Starting to get a lot more serious about practice again now that second path insights are starting to show up in force, after deliberately holding off on making much progress for a while after landing stream entry in order to deal with daily life householder morality stuff.

After a long period of instability in my life (in the process of moving abroad to live with my partner) things look like they'll be a lot more stable for a while soon, so I'm finally looking into going on retreat for the first time - I'm one of those rare people that managed to hit first path without a retreat, I guess, though I also first crossed the A&P when I was probably around 5 or 6 years old, so it's not a path I would necessarily recommend, not like there is a choice.
I've been looking at Gaia House since I've heard good things about that retreat center and since they're within Europe (for some definition of Europe) it would help keep the cost down a lot. They offer a 70% discount rate for people up to 25 years old and I turn 26 this summer, so I might see if I can make use of that still since money is tight, but you have to call them for it and I have terrible phone anxiety :/. I'd have to find out which of their retreats would be most suitable too since not all are open to first time retreatants and I'd like to go for at least a week to really get some momentum going.

In terms of actual practice I've managed to stabilize on having high quality daily sits again. I feel like I stand to gain a lot from finally really powering the daily life practice a lot too, so I've been working on that, which has gotten much easier post-Stream Entry.
In formal sitting practice I'm trying to work up towards longer sits but not making very much progress, I've hit a wall pretty hard. I can do 30 minute sits without much trouble but that has been my sit duration for a while now and going much beyond it in a way that's useful practice and not just forcing myself to sit still is really difficult. I'd like to be able to reliably do 45 minute sits for the time being.

To help make my sits a bit longer I've started adding more steps to my sits and taking some more time with each, so my current routine now looks like this:
- Reflect on motivation; why am I doing this? What do I expect to happen, why is that beneficial, why do I expect these techniques to work?
- Reflect on gratitude; notice how fortunate I am to have access to these teachings and techniques, how much of a miracle it is that all this was discovered and preserved for thousands of years; reflect on how fortunate I am to have life circumstances that allow for serious practice.
- Make a formal resolution to practice using my intended techniques for the duration of the sit for the benefit of all beings.
- Cultivate metta, mostly directed either at myself or towards someone who I know is suffering. I use this to cultivate tranquility and access concentration too.
- (Optional) if I feel my concentration is too diffuse or sensations related to metta start to get vague I briefly redirect my attention to sensations of the breath at the nostrils since that helps to solidify concentration.
- Once sensations of piti start getting strong enough to be distracting I switch to focussing on them, trying to stabilize first jhana.
- Once sensations of piti start feeling tiresome and irritating I let it fade more towards the background and try and put sukha in the foreground instead, encouraging the mind to shift into second jhana, though that's very much still a work in progress.
- (Optional) Either before attempting the shift to second jhana or when coming out of jhana sometimes I send out wishes/intentions in a magickal kind of way, supported by the metta cultivated earlier.
- After coming out of jhana I switch to gentle noting for the duration of the sit.

I find that I really need the increased tranquility and concentration now to make progress; I need a mind that's pretty still to really be able to penetrate the deeper subtler layers of stuff. Metta has been really helpful in allowing me to relax into seclusion and feeling good, something which is still really tricky for me. I feel like the really fast, sharp, dissecting kind of concentration/investigation I used before would probably still work at this point but that's not where I want to go right now.

Mapping stuff feels much less useful right now as now there's just too many levels of "fractals" visible. I've gotten really good at making the first path cycles progress just by recalling what each nana feels like, but now both first path nanas and second path nanas are occuring at the same time, and inclining the mind too much towards mapping the second path nanas tends to just call up the first path nanas instead. I'm fairly confident I'm starting to run into early dark night stuff in second path though, but I don't really find it fruitful to map "what stage I am in" at any given specific moment.

I feel pretty silly over getting smug after landing first path for a while since I can see clearly now that not all that much was accomplished. For what it's worth I knew it was silly at the time too and didn't really let it impact my actions too much.

