tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11955938538038813732024-03-14T00:44:32.876-07:00MeditationInsane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-63632244782302845122022-02-03T09:23:00.003-08:002022-02-03T09:23:31.733-08:00Letting Go<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfsMz3WvPArBpbP_F3KhTrafeKV72fZaFniiGnwmgK7E95x3oaFu4efaEVih6q_PAtfz8aZlTvP40BWM6sqJThGnwB7nc1S3hb9B05jAOeIogi6XczUBRxzIMWmmedg7UjBi9wOBKn904rrMnlR56IU8z1HwRrFMCV1BNDwSsSLFuLIf-QgTFqrIivXQ=s524" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="524" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfsMz3WvPArBpbP_F3KhTrafeKV72fZaFniiGnwmgK7E95x3oaFu4efaEVih6q_PAtfz8aZlTvP40BWM6sqJThGnwB7nc1S3hb9B05jAOeIogi6XczUBRxzIMWmmedg7UjBi9wOBKn904rrMnlR56IU8z1HwRrFMCV1BNDwSsSLFuLIf-QgTFqrIivXQ=w452-h430" width="452" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-59670556645097603482020-03-13T17:13:00.002-07:002023-10-22T15:30:54.421-07:00Ambient Meditative MusicI sometimes find it useful to listen to ambient music while meditating. There's tons of this stuff out there, but I do have some possibly unique angles on this.<br />
<br />
Here are some suggestions. I'll finish with a pleasant piece, but I want to get into the notion of working with the unpleasant, the unsatisfactory.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Sister Waize </h3>
<br />
I stumbled onto Sister Waize (David Mekler) by way of a reddit post where he had made the Realignment Series available for free (at the time). The so called "folding drone" music provides an interesting, constantly changing acoustic landscape with good ambient qualities. But the soundscapes come with a bit of an edge - while pleasant and ambient at times, there are also some challenging, gritty, dissonant, industrial elements. I find this combination particularly useful for working through challenging or unsatisfactory emotional material. It tends to provide a support for feeling and releasing such material. Out of the various Sister Waize albums, my first recommendation might be to try the Realignment Series as well as some of the others I've listed here:<br />
<ul>
<li>2010 - Torn Stone Fall</li>
<li>2011 - A Dawning of Wonder</li>
<li>2011 - Realignment Series Part I</li>
<li>2011 - Realignment Series Part II</li>
<li>2011 - Realignment Series Part III</li>
<li>2012 - Perennial Suicide</li>
</ul>
Sister Waize's music is available at low cost through <a href="https://sisterwaize.bandcamp.com/">Bandcamp</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Jeffrey Thompson </h3>
<br />
<a href="https://www.scientificsounds.com/">Jeffrey Thompson</a> has been a fixture of the new age meditative music scene for decades. He has many titles that would be good for relaxing listening (I would recommend the Alpha Relaxation System, for example), but my suggestion for some music that provides a foundation for the emotional work mentioned above would be:<br />
<ul>
<li> 1994 - Sri Yantra</li>
</ul>
As near as I can figure, Sri Yantra is out of print so I am making it available here:<br />
<a href="https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZWpvnkZEgEe0V8x7SBuJB7c73Qg8hgtOYwy">Sri Yantra part 1</a><br />
<a href="https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZJHvnkZk449lySPuHyR2QXGknbYY525CGMy">Sri Yantra part 2</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Unknown</h3><p>
<br />
This track has very little in the way of dissonance, although it has some slightly eerie sounds and other parts that sound something like Tibetan chanting. Generally this track is more pure relaxation. It comes from a youtube video a number of years ago. As I can no longer find any links or references to it, I'm making it available here, this is the original track name:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZfXvnkZtQROyMr9JsLt8Pl0BXWTa5wYNhe7">Out of Body Experience_ Low Bass OBE Meditation Trance _ Binaural Beats</a><br />
<br />
(I'm neither endorsing nor not endorsing binaural beats or out of body experiences, I just really like the track.) <br />
<br />
<br />
Back to the idea of the less purely relaxing music, part of the game is that there are unpleasant phases. The trick, as
with everything, is to fully experience the unpleasantness, the fear,
the angst, the anxiety, the nausea, the depression, allow it to be,
surrender to it, and in that way become less attached to it, to let go
of what can be let go of.<br />
<br />
But it can be difficult to stay with such sensations. We want to escape
it, to divert ourselves, distract ourselves. Meditation is a great
opportunity to stay with what is actually happening. But even then we
might consciously or unconsciously divert ourselves away from dealing with some minor unpleasantness.<br />
<br />
There is a sense here of exposing oneself to one's fears as a way of
overcoming them, a prominent technique for dealing with phobias.<br />
<br />
I find
this kind of music to be mildly evocative of these unpleasant states and useful for keeping one's focus
on these elements and thus ultimately working through them.</p><p><br />
</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Streaming</h3><p style="text-align: left;">Even easier, stream <a href="http://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/dronezone">Drone Zone</a> from somafm.com.<br />
</p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><br />
</h3>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-33290609931151527052019-11-26T16:15:00.008-08:002023-10-22T15:25:56.003-07:00Recommended BooksMindfulness<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-English-Bhante-Henepola-Gunaratana/dp/0861719069/">Mindfulness in Plain English</a> by the monk Bhante Gunaratana. Probably the most universally recommended book on general mindfulness.</li>
</ul><p>
Direct Pointing/Non-duality - These books may help provide a sense of what enlightenment is about, and the direction to lean into.</p><p>
</p><ul>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-That-Nisargadatta-Maharaj/dp/0893860468/">I Am That</a> by Nisargadatta. Classic text of transcribed talks, this would probably be my desert island spiritual book. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjoGzmwUn8U&list=PLWbsYwOiNfKurNcJqRAT792KHfFxjKJWZ">Free audio of the text</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Book-Taboo-Against-Knowing-Who/dp/0679723005/">The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are</a> by Alan Watts. Thought provoking and relatively palatable even for a mainstream audience. </li>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Be-As-You-Are-Teachings/dp/0140190627/">Be As You Are: The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi</a>
by David Godman. A classic, a compilation of many quotes
arranged by topic.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gateless-Gatecrashers-Ilona-Ciunaite/dp/1470028913">Gateless Gatecrashers</a> by Ilona and Elena (also the free <a href="http://www.liberationunleashed.com/PDF/Gateless_Gatecrashers.pdf">pdf version)</a>. Transcripts of conversations with seekers, containing some of the most direct pointing instructions available. If you dare, even more raw and a bit rude at times is <a href="https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Brutal-Beginnings-ebook.pdf">Brutal Beginnings (pdf)</a>.<br /></li>
</ul>
About the characteristics of Enlightened Individuals and a little bit on how to get there.
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Finders-Jeffery-Martin/dp/1572425555">The Finders</a>
by Jeffery Martin. This book presents extensive research into over 1000 people considered to be
enlightened. We can quibble with some of the assumptions, or about the morality of selling a Finders Course, but at present there is nothing else really like this. There is a <a href="http://www.nonsymbolic.org/publications">free ebook on the associated publication page</a> that summarizes the findings along with general recommendations for practice. </li>
</ul>
After Enlightenment<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/End-Your-World-Uncensored-Enlightenment/dp/1591797799/">The End of Your World</a> by Adyashanti. While this could be interesting even for seekers, this is probably most useful for those who have experienced a degree of awakening.</li></ul><p>Other readings:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230213120707/https://realization.org/p/iamquiet/what-is-enlightenment-and-how-do-you-find-it.html">What is Enlightenment</a>, a collected series of posts by user iamquiet on reddit, from realization.org by way of archive.org.</li><li><a href="https://nonsymbolic.org/TheLayersOfDepthInFundamentalWellbeing.pdf">The Layers of Depth in Fundamental Wellbeing</a>, many descriptions of various parts of the path from Jeffery Martin's work and the numerous participants in the Finders Course.<br /> </li></ul><ul>
</ul>
Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-68545102073643722302019-08-14T06:58:00.000-07:002020-07-30T09:25:36.645-07:00The Big Experience<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip7Wb37Wr11CdVozvb72LJbUs_nyIogdNmDP_qZ_JVnK5ktnvDwARELE7oeVgV2Mp3njMRB06gVvXXMakMNXD96LtKpcIuF6qqkinzQ16ZLxSZGiAhtoigQAEpnjUZrkdXeFTUEsGhlIg/s1600/meditative.progress.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip7Wb37Wr11CdVozvb72LJbUs_nyIogdNmDP_qZ_JVnK5ktnvDwARELE7oeVgV2Mp3njMRB06gVvXXMakMNXD96LtKpcIuF6qqkinzQ16ZLxSZGiAhtoigQAEpnjUZrkdXeFTUEsGhlIg/s400/meditative.progress.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
It
is somewhat common for people relatively early on the path to have a BIG
experience. It doesn't have to play out that way, but then again, a big
initial awakening or opening is not exactly a rare event. What's going
on? What is that about?<br />
<br />
The experience referred to
here often has some kind of taste of complete freedom or liberation,
possibly great joy, love, light, energy, etc. In the Buddhist/Theravada progress of
insight, this falls under the heading of what I simply call the "pleasant" phase (or the more arcane traditional label of the
stage of knowledge of arising and passing) and manifests in a range of anywhere from pleasant to ecstatic. It may happen as a result of
meditation, most commonly during massed practice on an early retreat of some kind, or from
using a psychedelic, or from great personal trauma, loss, or exhaustion. Extremely rare individuals have stumbled into it by
simply reading a sentence that gives them great insight.<br />
<br />
The
experience may be so "big" that a person may think they are enlightened.
Indeed, they may have gotten a kind of glimpse. But as pure as that experience
can be, it would generally be somewhat tainted by being viewed from
substantially within the assumptions they currently hold. And in virtually every case, the person will contract back to something like their former identity and beliefs.<br />
<br />
To
my way of thinking a couple of things are going on here. On the one
hand, in order to have a big experience, you need to establish through human culture a thorough
indoctrination into attachment to language, concepts, beliefs, cultural
assumptions, and identity. Check. Pretty much all people fall into
this category. But in terms of "big" I'd say plausibly the more attachment the better. My speculation is
that it might even "help" if the person is particularly rigid about some of
these things, solidly married to their worldview, even neurotic about
it. Not that you'd want to cultivate that.<br />
<br />
The other side of the coin is that you then need a
very complete relaxation of all these things. You need to stumble into a
very "pure" consciousness that has dropped as many of these attachments, assumptions, beliefs and
rigidities as possible. A complete letting go into pure consciousness,
the metaphorical original mind or natural mind. Complete freedom. A
thoroughly different point of view.<br />
<br />
It is the
gulf or contrast or difference between these two extremes that creates the ground for a big
experience. The more radical the change in perspective, the bigger the
relief, and the more dramatic it will be perceived. For some people who
already "get it", it might not be as big, it might not ever happen that
way. This would be like someone who has been meditating a little bit
over time and slowly gets it, kind of like the apocryphal metaphor of
boiling a frog. But for someone who is more thoroughly entranced by
thought-addicted identity views, the bigger the experience might be.
And again, pretty much everyone is substantially "attached", even if
they've read a whole stack of Buddhist books.<br />
<br />
The blue
line in the graph above attempts to portray the theoretical progress
over time of a typical person on the path. Slow at first, then perhaps a
tipping point such as stream entry, and a resulting acceleration, and
then a slowing down again as one asymptotically approaches some ideal.
Actual progress would be much noisier and different.<br />
<br />
The
graph explains why the big experience, from a meditation perspective, is generally only possible, or more likely, earlier
on or in the acceleration phase, because the gulf that creates the ground for
the experience is vast at first, but as progress is made, the chance of
experiencing something that big or dramatic falls away. As one moves towards the
liberated perspective and leaves the attached perspective behind, any
jumps into a very pure version of freedom seem more and more
inconsequential, more ordinary. After a certain point, it cannot be perceived as big
or dramatic, this is pretty much the way things are perceived all the time.<br />
<br />
Although
this kind of experience can be repeated, for a typical meditator it is also very common to have
just one big experience, and this is commonly the biggest, most
dramatic experience of a meditator's life. On the other hand, it is
possible to repeatedly release into a very absolute experience, and some
may have more of a predisposition to this kind of thing than others.
