General Practice Updates

Hello refugee pals,

I thought it would be good to start a thread for general practice updates. If anyone wants to share the leading edge of their practice at present, I guess this is the place to do it.

As for me, two things have been guiding my practice. First, I've been practicing metta (i.e. loving-kindness, good will) during some of my sits. I had played around with it before, but I never took it very seriously until recently. It is actually quite challenging. Simply intending good will toward myself or another brings up all kinds of resistance for one reason or another, and it provides me with a lot of "material" to work with. This has actually livened up my practice quite a bit. It has been feeling less "dull". Dullness still arises, and when I does I've learned to recognize, accept, inquire into, and untangle it (much like I try to do with various types of contemplative phenomena).

Second, I've been once again learning to love the plateau. Excessive striving is counterproductive. And yet, practice is necessary for transformation. So, learning to practice right here, right now, without worrying about where I'll end up works better for me in the long run (as I imagine it would for anyone). Of course, this is just the way people get good at things. It's a skills development issue. There's no use in trying to be a black belt when my skill level is more like a yellow belt. I'll end up practicing the wrong stuff, and my development will suffer setbacks. Best to just keep on trucking, exactly where I'm at, developing the at-the-edge-of-my-level skills that I have yet to master. This has been tricky, but I'm learning.

My practice still orients toward Progress of Insight cycles. I guess that's just how I learned to practice in the beginning, so it just keeps going. As I apply mindfulness to present experiencing, the cycles and stages just show up and do their thing. The important thing is to not practice simply to move through stages; but rather, to treat each moment of experience on its own terms - come what will.

I wrote more than I planned. Anyone else feel like taking a turn?

Jackson

Most of my sitting practice has been dealing with papanca/monkey mind issues. After a couple minutes' settling into myself, my linguistic mind ramps way up, and—especially if there's no guidance to latch on to at that moment—the commentary starts, and even if I'm able to return myself repeatedly to the breath, often the commentary just becomes narration, you know, an explicit 'Ok, we're going to the breath now. Allow the thought to recede, etc. etc.'—and then it begins to describe the quality of the meditation, to compose a recounting of the meditation as though it was being described to someone else after the fact.

I've been trying out various techniques to dissolve this. The best is probably an active perception of the breath and various body sensations, but sometimes that gets interrupted. Once, during a sit with Ajahn Geoff a couple weeks ago, I found myself basically occupying my linguistic faculty by actively pronouncing in my mind a single, continued, wordless sound, something like 'om', and just returning to it, in the way that you might count in-out, 1-2, bud-dho, et cetera. It was actually quite powerful and the sound increased in volume and power, until I was nearly bellowing it. The effects were unlike any other time I've sat, and I became very acutely aware of my body's energy, especially the concentric rings, formed by my arms and legs in one, and then by my hands and fingers in the second. To be honest, it was almost like one of those anime cartoons where the character starts bellowing and radiates energy. Shades of my previous martial arts training (long stopped) come to mind. I'm honestly not sure if it was particularly skillful, and I'm not sure I want to repeat the attempt, but it was sure interesting, anyway.

As most if not all of you know, my practice has taken a turn lately as I am turning to 12-step programs to finally begin dealing with my alcohol and drug addiction issues. This has been fun and exciting and I'm really glad.

Benefits for me so far:

- get to be part of a group of other spiritually minded people. This is nice. I hear a lot of useful stuff I wouldn't hear otherwise, I'm making some good friends for the first time in a long time, and there is often a sense of "presence" in the meeting rooms or in one-on-one conversations that is just wonderful and healing

- getting great relief from the basic suffering that addiction causes.

- the 12-step focus on "service to others" is bringing me in touch with valuable aspects of the 8-fold path that I've really ignored before now.

- being straight and sober is better for dharma practice overal, for me at least

- letting go, surrender -- another huge part of 12-step programs. And, again, for me, the central aspect of dharma practice. To me "turning my life over the care of god as I understand it/him/her/whaterver praying only for knowledge of his/her/its will for me and the power to carry that out (third step) " IS ... emptiness in action.

In my sitting practice lately -- for some unknown reason -- I'm really getting into concentration practices for the first time. This is something I've never taken to (I've always naturally preferred vipassana or a my own very related version of zazen), have never been good at, and never really understood the point of. My gut tells me right now that it is time to get better at this.

I think I'm also going to try to open myself up to finding some more opportunities to be of service to others. I'm not sure how this will manifest itself but I'm ready to try.

