of the internal dialogues they entailed: DAY 2: two small emotional releases, a few sobs for no apparent reason, occuring quite surprisingly deep into some very quiet samatha. DAY 3: two more small emotional releases. One of them came the first time (ever! on retreat or in daily practice!) I gave myself permission – experienced as: met Little Niels’ need – to do reclining meditation in stead of the planned sitting. I cried over the fact that I find it so hard to be nice to myself. DAY 4: Again it was deep into a very calm and quiet state (no narratives, no images, no memories), around an hour into the sit, then suddenly this tiny little impulse to cry. Little Niels said: ”I feel like crying. But I can’t.” Pause. I answered: ”That’s allrigh.” Then a few sobs came – and passed. I ran what I call my ”emotion-encouraging mantra”: ”You are allowed to feel everything you feel. You are allowed to feel it for as long as you want. You are allowed to express it any way you want. I am here for you, I will take care of you.” More sobs. When they died away, I repeated the mantra, and more tears came. This pattern continued for quite a while. At one point Michael Taft said: ”You are beautiful, guys!” More crying. This emotional release went on for almost half an hour. A deep feeling of relief, reconciliation. DAY 5: In the third sitting, Little Niels wanted us to lie down, so I lay down, and then something new happened: Little Niels lay (in ”child’s pose”, one of my yoga poses) on my chest and fell asleep. And I had the feeling that I was not meditating, but taking care of him, protecting him in his sleep, making sure that nothing would disturb him. After maybe 45 minutes, I returned to the cushion. While I was slowly changing position, Little Niels was hanging on to me like a baby monkey. When I got into erect sitting posture, I felt a deep deep deep physical calm, heavy, soft, solid, grounded, at ease – I can’t recall having ever felt so physically completely calm. The energy in the body was perfectly centered in a soft, warm, strong, elastic column from root to crown, very still, and in my imagination of a golden or honey brown colour. ”Oh my God!” I thought, several times. Little Niels was still there, almost like a fetus in my chest, same colour as the energy column. ”I have got you in my heart!” I said, I almost said it out loud. And then I cried. I cried for 3-4 minutes, repeating the phrase. Then there was an addition: ”I have got you in my heart. It’s so good that you are there!” And then I cried some more. I added these two new phrases to my ”emotion-encouraging mantra”. Said the mantra, cried, paused the mantra until the crying stilled, repeated the mantra etc. This continued for half an hour until the bell rang. I wrote in my notes afterwards: ”This is more important than Stream Entry. And I have got it! What a relief! This has already been a great retreat!” The next sitting was just very peaceful and quiet, and so was the next one, which evolved into metta: I felt like sharing this wonderful peace, so I came up with a metta phrase I hadn’t used before: ”May the peace I feel right here and now travel with the wind and touch the heart of every sentient being.” In the past, metta has always felt a bit fake and abstract to me, more intellectual than emotional, but here, for the first time, I really felt that wish for others’ well-being. And I cried againg, maybe 15 minutes this time. DAY 6: First sitting was more metta and more crying, again maybe 15 minutes. Instead of ”all sentient beings” the metta was directed at a lot of specific persons. A couple of minor emotional releases followed in some of the later sittings this day. In one of them Little Niels changed his visual appearence from a 7-8 year old version of me to a 2 year old version of me, a fat little happy buddha-Niels that made me laugh and then cry. DAY 7: First sitting was another metta-driven emotional release, metta directed at specific persons in my life interspersed with crying and with a feeling that only now did I actually see these people. Second sitting I felt like expressing gratitude and worked a little on finding a phrase that felt authentic, since I don’t believe in God and hence didn’t know who to thank: ”Thank you to that or those who have granted me this peace.” Fifth sitting was a lot of joy. Even the quite intense energy in the body felt joyful, playful, playing around. Some more emotional release came, for instance when my inner Michael Taft said: ”You guys! (meaning me and Little Niels) You are so alive!” DAY 8: Another emotional release in the first sitting. I asked Little Niels, as many many times before: ”How are you?” Promptly and surprisingly he answered: ”I miss my mother.” That made me cry. We had a conversation about him, me and the other characters in the ”Niels-System”. Little Niels asked me: ”What’s it like to be an adult?” ”Difficult,” I said. More crying. ”But also good. You can decide for yourself. Your parents don’t decide over you anymore.” I asked: ”How old are you?” ”Seven years.” ”What’s it like to be seven years?” ”Difficult.” More crying. We talked about loneliness, about the need to be seen and understood. And we talked about some of the other figures in the system. The Pusher, for instance – who is not a drug dealer, but a faceless and usually non-verbal urge to push the experience, a never satisfied force at work both in meditation (”this absorption isn’t deep enough”) and off cushion, a force who can think of even the best situation as ”not quite right”. ”The Pusher pushes,” said Little Niels. ”That’s all he can do.” ”How can we stop him?” I asked. Little Niels: ”We have to tell him something that will make him feel safe. What would that be?” I had to think about that. Then I remembered how I used to love riding on a sledge as a child, sometimes several children on one sledge, one of us pushing to get the sledge running faster. This gave me my answer: ”We can say to The Pusher: ’Thank you for pushing, you don’t have to push anymore, we are already riding. Jump on board!” This led to another twenty minutes of sobbing and crying. There were a couple more emotional releases in later sittings. Little Niels and I also discussed another character, The Skilled Yogi, the one who so desperately wants to be an expert meditator and reach Stream Entry NOW. What could make him feel safe? Little Niels: ”Tell him this: ’What you dream of is already in the process of happening. Enjoy it!’” We talked about why Stream Entry sometimes felt so important. I admitted that it had to do with other people’s way of looking at me, I wanted to be seen as a skilled yogi, I wanted the merit badge, I wanted to be part of the club of skilled meditators. Little Niels said: ”If it needs validation from others, it’s not it.” That ended the conversation, he is obviously much wiser than me.