Psychedelics do help to reach this kind of absolute, but even here some
degree of meditative practice makes a big difference.<br />
<br />
At any rate, the experience often provides the motivation to get serious about a meditation practice and continue on the path. <br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-66445071596204585852019-07-18T06:14:00.001-07:002019-07-18T06:14:51.996-07:00Jud Brewer's AppsI have been following Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, ever since he put some of my meditation teachers in an fMRI machine and measured their brain activity.<br />
<br />
I eventually learned that he has recently created a <a href="https://www.drjud.com/">number of apps</a> for<br />
<ul>
<li>Anxiety - Unwinding Anxiety</li>
<li>Eating - Eat Right Now</li>
<li>Smoking - To Quit</li>
</ul>
A close friend began using the Unwinding Anxiety app and has gotten good results. These are paid apps, but much of the material and process is covered in the first couple of months. They introduce mindfulness as a part of understanding and becoming aware of the patterns involved in anxiety, overeating, and addiction. The apps use daily videos combined with multiple random reminders a day to engage in a few seconds of mindfulness practice, in this case a basic form of <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">noting</a>. They encourage a day by day, moment by moment approach that slowly builds - you can't jump ahead to future lessons. Best of all, the apps have been refined with real world testing.<br />
<br />
If you are dealing with some of the problems above, these apps could be helpful as well as being a painless way to start getting into mindfulness practice.<br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-16902927648874257932019-02-23T07:37:00.000-08:002020-07-30T09:32:34.990-07:00A Simple Way to StartFor someone starting out or just willing to experiment, this is a series of four really simple meditation styles that progressively add structure. The idea is to experiment with each for maybe 1 to 10 sessions and see what works for you, and to monitor whether increasing amounts of structure help you to be more mindful.<br />
<br />
<h3>
1. Doing Nothing</h3>
<br />
This is an unstructured practice of continuously "letting go", as I describe in <a href="https://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-easy-way-do-nothing.html">The Easy Way - Do Nothing</a>. The practice is to just <i><b>be</b></i>, letting go of whatever, if anything, is coming up, and if you can't let go of something, let that be okay as well. And if you lose mindfulness and come back, just go right back into letting go. The practice is to let go, and continue letting go. In essence to just <i><b>stop</b></i>. Stop doing and just be. Just this, nothing to do but just be, and always come back to just being.<br />
<br />
When you realize you're "doing" something - thinking, inclining towards thinking, grasping at something or resisting something, just kind of stop and let go of as much of it as you can. No need to grasp at anything or seek something better than this moment, just let everything be as it is. During formal meditation practice you've set things up so that for a period of time you have nothing to do. So do that - just be. Relax.<br />
<br />
This has always been at the core of any good meditation practice, but in the past I thought of it as secondary to the need to maintain continuous awareness, and I taught the letting go part after some awareness was established, but I'm beginning to think maybe people need to hear this first, so that this is always in the background from the beginning.<br />
<br />
I would consider this to be an advanced style in the sense that many people will be spacing out left and right with this technique, and many may not get to what I would consider a full letting go, but I think this is nonetheless a worthwhile experiment - to begin to get it into the core of one's being that this is a valuable direction to lean in.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't endlessly practice this as a standalone unless you are maintaining relatively continuous mindfulness. Typically one or more of the following structured practices would be good to work on with an eye towards mastering the practice, i.e. putting in enough high quality practice until it becomes second nature.<br />
<br />
<h3>
2. Breath Awareness</h3>
<br />
The standard practice of following the breath. The main recommendation, the trick if you will, is to follow the <i><b>sensate experiences</b></i> of the breath, <b><i>feeling</i></b> the breath as opposed to thinking about the breath. The breath is always present and is used as a kind of anchor - when one loses awareness and returns to mindfulness, then return to simply experiencing the breath. Within the mindfulness of breath awareness practice, remember to continue to practice letting go, just being.<br />
<br />
<h3>
3. Breath Counting</h3>
<br />
Same as breath awareness plus now we introduce counting the out-breaths. Continue to feel the breath, but now we count the out-breaths up to 10, and then start over at 1. The breath counting gives us a little extra to do, using up a little bit of mental bandwidth that we might otherwise use to wander. Counting can become relatively automatic, so ratcheting the count back to 1 gives us a way to avoid that automaticity, and provides some feedback if we notice the count is over 10 (or if we lose the count). Again, within the mindfulness of breath counting practice, continue to practice letting go, just being.<br />
<br />
<h3>
4. Breath Counting with Mantra</h3>
<br />
Same as breath counting plus now we introduce a mantra on the in-breath. A mantra can be any word or phrase, but I'm going to suggest "awareness" as a possible mantra. Although any word could be used, I recommend targeted words that are designed for whatever you feel you need for that particular meditation session. Words like maybe "peace", "love", "stillness", "relaxation", etc. However I might recommend that you pick a mantra for a particular session and stick with it. In other words, don't give yourself the wiggle room to change the mantra in that session as that may tend to add extra thoughts and doubts. Again, within the mindfulness of breath counting with mantra practice, continue to practice letting go, just being.<br />
<br />
<h3>
In Practice</h3>
<br />
As you experiment with these 4 simple techniques, notice whether or not they help to keep you mindful. What works? What percentage of the time are you actually mindful, aware of your awareness in meditation? And within that, are you continuously relaxing, letting go?<br />
<br />
Even with a relatively high degree of this kind of structure, there is plenty of room to space out. A reasonably fit, relaxed person completes a breath about once every six seconds. Even with a mantra on the in-breath and counting on the out-breath, there are a couple of seconds to spare on each movement of the breath, which is an eternity in terms of the mind's inclination to immediately go off and wander. Sometimes you can notice that desire to go off and think. But the point is to commit to these continuous practices, continually interrupt your mind's tendency to space out, and keep giving the mind experiences of continuous relaxed mindfulness.<br />
<br />
Spending some time mastering one or more of the three structured practices might be a good way to develop a strong base before trying the noting practice I recommend in the series <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">How To Meditate</a>.<br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-4452261169787673452018-12-08T07:20:00.000-08:002018-12-08T07:20:04.994-08:00Concentration Practice - Analog ClockOne version of concentration style meditation is staring at a single object. The practice is simple - place your attention on the object. If you find that your attention wanders, return to the object.<br />
<br />
In this case the object is the tip of the second hand of an analog clock, which provides at least slight novelty and continuity as the hand moves around the clock.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://analog.onlineclock.net/">Here is one online clock</a>:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://analog.onlineclock.net/"><img alt="https://analog.onlineclock.net/" border="0" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="488" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmyj-kAe4HunM9fZqN7qKw8T7AaS7mH0LAqkVEkrsZu0hb-m6fgvmNNWZFfvidWRd_jvzR512BCunSILMO2BOU8xviUAqiLoeCFngdnsUkdccruGTCf-oFNM1uVicz36hj-XT5A3JutQC9/s320/clock.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-69581768930156275432018-11-19T18:21:00.000-08:002020-07-30T09:29:22.802-07:00The Easy Way - Do Nothing<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
For those who are hard on themselves, always pushing and pulling and striving, this may be the most important aspect of the teaching. Which is, for perhaps the first time in your life,</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<h1 style="text-align: center;">
<b>just stop.</b></h1>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Just be.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Every impulse to go off and do something else, or distract oneself, just stop. Witness the impulses arising, but don't take the bait. Let those things be. Let go. There will be plenty of time for striving later if you want. But for now, just relax and hang out right here, right now. Stay sensate - continuously feel the body, aware of awareness. Just an ordinary blob of flesh with nothing in particular to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. If boredom arises, then experience that. Don't push anything away with some need to distract, or to move to something "better". Feel that need for distraction, that need for things to be some other way than they are, and return to letting everything just be as it is. Stop fighting, stop pushing and pulling. And then continually feel and experience the next sensation, and the next.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in the mind. It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of mind without effort. We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make.</i><br />
<i>- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind</i>
<br />
<br />
<i></i>
<i>The essence of Zen is non-seeking ... </i><br />
<i>"Only practice" is the best, but without any object, without trying to achieve anything.</i><br />
<i>- Taisen Deshimaru, The Ring of the Way</i></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Both of these Zen master quotes illustrate the paradoxical nature of practice. A kind of effort must be made to <i>lean</i> (or perhaps <i>fall</i>) in the direction of mindfulness, yet ultimately through practice this <i>leaning</i> becomes the natural default of the mind, at which point we can completely forget ourselves and the mind can relax to an unbelievable degree. This is like the way a trained musician or athlete works hard over the years to ultimately forget themselves, to lose themselves in the moment when they play at the highest level.<br />
<br />
A taste of this forgetting is available in any moment, and for some people this simple understanding may end up being their method. To let go deeply, maybe for the first time, and simply do nothing but relax and be.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Stop leaving and you will arrive.</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Stop searching and you will see.</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Stop running away and you will be found.</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching</span></i></div>
<br />
The various structured methods I recommend are paradoxically useful for keeping oneself aware enough to do this vital practice of letting go. Some kind of effort in this way is often necessary to change, to retrain the mind, to unlearn what we have unconsciously learned. Maintaining awareness is important. But it is also important to understand the essence of the inward journey that needs to be happening amidst the awareness, that of relaxing and letting go, and letting everything be.<br />
<br />
Those structured methods can become a kind of trap for people that are used to striving, if they are pushing themselves too hard and beating themselves up for lapses. But the structure is often necessary, and it's a kind of balancing act to engage with enough effort to maintain a near-continuous awareness, while simultaneously letting go enough to be deeply relaxed.<br />
<br />
Some guidelines on this kind of relaxation from Tibetan Buddhism, Six Words of Advice by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa">Tilopa</a> (McLeod translation).<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Don’t recall - Let go of what has passed</li>
<li>Don’t imagine - Let go of what may come</li>
<li>Don’t think - Let go of what is happening now</li>
<li>Don’t examine - Don’t try to figure anything out</li>
<li>Don’t control - Don’t try to make anything happen</li>
<li>Rest - Relax, right now, and rest</li>
</ul>
<br />
<ul>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Alternate translation by Watts & Wayman:</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
No cultivation, no intention;</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Let it settle itself</div>
<ul>
</ul>
<br />
<h1 style="text-align: center;">
<b>just be </b></h1>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/06/why-use-noting-style.html">Why Use the Noting Style?</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
</div>
</div>
Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-8113586699420594352018-10-26T08:51:00.002-07:002018-10-26T08:51:53.525-07:00Dealing With Difficult Meditation ExperiencesMildly difficult experiences in meditation can be processed much like everything else, i.e. be curious and allow the experience to be what it is without resistance.<br />
<br />
But some experiences may be so challenging or overwhelming that at least temporarily they cannot be dealt with by surrender.<br />
<br />
The traditional advice is something like this: switch to single-pointed concentration practice or loving-kindness practice, if you can. This is often more calming. If that isn't providing relief, then maybe stop meditating altogether. Do some things to ground oneself: maybe get out in some fresh air, walk around, eat some hearty food, watch a movie, etc. Talk to people, talk to a psychologist.<br />
<br />
Although the ideas are similar, <a href="http://themindfulnesscircle.com/blog/lost-oblivion-exploration-adverse-meditation-experiences/">Lost in Oblivion – An Exploration of Adverse Meditation Experiences</a> goes into more depth, exploring many suggestions such as the following:
<br />
<ul>
<li>Significantly reduce your practice time</li>
<li>See a professional</li>
<li>Focus on life goals and values</li>
<li>Reduce self-focus</li>
<li>Try some different meditative approaches</li>
<li>Rotate between meditation and thinking</li>
<li>Working with a blank mind</li>
<li>Working with relaxation induced anxiety</li>
<li>Movement can be incredibly powerful</li>
<li>Practice Gratitude and other more ‘cognitive’ practices</li>
<li>Reading novels and enjoyable literature, and engagement in enjoyable hobbies</li>
<li>Join your community, and find connection</li>
<li>Be kind to yourself, don’t just sit through emotional adversity</li>
<li>Exposure and response prevention can be useful</li>
</ul>
Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-70207994046167573532018-10-23T09:08:00.001-07:002018-10-23T09:13:34.592-07:00Bilateral Breath MeditationIf you're having trouble staying aware with your breath meditation, there are simple options like counting the breaths, or using a mantra or noting practice that is synchronized with the breath.<br />
<br />
But it's nice to have a nonverbal technique. Part of what we're pointing at in meditation is our fundamental experience prior to language, concepts, or narrative. Like maybe a dog might look at the world. A nonverbal technique can help with that.<br />
<br />
My recommendation is to do something along the lines of lightly pressing a left finger into your left thigh as you inhale, and then release that pressure and lightly press your right finger into your right thigh as you exhale. And continue, in an alternating, bilateral, pressing and releasing that is synced up with the breath.<br />
