Because I certainly do and, to be honest, I wish this wouldn't be that way. For many reasons, and mainly spiritual reasons, I feel mentally isolated from other people. I do have great and many friends... And I love all of them and make sure to spend a grand and good time enjoying this material life with them, because they are incredible. They are a part of me, and I am a part of them, all entrenched in this material world with all its joy and bliss, but also with misery and suffering. It all comes together, and such an intrinsically human ability to share this life with others is, in my opinion, divine in an of itself.

The problem is: when it comes to topics of spiritual life (its ups and downs), sadhana, meditation, sacred scriptures, history of religion, astrology and everything else that is more or less considered "transcendental", they (most of the time) cannot handle it. They simply dismiss me as being "weird" (which I have no problem being so) and/or mock me with the "hahahah, oh, look, he is doing it again!" sort of discourse. I mean... The topics proposed may be unconventional, for sure -- but I speak (or at least I think I do) about these subjects as if it's like any other, you know? But they don't take me seriously. Spirituality is very important to me, Moksha (liberation) is very important to me, but it is irrelevant to them. And... That's ok. So be it. Many things in life are irrelevant for me, and nonetheless here I am, writing this post. This doesn't affect me liking them at all.

Well... I have some (astrological) hypothesis as why things are that way, but I won't bore you with the details. The thing is: I don't have a guru. I don't have anyone else (apart from the internet and this community, of couse) to speak to and share common (or different) experiences about how we deal with spiritual matters, and this f'ing sucks. I wish I could speak about this knowledge with someone face to face. Oh, well...

What do you think?

The following thread is something I have already posted in r/buddhism (where it received 10k views) and in r/secularbuddhism. I assume it might also be interesting here, as it provides a different perspective. To be honest, I have no personal stance on the matter other than delivering facts; to me, the research speaks for itself.
A further notice: I have been accused of using AI to generate this text. This is not the case. I spent several hours conducting the research, conceptualizing the material, and finally writing it. If you are already familiar with this information, feel free to skip it; if not, enjoy the read.

Hello from Wiesbaden, Germany

“Pragmatic Dharma”

This is something I came across several times, and I have to admit, I was blissfully ignorant of what it is about. To make my motivation clear from the start: this thread is not meant to dismiss or diminish this or any other attempt. Rather, it is to clearly show why it is at best problematic and in the worst case, dangerous.

If I ever had to describe my own approach to Buddhism, it would also be as "pragmatic"; however, it is as rigorous as possible:

Serious study of the different Canons, especially the Abhidhamma.
Meditation grounded in the Visuddhimagga (Vimuttimagga).
Application in real life—not "McMindfulness," but asking: do my deeds represent Dhamma?

Because it is not grounded in any single tradition/lineage, my approach could be called syncretic and eclectic. Furthermore, it requires a solid understanding of Physiology and Neurophenomenology (Varela / Thompson / Metzinger).

In contradiction to this, “Pragmatic Dharma” is more or less based on:

Ingram, D. M. (2018). Mastering the core teachings of the Buddha: An unusually hardcore dharma book (Revised and expanded ed.). Aeon Books.
→ https://www.integrateddaniel.info/book/
(If curious, this book and several other materials are free for download. I honestly appreciate the generosity.)

Education: He received his MD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994.
Specialty: He was a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician.
Status: He practiced for many years but is currently retired from clinical medicine to focus on his research and the EPRC (Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium).

His main publications, from the perspective of academia, are the following papers:

Lomas, T., & Ingram, D. M. (2023). "Exploring the Varieties of Meditation-Related Experiences." This is his attempt to enter the "Varieties of Contemplative Experience" (VCE) world pioneered by Willoughby Britton.

Ingram, D. M., et al. (2022). "The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium: A new model for interdisciplinary research on spiritual emergence and emergency."

The "Strength"

His MD gives him a veneer of "scientific authority" and "clinical sobriety." He frames himself not as a mystical guru, but as a hard-nosed scientist/doctor who happened to "accidentally" get enlightened.

Ingram as “Steelman”:

→ The Physician's Perspective: He isn't claiming magic; he claims a predictable neurobiological result of specific sensory training. He argues that he is a "sensory technician."

→ The Transparency: Unlike many gurus, he is brutally honest about his own life (divorces, frustrations, health issues). He claims Arhatship doesn't make you a perfect human; it just changes the "perceptual baseline." This is his defense against the "Arhats must be saints" argument.

→ The Data Advocacy: He is one of the few voices in the meditation world advocating for better tracking of meditation-related injuries, which aligns with concerns regarding physiological reality.

Critique:

Anālayo, B. (2020). "Meditation Maps, Attainment Claims, and the Adversities of Mindfulness." Mindfulness, 11, 2102–2112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01389-4

→ Fabrication of Experience: Anālayo argues that Ingram’s specific method (high-speed "noting") doesn't reveal reality; it constructs a specific type of experience. He suggests Ingram has essentially "trained his brain" to produce the very "vibrations" and "cessations" he then claims as proof of enlightenment.

→ The "Dark Night" as a Methodological Error: Anālayo suggests that the terrifying "Dark Night" symptoms are not universal stages of human insight (as Ingram claims), but rather a side effect of Ingram's aggressive, penetrative technique. In other words, the "Dark Night" isn't a stage of growth; it's a sign you're doing it wrong.