I'm still figuring out the second brain in my stomach



-cmarti

The figuring-brain can do only one thing right, regarding the stomach-brain-- R-E-S-P-E-C-T! [Tell, it, Aretha!]

I'm still figuring out the second brain in my stomach

-cmarti

I don't get it.

@cruxdestruct, I love your description of the narration. The mind really enjoys that, like a little kid describing a picture book outloud. "Look mommy, now the dog is going in the house!!"

In any case, my own practice is rather random at the moment. I've had a huge amount of life-upheaval lately (a big move, personal changes, adjustments to work schedule, travel, memories of the dead, etc.) and the resulting anxiety seems to generate physical pain and tension at times, especially in the face and stomach. When that tension is there I generally spend a few minutes doing noting practice, which dissolves it. Then I generally just sit, and often enough - as I am quite exhausted by everything that's going on - I start to fall asleep, with fragments of dreams and lapses in and out of consciousness. And sometimes mind runs off practicing upcoming conversations or working out parts of work assignments I need to do. But that all just does its thing and it's just fine, and I just sit, which is kind of novel for me.

Hi

Shortly before my birthday (end of february) I read your description (on another thread-- can't remember which; maybe Mike's "do you feel connected" thread?) of your current experience of your solar plexus, Chris, and something really tugged at me there.

I started to realize that of all the "centers" I couldn't remember ever really noticing that one, and began to gently investigate what it felt like to "be" there (or to be unable to "be' from there, more accurately). Suddenly I went from being pretty comfortably plateaued in my practice to discovering this swirling mass of anxiety and instability there-- like, BIG anxiety. The whole solar plexus area was just appearing and disappearing, and huge anxiety was just emanating from that place.

So long story short, having discovered this major suffering, and happy to have an opportunity to go a bit deeper in my practice, I ramped up my formal sitting and really dug in-- just welcoming all those sensations of anxiety, again and again, for hours at a time-- any spare time I'd just sit and welcome those sensations. Pretty unpleasant but I knew it was healing, things were shifting. Yeah-- I'm pretty sure this clue did come from your "do you feel connected" thread, Mike, because a lot of issues around connection and relationship came up around the solar plexus to be "digested". Finally the energetic pulses of anxiety had kind of expressed themselves enough after a week or two of intense and intensive sitting, and for the first time that I can remember I "had" a solar plexus, if you guys know what I mean. Only after the sensations smoothed out did there begin to arise some more cognitive insights into relationship, integrity, empathy, and clarity about what's "mine" and what I'm empathically reading in others. I began to see how much I take on what I read in others as if it were mine, without making the distinction between my feelings and empathy. Suddenly I could reliably "see" what another was feeling without having to feel it too. Pretty big shift for me, allowing me to be there for others in a more clear and relaxed way. Big thanks to Chris for sharing what turned out to be a big clue for me, and to Mike as well for starting such a great thread-- and to our whole community for being here and sharing things!!

Anyway, once I had integrated that area (of my body), I suddenly found myself in a really simple clear place in which there was very little "me", just very simple clear experience happening. On my birthday I had a car accident in a snowstorm. Immediately prior I had been enjoying this clarity and simplicity and had just started to notice that there seemed to be a very subtle, clear and totally impersonal timeless "me" in my heart which was enjoying the emptiness and clarity of experience, and that in fact this subtle observer was redundant, actually the only thing I could find that was complex and unclear in the simplicity and clarity.

This very subtle observer began to wink itself on and off, gradually recognizing itself as a redundancy-- it's hard to put in words, but like it realized it could do nothing but add a layer of complexity and dullness and dissociation to the sheer simplicity clarity and wholeness of reality. Subsequently I read a bit of Mahaboowa which seemed to describe it-- he uses the analogy of a man standing in a clear empty room, enjoying the empty clarity and spaciousness of the room, until he realizes that "he" is the only thing not empty and clear and open in the room-- and that in order for the room to be perfect, "he" has to disappear. It felt like that.

So when the circumstances suddenly shifted and it became obvious that I was going off the highway and headed for a rock outcrop, and could very well be severely injured or die, it just winked out. Whatever time left to me, "I" wouldn't waste it maintaining this fiction of being an "observer". The accident unfolded in utter clarity and peace and wholeness-- and then it was over, and somehow, I was completely unscathed. My car had launched off the rock, sailed through the air and landed on its side. I opened my door and climbed up and out, looking around at the beautiful and desolate wintry scene, fresh cold air and thousands of tiny ice and snow particles blowing in the stormy wind. No adrenaline crash then or later, no relief, just the simplicity. I began to handle the practicalities.