<br />
That's the suggestion. You can use your fingers, thumbs, whatever. You can press on your body, the couch, your clasped hands, whatever. Just a continuous pressure with the finger/thumb of one hand for the inhale, and the opposite side for the exhale. While walking I noticed an effective way to do it was to press the first and second fingers together while alternating hands as usual. While driving pressing thumbs on the steering wheel. Etc.<br />
<br />
You can also stack techniques if you need to. Sometimes we need more to do to keep ourselves focused on the present. So you could do this practice, paying attention to the breath with the alternating pressure, and you could add a mantra or noting practice on top of that.<br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-37671229433851984322018-08-14T12:54:00.000-07:002018-10-01T11:42:43.867-07:00Dealing With Rumination<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://nationalsocialanxietycenter.com/2016/06/20/stuck-in-the-aftermath-social-anxiety-and-rumination/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="https://nationalsocialanxietycenter.com/2016/06/20/stuck-in-the-aftermath-social-anxiety-and-rumination/" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWDtaR-TKDZqQeNDcs6hscv52bHILjcAdsOV1HRflhiPqvDu8KKoKT7ODNeG2olQE2gwDlZVNcUUfv1MzN6KYv5ItYm-p91WmEJYxxtFRWVB82eBE5qxkZR8YFA_C8lmn693rKk_HesyR-/s1600/rumination.jpg" title="rumination from nationalsocialanxietycenter.com" /></a></div>
Rumination is when we obsess with a particular problem or anxiety, running it over and over in our minds. Theoretically, a meditation purist might say we need to be present with that and continually notice the rumination. That's fine if you can do it. But sometimes the rumination may be so strong that it is neither possible nor practical to deal with it that way. In a sense, the rumination has become pathological.<br />
<br />
If one is constantly getting lost in the rumination despite ordinary attempts at meditation, my recommendation is to use a technique to substantially interfere with the rumination and maybe get it down to a more manageable level so that one could eventually practice with it. In some ways we need to interrupt the rumination and get some distance from it.<br />
<br />
This is not tremendously different from what I recommend in general, that is, to start with a technique that forces one to be aware and present, and later on (maybe much later on) laddering up into open awareness practices.<br />
<br />
One practice for rumination, and this is an example of a fairly hard core technique, is to use noting (<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">see elsewhere on this site</a>) along with breath counting. This is admittedly a lot to do, but then again we may need a lot to do to interfere with rumination. For the breath counting I count the out-breaths to 12, and then start over at 1.<br />
<br />
Why twelve? On the one hand it doesn't really matter. But there is a lot to keep track of in this practice. We're counting, but we then go off and do a note or two, then we go back to the count. It can be hard to stay continuous on the count at times. So, a bit technical and insane, but to make the counting a little bit easier to keep track of, I visualize the 12 points of a clock, and I use that continually rotating directional sense to keep additional track of the number. I do noting on the in-breath, noticing and labeling whatever arises in experience. Typically I will make 1 to 3 notes during that time, just whatever comes up in the moment.<br />
<br />
So noting on the in-breath, and counting on the out breath. We combine the mindfulness of noting with maybe the stability of breath counting. By practicing this way one can seriously interrupt the rumination process and get back to a more calm mindful mind.Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-65641646912140070542018-07-22T10:41:00.000-07:002020-07-12T13:07:39.507-07:00The Forbidden TopicsThe intention here is to warn people away, although realistically the title will likely draw even more views than normal. So be it. But be warned. Basically, if you are comfortable with your meditation practice and don't want to trip yourself up with expectations and so forth, bail out now.<br />
<br />
The epitome of not talking about phenomena is perhaps Soto Zen practice where in theory they tell you absolutely nothing about practice or experiences, states, whatever. They only teach you the position to sit in, and you sit. No instruction about what needs to go on in your mind, or anything about various stages, meditative experiences, nothing. And that is good in a way, because an indoctrinated mind can contract around these ideas and concepts, and that can trip some people up.<br />
<br />
Personally, I'd say the Soto Zen approach is a bit extreme. I think there is something to be gleaned from a bit of talk about progress, markers along the path and so forth. These things can help keep a person going, see where you are and that progress has been made. A form of useful feedback along the way as opposed to groping in the dark. But some people seem to manage to beat themselves up about not having attainments, or being jealous of other's attainments, etc., so be careful.<br />
<br />
The fact that there are Buddhist topics that are traditionally not talked about, such as actual experiences or attainments, this head-in-the-sand policy has both some dogmatism to it, and some skillfulness. The good part is that not talking about attainment avoids problems with one-upping and over-claiming and
people feeling poorly about their lack of attainments. The dogmatic part derives from the fact that the old Buddhist texts prohibit a monk from talking about such things to laypeople, and that has been incorporated into even very mainstream meditation groups, to the point that many teachers aren't even aware of this material. This dogma leads to a lack of basic awareness of what is happening, and a lack of reasonable feedback that could otherwise be conducive to progress.<br />
<br />
<br />
Some of these things that aren't talked about would be:<br />
<ul>
<li>micro-stages that one tends to experience while doing contemplative practice</li>
<li>stable, trance-like states of meditative absorption</li>
<li>macro-stages, analogous to something like years of college</li>
<li>non-experiences, gaps, or emptiness </li>
</ul>
<br />
<h4>
Basic Progress </h4>
<br />
Nothing forbidden here. You may have experienced some markers of fairly mundane meditative progress in your everyday life. Perhaps while experiencing some kind of task or game or even while having a glass of wine, you notice that in your current experience compared to how you were in the past, you are a little bit more aware, and a little bit more relaxed. For many, this will be the standard result from traditional meditation practices.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4>
Micro-Stages</h4>
<br />
The micro-stages (Buddhist jargon: Progress of Insight) are a series of experiential phenomena that seem to happen to in a somewhat repeatable order to people that do contemplative practices. Tradition breaks this down more finely, but a 4 stage version captures the essence. I will emphasize that not everyone is going to experience all this stuff exactly this way, so don't worry if you don't.<br />
<br />
These stages appear with varying depths and over various time frames. A person may notice a series of phenomena that arise during the course of a single sit, and eventually may notice that something very similar is happening in the background of their overall experience over many weeks and months as the underlying neurology catches up to the cutting edge in practice, and reflects that in daily life.<br />
<br />
<h4>
First Stage - Sustained</h4>
<br />
At the first stage, in my opinion not a lot is going on. This area was not even conceived of in this micro framework until quite late in the game (i.e. the last century) by the monk Mahasi who seemed to be using it as a way of introducing some basic conceptual understandings, but I'm not sure there is much there in terms of actual phenomena. What <i>is</i> there might be thought of as correlating with a kind of sustained effort, and there are some related physical phenomena that may occur particularly to newer meditators. Namely, at this stage there can be persistent (i.e. sustained) physical sensations such as itching, or a constant pain or tension or cramping.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Second Stage - Pleasant</h4>
<br />
The second stage we might call the Pleasant stage. You might notice various pleasant sensations, joy, energy, brightness in the visual field. At its best, everything can seem really good, very "sixties", people with flowers in their hair, togetherness, and everything can be really wonderful. You might notice some pulsing in the forehead as the demands on your prefrontal cortex are increased. Sometimes there may be a bit of flashing in the visual field as this happens.<br />
<br />
It is often during this stage that people might stumble into a big spiritual experience, an opening or awakening, a glimpse. I refer to this as the "Big Experience", and will be cover this separately. <br />
<br />
<h4>
Third Stage - Unsatisfactory </h4>
<br />
The third stage is the Unsatisfactory stage. At the beginning of this stage, in the wake of the Pleasant stage, everything might be very okay, but the relaxed okayness becomes a kind of relaxed but sinking sensation. After this transition, a series of unsatisfactory sensations might come up like fear, misery, or disgust. For example sometimes a pang of fear can come out of nowhere, or a scary dream. Or a feeling like you need to get up off the cushion or you will die. Things may seem generally unpleasant or out of phase. At the end of this stage there can be an angst-y depressive feeling that many people find to be the most difficult of all the phenomena in this stage.<br />
<br />
This is not a place to linger or get stuck. Many chronic seekers who constantly start and stop end up unwittingly spend vast amounts of time in this stage, working up to this stage, then backsliding, then back into it again. The general advice for this stage is to fully feel and accept the unsatisfactory phenomena, let go of your resistance, and keep meditating. Keep practicing.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Fourth Stage - Equanimity</h4>
<br />
And then this breaks open into the fourth stage, traditionally called Equanimity. Here we come to an aware, relaxed, open, and sometimes stable state where everything is okay. It becomes easy to meditate, and some people may even quit meditating since things seem to be going just fine. At some points during equanimity the mind may become a little spacier and it may require some persistence to stay aware.<br />
<br />
I don't like to look at these stages as written in stone, but similar to the meditative absorptions, it may help one to become more aware of your experience.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4>
A Straightforward, Common Sense Measure of Progress</h4>
<br />
<br />
If you are getting to that last stage during your sits, the state of Equanimity, you might have some idea of how long it takes to get to that point. Initially, a beginner might not even get there at all. But as you continue to practice, you might notice that if you practice 45 minutes, sometimes you get there. With continued good practice that number should come down. As the time to reach equanimity falls to 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute, you will know you are making progress, regardless of anything else. Your brain is making changes, it is adapting to the demands that you are placing on it. As you continue to practice well, you are laying down neurology that will become more and more permanent. You are changing your mind's default from monkey mind to mindful.<br />
<br />
You might also notice, as mentioned before, that over longer periods of time something like this same progress of 4 stages is happening in the background experience of your life, but playing out over longer periods of perhaps weeks or months, even years, instead of minutes.<br />
<br />
For some, the stages may not be as clear or specific as outlined here. During meditation you might just notice a sense of "shifting gears" as the brain covers this apparent territory and slowly settles into mindfulness. All of these repeatable phenomena are markers that you are getting somewhere, that you are covering some terrain, the brain is changing.<br />
<br />
<h4>
The Big Experience</h4>
<br />
Relatively early on, often at the level of the Pleasant stage, some may have a "<a href="https://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-big-experience.html">big experience</a>". A big, often dramatic release into a substantially more aware, relaxed, open mind, maybe with a lot of joy, the joy of relief, the joy of completely laying down the massive burdens of a typically indoctrinated life, if only for a few minutes. The big experience is not a certainty, but also not uncommon, and although the territory can be experienced again, often the first experience will be the biggest or most dramatic event in the life of a meditator. It is also possible to pass through this kind of area more slowly and quietly without much fanfare. The classic big experience is probably most likely for a beginner in a setting of massed practice such as a retreat situation.<br />
<br />
In the big experience the mind catches a glimpse of just how much baggage can be dropped, and it can be such a stark contrast to the person's normal everyday grasping mind that it is perceived as a very big and dramatic experience. It is sometimes mistaken for enlightenment, but it is indeed a taste or glimpse of that direction.<br />
<br />
In terms of progress, if we liken the meditative path to a four year college degree, the Big Experience (or merely passing through the Pleasant stage) would be the equivalent of passing the first semester midterms. <br />
<br />
The bigness of this experience, the drama or ecstasy, is dependent on having a "normal" attached, grasping mind. It's big because dropping "down" into pure consciousness, letting go of so much baggage, is incredible to the normal mind. The relief can be unimaginable.<br />
<br />
The big experience is more likely to happen earlier in a meditator's career because as someone continues to practice the mind gets closer and closer to being completely relaxed and let go (the background of the big experience), and so there is less to let go of, less relief to be had. At some point way down the road, this kind of massive relief is simply no longer possible - nothing can be that big of a relief anymore because the mind is already permanently relaxed to that degree. There is no longer a big dramatic difference.<br />
<br />
The big experience may also come about by way of psychedelics. Some may be lucky and stumble into an experience like this, but for many, psychedelic experiences will be merely interesting and strange rather than life changing. Meditation does make it more likely that one might access this territory under psychedelics. Makes you luckier, you might say. Just like the big spiritual experience, as one progresses down the meditative path, even these big psychedelic experiences will become less and less important, less dramatic. Nothing to see - move along.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Meditative Absorptions</h4>
<br />
Some may experience states that are often referred to as states of concentration, but could also be described as states of absorption or stability. These can be relatively strong sometimes, there is the sense of an altered state, and the stability and absorption can seem like a trance but with more clarity. These are what Buddhists refer to as jhanas and Hindus refer to as samadhi. Experiencing these would be a marker of progress, and there are a number of them that tend to come up, often in order. These states are usually thought of as being connected to single pointed concentration practice, but mild versions can be reached with mindfulness when the awareness of each object in succession is both good and continuous.<br />
<br />