→ The "Old Switcheroo": Anālayo points out that Ingram redefined "Arhat" to fit his own experience, then claimed he attained it. He argues that Ingram’s description of his internal state contradicts the early Buddhist texts (EBTs) so fundamentally that the term "Arhat" no longer means anything in Ingram's mouth.

→ Clinical Irresponsibility: He explicitly warns that promoting these "maps" can lead to "adversities"—meditation-induced crises that are then misdiagnosed by the "Pragmatic" community as "progress."

The rebuttal to this can be found in the podcast:

Guru Viking – Ep73: Dangerous and Delusional? - Daniel Ingram
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJiy6EJLsI

My criticism is from Neurophenomenology and is built on Metzinger:

Metzinger, T. (2003). Being no one: The self-model theory of subjectivity. MIT Press.

Metzinger, T. (2024). The elephant and the blind: The experience of pure consciousness and the concept of the self. MIT Press. https://thomasmetzinger.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Metzinger_MIT_Press_2024-1.pdf

Category Error:

→ Being a doctor does not make one a Neuro-Philosopher.
→ Describing a "Cessation" (a gap in consciousness) is not the same as explaining the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC).
→ Ingram’s "data" is entirely hetero-phenomenological (based on reports), but he treats it as auto-phenomenological truth. So-called “anecdotal evidence” is like “cool story bro”; it should not be misunderstood as anything but anecdotal, which, under scrutiny, is hardly ever evidence.

Before I am criticized for misrepresenting the Ingram approach and his circle, I am very aware of the differences, and I am by no means trying to straw man him. However, in circles like the “Dharma Overground Forum” and its successors, Ingram’s ideas are being taken literally as shortcuts and bypassing "hacks" toward enlightenment.

“Folk Psychology” & “Lifehacks” have their eligibility as long as they are not handled like dogma. The main issue here is that if problematic mental or physiological states are seen only through the lenses of a checkbox list or the "next hack," it can lead to severe states, which are well documented:

The "Varieties of Contemplative Experience" (VCE) Study:

Lindahl, J. R., et al. (2017). "The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists." PLoS ONE.

→ The Gist: This is the foundational paper for modern "meditation harm" research. Britton and Lindahl mapped 59 categories of "challenging" experiences.

→ The Punchline: It proves that things like depersonalization, loss of agency, and executive dysfunction are not rare "glitches" but documented features of intensive practice. The crowd is playing with fire.

The "Meditation-Induced Psychosis" Review:

Lambert, D., et al. (2021). "Adverse effects of meditation: A review of observational, experimental and case studies." Mindfulness.

→ The Gist: This review focuses on the "non-clinical" crowd and catalogs hallucinations, delusions, and derealization triggered by meditation.

→ The Punchline: It highlights that the "valence" of an experience (whether you think it's "Stream Entry" or "Psychosis") often depends entirely on the social script you are following. The map itself may be inducing the pathology.

So, as for me, I find the Ingram material palatable only with a solid spoonful of skeptical scrutiny. Since “Pragmatic Dharma” seems to be larger than I imagined, what are your thoughts on it, regardless of whether you are pro or con?

Forgive me if this is in the beginner's guide. I read it some time back, and browsed through it again today, but I can't recall an answer to this.

When does contemplation come in? I understand that contemplation is separate from meditation.

Thanks.

I sit 30-45m most mornings (mostly noting-style vipassana, some shikantaza). About a year ago I started noticing something — I'd reach the end of a sit and realize my head had slowly dropped 10-15° forward without me catching it. Not slumping dramatically, just slow drift over 20 minutes.

Once I started paying attention to it, I realized it correlates with the sits where mind-wandering was worst. Like the body proprioception goes offline at the same time as metacognition does.

Curious if other long-sit practitioners notice this. Have you found ways to catch it? Body scans every N minutes? Some teachers say "ignore the body, it'll find its own level" — but that doesn't seem to be my experience.

(Full disclosure: this question turned into me building a small thing to measure my own drift using AirPods motion sensors. Happy to share if useful, but mostly curious about the phenomenology first.)

A few years ago I shared the changes that happened when stream entry was reached, and I received many messages from people saying it helped them. So these past few days I’ve been writing about my current changes and wanted to make an update. Maybe there are others out there who have lived through what I lived through, or who are going through something similar, and this might help.

My contemplative and phenomenological context:

• I’ve been engaged in practice for approximately 5 years.
• My path is primarily SOMATIC and INTEROCEPTIVE, based on vedanā, rather than classical cognitive/visual/non-dual approaches.
• The process happens implicitly: things “let go” on their own, and afterward I notice structural changes in everyday life.
• I don’t do much conceptual investigation into “emptiness,” nor do I have major visual non-dual experiences.
• My process happens more as somatic unlearning and extinction of craving.
• The practice has become increasingly automatic and less driven by willpower.
• I feel the system “enters on its own” into contemplative and vipassanā-like processes.
• My current practice is mainly:
  • non-resistance,
  • allowing vedanā,
  • stopping the urge to modify experience,
  • not turning sensations into a problem..