I think fruitions have gotten significantly less common, though I had a really satisfying one a couple days ago. Mind that I've never been able to "make fruitions happen" in any sense and they've always been things that catch me by surprise, most often just walking around mindfully or lying in bed and only occasionally when still on the cushion when I'm just daydreaming and not practicing anymore. If they stop occurring for a while I don't think I'll really miss them now that I've confirmed the last bits of phenomenology I wanted to confirm about them (the bit about "fruitions always happen at the end of the out breath" especially I really wanted to confirm), they're not "all that" though the rush and sense of refreshment is nice.

Welcome !!!

What a journey, welcome indeed!

Thank you, friends.

I took a pretty big dose of edibles (weed) earlier today as a belated celebration of 4/20.
Weed tends to work wonders on my concentration, it's rather psychedelic for me and something about the relaxation really works out.
I was discussing the difficulty of teaching the dhamma with my boyfriend and then I turned that towards magick, as the ability to teach well is very magickal.
I commented on magickal effects being something I really wanted to learn more about as I naturally get them in high enough doses that it feels like a significant issue in how I relate to other people, and also in making it very hard for me to relax into deeper states of concentration
This led me to contemplate how malleable my perception of the world and my mind are, which started giving my phenomenology very formless characteristics Which has happened before.

I remembered reading Daniel writing about how it's not true formless realms unless the body completely vanished, which I really wanted to see, so I sat down and inclined the mind towards spaciousness, thinking "it's so big, it's so big"
That definitely amplified the sense of spaciousness but I couldn't push it far enough on a pinch
I went back down to 4th jhana stuff but there was too much excitement now
I tried going back to 3th jhana but it was very chaotic there, then going down to 2nd I suddenly had an insight about the interaction of vippassana and samatha, seeing how 3th vippassana jhana was changing the experience of 2nd samatha jhana as they are very different and the effect is really silly
I went back to 1st jhana stuff and suddenly I noticed that the there was no "I" that was "shifting jhanas"
The jhanas were just coming up and the mind was shifting towards them automatically as was necessary
Then I realized the same thing was true for the meditation object too, the meditation object was shifting around more to the body for a while
I had been trying to stabilize concentration using metta which didn't really work, very briefly the breath but that seemed too much of a jump from the boundless formless things I'd been trying to do just before, then the body which is always really good and I was able to work through a lot of the weird body posture issues I'd been having
Anyhow then I realized that the body was just posturing itself as well and then I just felt like getting up, noticed that the getting up was also just happening by itself, and just let that happen and went to write this here
When I focus on it I can tune into it pretty well but it's a bit destabilizing if I do and makes it hard to think

This feels very clearly A&P to me while I also notice that dark night stuff is very nearby
I think I should focus on stabilizing this stuff more though, I can't afford to stop practicing now and that itself would be pointless, but I feel like I should really resolve to analyze this A&P territory for all it's worth since I haven't done it enough justice
For some definition of "I"... I feel pretty humbled now, I was definitely thinking myself a fair bit smarter than I was, though to my credit I was also aware of that issue and was giving it a fair bit of attention
it's just intertwined with self-esteem issues elsewhere, and I'm definitely better off overcorrecting towards "arrogant" for a while; the two are very linked

My relationship to this plant have grown pretty complicated, huh. I don't have much issues with other drugs anymore and am much happier with my relationship to them, but weed does so much for me. It's hard decisionmaking when the benefits and shadowsides are both big and very evenly matched. This was after a month-long break which has been really good.
Edibles feel a lot less toxic and more healing to me, and being a bigger commitment is good since it discourages impulsive use. Taking longer to kick in also just always helps a ton with anything potentially addictive, I feel. Something like today at a non-degenerate rate would not be bad for me at all. I understand that the vast majority of my gains today though are because I've gotten my daily life morality very well in order, getting more exercise and eating and living healthier than ever and few obligations, as well as deliberately training in concentration and cultivating metta and such. And just doing meditation in high enough doses.