The first 4 meditative absorptions (using the traditional Buddhist model) are roughly related to the 4 micro-stages mentioned previously. The absorptions are absorbed versions of the micro-stages, more or less. The traditional descriptions are a passable guide to this kind of territory, this is a brief outline of the predominate aspects:<br />
<ul>
<li>1st - sustained attention</li>
<li>2nd - joy</li>
<li>3rd - contentment</li>
<li>4th - equanimity</li>
</ul>
The second 4 meditative absorptions are traditionally called formless or immaterial, because if the absorption is incredibly strong, experience of various senses and the body can fall away. But even without extreme concentration a degree of this direction can be noticed. Because of the formless, faded out quality, my overall description of these are as "dark and delicate". In a sense, these can be thought of as extensions to the 4th absorption. The traditional descriptions are:<br />
<ul>
<li>5th - infinite space</li>
<li>6th - "self" or consciousness</li>
<li>7th - no-thing-ness</li>
<li>8th - absorption without description</li>
</ul>
The formless states are extremely tranquil. If you get to the point where you can experience these, it can be good to "steep" in these states on a regular basis. Becoming familiar with the formless and training the neurology in this direction begins to bring an aspect of deep tranquility to your entire life. <br />
<br />
Again, this is merely a passable guide to the territory, and there are many concepts and objects that one can become absorbed into. To me not all of these absorptions are quite so
linearly defined, but nonetheless knowledge of these characteristics
may help one to be more aware of what is being experienced.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Cessations</h4>
<br />
If you keep up the good practice, get the dose high enough and long enough and get relaxed enough, at the stage of Equanimity you might eventually experience a weird little blip, a little discontinuity, a little "what was that?" moment often immediately followed by something like bright flashes of white light and perhaps a pleasant sensation coming up through the body. That would be a cessation, a gap, a moment when perhaps some part of the mind lets go in a more substantial way, and typically an important marker when it happens the first time. You might also experience a kind of general shift towards more mindfulness, you might have an exceptional few days or a couple of weeks (a "honeymoon" period), you might notice meditative absorptions for the first time, and you might notice more of those specific little blips. Somewhere in that type of phenomena we have the evidence for a first cessation, the next major marker after the big experience.<br />
<br />
A cessation is generally brief, just a moment. It is a discontinuity, but there is enough information from the before and after of the non-experience to model it as just a moment. But there is also the possibility of a cessation lasting for longer than a moment, say minutes. This is much more rare, but in this case one more or less "loses time".<br />
<br />
Coming back to the typically momentary cessation, at the first occurrence, in particular referring to the overall shift towards mindfulness that might happen, this tends to mark a kind of tipping point. In the four year college model of the path, this would be the equivalent of finishing up freshman year, and in many ways this would put you on a kind of final trajectory. This would be the most important bridge to cross and marks the tipping point as you have essentially hit "escape velocity". Again, it is vaguely plausible that some people could cross this territory without noticing, as the mind is very biased to model things as continuous.<br />
<br />
And if you kept going, you might notice that these blips appear for a while, maybe for weeks or a couple of months, and then they don't come up for a while, again maybe weeks or months. You might then notice going through the stages for the second time, eventually hitting Equanimity and finally a second round of cessations.<br />
<br />
At this point, two cycles in, you would be at the equivalent of finishing up sophomore year, although it becomes increasingly difficult to map beyond this point. After the first two or maybe three cycles additional cycles don't really map so well to linear progress anymore. The remaining years are a continual process of opening up into new
territory, polishing one's "empty mirror" and getting used to a more mindful, less attached perspective.<br />
<br />
This cycle will continue to repeat, and if you pay attention to it, like other phenomena the cycle may speed up to a degree, and may get irregular. If you're noticing this kind of thing, you're pretty far along. You should have fewer and fewer questions about this stuff. Over time, your meditation, your mind itself, will become more polished, mindfulness-wise. Meditation will become easier, smoother, faster, more constant. The mind becomes more open and flexible. Mindfulness becomes your new default.Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-47205375915768616832018-06-19T10:43:00.001-07:002020-12-11T08:23:50.250-08:00Getting It DonePeople who practice a little bit of meditation may notice that they become somewhat more aware and relaxed. But <i>much more</i> than a little bit of awareness and relaxation can be accomplished if one takes it far enough. I wouldn't go quite so far as to promise the wonderful "ever increasing bliss" that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramahansa_Yogananda">Yogananda</a> suggested, but there can be substantial tranquility, relief from anxiety and psychological suffering, as well as a substantially new way of looking at the world.<br />
<br />
"Getting it done" isn't that complicated. It is mainly about doing enough quality training to "cause" the mind to permanently shift, and implies a relatively serious part-time commitment to practice. This does not necessarily mean years at a monastery, but rather points to consistent high quality daily practice.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4>
</h4>
<h4>
Start Slow</h4>
<br />
<br />
Don't feel like you have to jump in right off the bat with a half hour of meditation. I mean, that would be great, but even one minute of practice a day is something to start with, it's doable, and you're not going to burn out. Experiment, have fun with it, and work your way up.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Motivation</h4>
<br />
Just about anyone who gets much of anything accomplished in life had some kind of desire to get it done, some kind of great love, hope, or interest. In the meditation world it is often driven by a search to solve life's many problems along with the magical promise of some kind of blissed out Buddha-like perfection. Although fantasies like the latter should be seen as such, the practical reality of shifting the mind to a relaxed, aware, open, non-conceptual view can be a very big deal. Most people have no idea of how many burdens they are carrying around, and how much can be let go of. And from where I sit, this seems completely possible, it is just a matter of getting the quality and quantity of training high enough. In my own case, the shift from relatively uptight to relatively serene was a big deal, a game changer. Your mileage may vary.<br />
<br />
For many people, reading books and watching videos can be inspiring, so dig in, but just make sure that you are actually doing the practice. If you want to get it done, it's not so much about some kind of conceptual understanding, it is about training the mind to be mindful and relaxed.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Dedication</h4>
<br />
Like many other things in life, getting it done tends to require a daily practice, very similar to something like playing a musical instrument. Imagine learning to write extremely well with your other hand, for example. That's going to take a lot of consistent, conscious practice, but it would be completely possible to do. It's like that. Establish a minimum daily practice routine, a time and a place, and stick to it. I used to keep a notebook where every line was a date, how long I practiced, and a word or two that summarized the main experiences of that session. If I missed a day, that meant I skipped a line, and I didn't like to see blank lines in the notebook.<br />
<br />
<h4>
All Day Awareness</h4>
<br />
A short (30 minute) daily practice, if extremely high quality, can do some amazing things. But the effect can be greater if one's mindset is to be repeatedly aware of mindfulness throughout the day, rather than just an isolated block once a day. Normally conditioned minds naturally fall out of mindfulness, but the idea is to become enough of a <i><b>mindfulness enthusiast</b></i> that you come up with creative ways of bringing yourself back to the present moment throughout the day.<br />
<br />
Noting out loud in the car on the way to work, practicing in the shower, on breaks, washing dishes, etc. Spending a minute here and there while watching TV with the full awareness that you are in fact in a room watching images on a screen, without getting lost in the narrative. Coming up with certain events that trigger mindfulness, for example, maybe whenever you walk through a doorway. Maybe use reminders (I did), like signs that says "aware, relaxed, open" taped to your computer monitor, in the bathroom, on top of the TV, above the kitchen sink, etc. Set a timer to go off every hour or something. Use an app that randomly prompts you during the day. Invent ways to get it done.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Quality</h4>
<br />
It is really important to stress the importance of the quality of practice, quality being something like the <b><i>percentage of time one is actually aware of being aware</i></b>. There is the practical sense that intention is important, and practice time is important, but it's really important to get the quality aspect down. Practice makes permanent. So what are you practicing? What are you actually getting done in terms of this percentage-of-time-aware metric? How many <i>quality</i> hours are you piling up? The path to quality is sometimes going to be the more structured methods that require you to maintain this kind of awareness. I recommend noting, breath counting, mantra, and combinations of those. If those aren't your thing, maybe try to at least occasionally check in with a structured method to get a read on exactly how you're doing. Feedback is extremely important in learning, and many people aren't aware of how often they are losing their mindfulness. <br />
<br />
<h4>
Continuity </h4>
<br />
The longer you can stay with this kind of meta-awareness we're referring to, the better. Longer stretches of continuous mindfulness tend to be a marker of progress, so be aware of how you are doing on the continuity scale as well.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Tight But Loose</h4>
<br />
It needs to be emphasized that ultimately, with practice, with the structured styles, only a small amount, maybe about 5% of one's attention should be on the structure - the note, counting or mantra itself. Most of the attention, eventually, should be on the actual object in awareness - the seeing, hearing, and feeling. One has to adjust to circumstances, tailoring one's awareness to the relative ease or difficulty that presents itself. When and if awareness is stable and continuous, one can let go of structure, while if one is spacing out left and right, this is a cue to reintroduce structured methods. These structures are tools, and it's <i>not</i> about the tool, it's about the work you do with the tool, and that work is the mindfulness itself.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Attention at the Edge</h4>
<br />
One small key might be to notice some things around the "edge" of your experience. At first a person may notice a kind of binary quality to meditative awareness. Either they are aware and present, or oops, they are lost. It may seem very black and white, but maybe try to start to notice the edges of that. Notice when you are losing it, and maybe note "losing it". Or maybe you notice "boredom", and that's a cue to reinvigorate your structured practice. Or maybe you could notice the underlying desire to go think about that thing you've been wanting to think about, and note: "desire". Being aware that the quality of your awareness has changed, that you have lost some clarity and are getting fuzzier or sleepier, this can be noticed and you can take appropriate measures.<br />
<br />
In everyday life, I notice that the times that the mind tends to start to run off is when there is some kind of slowdown or break in the action. While watching TV, you might have to pay attention to some verbal exposition to follow the plot, but then there is a break with a purely visual transition to set up something like a new location. The mind immediately notices that there is more room to go off and think and off it goes. You can notice this at times, that desire to "fill that space", the desire to think and the movement towards that.<br />
<br />
<h4>
The Dogmatic Approach</h4>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>"It is not a matter of good or bad, convenient or inconvenient. You just do it without question. That way your mind is free."</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>-Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki</i></div>
<br />
The dogmatic approach is to take a structured method and just dogmatically follow it. Kind of silly in a way, this method is to literally follow the method, but it needs to be said. Many people take a laid back, laissez-faire approach to meditation. They're chilling out, relaxing, and, while that's fine in its own way, they may be spacing out left and right, very much like they do off the cushion. The structured styles exist because there is a real need for them, because our minds have been conditioned to go off and think about those things, and to be very attached to that. We're like addicts in that way.<br />
<br />
A Hindu teacher once remarked on a practice seen in many Asian street markets where people buy cups of raw rice and other products. The vendors have a practice where they continually and repetitively count out loud each cup during the process of scooping up the product, transferring it, putting it in a bag, so the counting would sound something like "one, one, one, one, two, two, two, two" etc. It's a practical way of keeping the transaction honest, but it's borne out of the human tendency to space out. It's necessary. At some level it might look silly, but it needs to be done, it's the only way to be sure when you have small measuring cups and no scale.<br />
<br />
So the dogmatic approach is like this. It is based on the understanding, in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program">twelve step</a> kind of way, that we are otherwise powerless against the tendency to space out. And one remedy is to make this dogmatic agreement with yourself, that similar to the vendors, you will count every breath, or that you will note once per second, or whatever your technique requires. So you agree to note 3600, yes 3600 times in one hour. That you have no choice in the matter. You've signed up for boot camp. Just do it and stop complaining about it. Stop imagining that there is some other choice or that you can just wing it without technique.<br />
<br />
Someone who wants to be a professional jazz musician doesn't have some kind of choice about whether they practice scales or not. And even for a die hard musician, some of that might be tedious from time to time. But they do it because they want to get to the end goal, to play jazz. A guitarist is not born with the ability to play through a scale with 64th note triplets with perfect alternate picking technique. It takes a lot of "dogmatic" practice, and they don't get to just lazily pick a few notes and then space out for a minute. They stay focused on the task for minutes at a time, continuously. And over time it indeed changes them into a person who can play 64th note triplets with alternate picking technique.<br />
<br />