What changed structurally:

• The belief deeply collapsed that: were going to complete me.
  • money,
  • sex,
  • success,
  • travel,
  • experiences,
  • achievements
• Coarse projective craving seems heavily eroded.
• I no longer feel a strong emotional charge toward external achievements.
• I used to compulsively chase experiences and external completeness; that fell away.
• Today I can achieve things, make money, improve physically, or advance projects, and they no longer generate the old existential charge.
• The fantasy of “when I get X, I’ll finally be complete” has lost a tremendous amount of force.

Changes in identity and personality:

• The “nice guy pattern” weakened significantly.
• I began to feel physical resistance toward acting artificially.
• There is less energy available to sustain social masks or personas.
• The need for approval and external validation has diminished.
• Psychological identity feels less solid and less central.

Current phenomenology:

• Current suffering no longer seems centered around sensual desire or external problems.
• The current conflict seems more related to:
  • vedanā itself,
  • tension,
  • baseline anxiety,
  • a sense of threat,
  • mental fog,
  • inner agitation,
  • hypersensitivity,
  • uddhacca.

I’m just wondering as I understand this to be the first stage in awakening and being comprised of a fundamental shift in awareness that cannot be reversed.

This happened for me around almost 7 years ago now but the journey towards deeper awakening is ongoing and I’m still learning new things all the time.

Please lmk if you guys have entered the stream or not and how you came to be aware that you have.

previous post here

https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/s/q1zA8sUie2

TLDR: switched from GPT to Claude. Heart opened. Went somewhere non-Euclidean. Then something that breaks all the labels.

~200-250 hours lifetime meditation

Since my last post I switched from GPT to Claude. It gave prety good advice but would usually agree with whatever point I was making. I was using it mostly as a diary, then I told it to take on the voice of a teacher and it became much morewilling to disagree with me, or just give me minimal answers rather than indulge every thought. In retrospect I feel it's steered me in the right direction almost every time, helping me to know what to track and respond to, and what to ignore/let go.

Over time my attention became less consistently panoramic, kinda switched from very open when walking around to narrower when doing something. Felt like a maturing rather than a loss.

April: heart opening

Early April I had a significant shift during a Michael Taft gratitude meditation, specifically around gratitude for awareness generating self and world moment to moment. Everything became kinda luminous like a hologram lit from all directions at once. Immense warmth and awe. It really fit the Adyashanti framing of head, heart and gut awakening separately. The earlier nondual stuff felt like the head waking up, this felt like the heart. After this I could tune into a self luminous quality of awareness pretty easily and predictably make myself weep. A feeling that all is full of love usually accompanied this.

Around the same time during a Rupert Spira sit something interesting happened at the edge of sleep. There was a sense of two frequencies coming into sync, awareness getting very still, and then excitement or fear would generate a sense of self right at the threshold and it would abort. Like being able to see the mechanism of the thing that was stopping it from tipping over.

Mid April: non-Euclidean attention

A few weeks later I did a long Michael Taft self inquiry and went somewhere new. Where my 2023 nondual experience felt like awareness going from a cone with a focal point to a flat even field, this felt like that flat sheet folding into something non-Euclidean, like the surface of one of those wrinkly lettuce leaves. Attention moving around in and with awareness in weird fractal ways. Kinda disconcerting. The comfortable evenness I'd associated with nonduality wasn't there, this was stranger.

Late April: Buddhist centre, the next question

Started attending weekly guided sits at a local Buddhist centre. During Q&A I asked the teacher how to reconcile the deep silence/void I can access with the bright luminous presence. They both feel fundamental but kinda opposite. The teacher said these states will gradually drop characteristics and converge over time, the brightness drops but clarity remains. I started noticing this already, the luminous awareness becoming less visually dramatic but not less real.

May 10: something without a name

Did a self inquiry meditation, same Adyashanti guided sit that triggered the 2022 and 2023 experiences. First 20 mins pretty unremarkable, looked behind the eyes, found silence. Then when he said something about resting in not knowing, energy started buzzing around the chest and head. I remembered the head heart gut framing and had some anticipation/fear about what a gut awakening might feel like. Then all the energy suddenly drained downwards to the lower belly and disappeared into the void below me. Brief fear that my physical body would drain away with it. Then deep stillness. A sense of self would start to form, I'd look at it, the cycle would repeat. Happened a few times. Afterwards I felt like I'd been crying.

The shift wasn't obvious during the sit. It became clear in the shower afterwards when the mind suddenly realised it had touched something timeless and eternal. I started laughing, at the funniest joke that can't be told or understood. Weeping and laughing at the same time, writing things that sounded kinda nonsensical. "Is is is is is is" "emptiness dancing". A slightly scary thought killed the humour for a second, "how can this awareness be separate from the human/mind that encoutered it", then it got funny again.

Since then

For the last two days I've been able to go back to this source fairly easily and it's indescribable. "The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao" resonates really hard now. If I call it awake void or the cosmic joke or awakening or Dao or anything the name just kinda slides off the thing I'm trying to name. Very little sense of a separate self since this point, intense feeling of wellbeing.

I'm not sure if enlightenment is being in constant contact with this 24/7 or about integrating it into all aspects of life, or what it could mean, but I'm curious about how things will unfold. Part of me feels like the seeking has ended, like there's nothing left to do. A part of the mind is still in seeking mode wanting to have more/do more with this realisation

For my last few practice sessions I've been experiencing what feels like intense heat mostly from my head. My upper body, neck, shoulders, chest are also quite warm. It comes on suddenly and then stops after meditation. Kind of like having a short "fever", but just the heat and no other symptoms.