So for a week I was like that without any effort but due to circumstances was unable to sit. Whenever I interacted with others I felt a sense of integrity and simplicity and intimacy on a personal level and when there was no one to interact with there was just vivid openness and the immediacy of the senses. It gradually wore off and I found myself feeling paradoxically more normal-- more like I used to feel than I have in the past few years, almost as if I'd never meditated at all, and yet-- something was different.

The cutting edge of my sitting practice right now is to do a little breath counting for a few minutes and then to just "lighten up", easing off the sense of "me" which now feels like a palpable screen or layer superimposed on the simplicity and clarity and openness of reality. My practice is naturally gravitating to lightening that up till it becomes that very simple sense of presence in the heart area, like just two infinitesimal atoms slightly tugging at each other in the center of my heart, very clear and simple-- and yet infinitely more complex and unclear than the naked is-ness of whatever-- universe, reality, what have you. So I just relax and let that sense "roll up" into that very subtle tension in the heart and then relax completely. Then it's like the whole universe, my body intimate with it, without center or border-- like a bright clear vision happening no-where, to no-one.

Outside of formal sitting, which as I describe it above I would characterize as the shammatha aspect of my current practice, there is the informal daily insight aspect in which I gently attend to my mental-emotional states, seeing the way they arise, seeing how they (to me right now) seem to be uneccessarily complex-- how the whole realm of personal mental-emotional identifications which comprise daily moods and reactions seem to always boil down to some form of "toxic seriousness", "me" taking "myself" more seriously than others, than my bodily health, than my senses, than my environment. And yet, also noticing how the tendency to be some sort of impersonal, pure "witness", is actually a redundancy, as reality requires no observer, but just "is" with such sheer simplicity and clarity that any attempt to observe renders itself impossible and can only mar the clarity and simplicity.

So in a sense I feel a clear direction to my practice for the first time in a while, and yet the deeper I go into it the more I seem to just completely lose whatever I think I know or believe. Philosophical issues that long seemed settled are suddenly in play again. And the big upshot of this shift seems to be that I see that my orientation to practice has always had a "moral" quality to it, like I "should" practice, because it's "good" to practice (for name-your-reason). Whereas lately it seems like my orientation or criteria for practice has lost all the (unconscious) seriousness and moralism that drove me in the past, replaced by what I can only describe as an aesthetic criteria.

Just prefer the simplicity and clarity and openness to the self-obscuring, self-confusing, dissociated modes of experiencing. Nothing right about one and wrong about the other, nothing heavy about noticing the difference, just a simple and honest clarity that to the extent that I'm confusing, distorting, resisting or contorting myself-- it's simply preferable, aesthetically, to NOT do that. As if each moment can be a work of art-- if it's allowed to "improvise" itself, if I can get out of my own way.

Nice to hear about all y'all's practices

LOL I guess that was more like long story long

Very enjoyable quick session before bed tonight. Part of my happiness was just being able to sit and being so much more comfortable, physically and mentally, than my documented last time.

I haven't really been doing any kind of insight meditation at all. To be honest, I feel like I could devote all of my meditation to simple awareness, quieting, and observing the body without experiencing a single break or realization, and still have plenty to work on for a while. I alternated simple body/breath observation with metta practice, and both were fruitful: I found a couple interesting, satisfying spots in the body (viz. the back of my eyeballs) to sit in for some breaths, and I focused my metta on some friends of mine who I really should have a lot more goodwill and empathetic joy for than I do right now. Simply visualizing their realization of peace and happiness, I couldn't help but smile wide. Metta really, really works.

Endurance was still an issue, as it has been in my solo practice. I have a lot more trouble sustaining to, say, 20 minutes when I'm by myself, whereas 35 will fly by if I'm in a group session. I should try guided meditation solo.

Has anybody tried binaural/drone meditation?

Hi Zach! Yeah I've gotten a lot of mileage out of binaural beats myself. I have some software that lets the user create their own binaural routines and mix them with other sounds/music but I haven't used it yet. So far I've used the commercial ones.

Thanks for sharing, everyone. I enjoy being let-in on the leading edge of your respective on-going practices. It's encouraging to discover that there are those of us who continue to apply right effort to our practice, over and over again. This practice is for life.