So "you" give up, you surrender to this process. That's kind of useful in itself, as part of the path. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fULNUr0rvEc">Wax on, wax off</a>. The way that your mind has been living life for however many years you have been alive, you are going to abandon those habits and become a slave to these methods that are going to interrupt and interfere with those habits. Again, useful in itself. You are just going to sit and do this possibly insane sounding practice, and you probably won't like it at first (because the mind wants to do what it's always done), but that's it, you just do it. No sneaking off for a few seconds here and there, no buts, no thinking "I'll just wing it", you just do the freaking practice. The practice that forces you to stay continually aware of your awareness.<br />
<br />
It is possible to do this. If you wanted to, you could count 3600 little spoonfuls of something in a hour, at the rate of one per second. It's entirely possible, and counting out loud is one way you would be able to do it without losing count.<br />
<br />
But you have to agree to this, you have to be okay with this, you have to let go of your resistance. <br />
<br />
<h4>
And Yet Let Go</h4>
<br />
Although dogmatic practice is goal oriented in this way, it's equally important to emphasize the idea that you don't beat yourself up about the lapses that absolutely will occur. If you slip, you slip, and you just smile at yourself and go right back into the practice. Don't stress yourself out with it. You'll need to get up to speed with a new practice, learn a bit, get adjusted to the process, it will take time. Some people might even panic or worry a bit, but just keep it simple, relax, and just do it.<br />
<br />
At first, it may be hard, but eventually it will become easier, as it becomes second nature. Find a way to do it in a relaxed way, even if you're learning. Find a way to be okay with it. And as it becomes easier, you can focus more on that relaxation aspect. When you've got the awareness of awareness going, within that you can relax. Notice whatever physical, emotional, or mental tension there is. Let it be there. Don't fight it. If you can let go of some of that, great. If you can't let go of it, great, just let it be there. Feel your resistance to that tension, let it be there. If you can let go of some of that, great. If you can't let go of it, great, just let it be there. Repeat ad infinitum.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Lean into the Sensate</h4>
<br />
Our culture leads to a population of people that could be described as brains on popsicle sticks, relatively out of touch with our bodies and overly oriented towards thought. We are out of balance in this way. So another great pointer is to lean in the direction of the basic senses, seeing, hearing, and feeling. All you have to do is continually and wordlessly check in with basic sensory stuff. What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I feeling? With no conceptual elaboration, no stories, no spin. Just the sensate experience. Your techniques should lead you to a continual nonverbal answering of those questions. In a way it couldn't be easier: just what is here, right here, right now, seeing, hearing, feeling. All we have to do is set up a bit of structure to keep us from running off into daydreams, and we can just sit and be and witness.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Examples of Structured Styles</h4>
<br />
<ul>
<li>Noting</li>
<li>Breath Counting</li>
<li>Mantra</li>
<li>Noting with breath counting</li>
<li>Noting, timed with breath</li>
<li>Breath counting with mantra</li>
</ul>
<br />
<h4>
Support</h4>
<br />
Local meditation groups and teachers can be helpful, often giving people more motivation to practice well. These are almost always going to be promoting a non-structured, mainstream style, but you can meditate any way you want.<br />
<br />
There are a couple of online communities that are well oriented to the approach of actually getting it done. A person who really wants to get it done might consider joining these communities and possibly keeping an online practice journal for feedback.<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/recent-posts?">Dharma Overground</a> is the biggest, this is a typical "wild west" kind of internet forum</li>
<li><a href="http://awakenetwork.org/index.php/forum/recent">Awake Network</a> is a very small and protected community</li>
<li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/">Reddit Streamentry group</a> is relatively on point</li>
<li>Many traditional Buddhist or other forums</li>
</ul>
For many people psychological work with therapists and groups, bodywork, yoga, etc. might fall into this category, and has the potential to reduce suffering. <br />
<ul>
</ul>
<br />
<h4>
Gadgets</h4>
<br />
Whatever gadget or technique that works for you, use it.<br />
<br />
I'm not super into smart phones and their apps, but I understand that the<br />
<ul>
<li> <a href="https://insighttimer.com/">Insight Timer</a> (some free)</li>
</ul>
is relatively popular meditation app, and there are many, many others such as:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wakingup.com/">Waking Up</a> (some free) - I have used this app and recommend the content. It lightly introduces the basics while spending a lot of time pointing out some pretty advanced topics.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.headspace.com/">Headspace</a> (some free)</li>
<li>Calm (pay)</li>
<li>Buddhify (pay)</li>
<li>10% Happier (some free)</li>
<li>Simple Habit (some free)</li>
<li>Breethe: Sleep & Meditation (some free)</li>
</ul>
Also, not exactly pure meditation but the<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.unwindinganxiety.com/">Unwinding Anxiety app</a> (pay) comes highly recommended</li>
</ul>
<br />
When I was getting it done I often used a device (the <a href="http://habitchange.com/">Motivaider</a>) that was essentially a modified beeper that vibrated every so often. I had it set to the minimum, one minute. I would hold it loosely (so I would notice it more easily) in my left hand, and I logged probably over 1000 hours with it. They also have a <a href="http://habitchange.com/motivaider-for-mobile.php">mobile app</a>. And I'm sure there are many other apps that do this.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.resperate.com/">RESPeRATE</a> is a device designed to help pace and slow down your breathing. It is considered a medical device in that it has been demonstrated to lower blood pressure. I used one several times at a biofeedback practitioner's office and it is extremely effective at inducing relaxation. Cultivating slow, relaxed belly breathing is very worthwhile.<br />
<br />
Gadgets might also encompass guided meditations, <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2020/03/ambient-meditative-music.html">ambient music</a>, <a href="https://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/01/supplements-for-meditation.html">supplements</a>, whatever might help to keep you mindful and relaxed. <br />
<br />
Walking meditation is another possible "trick". The Theravada community spends maybe half their meditation time walking, and neurologically speaking, that kind of exercise helps with learning. And we are trying to learn.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Non-Dual Teachings</h4>
<br />
Another approach, or supplement, would be to check out the people who are doing talks where they are pointing very directly at or from an enlightened perspective. This would be the realm of Advaita/Non-duality/Dzogchen. There are more of these teachers now than one could count, but a couple of the more famous would be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Adyashanti">Adyashanti</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/EckhartTeachings">Eckhart Tolle</a>, for whom there are innumerable Youtube videos, books, and recordings. These can sometimes be helpful, teaching something about the direction to lean towards.<br />
<br />
Traditional Buddhist dharma talks might also be helpful and motivating, there is a huge repository at <a href="https://dharmaseed.org/talks/">dharmaseed</a>, for example. <br />
<br />
<h4>
Head-Butting Your Worldview</h4>
<br />
Another supplemental approach would be to do a kind of intellectual inquiry, digging straight into the concepts and seriously confronting one's entrenched views about the world. A good example would be the book <a href="http://www.liberationunleashed.com/PDF/Gateless_Gatecrashers.pdf">Gateless Gatecrashers</a> (pdf, also available in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gateless-Gatecrashers-Ilona-Ciunaite/dp/1470028913/">print</a>). They have a website, <a href="http://www.liberationunleashed.com/">Liberation Unleashed</a>, with forums where people work on this kind of stuff, and like the meditation forums above, you could start a personal thread to directly engage with people on your journey.<br />
<br />
The classic Alan Watts <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Book-Taboo-Against-Knowing-Who/dp/0679723005/">"The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are"</a> might be an additional example.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Effort vs. No Effort</h4>
<h4>
</h4>
Many would place me in the "effort" camp of meditation. There is some of that. But I believe the dichotomy of effort vs. no-effort is solved, like most things, by understanding that both things are happening, both things are required. One has to simultaneously remain mindful (effort?, at times) in order to notice the grasping and resistance that can be let go of (no-effort). So I recommend some kind of structure in addition to a basic intent to be aware, and I recommend feeling your feelings and letting go of everything that can be let go of. And letting go of the structure is fine. Just be realistic about how mindful you actually are, and return to structure when you need to.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Feel Your Way Into It </h4>
<br />
Don't beat yourself up about this. These structured techniques
are just tools, use them, and relax while you're using them. You're just doing the equivalent of counting
cups of rice, it doesn't have to be stress inducing, far to the
contrary, it can be relaxing. Counting a cup of rice isn't hard, but it does mean you don't get to go off and think about that thing. That's the job you signed up for.<br />
<br />
Maybe I should end by making the point that this is ultimately or eventually something that you very much have to <i><b>feel</b></i> your way into. Feel the sensations, feel the emotions, feel the grasping and resistance, feel the breath. And relax, relax, relax wherever you can. Counting the breath, for example, is not about the counting. It's not about <i>controlling</i> the breath. It's about using the counting as a tool so you can <i><b>feel</b></i> the breath continuously, until you are just watching it happen, until you are just being, effortlessly experiencing an animal that happens to be breathing.<br />
<br />
Best of luck to you.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2016/01/vipassana-or-insight-meditation-mahasi.html">Mahasi Noting Style</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a><br />
<br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-36595457678177981722018-06-19T10:33:00.000-07:002020-07-12T12:09:09.067-07:00Why Use the Noting Style?First off, use whatever works. Whatever works to get you present and aware of what you are aware of, and keep you there a high percentage of the time.<br />
<br />
The noting style comes from southeast Asian Theravada Buddhism, from a monk called Mahasi. The style came out of a period of experimentation and regrowth in the Theravada communities due to various cultural factors. It was an attempt to replicate what Buddha described in his talk about mindfulness.<br />
<br />
The following is a bit technical, but here are some of the reasons that this style may be effective:<br />
<ul>
<li>Perhaps most importantly, the noting requires you to continuously <i>prove</i> one is aware, to provide evidence that you are aware, unlike most methods where one merely <i>intends</i> to be aware</li>
<li>Regular noting at approximately one second intervals doesn't allow much time for mind wandering</li>
<li>Coming up with the note uses up a certain amount of mental bandwidth that might otherwise be used to wander</li>
<li>Practiced earnestly, it allows for a very high rate of continuous mindfulness or awareness of awareness, true for many structured styles </li>
<li>Freely noting from any points in awareness, "dancing" from one
object of awareness to another, trains mental flexibility and gives
insight into impermanence</li>
<li>Similarly, continually breaking up one's experience into parts,
deconstructing the experience, "busting it up", gives insight into
no-self</li>
<li>Every note is telling you what experience, what attachment, to let go of </li>
<li>The regular noting (around 3600 times per hour) provides a unique
type of feedback, allowing the mind to see patterns it might miss
otherwise, at times providing insight into dependent origination, the
billiard ball like physics of our experience (for example: loud sound >
fear > body tensions > fearful thoughts > realization >
relief > relaxation)</li>
<li>This style is perhaps exceptionally good for interrupting the conditioned prejudice towards, and attachment to, thought</li>
<li>This style is recommended by <a href="https://drjud.com/">Dr. Jud Brewer</a>, who has tested out many types of mindfulness with subjects using fMRI, comparing the results to that of advanced meditators </li>
<li>Ultimately, it is a complete by-the-numbers approach to learn how to pay attention to the present moment. If you actually do it, you are being mindful. If you are doing mainstream mindfulness practice where you merely intend to be mindful, it may be that much of the time you won't be mindful.</li>
</ul>
But again, whatever works. <br />
<ul>
</ul>
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/intro-to-noting-and-meditation.html">Intro to Noting and Meditation</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a><br />
<br />
<ul>
</ul>
Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-83358498276690387082018-05-30T17:33:00.000-07:002018-07-26T08:05:53.035-07:00Meditation and PsychedelicsMany, if not most, of the senior members of the meditation community and teachers came to meditation at least in part as a result of psychedelic experiences back in the sixties and seventies. Books like Zig Zag Zen discuss this phenomenon.<br />
<br />
Clearly the use of psychedelics is not widespread in classic Buddhism. Yet they do make the rare appearance in the form of the Amrita (and Soma) sacrament in ancient Tibetan Buddhism (and Hinduism). Descriptions make it sound likely that these were mushrooms, described as both "red" (likely amanita muscaria) as well as "blue throated" (likely psilocybe cubensis). These mushrooms have been associated with many other cultures and religions.<br />
<br />
Adepts would go through a certain amount of meditation training before being presented with an initiation experience with the Amrita substance intended to provide a glimpse of the "deathless".<br />
<br />
Psychedelics can be enormously helpful, but they should come with a big warning label. Pragmatically, anything that can amplify the underlying psyche, bringing our deepest psychological baggage into full, naked awareness, and/or destabilizing closely held beliefs about world views, should probably come with a few caveats and precautions.<br />
<br />
In the same way, intensive meditation practice and intensive psychotherapy should come with similar warnings. The difference is simply that psychedelics can get you there quicker.<br />
<br />
The general recommendation is that you would already have your stuff together psychologically and so forth before you embark. For the studies that have been done on psychedelics they typically screen out people with various problems, family histories of schizophrenia, etc. But the reality is that a far broader spectrum of people will be experimenting with these substances. While I would recommend starting a meditation practice as part of the preparation, I would say at minimum familiarize yourself with at least one of the many <b><a href="https://insanebraintrain.blogspot.com/2012/03/psychedelic-trip-guides.html">guides to tripping</a></b> that are available.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Meditation and Psychedelics</h4>
<br />