In hindsight I don't know how to feel about what I did during stream entry review. I think I was definitely overly cautious, I'm towards the tail end of a complicated multi-year process of moving abroad to live with my partner so I just figured all my effort should be going into not rocking the boat on that and making it all go smoothly. I did succeed in making everything go very smoothly but I feel like with more mindfulness and concentration and such it would've been significantly easier. I did need to meditate pretty regularly, but overall it was maybe every other day or even less and at points of it it was absent most days. I did make tiem to attend some 4-hour online mini-retreats and I got quite a bit out of that in terms of technique, but I never really got my concentration up high enough nor did I power on the daily life practice pretty much at all.

I think I could've gotten it done using strong resolutions not to progress too far and review deeper instead, and that toning down the practice probably caused more problems than it solved
Then again I did also review quite well, but mostly on the cycles, I learned to go through them quickly when they come up and I did some practicing with calling them up in purpose, slowing them down, going out of order etcetera because I just couldn't help myself
But that felt like a bit too much magickal power at the time, being able to tune my mind to that extent felt like biting off a bit more than I trusted myself to chew even though it would've been fine, but it was a hard-learned caution.
I guess that ultimately is very related to the insights I had today, so going there probably would've actually progressed things to an extent I didn't want. It's amazing that the mind seems like it already knows what the insights are, otherwise how could it stop you from having them
I guess if you follow this train of thought enough it leads towards the weird intriguing "you are already enlightened" stuff, but I think I'll enjoy the rest of my drug trip with my partner rather than go down that rabbit hole ^_^)

I would apologize for the ramble but I guess it's my practice log

It is your practice log indeed : ) keep up the good work! I recently started a log as well and I'm finding it useful in developing momentum and also playing with effort and ease. Blessings to you

Thank you Louise.

Attention feels extremely out of phase at the moment. Sitting is quite possible as there's a lot of stillness, but trying to direct the mind towards anything is hardly possible now. It's weird to realize that I can be in a state where mindfulness and concentration are quite high and the mind is still, and yet everything is very vague and fleeting, leading to a clear experience of vagueness.

I wonder how I can best utilize this particular mindspace. For now I think I'll just relax into it and try my best to at least maintain the regular rhythm of my everyday life. I'm not particularly thrilled about what is likely to come in the practice in the forseeable future, since I don't really want my daily life to be disturbed too much, but it is how it is, I guess.

Occasionally I have interesting insights or interesting things to say, but I can't really muster the will and concentration to write them out, so they're just kind of stewing in the back of my mind somewhere, and that's pretty draining in its own right.

At least going through these experiences with a much higher level of clarity now makes them feel a lot more useful and meaningful. This definitely feels like new territory, but at least now I can see a point to what's happening, I still feel like I could really be getting a lot more practice in. In principle my life circumstances allow for it, but it's hard to really settle into it, living in this tiny run-down apartment with two people while we search for a new place. The lack of privacy is an issue as well since between work from home and the weekend, my partner is home most days.

The new meditation territory seems much more centered around craving and aversion. Craving especially feels more like a thorn every day; it's something I feel glad to let go of. I feel deeply for all beings that are tied up in this. I notice just how much time I spend ruminating on various desires and fantasies.

I definitely notice insight stages occurring, but there's many layers of it and they interact in strange and interesting ways. There's interactions between the new territory and the old territory, between stages and their substages, and between vippassanic and jhanic modes of attention.

Unfortunately I can't say I'm doing a very good job of controlling bleedthrough into my interactions with other people right now. I really try my best, but I'm bad at controlling my emotions.

I'm starting to think more about how I can gear my practice towards my personal inclinations. I generally learn best if I can learn something in a way that's very integrated with everything else in my life, getting very regular but small doses with lots of breaks over a long time, with a lot of theorizing and discursive thought. I also get a lot out of being able to utilize my creativity as well. I think it'll be good to let go of normative ideas of what good practice should be for a while and just do what I think will work, which I feel much more empowered to do post-Stream Entry.

Writing this practice log has been good. There's something super powerful about actually writing/speaking out ideas and sharing them with another person; it really helps drive them home.