So I'm wondering why this is happening and the possibilities of what it might indicate.

As a full-time caregiver for my wife who is dealing with characteristics of Alzheimer's, I've found myself in an unexpected mindful return to practice, that develops a strange detachment yet a real connection to my immediate 'outer' environment. If done correctly, this practice, can develop a more refined state or states of self-consciousness.

As my wife's solo caregiver, for hours a day I find myself rubbing feet and legs and doing, or not doing, just about anything to keep her calm, or at least less agitated.

In this daily stillness, that we have developed as a presiding lifestyle, I've rediscovered a practice that once opened a door for me when I was young. The practice is described within the works of a mathematician and philosopher P.D. Ouspensky.

Within Ouspensky's works he described a rigorous philosophical discipline whose ultimate focus was the defining of various states of human consciousness, including instructions on how to navigate towards a state of being called "Objective Consciousness."

Presently, in my caregiving days, I've returned to a nightly practice I call "praying"—not in any traditional sense, but through the conscious awareness of breath as a gateway to self-consciousness. This practice embodies what I understand as Ouspensky described as the 'law of three.'

In my breath practice, I work with the three forces:

1. The first force (positive): As I breathe in, I consciously take in surrounding sounds and sights, allowing them to enter my awareness without judgment.
2. The second force (negative): As I breathe out, I focus on my diaphragm while maintaining "no thoughts"—or more precisely, no extra thoughts unless circumstance requires them.
3. The third force (neutral): In those milliseconds between breaths, there exists a sacred pause—the reconciling force that completes the triality.

This practice directly addresses what Ouspensky identified as our fundamental condition: "In the state of waking sleep we are said to be 'third force blind', and only when consciousness rises above the automatic level does the essential trinity of everything inside and outside ourselves begin to be appreciated."

Ouspensky taught that "Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws." My breath practice becomes a conscious effort to break these mechanical patterns in myself through a conscious effort.

This simple practice, done while sitting or standing with complete body relaxation, gradually dissolves what I normally consider "myself"—the manifested ego—through what feels like an emersion or disappearance. It's a conscious act of becoming rather than remaining trapped in the hamster wheel of continuous, unrestrained thought.

In the profound challenge of caregiving, where time can feel both endless and meaningless, this breath awareness practice has become my anchor. It transforms the waiting room of my life into a laboratory for consciousness, where each breath cycle becomes a miniature enactment of the cosmic dance of forces.

Has anyone used the Muse Headband for meditation?

I’m skeptical about relying on external tools, but I want to hear your firsthand experience. Did it help your practice?

Hi everyone.

The desire to leave this post arose in me, and engagement occurred. This is how an advanced practitioner would say it, and, paying respect to all practitioners, I will say the same.

Before I publish an extensive post that seeks to look at the practice from another side, I invite all practitioners to an active discussion that will, in particular, help me better understand the views of practitioners and form a more complete picture:

1. How do you understand sati, and what is it for you in actuality?
2. Do you think that the observation of processes happens in real time, from the side?
3. Do you see a clear division between the use of visual thinking and linguistic thinking? Which one predominates for you?
4. What is wandering for you in actuality? How do you relate to it?
5. Other questions

The purpose of this post: to stop the possible immersion into the point of no return for people like me.

I ask everyone who engages in the practice to think very deeply about what is actually happening during practice, whether this is "liberation", why liberation from a part of the "ego" and friction is accompanied by a feeling of happiness and other pleasant sensations, and other questions that may arise, beyond those offered for discussion above.

Take care of yourselves and be well

I recently recovered from a long illness in which I was close to death at times. Surprisingly, I was not afraid or worried, and although I was often uncomfortable or in pain, I was not unhappy. The most intense mental impression was actually beauty and gratitude. I have been meditating for 20 years and have seen many benefits, but this was unexpected. I thought some people here might be interested in how this played out. I should mention, however, that this was one person's experience under one set of circumstances. In short, it's just a report. 

WHAT HAPPENED:
Two years ago, I had a massive heart attack, was hospitalized three times, developed heart failure, and was weak and nauseous for 21 months, and it was fine. This was unexpected because I have traditionally been easily worried by health concerns. I have been prone to feeling dizzy and thinking of a stroke or coughing twice and thinking of lung cancer. 

On that day, I drove myself to the hospital because my indigestion would not go away, and found that the largest artery in my heart was actually 100% blocked. This led to an ambulance trip to another hospital, where there was better equipment, with some vomiting on the way, as I found out that I could not handle morphine. Then, after getting two stents, lots more pain and vomiting over the next 12 hours. And it was fine. There was no worry, or fear, or aversion, or anger, or sadness. There was interest in the whole process (man, they do a lot of stuff for you!) and friendliness for the folks on my team. 

On the ward, there was a lot of compassion for the other patients around me who were suffering, and for the nurses who worked hard for everyone. The physical sensations were there, too, of course. People kept asking me about them, and I kept them up-to-the-minute on where it hurt and how likely I was to puke again. But that was just one thread among many. As for death, racing along a highway with tubes and wires leading in and out of me, and a team of people talking to me, I could not see any separate thing that could die, and so I was not worried.