Some initial research indicates some usefulness for meditation in conjunction with meditation. For example the paper, <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881117731279">Psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type experience in combination with meditation and other spiritual practices produces enduring positive changes in psychological functioning and in trait measures of prosocial attitudes and behavior.</a>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“There was a participant in the study who had had an extensive, extensive practice, like tens of thousands of hours of meditation, which is an incredibly extreme amount,” said Frederick Barrett, PhD at the
Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “And she indicated after her psilocybin session that she relived all of the peak experiences she had ever had meditating. Wow.”</i>
</blockquote>
<h4>
Similarity of the Brain on Psychedelics with that of Advanced Meditators</h4>
<br />
FMRI
studies show substantial correlation in brain activity patterns between people using major psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin and that of advanced meditators. Both show a dialing down of the Default Mode Network (monkey mind). So it is plausible that this might be helpful with some kind of crossover or training wheel effect.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Seeing Things in A New Way</h4>
<br />
Psychedelics are a useful tool to see that there are alternatives to the way we usually experience the world. This can help us to open up to new ways of seeing things. While we humans are continual learners, I feel that once we reach a certain age it becomes maybe even more useful to begin to unlearn some of the stuff that we learned wrong the first time around, letting go of entrenched dogmas and psychological viewpoints that aren't helpful anymore.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Creativity</h4>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/10/29/brain-psychedelic-drugs/#.Ww84riApDtS" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/10/29/brain-psychedelic-drugs/#.Ww84riApDtS" border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="1024" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqP_Ec0mcNzeT2ekfC2Og0pNswdIqMvIPz4ZEU1ZlgpzE_1bcgwudKz5V3YHtHmtHsr0zhSEUigwnghY12E0ddGyaYumMrwcdYuEo9hHND1APr5KtfYOyUwAH-IlxNt-uTNhho8ZvEFSUD/s200/connections.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Similarly, psychedelics may help us to connect various ideas and concepts in new ways. The brain scans show that there is a type of interconnectivity in the brain that is not normally present.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h4>
Openness</h4>
<br />
One of the ground breaking findings from research into psilocybin is that <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0269881111420188">changes were observed in the personality domain of openness</a>, one of five dimensions of personality that were thought to be relatively fixed by adulthood. As with other positive trait changes resulting from psilocybin, the effect was correlated with the degree to which the individual experienced a genuine mystical experience. From the paper:
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The long-term positive impact of hallucinogens may depend on their ability to occasion profound insights and mystical-type experiences. The core features of mystical experience, are feelings of unity and interconnectedness with all people and things, a sense of sacredness, feelings of peace and joy, a sense of transcending normal time and space, ineffability, and an intuitive belief that the experience is a source of objective truth about the nature of reality.<br /><br />Because such experiences appear to enable individuals to transcend their usual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, it is plausible that they could occasion changes in core dimensions of personality.</i></blockquote>
<h4>
Offering A Glimpse</h4>
<br />
By offering people a chance of a mystical experience, there is a possibility to glimpse the kinds of insights that would otherwise be possible only after years of meditation.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Magnifying Glass</h4>
<br />
Psychedelics are sometimes described as a non-specific magnifier of experience. They can sometimes bring hidden issues to the forefront in clear detail. <br />
<br />
<h4>
Concentration Practice</h4>
<br />
The meditative absorptions known as jhanas or samadhi are easier to attain on psychedelics and more intense, this makes various aspects of jhanas clearer than they might be otherwise. Again, a training wheel effect.<br />
<br />
Although controversial, I think a retreat practice that included some days of very low microdoses could be effective.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Oneness</h4>
<br />
The dropping away of the ego into pure consciousness or oneness is easier to stumble into. This could help with a training wheel effect or perhaps more realistically it simply gives one a better idea of the ultimate direction to lean into.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Psychological Healing</h4>
<br />
Under certain conditions psychedelics can help with the healing of difficult psychological problems. The use of MMDA for PTSD is relatively well established, now in stage III clinical trials, but this type of thing can happen with major psychedelics as well. The short version is that the challenging material needs to come up under the influence and be "allowed" without resistance.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Neurogenesis and Plasticity</h4>
<br />
There is some sparse evidence (studies on mice, I believe) that the major psychedelics enhance neurogenesis and plasticity, things that are beneficial for training and learning of all kinds.<br />
<br />
<h3>
On the other hand</h3>
<h4>
<br />
Promotion of Delusion</h4>
<br />
Because things can seem more real under the influence of psychedelics, and the mind is particularly open and vulnerable to different ways of seeing things, strange beliefs and superstitions often arise. In the world of recreational psychedelics, pseudoscience rules.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Often doesn't make for Permanent Changes</h4>
<br />
Occasionally, yes, particularly under the right conditions, but as a rule, probably not so much. Spiritually, one gets a glimpse. All too often a person will simply fall back into their previous patterns. Can be very helpful, but the way it is typically used recreationally is not ideal. Used properly, and in combination with a good meditation practice, I think there are some real benefits.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Some Personal Experiences</h3>
<br />
Around 1980 or so, early in my twenties, I had my first psychedelic experience, with LSD. It was blotter with the image of something like a blue dove. Whatever it was, it was not weak. It was an interesting and
surreal experience, but at the time, I didn't take it as much more than that. Looking back I can see there were a lot of important insights that I passed off as merely unusual.<br />
<br />
<h4>
No-Self</h4>
<br />
For example, seeing that everything was
happening, without "me". There were clearly many experiences like this during the trip, but I find it fascinating that it didn't really impress me as mind blowing or anything. I think the basic problem was that I
was still living with a very solid assumption of self. And I had not really considered the notion of ego-death, if I had even heard of it at all at that point. Frankly, if you had asked me if ego-death had happened to me, I would have said no. And I did not release into what I would call pure consciousness. That would be decades later for me.<br />
<br />
I did a little bit of drawing with a sketchpad, and I noticed that the drawing was just happening. I wasn't controlling it or guiding it, or cognizing about it as I usually might. No lining things up or checking
angles or proportions, rather it was just flowing naturally and the pencil was moving as if by itself. I was just watching.<br />
<br />
A friend took me to a video arcade where I played the game Asteroids. As I played, it was as if I
wasn't doing anything, but again, just watching it happen. Like the sketching, I wasn't trying to direct or control anything. My hands were moving by themselves and stuff was happening on the screen. I ended up
with a score that was about 10% higher than I had scored before or since. I would say this is primarily because "I" got out of the way, perhaps in the same way that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock_Ellis">Dock Ellis</a> pitched a no-hitter while high on acid, or when Jimi Hendrix knocked out that incredible set at the Monterey Pop Festival.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Being very purely in the moment</h4>
<br />
We then went to a repertory showing of the Beatles movie "Let It Be". This became very strange, because I lost the ability to understand music. My experience was so intensely, concretely, <i>so hard into the present moment</i> that it was as if the past and future didn't exist. With no past and future, only the present moment, there was no continuity of sound and therefore no "music". In that context, all I could perceive was the fundamentals of sound in each moment, each happening in an utterly independent way, with no connection to the next
or previous moment. Just isolated, random sounds, with no perception of melody. I'm not sure if I could perceive harmony, but there was certainly no enjoyment or appreciation of what we would call music. It
was just sound. In the hearing was just hearing.<br />
<br />
I also lost some ability to distinguish visual objects at times. I can remember being unable to separate the microphone from Paul McCartney. It was as if it was one object, microphonepaulmccartney.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Thoughts Are Just Happening</h4>
<br />
Winding down at the end of that evening, as I fell into bed and maybe for the first time relaxed and went within (something that decades later I wished I had done from the start), I was noticing my thoughts, and what was peculiar is that it was as if they weren't my thoughts. It was as if I was separate from the thoughts and I had no connection with them. Once again, they just seemed to be happening.<br />
<br />
All in all, that one experience on LSD was jam-packed with insight. I feel fortunate to have gotten so much, but it changed my life almost none. Only years later, with extensive meditation, did it all come together for me. <br />
<br />
<h4>
5th Jhana</h4>
<br />
Many years later, the first time I experienced 5th jhana, which is a meditative absorption with the predominate feature of "infinite space", was while taking psilocybin. It blew me away. This was a bit of a game changer because, for me, it was such an unusual distortion of my normal reality in a way that was inescapable. And since it was repeatable, I couldn't explain it away as imagination, suggestion or whatever. The fact that it plays on the primary sense of vision as well, making whatever space you're in look and feel enormously big and sometimes expanding, wow. This is an example of the way that psychedelics are what I call spiritual steroids, they allow you to go beyond your cutting edge and see a bit more. Within weeks I experienced it in normal meditation.<br />
<br />
At the time, I didn't know it was 5th jhana. I didn't know enough about jhanas to know that. But I did guess it was one of the higher jhanas, and afterwords I pulled a book off the shelf with some descriptions and found out what it was. I was almost disappointed it was "only" 5th. Hah, the ego.<br />
<br />
5th jhana on psychedelics holds a special place for me, not only because of that first experience, but there was something about continually experiencing that, and expanding out to infinity, it kind of literally opened me up, it was as if it physically connected me to all things, to all people. Literally expanded my world.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Fading out of Senses</h4>
<br />
On
many other occasions with psilocybin and various combinations I have experienced the loss of one or more senses
while on psychedelics. Most commonly the sense of hearing. Sometimes sound became distorted like the clipping of an overdriven amplifier, more rarely it would drop out completely, sometimes turning off and on
as if someone was flicking a switch. And, one time, on my highest dose, I experienced a void where there really weren't any senses. I didn't know where I was or what was happening, and my cognition was very limited. Might have been something like a hard 8th jhana.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Bright White Light</h4>
<br />
I have
also experienced a significant brightening of the visual field on many occasions. I sometimes would use a light and sound machine for the entrainment and entertainment of flashing lights. On the most extreme occasion I can think of, the white brightness of my visual field became so intense that I couldn't even make out the LED's on the light goggles that were flashing directly over my pupils. I remember resignedly taking off the goggles muttering to myself, "well this is pointless".<br />
<br />
<h4>
Caution and Final Words</h4>
<br />
These personal stories are some of the more extreme experiences of someone who, for a period of about 5 years in particular, was something of a psychonaut. This is the cream of extreme out of hundreds of experiences, although I can't even begin to do justice to them, and the hundreds of other insights that came along the way. Out of all those experiences, I should mention that there were maybe 3 sessions that were substantially challenging, one particularly so. That's going to happen at some point, although the most difficult experiment resulted from too high a dose in combination with an mao inhibitor. Not a good choice, stay away from both, and work up slowly. The other two difficult experiences were a result of tripping while experiencing a lot of unsatisfactoriness. Again, not a great choice, although the underlying psyche can be difficult to read.<br />
<br />
Also, that first experience on LSD had a segment of very intense paranoia. For me, it took a long time to get past that paranoia, and I encountered it a little bit on every trip for a while. Then, perhaps starting a dozen trips down the road, I started to finally be with that paranoia, allowing it to be there, allowing the underlying part of me that I was resisting to just be what it is, accepting it, making peace with it. That process played out over about 5 trips for me and ended up being the most important therapy of my life. It fixed me. I really want that for everyone, but, you know, be careful, be prepared.Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-40908834926401655982018-01-01T09:39:00.000-08:002018-01-01T09:39:39.589-08:00Supplements for MeditationBesides a reasonable healthy diet, there may be supplements that make sense for a meditator.<br />
<br />
As meditation training is a kind of learning, the concepts of neurogenesis (adding brain cells) and neuroplasticity (creating lasting changes) makes sense. Neuroscientists are not exactly supplement junkies, but they do typically recommend two things over and over:<br />
<ul>
<li>Omega-3 Fatty Acids</li>
<li>Aerobic Exercise</li>
</ul>
I find it interesting that the Theravada Buddhists include substantial portions of walking meditation on retreats, sometimes 50% of meditation time, as much as 8 hours a day. I think that much might be overkill, but the general idea gives one at least the incentive to do what the medical establishment already recommends, about 30 minutes a day of moderate activity like walking.<br />
<br />
It is fairly common in retreat environments for stimulants to be provided, such as:<br />
<ul>
<li>Tea and Coffee</li>
</ul>
I'm a bit sensitive to those myself, but if those work for you and you don't overdo it, use them intelligently when you need to. On the other hand, if you need to sleep, sleep.<br />
<br />
Rather than, or in addition to caffeine, I recommend one of the earlier "cognitive enhancing" drugs:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam">Piracetam</a></li>
</ul>
The research on piracetam is somewhat inconclusive with respect to the kind of things it is often tested for, such as cognitive impairment, etc. I can only point to a small number of advanced meditators that have gone on and off the substance and noticed the difference. There are other more potent "racetams", but the original is the best studied, probably safest in that regard, and seems to work fine.<br />