This self therapy with its series of emotional releases and internal dialogues felt like far the most important result of the retreat. But there were …


Other minor results:

An emotional release-sitting would typically be followed by (perhaps a calm phase and then) some intense energy experiences. This energy work was similar to what I experienced on my Spring Retreat (cf. above). A new feature was that I for the first time was able to move energy intentionally: I had some really powerfull stuff going on in the upper chest and head, not painful, just extremely intense, and in the midst of this silent chaos, a voice (presumably my inner Michael Taft) suddenly shouted: ”Bring it down!” I didn’t really know how to, but experimented with different manipulations of the breath, inspired by the energy yoga (bhandas) that I do, combined with attention locked into the stomach, and a noting or rather directing voice in my head saying ”down, down, down …” on the outbreaths. And in the course of 5-10 minutes, the energy actually went down the front of the torso, I felt it in my chest muscles, then futher down in the pelvic area. This is how the daoists describe the circulation: up along the back, down along the front, but the last part of that was new to me experientially.

Some insights arose during Do Nothing, Self Inquiry and other vipassanesque phases: There were some examinations of external sound, experiences of not being able to find the line between sound and listener, of external sound being both ”in here” and ”out there” at the same time. Glimpses of something non-dual, I assume. - Also there arose some spontaneous vipassana during the otherwise quite focused and intense energy work: There were experiences of very subtle image thoughts giving me the hunch that the regular, ”anatomic” experience of the body seems to be based mainly on these thoughts, in other words that the purely tactile sensations (of energy) did not involve an anatomy with clear locations. For instance the energy in the middel of the chest and in the mouth were not experienced as separate, even though the image thought would put a distance of 20-25 centimeter between them. They pulsated in the same frequency and had all the same qualities. In other words there was severe conflict between the visual (experience of the) body and the tactile (experience of the) body, and during the intense energy phases, the tactile ”won”, and the body seemed visually/anatomically fragmented, incoherent.

On the samatha front, there were a handful of sittings with deep absorptions, similar to what I have tried many times before (what I have called ”Deep Space”, and ”Bottom of the Ocean”, cf. above, though both in very clean and luxurious retreat editions). There was a little aversion to them: Mind found them boring. And finally some very calm states that didn’t feel like regular absorptions, in that they were not deep, abstract, silent, but rather dreamy, drowsy, hypnagogic, sometimes dipping into some dream-like verbal or image thoughts, but never quite sliding into dream or sleep, with sort of a steady pilot light of mindfulness. Very pleasant, childlike, like taking a very light nap, never entirely gone.

Reflection on the internal dialogue
A few times Angelo Dilullo also showed up in my inner theater as a sort of assistent teacher to Michael Taft. I have read Dilullos book and watched some of his YouTube videos, and I especially like his very detailed instructions on how to work with self inquiry. At one point, where he advised me to do self inquiry, I answered: ”Please give me a good question to work with.” He hesitated for a second or two, then answered with a smile: ”Who’s asking the questions?” Which I found and find to be an excellent question for me, now that this sock puppet theater has shown up in my practice. At first it felt a little ridiculous to have these internal dialogues, since all the characters are ”me”. It felt childlike. I never played with dolls as a kid, boys of my generation rarely did, and I envy the girls/women who did, because I am sure it gave them not only social but also psychological training that I certainly could have used a little earlier on than at age 53. In spite of my initial scepticism, the individual puppets or voices became very real and very independt of ”me”. A lot of times they said things that surprised me deeply. In the breaks on retreat, and especially now, afterwards, I was/am wondering who this ”me” is. I could just call him Adult Niels, but my hunch is that he can be broken down into several sub-characters, and that some of the already known characters – The Skilled Yogi, for instance – sometimes takes his place, that is: Feels like ”me”. I know, of course, that there is no permanent me, no ”real” hand inside the shifting fictitious sock puppets. There are only sock puppets. Every thought, verbal or non-verbal, that ”I” have, every word that ”I” utter in speech or writing stems from a sock puppet. Some of them I don’t identify with. The Pusher, for instance, who a few years back (when he was still unseen and unnamed) used to be fully verbalised and hold a lot of authority, but now he is nonverbal, very subtle, and the second I spot him, he loses his grip. Other voices/puppets I do identify with, often unknowingly, I assume. So perhaps something to work on is to ask self inquiry questions like ”Who’s asking the questions?”, ”Who’s talking now?” Both with internal and external speech. Who wrote this long, perhaps too long post? The Skilled Yogi, who wants recognition from his peers? Little Niels who wanted the world to know that he exists? A mix?

To conclude, I was very very happy with this retreat. I have cried more this week than perhaps the rest of my entire life combined. Never knew I had so many tears in me. There might be more, even much more, who knows? What I was brought into contact with was raw emotion, no narratives or memories attached, just sadness, helplessness – and joy caused by finally feeling these emotions so strongly. And more sadness caused by the fact it has taken me so long to get to this point. And more joy, much more joy – also now, after the retreat – caused by the fact that I am now actually at this point.

