Thitatto's practice blog

[thitatto]

Meditated 1 hour and 10 min today. Gets up into Equanimity towards the end of last sit. Doesn't become a Jhana state like it did some days, but I'm staying with the strobing light in the visual field, having my eye gaze towards my eye-brow center, and feeling some activity going on in my eye brow center as well. Seems pretty straight forward now. Just do this as much as I can manage. Planning to do a solo-retreat this weekend, supported by scheduled sessions with my noting partner.

[thitatto]

First day of my little home-retreat, and I'm starting to wonder whether it happened to me as well. I'm also worried about scripting the experience, because I have been reading NickP's journal closely.

But here is what happened. I really had this really perfect equanimity going, and from the beginning I really set out to just enjoy my self for this retreat. Do some noting aloud to sharpen up my concentration, but not really push myself very much, do a little yoga, drink a cup of tea while doing some rest in awareness practice, etc, just have a really good time enjoying silence.

And I really did enjoy it tremendously. My mind was getting really really still, and there was no thrill to it, I just felt like a perfectly normal guy with a very quiet mind, so just perfectly normal, but without the monkey mind. Concentration was not a question, when I did walking meditation, I was just with my feet and my breath all the time without hardly trying. As I told my noting partner just before this last sit "if I could live in this state for the rest of my life, I would have been really happy."

And then, when we started to meditate, my energy started to build up, and I was like, yeah, this is really peace of cake, just cruising here with this partner noting technique, all though I don't really need to this right now, I don't mind doing it either, and very quickly I thought I had this famous blip. It seemed to originate from my eye brow center. Like it could have been a discontinuity in the totality of my experience, but it was noticed with like a sort of a jerk in my eye brow center, perhaps as if there was like a little jump in my experience. My mind started racing: "Was that it?", "No, it couldn't have been already", "Well, they say it is sort of a anti-climax."

So anyways, what I was left with afterwards was that I lost all that energy that was in my equanimity, as if my mind was building up to become even more still and more like turbo-present, and I'm left with feeling a little bit sad and disappointed, and feeling that the build-up that I've experienced today is gone, and the shift was pretty sudden. I'm still calm, and my mind is still fairly quiet, but with a touch of sadness and disappointment to it. Disappointed that that strong Equanimity that was seemingly going to last for the rest of the retreat (or so I unconsciously assumed) left so soon.

There is still tingling sensations going on in my whole body, and I still see vibrations of light when I close my eyes, but I don't feel like pursuing those vibrations, like I did when my energy was building up, because the energy to go deeper into concentration is gone.

So anyways, sort of embarrassing if this is just scripting or whatever, but I guess this is how it works in this community, and I'll continue my retreat like planned tomorrow regardless.

Guess it could have been the A&P Event as well, but I've had like tons of meditation induced manic episodes before, and I'm wallowing in the Dark Night all the time, and the Equanimity I experience is far more chilled-out than anything related to the word manic. I also experience the Equanimity as something that comes at the end of my meditation, when things gets really calm and ok, and I've never experienced something coming after it.

Anything specifically to look out for as I go along with my schedule for tomorrow?

[thitatto]

Pretty sure what was reported in the last post wasn't it.

This practice weekend is now over. Managed to get in 5-6 hours of formal practice both saturday and sunday, and a lot of yoga and time in silence as well.

I don't think Equanimity is my baseline any more. It's more like my cutting edge, but certainly not where I spend most of my time.

Except for the last 20 min of todays last sit, I was nowhere close the kind of Equanimity I reported on friday. These last 20 min where pretty exceptional though. There were tingling sensations through-out my whole body, all connected together, instead of separate patches here and there, I had a really narrow focus on the strobing visual field right in front of my 3rd eye, and a lot of activity in my 3rd eye as well, which also became part of the focus. The narrow focus started to take up the whole of my experience, and going deeper into that seemed like the right way to go. Next time.

My goal for this next week is to continue my daily sittings and in daily life to pay particularly extra attention towards unpleasant sensations in my chest and abdomen, in order to avoid spinning around in my mind trying to figure out how to fix my life, but rather be present with those unpleasant sensations.

[thitatto]

Meditated 1 hour and 50 min today. Getting up to the point where I can disband with noting and just stay with the strobing visual field. Realized that I'm forcing it when I come to this point, almost as if I'm trying to "break into" my 3rd eye. I probably start to force it because I start to think I'm really close to stream entry, and then I'll try to rush it. So this time I tried to relax just even more, and I experienced with narrow focus around my 3rd eye area, and panoramic focus, and going back and forth. Seems like I naturally start to foucs in again at some point when I'm in panoramic focus, and then after a while, it is good to let go of narrow focus again, and zoom out. Perhaps it has a natural rythm to it.

[thitatto]

1 hour of walking meditation and 1 hour of noting aloud today. Reached what seems like a very stable state of Equanimity at the end today. I am getting more interested on where I am on the maps all day long now. Realizing perhaps I'm experiencing much more A&P and Dark Night than I initially thought. For instance I've been "running around" today daydreaming intensely about how cool it is to meditate and that I want to become a meditation master, and the mind just goes on and on about how intensely cool all this is, and then suddenly I have some really strong kicks of restlessness and irritation. When I eventually reach Equanimity all of that seems to be put into a much more sober and peaceful perspective.

[thitatto]

50 min walking meditation and 40 min noting aloud today. Nothing new to report. Would have been really good if I could exhaust my need to reflect around this process. But hopefully I can be less intense with my friends and relatives by journalling about it here

[thitatto]

40 mins of noting aloud today. Been going through some inspired manic phase since I took up meditation again, but now it seems like the air went out of it, I'm pretty tired and looking forward to a normal night of sleep tonight. Planning some extra sits for the weekend.

[thitatto]

30 min walking meditation and 45 min of noting aloud. Seemed like I got into high equanimity for the last 5 min, which was surprising. Been uninspired and almost felt like giving up on the whole thing today. Strange how tiny the distance between feelings of failure and success are. Sometimes (often!) I make too much of a project out of this in my mind, but I calmed down when I reminded myself I could at least do 30 min of noting aloud per day. I'm thinking about making that into some sort of "safety net" for my daily practice.

[thitatto]

Meditated for 4 hours both saturday and sunday. Mostly it was just dry, unpleasant and rough. Appreciated the increased focus on the practice, and really getting drilled on the technique, but I'm questioning whether spending so much time practicing is a good way to spend my time. I find it strange that when I can pretty easily get into very peaceful, still, and pleasent states in daily life practice, the whole "juice" and life seems to go out of it when I intensify.

[thitatto]

40 min of noting aloud today. Had a bit of a burnout feeling in my body today after the intensified practice in the weekend, but "practice joy" was present again (which it wasn't for pretty much the entire weekend). Haven't had the chance to ask any teacher about this phenomena, but I'm starting to suspect that "less is more", which could of course just be wishful thinking, but I'm continuing to experiment with finding out what is right effort for me.