Zach - using a meditation word like "Om" or "Bud-dho" is a great way to use the verbal-thinking aspect of mind to your advantage in practice. The monkey-mind thing will continue to show up at different points in your practice. I know that for me it happens very predictably during each sit, in a somewhat stage-specific sort of way. This, of course, comes from my background in Mahasi-style vipassana. I don't think everyone's practice unfolds and cycles in stages in quite the same way. Anyway, try using the meditation word while practicing different ways of breathing into your body. You can start to see how different ways of breathing, as well as different ways of visualizing what is happening (e.g. breath entering at different points, or through every pore, or thinking of the body as a breath-energy field). This can really evoke rapture, which can catalyze your practice past the point where directed thought plays a central role.

Mike - I'm really happy to hear that you're feeling good about your involvement with AA. What really matters is having a group of folks you feel comfortable with and supported by. Of course, I'd love to hear more about how you're doing, either here or via PM. I'd also like to know more about your concentration practice, to learn about how that unfolds for you.

Ona - your description of practicing during a time of "life upheaval" is a clear reminder that some of the best times to practice are when our reactive "stuff" is triggered by stress. I can see why Zen teacher would instruct newly realized students to live in poverty for ten years. That kind of life is stressful. It brings up tons of material to work with. I imagine this time of practice will be very fruitful to you, even if it doesn't feel like it.

Jake - you wrote a lot in your post that really resonated with me. Specifically, you wrote: "I began to see how much I take on what I read in others as if it were mine, without making the distinction between my
feelings and empathy. Suddenly I could reliably 'see' what another was
feeling without having to feel it too. Pretty big shift for me,
allowing me to be there for others in a more clear and relaxed way." I know that you're considering going into a psychology/counseling related field in the future (or maybe you've already started training - I don't remember). If you do, this way of experiencing others feelings in a less filtered way will be a great asset to you. Not every is able to intuit emotional information from others very skillfully or clearly, which can make it somewhat impossible to see behind the mask (so to speak). Learning to experience the presence of another in an emotional way, with fewer ego-defenses operating, is such an aid to therapeutic practice.

Thanks again, guys.

Jackson

A bit of physiology trivia that I'm prone to bringing up [and if I've already done it here, pardon my forgetfulness] is that the gut LITERALLY produces more of the neurotransmitter serotonin than the brain does. As those who have delved into what biochemistry is involved in depression will know, serotonin is pretty much the Holy Grail. Comes to that, it features prominently in the biochemistry of meditation.

The other factoid about serotonin, which I remember from my involvement with a depressive smoker, a few years back-- is that nicotine has a complex and antagonistic relationship to serotonin. And to gut function.

So there's nothing merely mystical about encountering and respecting gut-wisdom. You could see the rest of the body, including the brain, as the gut's means for getting its needs met.

Kate - if there's one thing I love it's the gut brain stuff. I love the idea that everything else is just there to get the gut's work done.

More mystically, just now it reminded me of something Adyashanti said that I had jotted (and this is from notes I took listening to a video or podcast, so the wording is my own):

there is a gradual
dissolution of personal will, uncovering of repressed emotions, etc as
the transcendent experience of awakening drifts down from mind to heart to
gut. in months after especially, but even years, the "knower" "doer"
motivating factors are disturbed "if there's nothing to do, why get out
of bed" - can become dysfunctional for a while. divine will needs to
fully integrate into heart and gut.

thoughts?

Yes, if I remember correctly, there are actually neurons-- not just nerves-- in the gut, as well as around the heart and solar plexus areas. So the brain in the gut is no metaphor, but physiologically real. Very interesting stuff and a little google-ing should bring up some interesting material. Dan Seigel's work looks at "integration", as the definition of "health", in multiple dimensions. One is "vertical integration", which is the integration of all these layers of the "embodied brain" as he calls it, reaching throughout the body, but especially throughout the trunk. Vertical integration is the ability to fluidly process information/experience at and from all these levels, rather than being literally stuck in our heads. There are definite brain wiring changes that facilitate this integration, which can be cultivated by specific modes of directing attention (surprise surprise).

Another dimension of integration according to Siegel is the interpersonal. This involves changes to the parts of the brain to do with empathy, and leads to the kind of insight I was expressing above which you singled out Jackson. Seigel specifically mentions the importance of this for people in the helping professions-- and I expect it would also come in handy in more informal, voluntary peer helping situations like AA, Mike. Of course it's important throughout life; I would say it's essential for parenting. Basically it's a way of "seeing" what others are feeling, without going the extra step of having my mirror neuron system simulate their state of arousal in my own nervous system. this connects to vertical integration too, as I understand it, since the mirror neuron system involves sending signals from the higher levels down into the embodied brain, causing hormonal and arousal states which "mirror" that of the other person. This is a sort of "empathy training wheels"-- it seems necessary in order to learn to take others' states seriously, but ultimately it's redundant. It's actually enough to see and understand another and respond, without simulating in my own body their anger, sadness, fear or whatever.