Very very nice. Such a masterful mix of not forcing things with at "Do Nothing" attitude, but still giving free rein to your natural intelligence, curiousity, and creativity and thus doing stuff!  

Everybody has a different path and the difficulties we face in practice are there to challenge us and direct us toward our own specific resolutions. The skills we learn along the way are as important as any particular experience we have. 

All of these developments take a certain amount of activation energy -- we need to put in the time, explore the terrain, find our resistances/dead spots, and enliven our psyche... but what we get out of this heartfelt work is much more that we put into it, even though we have no way of knowing what might happen.

There really are only two critical components of this work. First of all, we have to honor what happens/arises in practice. Basically, we say "yes" to what shows up and honor it. And also honor the questions that come up, the problems we have, the desires to seek solutions, and the creativity and curiousity and ideas that show up.

Second of all, we have to be honest. And this takes time, because there are lots of veils that cover up our honesty -- roles we feel we need to play to survive, attitudes we feel we need to adopt to be respected, etc etc. But there is a sense of conscience that we need to listen to. We need to learn to listen to our inner voice that tells us when we are doing too much, not enough. We need to listen to our inner voice that says we're needlessly hurting ourself. It takes time. But the "voice" or the "guide" or "conscience" or "wisdom" becomes clearer over time. Half of this journey is learning to not lie to ourself about how things really are.

Nicely done Niels!

(interesting how honor and honest have the same root in english/latin)

Niels, It is so much fun to read you latest posts. I feel like every other thing you report, I'm like, "Yes!" There is a resonance as I read your progress that gets me really excited for my own practice.



I've been thinking a lot about this. How can we have an aspiration for Stream Entry if we have no idea what it is? Why are we chasing after some concept that doesn't energize us in practice, that we feel like should be our goal, or that everyone else is expecting that shoot for? I love that your practice is gaining its own authority and wisdom and that is what is guiding you and driving you. I love hearing about how you are giving voice to this different parts of your self, but how it is all emerging organically. The pusher isn't there trying to strategize the most efficient or best way to do this. There is just this natural wisdom emerging that is opening doors clearing a path forward.

Shargol, Your response feels exactly what I need to hear in practice as well! Thanks for your insights.

Awesome home retreat Niels! What a great description of psychological work. You should really be proud of all the stuff you have faced with innocence and honesty. If enlightenment is waking up to one's life, then you have already walked a long stretch. Cheers! 

Update November 23rd 2021

An update for those reading along here, though nothing much is happening.

I still sit 2 x 60 minutes a day. I have lost interest in dharma books, and in logging, even my private log in Danish I have more or less dropped. It is as if I don’t need any more pointers, any more tracking my steps, none of that seems to matter anymore, it wouldn’t make any difference, so I just sit. I still enjoy the sittings, though, and look forward to them as pauses in the course of the day. Four out of five of them go more or less like this:

Concentration builds quite steeply from the first breath and onwards, after a few minutes I arrive at a near-cutting edge level, and usually but not always, there is a notch up some 35-40 minutes in to cutting edge-level. The technique is still ”Do Nothing”, although the mind by itself sometimes focuses on the breath at the nostrils when it needs to calm down, either in the beginning, or somewhere along the way. It sometimes does a little metta if it feels like it. Otherwise just broad open awareness. Things are calm and panoramic, easy. There are few thoughts, they are clearly seen. Energy is stable, homogenous, often centered around the column in the middle of the torso (in front of the spine). For a couple of weeks I had quite strong pains in the back of the neck on and off during each and every sitting, but this last week energy has been neutral in tone and mainly in the head, especially the middle of the head, the top part of energy column from the crown and some 10-12 centimeters down. Sometimes there is spaciousness, a sudden expansion of the sense of space, especially to the sides, and the ”self-point” in the middle of the head moves or gets confused or is diffused or expanded. When I become aware of this, it returns to its invisible (no-)place in the middle of the head. I call it ”the light in the refrigerator-phenomenon”: Every time I look for it, it’s there – because the looking, i.e. the opening of the refrigerator door, turns it on, but I am quite sure it is not on all the time. Some times the mind focuses on the energy in the middle of the head, exactly where the ”self-point” should be, often a self inquiry question then pops out by it self: ”From where are the sensations in the middle of the head felt?” In these moments (usually 5-10 seconds), the mind, in a very clear way, cannot localize the place from which it is aware. It’s an odd feeling. There is no aversion to practice (including no boredom), but also no enthusiasm, things are kind of mellow and peaceful.

I am planning another home retreat, starting the coming Sunday 28th of November and all the way to December 14th, so sixteen days this time, in stead of my usual eight. The reason for lumping two usual retreats together into one is that I have noticed that I usually spend the first 2-3 days to get deep, and that I spend the last 2 days stressing a bit about the fact that the retreat is soon over, so actually I only have around 4 days of optimal conditions on an 8-day retreat. This time, hopefully I will tripple that number. The daily schedule will be as at the last three home retreats (12 hours of daily sitting). It will be my longest retreat so far, and I will be off-line and alone, but check in on the phone with my girlfriend after 8 days. Also, I stay open to the possibility of ending the retreat before time if there seems to be reasons for doing that. I don’t think it’s likely anything will happen that I cannot handle, but better safe than sorry.

I will be back with a retreat report in medio/ultimo December.

Thanks for the update. I always enjoy your posts and am glad to know what is going on with your practice. It's also comforting to know someone else has an unremarkable but satisfying practice. 

I love the fridge light analogy. That is perfect!

Good wishes for your retreat. That is a lot of sitting. I hope it brings many benefits. 

