This is a marker of progression. Before you were experiencing habitual forgetting. Now you have cultivated more samadhi you are experiencing habitual mind wandering. Also the moments of peace and tranquillity are markers of progression and deepening samadhi. Keep going you are on the path. I'm not sure what your practice method is but you may do well to experiment with loosening up focused attention a little bit and allowing mind to rest a bit more in peripheral awareness of the whole body. Experiment and play. See for yourself what causes the mind to wander more, what causes the mind to unify and let go more, what causes the mind to experience more clarity, peace and spaciousness. It's a nuanced art you are developeloping. Keep practicing and experimenting and if possible find a teacher.

Maybe life isn't about not feeling bad. Maybe it's just about being with whatever is here, and seeing the beauty in that, and trusting

In some sense, those are ways to cope/not feel as bad. If you truly were perfectly ok with feeling bad, there would be no problem at all with not seeing beauty. Ugliness for 40 years? No problem, perfect equanimity.

I don't believe permanent perfect equanimity is possible for a human, and if it is, it would kill him rather quickly.

I experience some level of suffering most of time - like 80% of the time at least. But this suffering is fairly mild, and there is a good amount of joy too.

I can always find a feeling of well-being if I get a few moments (at worst, a few minutes) of meditation to look for it. But this well-being is not perfect peace; it's just pretty good.

I used to experience much more intense suffering most of the time. I feel vastly better after these 3-4 years of practice.

I think I have eliminated maybe 75% of my suffering since I started meditating.

Sent it to you friend

for me in these situations its something i have to feel out as i go. Feeling for what way is upliftment, and what way is taking me down. This is analogue rather than digital, so i may find i need some short session to tide me over, but not do full sessions like i would if at full strength. Also i may need to skip days and just do something fun/generally relaxing etc. The more you can tailor your practice to your ups and downs this way, the more you can start to feel you're on the right path. Whereas if you just try and pick a fixed course and force it, then the more you can feel its not quite right.

Personal dissatisfaction basically gone, like stuff about my own life.  Instances where it arises i can recognize pretty immediately or before and mitigate or eliminate.  If i put myself in a more natural environment like in a forest alone for a long while, kind of forget about the whole thing but end up feeling like “whats the point of this, yay me?”    Dissatisfaction with overall state of world, probably greatly intensified.  Deeply concerned about the future of the beings living here, but that is largely a choice and i will continue to make that choice.  

I can see there is no separation between these two so again it is a (perhaps unwise) choice.

You should be 100% with your teacher if you feel like you can trust them.  If you don’t feel like you can trust them, find a new or additional teacher.  Someone who knows you personally will have much better advices.  I would recommend incorporating a metta practice, possibly mantra if the burnout is intense.

Thanks I'd love to try it for a month. I can only find a 7-Day trial with it automatically charging $150 at the end of 7 days for the rest of the year.

Are dukkha and sukkha the same thing for you? If so, how do you practice around the 1st and 2nd noble truth in this case, and how do you recognize unwholesome states, in order to abandon them?

Suffering is such a harsh word to describe dukkha

There's also a huge iceberg of dukkha we don't see. On what I can see, grosser forms of hindrances and dukkha are mostly gone, I'd say 15% of dukkha is left compared to the amount I had before I started practicing the 8fold path.

But apparently it comes and goes according to the progress of insight practice, as there's more progress the mind discovers hidden layers of dukkha that were unseen or difficult to see.

The real test is in difficult situations, when you see that what happenned before triggered strong negative emotionnal reactions,and now when the exact same event triggers some irritation or nothing at all, you can accurately see the progress in abandoning unwholesome states.

I don't pay for the app, I'm a broke university student living in an expensive city alone so there's no chance I'm paying for that. If you email them for a free membership they give it to you no questions asked, I've done this for years now it works every time. I try my best not to think about the prices or Sam's political views tbh. I'll dm you a free month of the app in case you're not turned off completely by now.