He talks a lot about "compassion fatigue" and burnout in the helping professions coming from the lack of this skill (of differentiating, viscerally, my feelings from yours, thus avoiding the extremes of callous disregard and undifferentiated suffering-with), and hence in some sense, a misunderstanding of what compassion really is-- at least from a mindfulness perspective.

Compassion is probably a poor translation choice for what buddhism has in mind by "karuna", since compassion literally means "suffering with" and is basically an emotion word. Karuna, which is the sanskrit word translated by compassion, comes from the same root as karma. Karuna is "action", a response in word or deed to anothers' suffering which actually helps the other person. There is no connotation of suffering with, although there is the sense that the suffering of the other is seen clearly and responded to in action-- kr=action. Interesting, eh? Two modes of being-in-the-world, both active, yet one tied to preserving an imaginary sense of self at al costs, the other actually available for intimate appropriate response to others.

Jake, that's a really useful and interesting distinction between compassion and karuna. Thanks for that.

@hipster - thanks, yes. A friend recently said if a practice only works when things are easy and doesn't help in the most difficult times, it's not much use.

Body and mind have been overwhelmed with anxiety these last few days.

Yes, thanks all. Very nice to be able to share and to benefit from what you all share. I'm coming to believe that Sangha is really essential to my path, and I find it here. Without some of the clues I encounter in what others share, I might never come to certain experiential understandings, or it might take a much longer time.

Pretty interesting session this week. I was in the middle of a pretty successful but unremarkable sit when I suddenly felt flooded with a weird sense of easy gratitude, and I found myself repeating, 'thank you' several times over. What seemed like a moment after that, I felt myself completely suffused with this sense of rapture that wouldn't go away. I found myself leaning deeply on my hands (one hand was curled into the sole of my half-lotus foot, I think the other was just on my knee) and stretching my head up. And I was grinning this giant, shit-eating grin. God knows what i must have looked like from outside my head! But I really couldn't stop myself from taking that position. And as I stretched out further, the joy kept flowing through me, and I had a series of strange body sensations: my flesh, especially the flesh of my face, seemed to expand and get thicker, so it felt like my whole body was swelling up and my head was swelling up on top of it. And as it thickened, and my head swelled up, my flesh began to feel incredibly dense—exactly as though it were a sort of dense, relatively hard putty. More fleshy than stone, I was very sure of that. Anyway, it's hard to say how long this sensation continued, but certainly it went on for long enough that I had brain cycles to feel myself in this position, and notice these sensations, and had time to have my mind wander a little bit, wonder if I should try to recenter, etc—all without any abatement from all of the above. Finally I cooled down and by the time we came up from meditation, my primary physical sensation was the usual series of extreme pins and needles in my legs (perhaps relatedly, my leg was more thoroughly numb that session than it ever has been). Though I did emerge considerably more at ease than when I had entered.

Anyway, it was very interesting, as I say. Maybe it happens to a lot of people. I would say it was rather fun, though I'm not sure I would purposefully seek it out again.

I was talking about that sort of experience with a friend last night. It seems to just be the way it works - you get the heavy, dark, tense, cramped, dull, discouraging or frightening bits, and the pendulum swings the other way and you get open, expansive, blissful, joyous bits. Back and forth, back and forth. Like a slow breathing or a macro size cycle of sleeping and waking.

No point in seeking it. It's just doing its own thing.

If I recall Shinzen calls it expansion and contraction, Adyashanti calls it opening and closing.

Are there neuroscience explanations for this phenomenon?

Well from a general principles point of view, it seems like meditation cuts back on novel stimuli, like sensory deprivation. The brain's response to that is generally to start coming up with its own stimuli. Like dreaming, though, this just gives a basic notion of why experience becomes more plastic, but doesn't say so much about why specific dreams or meditation experiences happen.

If we (here on the forum) knew enough about neuroanatomy, we could pull a James Austin and describe likely regions that were activated in the experience (brain regions correlated to body perception in the head, feelings of rapture, etc.) but that wouldn't be an explanation so much as a re-phrasing of Zach's experience in terms of corresponding brain processes.