Always love reading your reports. Thanks for sharing. 

Nice, you're in a great place.

Be sure to set an ambitious but achievable intention for the retreat, hopefully one that would benefit yourself and all beings. 

The ability to retreat is a rare thing and life is uncertain. I'm sure there will be a temptation to end before you have accomplished your intention, so remember that the ability to retreat is a rare thing and life is uncertain.

Best wishes to you!!

December 16th 2021

Retreat report

I recently set out on a 16 day solo retreat with 12 daily hours of meditation. Before the retreat, following shargrol’s advice, I sat ”an ambitious but achievable intention”, which was to reach Stream Entry. I also made a commitment not to quit the retreat before time unless I felt that my mental or physical health would be threatened if I didn’t quit.

I finished the 16 days as planned, but I did not reach Stream Entry. Still, I am content with the retreat.

Compared to my earlier retreats, this one was outstanding in one aspect: It was uniquely eventless. Nothing much happened. Although some minor new things did occur (cf. below), it was more or less like my daily meditation, only a whole lot more of it.

I think it is relevant to specify what did NOT happen on this retreat:

1) There were no blissfull states, no physically pleasant absorptions, nothing extatic or orgasmic or deeply peaceful as in my retreat in December 2020.

2) There were no emotional releases as in my retreat in August 2021 – actually this retreat was emotionally very neutral, and even though I tried to stay alert to the possibility of strong emotions showing up, no such emotions came.

3) There was almost no A&P-like stuff off cushion. One lucid dream (but I have those about once a month, so nothing special there), otherwise nothing: No open-eyed hallucinations of animated handwriting on the walls, no weird hypnagogic stuff and dreams within dreams, no strange electric phenomena in the body, no remarkable visuals during meditation, no mania or even excitement about what meditation can do to experience. In each and every one of my earlier retreats, beginning with my first Goenka retreat back in October 2017, I have had these kinds of phenomena showing up after 3-4 days retreat and intensifying along the way. This time, day 5 was not significantly different from day 1 – or day 8 or day 14. My mind state was so unaffected by the retreat that I at any point, both on and off cushion, within two seconds could have entered into any social or work related situation and performed normally. This would not have been true for any other retreat I have done: The distance between retreat mode and daily life mode was gone. I find this remarkable.

So what DID happen? Mainly two things: Energy work and vipassana work. I will unpack these two shortly, but first a remark about technique. My (anti) method was as it has been for a long time: Do Nothing. If the mind by it self goes in samatha direction and focuses on an object to settle down, I let it do so (this would happen perhaps 20 percent of the time). If the mind by it self investigastes, either by observation or self inquiry, I let it do so (this would happen perhaps 70 percent of the time). If the mind by itself utters metta phrases or perform some internal dialogue between ”internal family members”, I let it do so (this would be perhaps 10 percent of the time).


Energy work
About 90-95 percent of the time, the tactile sensations of energy in the body was in the forefront of experience. As mentioned, there was nothing strongly pleasant. Also there was nothing quite as painful as the strange ”energy transportations” I experienced on my spring retreat 2021. But there was medium level painful or unpleasant energy maybe a third of the time. However, my attitude to the painful and unpleasant tactile sensations has changed since the spring retreat: In the spring, it required really strong concentration to sit with the ”difficult” energy, and there were no thoughts at all. At that time, I thought of the mood/emotional tone as neutral, but looking back now, I think it was (also) a bit stern or a least very serious. Whereas now, on this retreat, the mood/emotional tone was at least kind (sometimes even warm, and now and then playful), and there were thoughts along side the painful and unpleasant sensations, not aversive thoughts, but constructive and comforting practice thoughts: Guidance from my inner Michael Taft or from a newly emerged nameless female guide (who is more soothing and comforting than Michael Taft).

Another difference is that my ”Little Niels” inner child often was present during the energy experiences this time, whereas he was always completely absent in the spring when things got tough. Beforehand ”Little Niels” has mostly been interested in visuals, never in tactile sensations, but now he had the same curiosity with the energy, even the unpleasant energy. And – this is yet another change in my attitude – I was much more quick in changing posture when things got too difficult. In the spring, when I felt an intention to change posture during a painful energy experience, I would push myself to sit a little longer. This time, as soon as I felt any intention to relief pain (sometimes, but not always, experienced as Little Niels letting me know that now it is too much), I followed this intention immediately. Not only is this being nicer to myself, it is also, as I understand it, a more ”precise” Do Nothing attitude, since the pushing to stay with the pain is a ”doing”.

Not all the energy was unpleasant, though. It was neutral a third of the time, and slightly pleasant or straight up playful a third of the time. This last thing was one of the little new things for me, and by playful energy I mean for instance: A soft and wobbly ball of energy moving from solar plexus to the head in maybe ten seconds (whereas the hard balls of energy in my spring retreat could spend half an hour travelling the same distance); airy and swirly movements, spiraling, turning, and swinging around the central axis in the torso or the head.

By the way: The energy could be anywhere from root to crown, but the large majority of the activity was in the head – and none of the activity in the head (entire back half of the scull swinging back and forth, crown pulsating, third eye tingling etc.) was painful or unpleasant, but rather was perceived as interesting and even joyful. The pain was mainly at the spine, solar plexus and heart level.


