Andy's Practice Thread

[AndyW]

60 mins this evening. Distracted first fifteen minutes in which I unsuccessfully tried to get into jhana. May have skimmed the top of first, but probably not. Then noting. More aversion than yesterday, but generally pretty stable concentration until the last five minutes or so when I started to get restless. Conscious that my awareness of the middle and lower part of my torso is very poor, and that I tend to collapse the body in my mind, even to the extent of imagining it collapsed, with the shoulders more or less growing out of the hips.

Noting: "prickling", "holding", "releasing", "expectations", "aversion", "heat", "burning", "tingling", "imaging thoughts", "imaging thoughts", "aversion", "softening", "release".

[kennethfolk]

Andy, if you don't mind text noting, try making a word cloud and uploading it to your thread; it gives a great visual snapshot of the entire session. For example, you could type all those words in your post above (without the quotation marks) into the text window and convert it into a word cloud with one click. I've been using worditout.com.

[AndyW]

I haven't updated this journal in many months, but this evening's sit seemed significant and so it felt necessary to record it somewhere.

So I have been continuing to alternate between outloud Mahasi noting, and Adyashanti/zazen style doing nothing. Usually the former in the morning, and the latter in the evening. My sit just started off with the intention to surrender, to relinquish control, to do nothing. There was no anxiety about the lack of anything to do, although sometimes thoughts would emerge about how to "do" surrender. Then this happened: I became aware that I was lost in thought about work or something. So I made the effort to come back to nothing. Or rather, "I" didn't, because this happened all of its own accord. There was just the thought "I am coming back to surrender", but this movement was not initiated by "me". The observation arose that a train of thought comes to an end all by itself, and the movement back to surrender emerges also by itself. Then the thought arose that all I need to do is sit back and observe this whole process unfolding. Then the thought arose: why does there need to be an observer? At this point there was a lot of energetic phenomena, cool tingles, all very A&P to Dark Nighty, with rapture, fear, disgust, sadness and so on, expressed in cool energy. More interrogative thoughts about the observer arose during all this, asking "why should there be an observer? Where is the observer? And what is this fear/irritation protecting or standing in front of? If anything?" I felt something contract in the head, and sort of spin around a bit. Then the timer rang to let me know when there is five minutes left of the sit, so that I can do some metta. As always, I began with myself, but somehow it wasn't clear what the "I" of "May I be safe and protected" really was. I could only come up with "May this body be safe and protected". When it was time to do others, this felt especially immediate and sweet.

No conclusions, but a nice feeling of spaciousness and vividness of experience remains. All feels good, and yet barely different.

Metta, everyone!

[Russell]

Nice report Andy! Good to hear from you.