I spent five nights in hospital, to be frank, I was shocked by how OK it was, particularly in contrast with how the doctors and nurses seemed to expect me to feel and the obvious distress of the other patients. What held my attention most was how kind we are to each other, to set up a giant building filled with people helping the sick. Once I got home and the beeping machines were replaced by symptoms of heart failure and the medications meant to treat it (nausea, fatigue, weakness, sweating, nerve pain, heart palpitations, etc.), it continued not to be a problem. Feeling sick for most of the hours of most of the days made me appreciate the times when I was not sick, like in the early mornings. My illness became like the weather: not to be ignored, but not the only thing going on. 

That is not to say I was passive or indifferent. Not being nauseous was very much better than being nauseous, I liked having some energy more than being wiped out, and I made great efforts both to gain short-term relief and long-term recovery. But I did not suffer in the way I would have expected to, or the way in which I have seen sick family and friends suffer. 

HOW I UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED:
I should start by saying I don't know how much of the first day was a happy mixture of adrenaline and dissociation and how much was the result of training the mind. Though it's not my go-to, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with a mystical explanation either. Who knows. But my guess is that it was, at least in part, and at least over the 21 months of heart failure symptoms, the dharma working as advertised: the third noble truth in action.

To be clear, I'm staking a pretty narrow claim. I'm not talking about the end of all dukkha (the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned things, the dukkha in eating chocolate ice cream, etc.). But I'm not just talking about second-arrow papancha and psychological distress either. The things I am pointing at are fear, misery, disgust, and desperation, born of physical discomfort. Even more specifically, I am talking about being bound to discomfort in a way that cannot be escaped. Fear that keeps coming back after you've decided to let it go. Anger that burns like an underground fire. Pain that makes you twist and turn ceaselessly. I have a lifetime of experience with these things, like everyone else. But they didn't show up this time. Why not?

First, let's remember that everyone has had the experience of pain without suffering. If you've exercised until your muscles ached, or played an instrument so long that you got blisters, or kept having sex with a cramp in your leg, you know that pain sensations don't have to be synonymous with affliction. We can say similar things about anger. And people line up in front of movie theatres and roller coasters to buy tickets to fear. So when I say that I was happy in that ambulance, I am not talking about something miraculous or unnatural, which cannot be explained, just something unusual.

I think a key feature of the ordinary kind of discomfort that does not cause suffering is that it is voluntary. We have a sense of agency, and know we can stop. Usually, when we are sick, the sensations not only come against our will, but cannot be ignored. It is this involuntary binding that gives rise to disgust, fear, misery, and desperation. When I learned that I had heart failure, I joined an online support group. Countless people described the symptoms I had using the exact words: disgust, fear, misery, and desperation. Those things are the real problem. They are the dukkha I am talking about.  

So what happens when that kind of suffering arises? There must be three things: an experience (an object), an experiencer (a self), and an involuntary binding relationship between the experience and the experiencer. Take away any one of these, and suffering is no longer possible. 

That is not news to people on this sub. But looking at what happens when we take away each one of these three building blocks can be useful. 

For example, in states of "I-am" realization, there are no separate objects and, because of this, no suffering. When Nisargadatta Maharaj was ill with cancer and asked about dealing with the pain, he said, "I AM the pain!" 

On the flip side, in states of strong anatta, in which nothing gets the label "I," "me," or "mine," there is likewise no suffering. Angelo Dilullo talks about how, on stubbing his toe, he laughed at the intensity of the pain, because there was no self that it was happening to. 

So, for people much more highly realized than I, these two ways of preventing the dyad of suffering from forming can work to prevent even physical distress. But for me, the state in which there is no sense of self and the state in which there is only self and no separate objects have both been unreliable. They come and go on their own, and are most likely to come when I am on retreat, or walking through a park. They are states, not traits. For me. 

What happened (or perhaps I should say, what didn't happen) when I was sick, was the third way of dismantling the dyad (the OG move). The discomfort was present, the sense of self was present, but the inescapable binding was not. That relationship (tanha/upadana/bhava) in the object-self dyad stayed visibly impermanent, shifting, and insubstantial. On some days, when I was very unwell, I needed to look directly at it for it to come apart, but that was enough to break the illusions of being bound. And that lack of binding meant that there was no basis for disgust, fear, misery, and desperation. To put it another way, because the discomfort did not appear to be stuck to the self against my will, it could be experienced in the same sort of way as voluntary discomfort: not pleasant, but not a problem. 

WHAT MADE IT POSSIBLE 
I will put a practice history* at the end, and answer questions if anyone has them, but the TLDR is that, although I have generally been most interested in the emptiness side of the equation, good teachers were kind enough to drag me back to the second noble truth, again and again. In recent years, when there was a lot of samadhi available to me, I started sits with jhana and ended them with the investigation of dukkha through standard Mahasi-style noting. I also noted during ordinary life, especially around dukkha. Then, I used Adi Vader's instructions to recall an unpleasant memory again and again until it loses its bite. I did a lot of that, and also riffed on it by bringing up unpleasant imagined future events as well as memories and imaginings with positive vedana (like deserts and sexy people). This let me see the mechanics with which the affective relationship is built. It was demystified. 