Vipassana work
Just as the energy worked in my body without me ”doing” energy work, there would be a lot of ”vipassana work” without me doing it. And this is more difficult to explain, because what went on was extremely fast and subtle. But it had to do with the ”center point”, i.e. the physical location of the (feeling of the) self. As you know, this is usually somewhere in the middle of the head, but can never actually be found. This strangely absent center point was thouroughly investigated through observation and self inquiry (almost always the same question: ”From where is this perceived?”). This would usually go on when there was energy activity in the head, which as mentioned was most of the time. And there would be some interesting experiences, glimpses of seing myself from a point outside the body, usually behind the head or behind and above one of the shoulders. Also experiences of an ”impossible” physical body, like the head having moved (not tilted, but moved) to the left, now growing from the shoulder rather than from the neck, the head split in two as if with an axe, the head being flat, two-dimensional with sensations at the lips and at the back of the head being at the exact same location, the head having moved at least half way down into the chest.

Sometimes – and this was another of the few minor new things – it was more than glimpses, and the mind could gaze at its own impossible body for ten or twenty seconds. It was like staring at an M.C. Escher picture of a stair going from one landing up to a second, then a third, then a fourth, and then up the first one where it came from: Such a stair cannot exist, and yet you can see it. At other times it was more like a cubistic painting with several perspectives co-existing. Often the usual ”anatomic” body experience had almost faded away (but could be refound with a couple of seconds of intentional effort), and there were no body parts, just energy. Sometimes, when looking for the ”normal” body, the mind would see this body ”render” or ”regenerate” before its very ”eyes” in a fraction of a second, also an experience perceived as interesting. There would be feelings of calm disorientation: I couldn’t find my way in my own body, sometimes it could take a second or two to re-establish the up-down or left-right axes. It wasn’t frightening or even dizzying, no feeling of falling or losing one’s balance, and the body would sit very still and just be calmly curious about the fact that it had somewhat lost its orientation.


To conclude
The last day of the retreat was a little different than the rest. There were more thoughts, evaluating the retreat. All the way through the 16 days, I was never anything less than content, often I was even happy, joyful, felt alive, inspired. There were thoughts about Stream Entry now and then, but they were never a problem. But the last day, there were some minutes here and there where there was discontent, speculation and worry. My inner voices debated whether or not I was disappointed that I had not reached Stream Entry. I am beginning to learn that it is very important to be honest with one self, honest also about shameful emotions. And of course my inner Skilled Yogi knew that the ”best” would be NOT to be disappointed, but totally chill and accepting. Only a ”bad” yogi would be disappointed, disappointment would be shameful. So I tried to analyze what kind of disappointment I felt.

The analyzing thoughts reached the preliminary conclusion that disappointment can be at least two things: 1) Dissatisfaction with the fact that something did not turn out the way one had hoped. 2) A feeling of ”unfairness”: ”I had deserved this, and I did not happen.” Which again can lead to an emotional reaction, either ”I’m gonna try even harder now” or ”If it’s this unfair, then fuck it, I’m out”. And while I definitely admit that I felt some disappointment in the first sense (after all, I had set an intention), I did and do not feel any disappointment in the second sense. I know – both intellectually and emotionally – that Stream Entry is not something you ”deserve” and ”get” if you work hard enough. It is something that might happen due to causes and conditions, most of which are beyond any individual control. All you can do is set an intention, and show up on the cushion and do your best. And I did that. And I feel I made some progress, even though what I had intended did not happen.

The next time, I will try and see if I can set an intention without having any attachment to the outcome. My inner Skilled Yogi knows that this is the ideal, also if you are trying to help somebody else (as a meditation teacher or therapist, for instance). So I will aim for that.

I have returned to my regular 2 x 60 minutes a day now. My faith in practice is just as strong as before the retreat. I still enjoy sitting. I am pretty confident – and here PLEASE let me know if you disagree! – that I have a reasonable practice (consistent, non heroic, well-informed). So I will just continue.

Yeah, this sounds good. You've gone through a lot of territory and really cleaned up your body/mind! It's such a major accomplishment. How nice to have a sane retreat!

For what it's worth, I'm also a little surprised that more didn't happen with that dose of meditation... but it sounds like you were entering some solid body-less jhana etc etc... so it's not like it was bad practice --- many people would be very happy with such a retreat!   The description of micro-vipassaning sounds exactly right, and could only be described by someone with very solid practice, so I don't think you were doing anything significantly wrong...

But I guess the main thing I would say is I'm not hearing the usual "joy" that people experience when their drama and striving falls away... so I wonder if there is still some seriousness and stern attitude that might be flattening your joy? Do nothing is fine... but it can also be a sneaky way to repress/avoid or stay in control. For most people, more doing nothing is needed, but for some people more doing something is needed.

Part of me wonders if you might like to add more fun to your daily sits?

(Does your mind say, "I'm worried that having fun will slow down my progress toward SE"? That might suggest a little too much sternness.)

What sort of practices give you the most joy? What practices have you always been curious about?
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(edit: I might be totally off here, so definitely disregard if it doesn't seem to apply. Late EQ and SE are very very very personal. Sometimes I think teachers get in the way for this stage.  ]

Another thing you could try is to deconstruct the idea of stream entry as being an event that will happen in the future. What you can do is investigate how the mind fabricates events and the future out of raw sensations that are eventless and timeless.

From an experiential perspective (and what other perspective is there?) the future is nothing more than a collection of ideas (thoughts & images) which only ever arise in the present. The future never actually arrives, we only ever experience the present moment, it’s just that we trick ourselves into thinking that some of our experience is not actually happening in the present because it is “about the future”. (The same is also true of the past.)