<br />
My take is that piracetam is helpful in keeping the mind aware and mindful, a literal mindfulness supplement. <br />
<br />
It is often suggested that one start off with higher doses of piracetam, around 4.6 grams twice a day, and perhaps gradually tapering down to a maintenance dose of around 2.4 grams once a day, but you could also just start at the maintenance dose if you're more patient. Your mileage may vary. I've been satisfied with a modest 0.5 gram per day for many years now.<br />
<br />
Even more controversial, and based on even sparser research, it might be worth mentioning perhaps even a:<br />
<ul>
<li>Major Psychedelic</li>
</ul>
There is a very small amount of research showing that major psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, promote neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. Perhaps that by itself is not enough to recommend it, and at some point I intend to do a more detailed post about psychedelics and meditation, but for now I would speculate that, if you are comfortable with these substances, a <i>very small</i> microdose, perhaps 1-5% of a dose, taken first thing in the morning on retreat, might not be the worst thing to do.<br />
<br />
Of course, better than any supplement would be to make sure you are:<br />
<ul>
<li>Regularly, repeatedly, earnestly engaging in the practice of mindfulness and letting go</li>
</ul>
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-15949046010679905362017-11-03T08:02:00.001-07:002018-10-05T05:47:03.064-07:00Alternative NotingThe kind of noting described so far could be done anywhere, but an alternate or additional form can be used off the cushion, which is to describe <b>actions</b> being performed. For example, the practice of focusing on the breath is often noted with the "rising" and "falling" (of the diaphragm), or sometimes "in" and "out" if noting the breath at the tip of the nose.<br />
<br />
Walking can be noted as "stepping", or during slow meditative walks as a sequence of "lifting", "moving", "placing", "pressure", etc. Getting a glass of water, there might be "reaching" for the cabinet handle, "grasping" the handle, "pulling" the handle, "reaching" for the glass, "holding" the glass, "moving" the glass, "reaching" for the faucet, "turning" the faucet, "moving" the glass, "filling" the glass, "reaching" for the faucet again, "turning" the faucet, "raising" the glass, "turning", "sipping", "tasting", "swallowing", etc.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/06/getting-it-done.html">Getting It Done</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-36258135283627194402017-11-03T08:01:00.005-07:002022-09-06T12:36:56.852-07:00Second Stage - More Detailed Noting<p>A second stage might be to begin to flesh out the feeling component into basic physical sensations like "pressure" or "tension", as well as basic emotions such as "anger", "joy", "sadness", and "fear", and to flesh out thinking into a few categories like "planning", "wondering", "remembering", or "imagining". <br />
<br />
We don't have to go crazy with a million notes, but I will list a few more here for reference. Pick and choose what works for you.<br />
<br />
Feeling <b>physical sensations</b>: pressure, tension, release, itching, tingling, twitching, pulsing, throbbing, warmness, coolness, softness, hardness. It doesn't have to be complicated. 99% of the time I find myself using pressure or tension.<br />
<br />
Feeling <b>emotional sensations</b>: Besides basic emotions such as anger, joy, sadness and fear, there can be related subcomponents:<br />
<br />
Related to <b>anger</b>: disgust, frustration, annoyance, rage, irritation.<br />
Related to <b>joy</b>: love, bliss, exhilaration, wonder.<br />
Related to <b>sadness</b>: depression, grief, hopelessness, despair.<br />
Related to <b>fear</b>: anxiety, worry, surprise.<br />
<br />
There is also a category of <b>mind states</b> that might not fit neatly into thoughts or feelings, such as amusement, curiosity, compassion, relaxation, tranquility, anticipation, apathy, boredom, etc.</p><p>Experiencing <b>thinking</b>: thinking, remembering, imagining, planning, visualizing, wondering, analyzing, judging.<br />
<br />
I would say that when I am noting, I am probably using less than 20 notes on a regular basis. It's just a tool to keep us aware, and it doesn't take tremendous variety to go beyond the benefit of a simple mantra.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/third-stage-grasping-and-resistance.html">Third Stage - Grasping and Resistance</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a></p>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-87266397992357132792017-11-03T08:01:00.004-07:002019-11-04T07:14:05.833-08:00Getting In Touch With EmotionsRealize that when you are having an emotional experience, there may be many things going on. There could be a primary emotion such as anger. Easy enough. But there could also be tensions in the body that are related to the anger. One of the better habits to cultivate is an ability to quickly (or slowly) scan through the body and notice where there are any tensions. Often, a fair amount of that tension can be let go of immediately, once you are aware of it. In addition to the emotion of anger, and the body tensions associated with anger, there could also be angry thoughts or something subtler like a grumpiness. If you're experiencing dissatisfaction, gently explore the body, the emotions, the mindstates, try to understand where that is, what it is, what you are really experiencing.<br />
<br />
Understand that I'm not suggesting you intellectually analyze your emotions or try to figure out the "why" behind them. Why is not so important. I'm encouraging you to actually <b>feel your feelings</b>. For some people it might be useful to probe a little deeper, i.e. maybe there is a surface emotion, which is enough for basic noting practice, but maybe check to see if there is anything deeper. I don't normally advocate "hunting" for objects of awareness in noting, rather just note what is there, but if emotions are tricky for you, it might be worth poking around a bit. Are you noticing all of the emotional material? Are you avoiding or resisting any emotional material? Be curious, and try to make sure you're feeling everything that is there, that you aren't skipping over or ignoring something.<br />
<br />
It may be worthwhile to remember that when you are experiencing anything related to emotions, maybe check out the other parts of the body-emotions-thoughts complex, and see what else can be noticed and possibly let go of.<br />
<br />
This is similar to the idea of breaking things down into their component parts. What is this sensation made of? Where is it in the body? Does it change? These are questions to be asked and answered without words. Feel this stuff. Adyashanti once made the analogy of being like a mad scientist, exploring the feelings that you are resisting or fearing. What is that nasty depression like when you break it down in this way or stop fighting it? Or that rage or fear? Plunge into it and first try to just let it be what it is and break it down, or simply experience it again and again. Let it be what it is. Be curious, as curiosity is a great tool for maintaining awareness. What are the basic sensations, where are they in the body, what does that feel like, what are the thoughts, might I be able to let go of some of that? Could I let that be without resisting it? Do this until you begin to do this wordlessly.<br />
<br />
I hesitate to get too deeply into the beliefs underlying emotions, because we are trying to break everything down into component parts, and simultaneously we're trying to avoid going into stories and narrative. For our purposes the why is not so important. However, I should mention that on this emotional axis and the body-emotion-mind experiences that are woven there, there is typically an underlying belief, an opinion, an assumption, often a fear, that lies beneath resisted phenomenon. Letting go of the underlying belief can facilitate the letting go of all the various sensations. If you are aware enough of your own psychology to go down that road, I recommend keeping the concepts to simply noticing something like "my parents were controlling", and then go right back to noting basic phenomenon. Nothing to see here, move along - it is just phenomenon like any other. Psychological analysis can take place outside of formal meditation practice.<br />
<br />
So the recommendation for things you are resisting is to lightly and continuously, repetitively, explore the usual suspects of body, emotion, and mind, investigate without creating a bunch of stories, let go of what can be let go of, and ultimately let everything just be with as little resistance as possible. The background of the meditative path is one of relaxation, which is about letting go of the tensions that we are often unconsciously creating.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>"get comfortable with being uncomfortable</i>" </div>
<br />
Sometimes we may be dealing with something that is more persistent or troublesome emotionally. This requires more of the same. The pointer is to work in a very continuous way on feeling, accepting, allowing, acknowledging, welcoming, surrendering, opening up, making friends, being receptive, holding the space, letting be, letting go, etc. This aspect of treating everything that comes up in a non-judgmental way, relaxing with it, allowing it, is a very important part of the practice.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/alternative-noting.html">Alternative Noting</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-14897180686791958232017-11-03T08:01:00.003-07:002019-11-04T07:34:56.650-08:00General TheoryAt first the verbal quality of the notes themselves might be relatively primary in awareness. It's a new task where we have to focus on the words and choose them, and it may take some time to learn to label experience effortlessly. The underlying goal is to pay attention to what is happening, and there can be more than one thing happening at once. Just try to label what is more or less predominate, and understand that not everything will get formally noticed. Try to notice what you can.<br />
<br />
As you become familiar with the practice and you've learned a decent palette of notes, it should become as easy as picking out the color red on a palette of primary colors. As it gets even easier, the goal is to put most of your attention on the objects themselves, the actual experiencing of seeing, hearing, feeling, and very little on the mental/verbal note. Perhaps something like 5% of your attention might be on the note itself. Noting is a tool, but the goal is to be continuously mindful of the primary objects, the actual seeing, hearing, and feeling. Almost your full attention should be on the objects, moving from one object to the next, maintaining continuity of mindfulness like stepping from one lily pad to the next, keeping continuously aware, relaxed, open and non-conceptual.<br />
<br />
Notes should typically be kept simple - one word, straight to the point. We're not trying to go into long descriptions, stories, or concepts, in fact we're trying to avoid that. All we need is a simple pointer, a placeholder, a check mark to see that we're doing the main job of mindfulness. Although we are using a tiny bit of conceptualization in the form of the note, as long as we keep it simple and are well practiced, there is very little conceptual processing, and it can become second nature.<br />
<br />
We can also see noting as a process of breaking our experience down into its component parts, seeing what we are made of. There are a lot of ways to break down our experience, one concept is that it all comes back to the 6 sense doors - the 5 basic senses plus thought. Everything can be labeled as seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling, and thinking. While you are meditating, forget your ideas and assumptions about a body or your life, what the room looks like, or what is outside. Just keep dissecting your experience into little bits, the basic building blocks of your experience.<br />
<br />
It is helpful to view all experience, the objects of awareness, as processes happening in the present, here and now. To that end, notes are often verbs ending in "-ing", the <b><i>present</i></b> participle in grammar. Even when they are not, it is implied, as everything is a process. For example if we note pressure or angst or relaxation, what we are really noticing is <i>feeling</i> pressure or <i>feeling</i> angst or <i>feeling</i> relaxation.<br />
<br />
Absolutely everything can be noted, everything can be put into the note-o-matic experience processor. If you are having trouble coming up with a note you can always relax and note "this" or "don't know" or "blank" as a catch-all, but in such an instance maybe you could also look a bit deeper, perhaps noting "searching" or "wondering" or perhaps because of that struggle there may be "anxiety" or "frustration" or "grasping", and maybe even "resistance" to that frustration. Don't go crazy searching for the right note, but understand that over time you can become aware of more of what you are experiencing. Certain relaxed spaces may seem at first to be empty of gross sensation and thought but might be noted as relaxation, peace, tranquility, etc.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/getting-in-touch-with-emotions.html">Getting In Touch With Emotions</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a><br />
<br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-11385047956984496212017-11-03T08:01:00.002-07:002019-11-04T07:03:20.504-08:00Third Stage - Grasping and ResistanceOnce a basic palette of notes is established, most of what we experience is being noted. But I've left out another important dimension (or two). The primary thing here is to focus on one's reaction to experience in terms of what we might call grasping and resistance. This is an area that is more or less covered in traditional Buddhist terms by noticing that things may be perceived as "pleasant", "unpleasant", or "neutral". This gives us some information about how we are built, what our biases are, and what reactions are coming up. This dimension is sometimes based on inherent qualities, and sometimes learned.<br />
<br />
The dimension of pleasant and unpleasant is closely related and almost identical to what might be the most important takeaway from this section, the overall awareness of "grasping" and "resistance". For most practical purposes these will line up, as we will grasp for things that are pleasant and resist what is unpleasant. So we can kind of think of it as one dimension. But just to be accurate, notice that occasionally, for example when long term goals are involved, we might find that these don't line up. An endurance athlete may learn to grasp for the intense unpleasantness of pushing into the "red zone", knowing that this is how they win.<br />
<br />
The dimensions of pleasant/grasping and unpleasant/resistance begin to tell us a lot about our relationship with our experience. The goal of meditation is in some ways to become okay with all experience, and so when we notice that something is unpleasant and we are resisting it, we can actually note the resistance itself, let that resistance just be there like it is like any other object in experience, and see if maybe we can let go of some of that. And if we can't, we let that be okay too.<br />
<br />
It becomes very important to notice grasping and resistance as these are the areas where we really learn to surrender and let things be. Sometimes this can be difficult if we have conditioned ourselves to avoid unpleasant experiences. We may immediately, perhaps unconsciously, in a habitual way, distract ourselves away from unsatisfactory experience. The remedy is to develop practices to keep ourselves continuously aware, and to notice these sometimes subtle movements. Notice the movement away from the unsatisfactory and feel the unpleasant sensations. We're not cultivating or dwelling unnecessarily on the unpleasant, we're just giving these sensations the fair share that they always deserved, and we're getting the feedback from those experiences that we've been missing out on.<br />