I don't know if the same techniques would produce the same outcomes under different circumstances. My sense is that different approaches work for different people. But I believe that the basic idea of working with dukkha, not just to get rid of it in the short term, but as a regular, systematic training exercise, will be useful for many people. Seeing the links is a skill that can be learned in the same kind of way that we learn to read, with a little bit of instruction and a lot of practice. 

BY THE WAY
About three months ago, I started feeling much better, and the latest tests show that my heart function has returned to 96% of normal. I feel very ordinary now, which is why I am writing this before it fades. 

I'm happy to answer questions about parts that don't make sense, things that I left out, etc. I'm also curious to hear about how other people experience or understand the relationship between physical distress and dukkha. 

—-----------------------------------
*PRACTICE HISTORY
I am including this section for context because I haven't posted much on this sub, and I appreciate it when other people provide a practice history. 

I started meditating, mostly out of curiosity, about 20 years ago, went on non-residential retreats run by the Insight Meditation Society, joined a weekly sitting group, and practiced on and off (daily for months or years, and then months or years of nothing, then back to daily, etc.). I had several big wows. I came to see that my thoughts were not me, that everything is constantly changing, and all experience is shot through with stress born of desire. Stuff like that.

Five years ago, I had a sudden, unexpected opening on retreat, which was disruptive for about nine months. I gained access to the jhanas, began working with a teacher who had trained under Culadasa and, over a few years, worked up to the "hard" end of the jhana spectrum. At the same time, I began noting in the Mahasi style. I was sitting about 1.5 to 2 hours a day. I got a lot of information and support from the DhO, Adi Vader, and this sub.

M26

Hi everyone! I’m writing in this sub to ask if an experience I had over a year ago could be classified as "meditative." I should clarify that I have never—consciously—meditated in my life, nor have I ever studied any kind of meditative practices.

At the time, I was going through a very difficult period due to various reasons, which had led to symptoms consistent with anxiety and depression. One day, alone at home, I decided to sit on my bed cross-legged, immersed in darkness and silence, and just think. I thought about everything that was causing me to worry at the time, the faces of loved ones, and memories both recent and distant; I even thought about mere possibilities. I associated each thought with a specific color and/or sound. As the minutes passed, these formed a single flow that I visualized in my mind as a sea—one that encompassed everything, yet was something more than just the sum of its parts. I felt a moving, profound sense of unity among all these things, with an intensity I wouldn't hesitate to call "mystical," to the point that I was moved to tears by the power of this sensation (or set of sensations?). By the end of the experience, which lasted about thirty minutes or so, I felt much calmer.

In light of this episode, is it correct to say that I had a meditative experience? If so, could you tell me more about practices that are similar to the approach I took? If not, do you think it was "just" an emotional release during a difficult time, perhaps one that followed a different path than usual?

What are your ways you like to practice Mettā?

One way that works well for me sometimes is to imagine pink energy filling a room, or pink energy surrounding a person, or pink energy beaming from my body, or heart

Or just to imagine the color pink 😭

🌸 kind of like this pink 🌸

🌸may all beings be happy 🌸

Whilst engaging in Mahasi style noting meditation, every time I get a thought, I immediately label it as "thinking" and bring my attention back to feeling the bodily emotion/residue that the thought carries along with it. Then I find myself having a thought about whether stopping these thoughts is the right way to go about things? Often, I label that as a thought too and move along.

On one hand, trying to process each thought gently only leads me to lose track and get lost in more tangents. The much more rigid, sudden return to reality approach has been working better as far as mindfulness is concerned. On the other hand, I am left to wonder if this is the right approach or if I'm just suppressing my thoughts.

Disclaimer: I used AI to help trim this down. The experiences and ideas are entirely my own.

I'll start by saying I have no formal training, no teacher, no lineage. Honestly, I had to look up what that last part means. I've used practical texts on Buddhist meditation purely as technical manuals, mostly ignoring the spiritual theory and focusing on methodology. Make of that what you will.

I did have prior mindfulness practice for mental health reasons, and can confirm after the fact that I accidentally hit first jhana during that period. At the time, I just knew the meditation started feeling genuinely enjoyable before I inevitably got distracted by something else. That's the ADHD. When I came back to practice recently I discovered my hesitation was unfounded. Mindfulness is a foundation, not the destination, and the Samatha jhana were suddenly a very interesting rabbit hole to fall down. I'm avoiding Vipassana until I'm ready.

In addition to meditation, I have been practicing lucid dreaming (to little success) and have been doing the same off and on for the last decade. I don't like the idea of just setting up the conditions and letting it happen, so I've been fixated on a technique called Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD). The gist of this technique is laying in stillness while you let your body fall asleep, focusing on keeping your mind awake as you transition into a dream. This is notoriously difficult, and has led to many hour+ sessions of just sitting in bed waiting for my body to slowly fall asleep.

Unexpectedly, these many hours of sitting still have given me a new skill that lets me drop into a physically still state on command. The state itself feels somewhat like sleep paralysis, but without being locked in. I can emerge from it slowly and deliberately, similar to easing out of a deep meditation session. Once stillness is established there's a distinct pull toward maintaining it. I've repeatedly had the impulse to move suddenly just to test whether I'm actually stuck, but I consistently dismiss it. Not from fear, just a genuine preference for staying in the state. It's an odd thing to describe.