An event is a collection of sensations which we carve out and attribute meaning and significance to – here’s what happened, I can refer to it using a label and fit it into a self-narrative involving a lot of other events. But you can take any event and decompose it into its constituent sense objects (thoughts, images, feelings etc.) And then you can decompose those sense objects into the raw “particles” of sense experience - those energetic vibrations or static hum or however you describe what it is you experience with a really quiet mind in meditation.

​​​​​​​So it turns out when you really investigate the matter that at the most basic level there are no events and there is no future. In particular, stream entry is not an event that will happen in the future. It is actually the opposite – it is what stops happening when the mind lets go of fabricating events and the future for a moment! It is the first taste if you like of the realization that deep down, nothing at all is happening and time is not passing (or to be more precise, the sense of things happening and time passing is a creation of the mind which causes stress when we take it to be something more than just a creation of the mind).

[Edited for clarity]

Have been thinking what could I add to the conversation, as I'm in similar territory. But my experience is almost the opposite, as every session is different. For example, in the last couple of sessions I found that thoughts are mostly aural in my case (yours are visual, IIRC) and so I was not giving enough attention to other sound/wavy sensations. Once included, the mind went deeper and so was easier following the movements of attention, kind of riding the attention, even being the attention. So that reminded me of MCTB2 pointers on subject-object synchronization, formations, etc. This is the summary I made about a year ago on that chapter. What's your experience of formations lately? Are all six senses present?

Also, Nikolai recommended (many years ago) to those whose sessions were even and comfortable, to challenge them by bringing in something disruptive and investigating your reaction patterns. So trying to bring in attractive, repulsive and neutral things would be a way to spice up your practice.

Edit: As Shargrol says about sparking joy, curiosity, I would go for jhanas, metta, fire-kasina, etc.

  

"Also, Nikolai recommended (many years ago) to those whose sessions were even and comfortable, to challenge them by bringing in something disruptive and investigating your reaction patterns. So trying to bring in attractive, repulsive and neutral things would be a way to spice up your practice."

I agree Do not stop with Noting too soon. Noting will disturb it. Noting as in labelling. Slow tempo but consistent. Note it until all becomes fucking boring as feck! Boredom is your friend here. EQ is not your friend. EQ is a boring Status Quo! Keep Noting. Cessations can also happen off cushion. On cushion is work time. Off cushion Do Nothing, open awareness, chill out, chop wood, carry water ... 

Best wishes! 

(yes, do ignore what I say in case it does not resonate, as I'm limited to only my own experience, might not work for everyone) 

Thank you all for your kind and thought-provoking answers.

Shargrol, your suggestion really resonates with me. There is indeed a flatness to my joy, as if I don’t allow myself to be fully happy. Still some sternness.

Your remark had me think about a detail from the retreat that I did not mention in my report: Every day, I did the third sitting in my little meditation hut in my very little wood. And every day, after 20-30 minutes, I changed from sitting to reclining, and almost every time, I would slip into this lovely mind state I guess you all know: the light, spacious, clear, deeply calm, wonderfully thought-free and care-free mind state right at the edge of sleep. There was still mindfulness, but only of the sound of the birds and the wind in the trees and now and then the breath and the pleasant stillness and heaviness of the body. BUT: Every day, there was also a little resistance to reclining, not much, just a second or two of (the Pusher) thinking: ”Reclining isn’t as serious as sitting, can I allow myself this?” I could, and I did, but the little resistance was there every time.

Even though I am not myself a Christian, I grew up in a society with a protestant work ethics, which my father very much incarnated: ”Work is always hard work, fun is something you might have in your sparetime – if it’s fun, it can’t be work.” My inner Pusher very much takes this position. So I have always – especially when it comes to ”work” – had some difficulty allowing my self to have fun (meaning: allowing for the work to be interesting, pleasant, stimulating). And meditation, apparently, is "work".

And now, when you suggested that I might want to add in a little fun to my meditation, my Pusher immediately kicked in (in my sitting yesterday, after I read your remark). I had the reflexion about reclining meditation, and then the Pusher said: ”Ah! Okay! So now let’s schedule reclining meditation, if that is what it takes! From now on, you will only do reclining meditation until you wake up! Have fun, goddam it!”

This is of course ridiculous, but the Pusher still has some influence in my system, so this morning, I decided to do the first sitting of the day as a reclining meditation. When I started the timer, I realized that I had never done that before: Set a timer to do reclining meditation. I have done very little reclining, and it has always been either 1) as an ”allowed” relief when sitting was too hard, or 2) when falling asleep at night. So now I did my first formal hour of reclining meditation. I did not get into the pleasant mind state, of course. There was too much resistance, too much internal dialogue, no real calm. The Pusher, after 30 minutes or so, even wanted me up on the cushion, this wasn’t working – this wasn’t work.

I didn't change posture, though, finished the hour, then went online and saw the remarks from you other guys. And interestingly enough, they also resonated: You are right, I need to do something disruptive, to shake up my practice a bit, so as to find whatever little dukkha might be left in my otherwise very satisfying meditation (and very satisfying life, I might add). And the most disruptive thing I can do is apparently to tell my self to have fun!

So my tentative conclusion is that I will try changing my practice instruction from ”Do Nothing!” to ”Have Fun!”

I think I will have to ally myself some more with Little Niels. He is uninterested in Stream Entry, he doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t care about any future event, actually. So rather than following the Pusher and plan a specific posture or technique (in order to …), I will try, moment by moment, to feel (i.e. ask Little Niels the question) ”what would be fun meditation right now?” Sitting, reclining, standing, walking? Going for deep samatha states by staying intensely with an object, or just let mind decide by itself (Do Nothing), or …?