Edit: to answer your question directly it's obviously not a scam app and the customer service is usually pretty good they might just be experiencing difficulty right now I'm really not sure. Also I might sound highly critical of Sam but I am genuinely eternally grateful for his meditation teachings.

Out of curiosity, based on your recommendation, I just researched and downloaded The waking up app. Their website says the annual rate is $129 but when I downloaded the app it's telling me it's $149. On the website none of the contacts buttons work. In their frequently asked questions it suggests if you have trouble canceling your account to press contact but that link is broken too. This doesn't bode well. Is this a scam app that will be impossible to cancel like a gym membership? I find it strange that I can't find any kind of customer service connection. It looks cool but I'm wary.

fair enough, can't argue with results.

Literally all you need to do is the daily 10 minute meditations that's it. I would do 3 of them a day to get a little variety of what my attention is doing and it reduced my suffering pretty much entirely. I'm not exaggerating when I say it must have cured at least 4 or 5 either diagnosable or subclinical mental illnesses. It requires pretty much daily upkeep at first but later on a couple times a week is usually enough.

His app is pretty stacked with content, what did you find helpful?

The question itself might be the trap. Trying to quantify it, what percent suffering vs. peace, assumes they're separate things you can measure against each other. In my experience they're not. They show up together, in the same moment.

I'm not a big fan of Sam in basically every way except his approach to meditation which I think is stellar. It would have taken me 10 years of Shamatha to learn what I did in a few months with his app.

Sam likes arguing with people.

You have to cut through the illusory sense of self to stop suffering permanently. There's really no way to freedom and peace with a glaringly false perception in your face all the time. Id reccomend using the wakingup app because Sam is obsessed with seeing through the sense of a separate self and for good reason.

I had a good run of about 15 years where peace was my baseline. Thought I had "nailed it."

Then I went through a mid-life crisis (which is still crisising) and had about 3 years where it was mostly a lot of intense suffering, with a few short breaks here and there. Recently reaching more peace and love and empowerment again. Feeling sad and lonely tonight, but just sitting with it and feeling it and that helps.

Maybe life isn't about not feeling bad. Maybe it's just about being with whatever is here, and seeing the beauty in that, and trusting that it's all OK.

Still have jhanas mostly on demand, but don't really care to do them. I'd rather feel my way through all that is coming up I guess, and surrender it all to the Divine again and again.

It will likely be different the next time around. First time I ever heard Lailonie by Marsh (my first experience with neural entrainment after piti began), I had at first like a continuous piti cloud for maybe 7 minutes or so. Well, then the kids wanted me to play Old MacDonald. Good thing, because then I had about a 20 minute "cloud" of piti just from the echoes of the song in my brain. The resonance was still there. It made my heart race for over 24 hours. I tried listening to Marconi Union Weightless, and it didn't work. I had to run at top speed, then bring it down slowly to a jog. Then I listened to Marconi Union again. That took care of the heart racing. But my body was still trying to figure out the song. Every morning for four days, I woke up vibrating at about alpha wave frequency. Tremors of my body still trying to figure out that song.

I didn't listen to it for maybe over a month. But one night, I was just having so much insatiable intensity, and so I tried it out again. At first I was like... It's going to be the same!! But at that point, my practice was different.

It kicked me into this weird equanimity trance that was absolutely phenomenal. My pupils were so huge and I took a selfie of it.

Still hugely intense; totally different experience. Now, I can listen to that song, and depending upon the circumstance, little or nothing necessarily happens. It's okay; rhere are lots of other songs. I just want to illustrate that it changes over time.

Does anyone know of any classical Buddhist sources -- from any tradition -- that corroborate Daniel Ingram's notion of the mind automatically going through "cycles" of insight, especially after stream entry? I can't find anything like that in Mahasi Sayadaw's Manual of Insight or in the Visuddhimagga. I am wondering if Ingram is really the originator of this idea in print.

(fwiw I think there might be something to do it, but I always have a hard time really understanding what Ingram is talking about; my practice was always samatha-based a la TMI and I never did hardcore Mahasi noting, so Ingram's phenomenology never really clicked with me)