<br />
And although we've spun the pleasant side as, well, pleasant, it turns out that if we are desiring or craving something, there can actually be an anxious, furtive, needy quality to the grasping, a sense of lack or want that we may eventually come to see as unpleasant. People tend to notice this long after dealing with the more typically unpleasant side of things. Once again, more to let go of.<br />
<br />
Noticing "grasping" and "resistance" are a major key to unraveling ourselves. Other similar words would include craving and aversion, or contraction. Use what works.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/general-theory.html">General Theory</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-677170954700672472017-11-03T08:00:00.005-07:002018-06-21T08:23:23.265-07:00First Stage - Basic NotingA brief word about posture. Posture is important only in the sense that we need to be reasonably awake, alert, and free of pain. From the standpoint of lower back health we might also want to sit in a reasonably healthy posture as long as we're going to be sitting for a while, so some kind of decent upright posture is typically recommended. On the other hand you could even meditate lying down, but it will be more likely that you might fall asleep. You don't have to sit on the floor, or on a meditation cushion, or in a lotus position, or with your fingers in a certain position. Sitting in a chair is fine.<br />
<br />
A first stage of noting might be to note all phenomenon, the objects in your awareness, as either "seeing", "hearing", "feeling", "thinking", or if you're having trouble picking a category, perhaps "don't know" or simply "this" to represent whatever you can't quite put a label on. Try to maintain a pace of around once per second or so, keep to a steady rhythm, and just do it, do it no matter what. Noting may seem a bit clumsy at first - it is - it has perhaps more of a learning curve than other techniques, but it just takes some practice to get used to it and develop a palette of notes. Persistence tends to work here, it took me a few months to really feel natural about it. I persisted because a number of fairly intelligent and reasonable people said that it worked really well for them.<br />
<br />
You don't have to note forever and always. If your meditation gets quiet and stable and you can sit without technique for a while, go ahead. Just be aware, and if you find yourself wandering, go back to the technique again.<br />
<br />
Note what you are aware of regardless of whether there is much of anything there or not. So if your attention is on the visual component, say the back of your eyelids, you would note "seeing" regardless of whether you are seeing something specific or it is pitch black. Your attention is in the direction of the visual component so you note "seeing".<br />
<br />
Noting is typically done silently for practical reasons (group sits, etc.), but noting out loud is actually a powerful and recommended practice. It is much harder to drift off into thought while noting aloud. When you can, try using out loud noting when you are having trouble staying aware.<br />
<br />
Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/second-stage-more-detailed-noting.html">Second Stage - More Detailed Noting</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a> Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-38982185136985664162017-11-03T08:00:00.003-07:002019-11-04T06:57:19.602-08:00Intro to Noting and MeditationThe style of meditation I most often recommend is called noting. The technique of noting style meditation is to notice what you are aware of, and to label it with a simple "note" such as "seeing", "hearing", or "feeling". By doing this at a steady, frequent pace, about once every second or so, it forces you to be continuously aware and present. As you practice, it requires you to be mindful, because each moment you must prove that you are mindful by naming what you are uniquely aware of in that moment.<br />
<br />
Noting could be seen as a more powerful form of mantra, in this case a dynamic or adaptable mantra. Rather than repeating the exact same word or phrase, each moment we must come up with a unique description of what is more or less predominate in our awareness at any time.<br />
<br />
This practice is one of the more effective at interrupting the mind's natural inclination to go off and think about the next thing.<br />
<br />
Some may be put off by the structure of it, or the verbal nature of it. My advice is to train the mind with high quality practice by whatever means you can. If that's noting practice, fine. If you can just sit without any technique, and by pure natural talent and willpower you can be present and aware during 95% or more of your formal meditation practice, then maybe do that. I list many techiques for this kind of mental skill training in <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2016/12/basic-meditation-styles.html">Basic Meditation Styles</a>, find what works for you.<br />
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But I would definitely look for something that gets the quality high. Quality in the sense of <i>a high percentage of time aware and present</i>. My belief is that getting the practice very pure, at least for a few important developmental years, may be pretty useful on the path, not that you should be hard on yourself for any lapses. As my guitar teacher pointed out, practice makes permanent. If your mindfulness practice is extremely sloppy, and you're spacing out left and right, to some degree that is indeed the mind that you will make permanent.<br />
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For some, it may even be that the very effectiveness of noting technique ends up putting them off. Noting can be very good at getting in the way of our natural conditioned desire to think, and the mind can find that frustrating, while at the same time being a new and difficult task. The underlying neurology wants to think, to daydream, to fantasize. It doesn't want to go on the equivalent of a thought "diet", and as a result many consciously or unconsciously prefer half measures.<br />
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People often seem to feel that they should just be able to "wing it" without technique. They drop the technique and end up doing a lot more of all that daydreaming that their underlying neurology wants to do.<br />
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My recommendation is to just have some reasonable awareness of how you are doing on your percent awareness meter, the percentage of time you are actually present and aware in practice, and be careful not to trade short term desire or inertia for long term peace and tranquility.<br />
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Regarding thought, there's a fine line in that we don't really want to create aversion to thought. One of the basic themes that comes out of the contemplative path is that everything is okay just as it is. That's true, and we can bring something of that into every moment, but the problem is that we have spent perhaps a hundred thousand hours overemphasizing thought and our identification with it, and it will take some attention to remedy that.<br />
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One piece of practical advice is, for perhaps a few years, lean a bit more into bodily sensations. If you can let go of thought a bit, and can pay a little more attention to what is going on in the body, you are restoring a kind of natural balance. We have unconsciously prejudiced ourselves towards thought, and we're not going to be able to immediately let go of that. We need to pay more attention to the body, kind of an affirmative action for the sensate world. There is nothing necessarily wrong with thought, but we are essentially prejudiced bigots with respect to it, so affirmative action is required.<br />
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Advocating a relatively hardcore kind of effort can lead to problems for some people. They may become overly concerned about practicing correctly. "Am I doing it right?" or "Oh no, I've spaced out again!" The way to practice is to learn the simple basics and then be nonjudgmental about the results. If you're practicing in the direction of being continuously aware, relaxed, open, and non-conceptual, you are practicing correctly. If you space out, that is very much to be expected, particularly at first. More about that later, but the basic advice is don't beat yourself up about it.<br />
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It's also worth mentioning that the more effective a practice is, the more likely it is that someone will eventually stumble across some buried psychological problems. In the same exact way that enough psychotherapy or experimentation with psychedelic drugs will likely bring your psychological issues to the forefront, so will intense meditation practice. Sitting around daydreaming, not so much. But this is the path, to learn to become okay with all the parts of ourselves. As layers are peeled back, sometimes it will be tender underneath. You have to acknowledge and surrender to that tenderness, that pain, until you are okay with that newly uncovered layer, and then you continue and perhaps begin to peel off yet another layer.<br />
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Again, you're up against maybe a hundred thousand hours of practicing grasping at thought. When you do drift away and come back, understand how natural that is, and understand it is a good thing you came back to the present. This is what we want - to come back to here and now, so be pleased with the coming back part, and just go right back into your practice, your technique, and maybe this time with a little bit of extra energy or intent. Back to it, back to it, again and again and again. You keep putting the puppy on the newspaper, and eventually it learns.<br />
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Next: <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/first-stage-basic-noting.html">First Stage - Basic Noting</a><br />
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<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a>Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-30602603946581785152017-11-03T08:00:00.001-07:002020-04-07T09:45:05.409-07:00Meditation OverviewMeditation at its simplest is about training awareness. Training the mind to be present, aware of what is here and now as opposed to being lost in thought. We find ourselves in the predicament of having been unwittingly conditioned for many tens of thousands of hours towards thinking as our default, and we have ended up greatly attached and identified with those thoughts. As humans, we exist in an ocean of conditioned concepts. Meditation seeks to undo this conditioning by practicing awareness of the here and now, and within that awareness, letting go of everything that can be let go of.<br />
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In a way, the first key is merely remembering - remembering to be mindful in this way. This is an easy concept, but difficult in practice. Because it is so difficult, I generally recommend techniques that are relatively structured, that provide some kind of regularity or feedback to keep one continuously aware. If the style described here isn't your thing, there are many other approaches such as those outlined in <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2016/12/basic-meditation-styles.html">Basic Meditation Styles</a>.<br />
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The goal is to train the mind back to a kind of "zero point" - aware but not attached to experience, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, opinions - something like the mind prior to all the conditioning and baggage of human culture.<br />
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Next: <a href="https://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-easy-way-do-nothing.html">The Easy Way - Do Nothing</a><br />
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<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-meditate.html">Table of Contents for How to Meditate</a><br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1195593853803881373.post-11209112583447007302017-11-03T07:59:00.000-07:002020-03-13T15:56:51.618-07:00How To MeditateThis is primarily in-depth instructions on the "noting" style of meditation I recommend, although there is much that applies to any form of meditation. I also have a simple one page description of some simple forms of meditation that would be a good foundational set of practices in <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-simple-way-to-start.html">A Simple Way to Start</a>. <br />
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If you feel that maybe this noting approach isn't really your thing, but you'd
like to know more about meditation, a highly recommended and largely
non-dogmatic book that can give you a good feel for the territory is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-English-Bhante-Henepola-Gunaratana/dp/0861719069/">Mindfulness in Plain English</a>, by the monk Bhante Gunaratana. Also, <a href="https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/1095/">the 45 minute audio of basic instructions given by the nun Andrea Fella</a> is a great introduction. Those are great resources for learning an unstructured style of meditation.<br />
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The noting style is sometimes called the Mahasi or Burmese style,
after the monk that developed it. This style is more or less the main style of
mindfulness or vipassana that is taught in southeast Asian Theravada
Buddhist communities.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
An abbreviated version of this style is to</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>notice what is roughly predominate in awareness and label it, about
once per second, as either "seeing", "hearing", "feeling", or "thinking", or "don't know".</i></b> </div>
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The last page below <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2016/01/vipassana-or-insight-meditation-mahasi.html">(Mahasi Style Noting</a>) contains links to audio that explains the style.<br />
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<ul>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/meditation-overview.html">Meditation Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="https://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-easy-way-do-nothing.html">The Easy Way - Do Nothing</a> - letting go</li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/06/why-use-noting-style.html">Why Use the Noting Style?</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/intro-to-noting-and-meditation.html">Intro to Noting and Meditation</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/first-stage-basic-noting.html">First Stage - Basic Noting</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/second-stage-more-detailed-noting.html">Second Stage - More Detailed Noting</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/third-stage-grasping-and-resistance.html">Third Stage - Grasping and Resistance</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/general-theory.html">General Theory</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/getting-in-touch-with-emotions.html">Getting In Touch With Emotions</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2017/11/alternative-noting.html">Alternative Noting</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2018/06/getting-it-done.html">Getting It Done</a> - there is gold here</li>
<li><a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2016/01/vipassana-or-insight-meditation-mahasi.html">Mahasi Style Noting</a> - and additional resources</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
</ul>
Other <a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2015/07/article-list.html">instruction oriented articles</a><br />
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<a href="http://ericgatleymeditation.blogspot.com/2015/07/personal-meditation-instruction.html">Personal instruction</a><br />
<br />Insane Brain Trainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04716319361572130128noreply@blogger.com0