For now, this is what I will try, but I am very eager to hear your reactions to this.

PS: I love that shargrol writes "part of me wonders if …”, and then later another more cautious part of him comes online and adds the EDIT. Since discovering my ”internal family” on my August Retreat, a friend of mine, whom I told about the experience, mentioned Richard Schwartz and his ”Internal Family System” to me. I have read Schwarz's latest book and seen some videos, and it is, at least for me, a very relevant ressource – a form of (self)therapy that is very compatible with insight practice.

Not the Nikolai's post I refered above, but food for thought nevertheless:

Sometimes the 11th nana/4th jhana has the equanimous feeling but a lack of specific neutrality towards all formations/ fabrications and this could lead to stagnation and regress. Perhaps there is attachment and clinging to the equanimous feeling. This means there is a lack of the vital ingredient for cessation, ie specific neutrality.

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Yeah, I think you need to be on the look out for your personal "protective mechanisms of confused suffering".

Basically, part of mind is willing to give up on the edgy intimacy of being on the cutting edge of practice, and instead it retreats back into a pattern of thinking/experiencing/framing that is more intellectualized. This compromise is very subtle, but over time it feels like practice becomes flat or tinted with angst or ill will. 

The trick is to sort of trace the flatness/ill will upstream --- what is it? what creates it? Why am I not happy and intimate with the movements of my mind? What do I secretly wish was happening? Why can't that happen now?

Be on the look out for thoughts like "I have to..." "I must..." "It's necessary to..."  a lot of those are unconscious protective mechanisms. When you see these clearly, you aren't confused anymore. And ironically, the suffering that you were protecting yourself from really doesn't cause suffering anymore. It's sort of like the problem you think you had never existed in the way you thought. 

But that only gets untangled by going _into_ the cutting edge experiences (usually sensations and emotions)  that we would rather avoid. 

I spent a lot of time of looking for residual ill will and then welcoming it like a friend in my mind. It was like throwing a party for my personal dukka. Fun and challenging. Could I invite my enemies to party with me?

Really hard to describe!

A hard work ethic is the perfect channel for repressed anger. It's productive and can be used to legitimize the anger and make others feel guilty.

I really appreciate your effort and your sati. Knowing that you are practicing as you are makes my practice easier and happier.

Indeed, I followed your lead today and, rather than go out for a cold one-hour sit in the garage, as I normally would, I tried reclining practice inside. I was surprised to find that I could complete all that I normally would and, when I got to the end of my planned practice, I just kept going so that it turned into a two-hour session. So nice! If you hadn't mentioned your reclined practice, I never would have thought to do it. So, thank you!

@shargrol ... and really hard to understand! I have read your post ten times, and every time I feel I sort of understand what you mean, but the minute I log off DhO, I can't explain it to myself: "So what was it shargrol was suggesting? Looking for subtle ill will ... upstream? How do I do that?"

So in other words: Even though I kind of understand what you mean, and intuitively feel that you are right, I find it hard to translate it into specific practice instructions.

Right now, I am working with the simple instruction "Have fun (while meditating)". And it seems productive, because either 1) I actually have fun (apparently samatha seems to be preferred when I am "allowed" to do something rather than nothing), or 2) I get to witness how the mind stops itself from having fun by all sorts of stupid thoughts, mostly delivered by The Pusher.

Then you write: "But that only gets untangled by going _into_ the cutting edge experiences (usually sensations and emotions)  that we would rather avoid." And this had me thinking that my "Have Fun"-approach might not be ideal (or cannot stand alone). Futher, it made me think about two things:

1) As to emotions, I have not had any strong emotions on or off cushion since my series of emotional releases on my August retreat. This puzzles me: Was that it? Did I really clean it all up in one retreat? Why is my emotional experience still quite shallow, then? As I wrote in my report, I try to be on the look-out for any emotion, I have my emotion-encouraging mantra that I run at least once in every sitting. But no emotions show up. So how can I work with emotions when they don't show up?

2) Perhaps they do show up, althoug only in the form of energy in the body, i.e. sensations. And one thing I actively have tried to avoid these last days when I allow myself to do something rather than nothing, is the painful energy experiences. I have had a lot of those in my practice, and apart from my New Years-retreat a year ago, virtually no real full-on pleasant energy/absorption. Are you suggesting that I go more into the difficult energy? My inner Pusher would be easy to persuade that that's the right thing, because that is hard work. And I am good at that. But I am not sure that's what's right for me at this point.

 Well, eventually you have to go into what you are avoiding... both fun-ness and painful-energy-ness. You're going to have to figure out how to do it.  I'm suggesting starting with a basis/foundation of having fun. Soak in guilt free pleasure. Soak in jhana if it arises. Enjoy! And then, only when you're saturated, then I'm suggesting inviting painfulness to the fun party. Titrate it in, a little at a time. Also enjoy!

(Basically I don't think your painfulness will fully show itself and be able to release unless it knows that fundamentally the mind is a joyful place to be. ) 

I think most people are already indulgent and have no problem with haivng fun... for them they need to have a little more discipline and go into the painfulness. But you seem to be too disciplined, to the point of avoiding experiencing joy/pleasure  and so you need to work on the guilt-free experience of pleasure... which will eventually allow the resistance-free experience of the pain, which will then create the conditions where it can liberate into energy and real insight. That's my hunch.