A lot of emotional shadow stuff has been coming to the foreground. Proximally it manifests mostly as envy but there's also aspects regarding expectations, bits of vanity and obsession with the body -- I think my hair is definitely thinning, lol. It's all stuff that's very tied up in imagining there's a "self", and feelings of conceit and entitlement that come with that. A lot of it is triggered by becoming a lot more social again and facing tricky sexuality/gender related questions again. This mirrors what happened during my last major A&P-through-Dark-Night cycle before SE.

Karma really is a bitch, huh? Having naturally strong but very fickle and poorly controlled concentration abilities is a massive footgun. I still feel the effects daily of lots of very strong and dark ill will, resentment and general "dark jhana" stuff I fostered close to a decade ago, even though I now totally disavow that stuff. Likewise I'm very burdened by similar mental stuff I did riding very high A&P concentration into dark night stuff in the cycle I mentioned last paragraph -- an affair involving an ill-considered relationship and then a very painful breakup. I am immeasurably grateful I was able to find MCTB and through it the dharma around that time.

All of this has kind of left me in a bind, because years of having this stuff happen has made me very aware of how much of a double-edged sword strong concentration is and how many dumpster fires I have left in my wake because of it, which makes it very hard to actually allow strong concentration to arise and cultivate itself. The effect is very scattering and depressing. There's a lot to be said for training well in morality before training in strong concentration, as not only is strong concentration a potentially very dangerous power tool, it's also the case that strong concentration really has to be allowed to arise, and the system will try and prevent that from happening if it doesn't trust itself.

The flip side of that of course is that concentration is a skill like any other and has to be actively practiced to be mastered, and strong concentration can arise naturally without training. It's a similar story for insight, which is greatly helped by strong concentration, but insights significant enough to really mess your stuff up can also arise unintentionally quite easily.

I do strongly feel like I really, really need to get my concentration trip in order at this point, but it's hard to get a foothold on it. As I said, I naturally enter deep concentration states easily, but doing it on demand, sustaining it, sustaining or changing the object of concentration and growing or shrinking the breadth of the concentration object are much harder. It'll be a work in progress for a while.

On a higher level, I'm not sure what to prioritize; with the sense field being as erratic as it is with intrusive "stuff" coming up in high quantities and general energy levels, concentration levels and such fluctuating wildly it seems hard to practice the kind of consistency and finesse necessary to master concentration; I also don't want to amplify difficult stuff to beyond what I can handle. Right now morality stuff is still top priority. Concentration itself can act very stabilizing as well, and resolving strongly to focus on concentration and not investigate too hard might slow down the destabilizing phenomena. On the other hand, at this point I really don't think I can hold insights back anymore.

Working hard on insight and gunning for calmer waters is also an option. I definitely feel like I am a lot more on top of things now than I would've been in the past, and so far what's been going on has been a healthy level of challenge rather than the being way in over my head it was before. I'm also cautiously optimistic about what's the come, but it's hard to know. On the other hand, I feel like getting a handle on the concentration thing is 20 years overdue by now, and it might be irresponsible cranking the insight engine looking for the kind of stability that's very hard to come by in this inconstant world. I also just really don't want to bite off more than I can chew.

It's very liberating to realize that as long as I can control the bleed-through there's just really nothing bad about what's occuring. In fact, it's very healing, and I can tell it's necessary. That by itself helps a lot to muster the kind of equanimity and faith necessary to let it all happen. Getting my morality trip in order has also been a massive support; the benefits of a healthy diet, stable sleep schedule and regular exercise can hardly be overstated.

In terms of actual practice I think I will give up on extending my sits to 45 minutes for the time being, especially since I've stopped using a clock. I'll dedicate my usual 30 minute morning sit to morality and concentration, and pepper insight throughout my day. I'll focus more on the joyful appreciation and equanimity brahma viharas, as those are a very good antidote to the specific troublesome "stuff" I am encountering; currently I neglect these and focus on metta and compassion since those are much easier to generate for me.