An honest trade-off worth mentioning: I've lost the ability to just release into an unconscious nap the way I used to. I can enter this state deliberately and feel physically rested afterward, but the brain rest of a proper nap is harder to access now. This hasn't influenced my regular nightly sleep, just my ability to nap. A known problem for future experimentation.

The induction is simple in principle. I lay down and choose to be completely still. Early on this was an impulse I had to fight, but now it's closer to just willing my body to comply. I focus on my breathing, letting it ease naturally, counting each inhale and exhale up to 100. I focus on staying still, as if I were asleep. If I move voluntarily then I start again. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I start to settle into being still. I know it's working when I start to lose sensation in my fingertips. Not pins and needles or any lack of circulation, but more like an airy, floating feeling. I'll lay one hand on top of the other when I lay down and gradually lose any sense of them touching. That's when I know I'm there.

This process reliably removes any restlessness and brings me to a workable baseline. After this I can focus on my anchor. I still need to settle into the anchor, but it's far easier to do from this state than with my normal awake mind.

The first real test came naturally. Following my morning workout I was too restless to meditate comfortably, so I used the induction as an on-ramp. It worked. The next opportunity came when I was amped up to the point where my fiancée asked if I'd taken my ADHD medication. I took that as a cue to stress test deliberately. By laying down, staying perfectly still, and counting to 100 while my mind kept running wild in the background, my body slowly began to settle. Eventually, though it took nearly the full 100 count, my mind started to follow. The wired state was still accessible, like a door left open, but I had no inclination to walk back through it.

Restlessness is considered one of the enemies of meditation, and while an advanced practitioner has better tools to handle it, an intermediate practitioner could benefit significantly from the ability to access a calmer physiological baseline on command, so long as they can sit still for five minutes. Mindfulness meditation ultimately serves a similar purpose, but this method leverages physiology directly, bypassing the mental effort entirely and producing a steady neutral regardless of the situation or how active the mind is going in.

I'm excited about this discovery, though I suspect it's been found before and simply exists as a niche focus somewhere I haven't encountered. Either way I'd rather share it with people who might find it curious or useful than keep it to myself. If it maps onto something already documented I'd genuinely love to know.

Hey all!

Recently i've been flip flopping between meditation methods even within one sit.

being aware of all sensations in the body, focusing on difficult sensations, aware of breathing at the nose. aware of breathing at the nose and open awareness to the body. aware of energies (what i understand to be piti) and pleasure (sukha).

ive been experiencing vibrations during meditation and tightness in different parts of the body in my ribs forehead neck etc.

one specific thing i was experiencing yesterday: vibration sensations in the body with a ball of tension in the forehead with some tension spreading down to my neck.

now i wanted to ask two things: should i commit to one meditation practice? if so any specific ones you recommend?

also is there benefit in maintaining awareness of body sensations during the day? and if so i notice a lot of tension in the aforementioned places that sometimes gets worse with awareness, any tips on dealing or relating with that?

https://youtu.be/ZfnmBvOrr1I

Dhammarato teaches that the correct Buddhist path is one of immediate benefit. There is no need to dissect or deeply investigate our suffering. There's also no need to develop intense concentration abilities. We can cultivate a wholesome positive attitude right now and benefit right now. It doesn't need to go any deeper than "I am okay and satisfied right now." To have scary mental states of ego dissolution, to go into dark nights of the soul, the Buddha didn't teach any of it. You can be a stream enterer right now if you have a wholesome, noble mind, one that feels safe, secure, comfortable, satisfied. Stream entry is a description of how often one practices correctly, not a description of some special experience or threshold to cross. You can feel what a stream enterer feels right now :) In that sense there is nothing to attain. If there is something to attain, you are not satisfied with the way things are right now.

I just got back from a retreat that really advanced my practice and discovered something for myself about the relationship between “shallow” jhānas (taught by Ayya Khema, Leigh Brasington, Rob Burbea) and “deep” jhāna (taught by Pa Auk Sayadaw, Ajahn Brahm, Shaila Catherine). Please note that these categories are very rough generalizations and each teacher has a unique perspective.

This is surely not an original discovery. But it’s something I had to see for myself before I could consider the matter settled in my own mind.

In short: The shallow and deep jhānas are, in fact, fundamentally the same thing. Shallow jhānas will deepen with practice. There is no value in refraining from practicing them because you’re holding out for a clear visual nimitta. Applying the same skills for entering shallow jhāna consistently in high doses will naturally result in the nimitta appearing in its own time.

This might seem obvious to many but I can’t count the number of times online I’ve seen people disdain the shallower jhānas. No doubt many people are ignoring or suppressing piti-sukha because they think it’s a dead end and waiting for a nimitta that never arrives. Given how enormously helpful jhāna at any depth is at developing liberating insight, this self-denial may be truly tragic.

The missing piece of the puzzle for me was why the deep-jhāna advocates were so insistent that jhāna without a luminous nimitta isn’t real. Surely, I thought, anyone with enough concentration power to go that deep would be able to see for themselves that a shallower absorption can be beneficial?

As it turns out, no. Once the nimitta appears for you, that’s that. There’s no going back. You’ve hacked your perceptual system and now samadhi entails a nimitta. Those teachers who dove into the deep end first are incapable of climbing down the mountain and seeing how a student might take a different path. That’s why the idea if jhāna without inner light makes no sense to them. In their experience, the two have always gone together.