The key is knowing that samsara is confused compassion. The things that cause us suffering are things that we do because we think they will fix suffering. A lot of the compulsions, strategies, and intellectual framing that we do seems to fix problems on the surface, but more deeply causes unnecessary suffering. Insight is seeing how things aren't the way they seem on the surface and really understanding the consequences of our simplistic patterned ways of thinking and living. 

Again, it's sort of like a deep masage. First the body needs to warm up and relax and feel good, and only after that can the massage go deeper and work on the deep knots, which both hurts and feels good. When we realize that deep down the way we "hold" our body causes suffering, then the knots release and there is a new range of possibility. If the massage goes too deep and too fast, it's more likely is that a new protective knots will form around the old knots. Ironically, these people won't feel discomfort during deep masage, but it's not because their tissues have cleared up, it's because their tissues have grown scarred and numb. So it's all about the gentle approach... and then gentle exploration of what is deeper... to arrive at real insights.

Another general rule is that we should only go to about 70% to completion when trying/training challenging things. The Pusher will say "I need to go to 100%". This is too much, too soon. It's so much better to have three sits at 70% than trying to do one sit at 100% -- you know what I mean? There is a saying: "going slow is faster". 

Anyway, a classic practice for all of this is the four immeasurables.

Here is a normal buddhist description... "The four boundless qualities, enumerated in the early canon’s Mettanisamsa Sutta SN 46.54) as the “four Brahma dwellings,” further both of them. These four boundless qualities, which literally have “no measure” (apramana), are equanimity (upekkha), love (metta), compassion (karuna), and joy (mudita). By dissolving the boundaries that constrain us, these four qualities expand our capacity for experience." https://tricycle.org/magazine/four-immeasurables/

I actually like the plainer words: friendliness (metta), appreciation (mudita), acceptance (upekkha), and caring (karuna) as a way to make these ideas less lofty. So with four immeasurables, you basically cultivate joy/fun and jhana and then from that blissy state intend to embody one of the four. Eventually you work through all of them. So during a series of practice sessions you can cultivate:

friendliness  – establishing connection with your sense of body and mind and others - connecting with kindness (counteracts connecting with pushing/power) and joy/ecstasy (counteracts self-punishment)

appreciation  – establishing the right context for deeper work by appeciating how everything is interrelated, mutually influencing, dependent (this counteracts ill will and masochism) and cultivates real empowerment, which is the combination of power with respect for how things are

acceptance – recognizing limitation, dilemma, paradox - this is the real insight stage, where you don't hide your hope/fears from yourself, you learn to see how "the psychological shadow" is both a wound and the beginning of new power (this counteracts endlessly indulging in joy/ecstasy) and develops real equanimity (in otherwords, it allows you to accept the reality of the shadow side of things but not be depressed)

caring – this comes last because it is where you take all of the previous things and use them to establish presence in meditation and off cushion. Cariing is the ability to connect with by appropriately allowing the trial and error process of wisdom to happen (allowing our mind to work through it's limitations, allowing others to go through their dramas as they develop) which means having compassion (the ability being able to maintain presence; neither avoiding or indulging in positive, negative, or neutral experiences).

I would allow my body to cook up in joy/bliss/jhana/love and then "beam out" these feelings of friendliness, appreciation, acceptance, and caring to myself, friends, people who support me, people who oppose me, all beings on earth, all beings in the cosmos, and end with myself again.

Lots of possible variations, and it's really fun to play with different visualizaitions/rituals/cultivations. This is definitely a practice that every person should customize for themselves!  

Insight without joy is actually more like rationalization. 



 

@shargrol: Thank you, once again, for taking the time to formulate a thorough answer. Your reflections make a lot of sense to me. Now I have a much better idea of what to work on.

One last hopefully helpful thought...

The Pusher is also confused compassion. It's not trying to wreck your life. It's not trying to put a wall between you and your father. It's not trying to mess up everything it messes up. It actually has a lot of compassion, but confused compassion. It just thinks pushing is the answer to solve it's problem and thinks that if it doesn't push it will die. 

At some point, it could be interesting to do vipassina/therapy for the Pusher. Investigate what core problem motivates the Pusher, what wounds it has, what pain it feels, what kind of confused compassion is compelling it to Push as the answer to it's suffering. There will be some kind of core urge, which has a particular feeling tone. It's that feeling tone the Pusher must avoid. (But what if the Pusher was infused with bliss and jhana and was safe and protected and then it felt that feeling tone?)

The Pusher also has a simple mantra-like pre-verbal motivation like "I must Push, I cannot _____, otherwise I'll die." The pre-verbal motivation is the compulsion it must act out to avoid. It can be good to notice this thought appearing throughout the day, both on the cushion and off the cushion.

Also see if you can discover what fills in the blank spot in the motivation-- what does the Pusher fear more than anything?(Probably something like relaxation, enjoyment, self-esteem, feeling worthy, resting, intimacy, love, friendliness.) Explore what the Pusher thinks it cannot do or it will die. What if the Pusher feels safe enough to experience relaxation, enjoyment, self-esteem, feeling worthy, resting, intimacy, love, friendliness? What happens?

When you see the Pusher has a false problem, the Pusher itself loses a lot of it's power... and the Pusher transforms into it's wise compassionate opposite (probably some form of nurturing, mentoring, parenting, coaching wisdom.)

Through a process like this you can un-confuse the confused compassion of the Pusher.

I'm re reading Dune after 25 years and still find it fascinating. Yesterday I found this quote and couldn't help remembering what Shargrol wrote above  
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Time for a new log!