Forum: Practical Dharma

Usually when doing noting practice, I end up investigating impermanence, vibrating sensations.

The other night, I felt very noticeable pain in the back and legs, so I decided to go into a little more detail than simply noting "pain, pain".

At first, I tried to find the "borders" of the painful feelings. Tricky! The pain shifts around a lot, it turned out. At one time, I thougt I had found a "nucleus" of pain, but it vanished after a few moments, of course.

I didn't have such a hard time keeping my attention from rushing in on the pain, or turning elsewhere - I was able to just note these impulses.

But after a while, it all just became so awful, so annoying, so unasked-for, that I decided to stop meditating. "Woa! Almost followed it! Just note that impulse." After a few minutes, the same. It almost felt like a few years ago, when I started sitting for longer periods of time - the slightest pain would stongly draw my attention. Only this time, it wasn't the pain itself, but an unusually forceful "being-fed-up-with" meditating. "Is it time yet??" "Note: Wish to stop" "I'm really fed up with this" "Note: Aversion" and so on.

Afterwards, thinking about the experience, I had a nebulous hunch about the relationship between desire (second noble truth), and the defilements.

Anyway, what are your experiences with investigating unsatisfactoriness? What techniques do you use? How do you decide when to investigate unsatisfactoriness as opposed to impermanence or not-self? Do you mix these?

Cheers,
Florian

Hi Florian,
really interesting topic. Usually, when my noting speeds up really fast the unsatisfactoriness-factor shows up which feels like a brick wall. It´s annoying, like a flat stone flipping over water my attention gets repelled from the target as soon as noting gets fast enough. With practice I managed to stay with the vibrations during fast frequencies as well. I guess it´s just practice.
So let´s keep it going!
Martin

A nice complement to noting is asking, especially when facing "a brick wall". I used both "Resisting?" and "Avoiding?" to challenge and open myself to enter places where attention seems to implode on itself or simply bounce off. There's an affective component to attention, a source of curiosity and openness, vulnerability and acceptance.

Ah!

Something just surfaced from the depths of my memory - asking "Is that so?" (Or "resisting?" or "avoiding?", as you suggest).

Thanks! hat was really helpful, Hokai. Can't wait to try that

Cheers,
Florian

I had spoken to my teacher about having a lot of trouble with something similar sounding. He suggested that I ask questions as well, like "is this permanent?" "is this self?" and particularly to broaden the focus or object to cultivate more equanimity.

Another useful variation in my opinion is using different volumes during noting. Sometimes it helps to yell and sometimes to whisper the notes. For me it works, how about you?

One of my early teachers advised posing this question to oneself: "Avoiding relationship?" By relationship he meant all kinds, not simply human-to-human, or human-to-thing, but human-to-experience. What we prefer to avoid can come to dominate us. What we relate to we come to know, understand and feel compassion toward. It's easy to love the better angels of our nature. It's harder, but perhaps more valuable, to develop sympathy for the devil (with a bow to the Rolling Stones for that phrase).