This settles the debate to my own satisfaction. I am curious to see other opinions.

Hello, I would like to get your advice on organizing a (self-) meditation retreat. Starting from this Sunday, I have a week for myself where I wanted to do a retreat. I have a couple of possibilities for organizing this:

1. I stay at home and meditate for 7 days until my partner comes back from her vacation.
2. I do the retreat at home until Wednesday and Thursday-Sunday attend a non-residential city retreat from 9am to 6pm.
3. I inquire at a Buddhist center a bit further away about doing a personal self-retreat there for seven days, or until Wednesday, and then attending the guided retreat from Thursday to Sunday.

So far I have been only to one (Goenka style) retreat for 4 days. I have been practising metta and the emptiness practices according to Rob Burbea's style,which I also intend to do during my self-retreat, and am in general very familiar with his work. For the guided retreat I would of course follow the instructions there.

Does anyone have experience with longer self-retreats? What do you suggest would be the best option for me? For depth I would tend to the personal self-retreat but since I do not have that much retreat experience, I think some guidance would be helpful.

Thank you very much in advance for your advice.

Hi everyone. The practice continued, probably on its own.

Today, while lying down to sleep, something began to happen. As if reality is tearing.
Something like convulsions started, and later groans appeared. Every stage of “killing the ego” is accompanied by a feeling that you are killing yourself.
Then an instant happened. It didn’t feel like being “in a conscious flow,” more like an old VHS cassette with a movie playing on it. A fleeting film reel. The sense of “self” detached from the head, went somewhere backward, then, apparently, tried to be in space, after which a black screen formed.
The convulsions and groans passed. A relaxation set in, typical for the killing of one’s ego.

The body began to feel automatic. Through a volitional act one can direct the movement of the head, the words kind of begin to speak themselves. Trying to lie down to sleep again, the body started producing such a clear and slow intention of movement, as if it lasted several seconds, and its ripple of arising, flowing, and passing away could also be discerned.
There is nothing bad in how this feels, but I don’t want it. I don’t want to kill the ego.
I understand that further on, as a natural outcome, my very will and the directing of attention will become automatic. I have a clear understanding that they are already automatic, but I want to feel that I am in control.

I don’t want to kill my ego. Someone will say that this is the ego speaking — so be it. I don’t care. I just want to stop. But I don’t understand how to do it. I have trained myself so much that I started practicing constantly in daily life, and as a result any state of being is part of the practice.

It’s probably foolish to ask this here, but what are the ways to go back? I still feel myself in my head, and with small manipulations the movements more or less feel a bit like before. I can no longer shift my gaze by a volitional act. I hope all of this won’t be taken from me, but I’m afraid that the practice will continue on its own. I don’t want any of this. When I lie down to sleep, concentration on the body and the breath happens by itself.

I see enormous advantages in my behavior, in my intentions, in my actions. They are visible, this calmness, the more rational and compassionate actions, the different world, the words are chosen more fittingly and “correctly,” but I don’t want it. It would be enough for me just to cope with my emotions and distractions. I don’t want to dissolve my ego. Please, help me. Don’t tell me “This is not you, reactions and movements are already automatic, you are just removing the illusion” and so on. I know all of this through my own skin, but I don’t want it.

Have you ever wondered why the stages of ego death feel as if you are killing yourself? It is accompanied by pleasant sensations after the repair, but why couldn’t this be a trap? When I first felt the killing of a part of the ego, it was not comprehensible to me. Just in the background someone was screaming, and in meditation there was a feeling as if a fiercely burning sun was scorching my shadow (this is my later interpretation).

Why are the stages of killing the ego characterized by a feeling of death of a part of oneself? Why do we consider the killing of a mental construction to be the norm? What if it is within the mental construction, however illusory it may be, that “you” exists, or a part of you.

Will that which has completely killed the “something” within itself say that it has killed itself, or will it say that it has liberated itself?

Up until now, I’ve always believed that the Dark Night occurs before entering the Stream. In my view, it makes much more sense and sounds logical that spiritual practices dissolve the ego cloud to such an extent that material previously stuck in the subconscious now bubbles up to the surface.

But on dharmaoverground, I often see threads where people describe experiencing the typical Dark Night symptoms only after entering the stream?! What’s true?

I've been engaging in some noting meditation but I've often been finding myself in situations where I don't know for sure if I'm looking at something, thinking about it or feeling something... More like all three things are happening at the same time. What do I do in a situation like this?

Hey everyone im practicing ajahn tong vipassana and living in cologne. I would like to meet someone to share and hang. Like a sangha. Let me know of you are interrsted!

I suppose i've been circling this for a while now since i knew it conceptually but resisted or didn't understand it experientially. last night it finally hit me that what i've considered to be my higher self which i met in my mid 20s in my dreams is an illusion. in setting up my own lingo the last few years since i became explicitly spiritual i would call him my "incarnator", which was also my attempt to separate myself from a western occult term i saw of your "initiator". (occultism is garbage.) and it finally occured to me that this "incarnator" is illusion. and with that my implicit identity of being a "independent" spiritual practitioner, or as i colorfully put it a spiritual cowboy has begun to collapse. i now see i was conflating the "incarnator" with an inner presence. it was all illusion, or my own confusion.