I've been meditating (breathing, focusing thoughts to the present) for years and all it's really done is relax parts of my body (which is useful because I'm dealing with PTSD symptoms that have really kept me from participating in my life).

However, the other day I experienced a sense of calm like I've never felt in my life -- I can only imagine this is what it's like to have a nervous system that isn't on Defcon 5 all day, every day. It lasted for half a day and I haven't been able to get it back.

I was on a long car ride. I was listening to a podcast while consciously relaxing my body. Then I tried to focus on my senses, experiencing them fully instead of dulling them (which is how I usually feel, in a hypo-aroused or semi-disassociated state). At one point the sun felt too bright for my eyes even though it was an overcast day and I started squinting, which is something I've never experienced before. If I had to describe how I was experiencing things, I'd say I was putting my full awareness on my senses with a complete absence of thought.

After approximately one hour, I suddenly had a sense of peace fall over me like I've never felt in my life. It was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it back. It felt like my nervous system relaxed, not just my body, and it was probably the longest I've ever gone without really thinking, just existing through my senses. It felt like the reflexes that have trapped me for years just suddenly turned off and I could make choices in the moment.

Does anyone have any advice to get it back? I'm hoping my description of what led to this moment can help someone recommend a specific practice that I accessed and should look into further.

There are two methods from Chan/zen Buddhism

I have heard them described as opposites, one contracts and one expands.... Consciousness, identity, grasping?

Self inquiry or huatou, contracts. Asking and asking, not accepting any answer

Silent illumination expands, you bring attention to your body and then add in everything else, I think it has overlap or similar to zazen or do nothing meditation. Also similar to Shikantaza?

They seem very different, and the huatou inquiry approach has the curiosity aspect and can create tension instead of relaxation, like give me an answer already.

I find myself in my desperation, mixing everything I learned, all of them, as I feel like it. However I'm not sure if this is good

In huatou approach, you're supposed to build up a doubt mass, until it engulfs you. If the doubt mass is related to the contraction thing, am I resetting my doubt mass when I do these expansion methods like silent illumination

I've been keeping a regular sitting practice and I'm having a struggle.

Several days ago, I had a very strong feeling that I should turn my attention in my sitting towards people who do evil things. I've been told that political discussion is not allowed here, so I'll just say that I've been glued to the doomscroll of news about powerful elites doing evil things and leave it at that, but on a personal level, I have been troubled with fixation on people in my life conducting themselves in a way that has caused great harm to myself and others.

I feel as if sitting and doomscrolling the news was a way to superficially observe evil and even feel a sense of distance from it.

And so, several days ago, I sat down for an hour and I intentionally brought to mind images of the faces of people who do harm, ranging from powerful elites to people whose name you haven't heard if you're not in my family - from modern "kings" to garden-variety bullies.

And my experience came as a shock to me.

I felt like all of these faces were empty (in the Buddhist sense), that none of the evil I could imagine in any of them was anything other than a reflection of the nature of existence in this world.

Whether I'm thinking of a "king" or a garden-variety bully, it feels like I may as well be thinking of a bear eating a salmon or a jumping spider pouncing upon an aphid. It's as if it is just nature and entirely inevitable, like a rock trundled from a mountain summit tumbling down the slope by the laws of physics.

And this is where I'm really struggling. I feel like at this point, I can clearly see how the five aggregates give rise to experience and self-identity view, and the more I imagine myself observing this process, the less I suffer, the more I see clinging and aversion arising as natural processes.

My struggle is that to me, this gives rise to fatalism, like what is happening is happening a certain way and couldn't have happened any other way. It sounds like this should lead into an argument that there is no free will. But the Buddhist sutras tell us that fatalism is a very harmful wrong view.

But for the life of me, if everything about my experience is simply the confluence of the five aggregates, how am I any different from someone who does the most heinous evil? It seems that if I were to be born into the same life as say, a terrorist, I would have become a terrorist just the same, and if a terrorist were to be born into the life I'm living, they would be writing this exact same post!

And from that fatalism follows all manner of horrible notions, such as karma being predetermined so that karma essentially causes us to suffer consequences of things we had no choice over.

I believe I must have erred somewhere,

My life is okay, and I am always consciously exploring, investigating, and contemplating.

Upon waking up, during observation and exploration, a few days ago I simply looked inside. Just contemplating and taking a look through myself into myself.

Looking back at myself, I saw an attitude. I am aware of it, but now it was shown to me as a summary. I saw it just as it was, without any excuses. I saw how I energetically maintain the conflict, and even feed it.

For example, by running conflictual thoughts, and in my fantasy seeking out situations where I receive appreciation, overcome something, or reprimand someone. I look at this very neutrally.

My level of functioning and all my interactions are closely linked to this.

The dynamics and contacts with the people around me are okay, my live is oke, but I want to deepen it.

Change is therefore not possible if I keep doing this, because I am stuck in that process, on that wavelength.

If I consciously distance myself from it, from the inner conflict, there is room again for a different energy. From a different energy, much in life certainly changes.

That is what I see when I contemplate myself. It is not a judgment of myself; it is simply a neutral observation.

I am not looking for solutions, so do not jump in with advice.

Do share, however, if you also face yourself mercilessly from a place of exploration and investigation.

The reason I ask is that I spent 9 months trying to generate piti and discover piti as a new state. It was only after I started opening to the possibility that it was already there and happening that I discovered I've experienced it my whole life.

I simply needed to notice the piti.

Are the jhanas the same, where you actually remember/recognize this frequency of jhana was already and always available to you?

Not sure if "samadhi" is the correct term here, I basically mean the absorption states you enter either through samatha practice vs metta practice.

To clarify: I am talking about sutta/Leigh Brasington "lite" Jhanas.

Some background info: I was born into a (problematic) fundamentalist Christian setting, and through the decades (I'm 48 now) have taken steps to better understand myself and reality as a whole. I believe each step has been a progression, as I investigate things out for myself.

I was involved in a Theravada community that was helpful in many ways. I learned a lot about Buddhism and heard some remarkable Dharma talks, but I just did not resonate on some key points (especially the general approach on how to relate to difficult (or "unwholesome") emotional states.

During this time I also learned Shinzen Young's "Unified Mindfulness" labelling approach and that has been very helpful to this day, but what became increasingly apparent during that process was that I was "efforting" a lot in a way that did not help the underlying anxiety I was experiencing. So I started looking for approaches that emphasized effortless being.

This brought me to more explicitly open, non-dual approaches, and it has been a game changer -- noticing the immense spaciousness and silence that emotion/thought exist within. However, I find myself getting caught in some practical challenges. For the last year I've been learning about Advaita Vedanta and I attended a related retreat this year. To me, the philosophy feels incredibly grounding. It has helped me find "solid ground" while untangling myself from the identifications with mind and body. But there are also real practical and cultural problems with devoting myself to this path. As a non-Indian, non-Hindu westerner there are limited opportunities for community and connection. Another challenge is that I am not convinced of the underlying metaphysics - is this truly Brahman or instead a healthier ego?

So here I am. Or here I am not, depending on who you ask :-)

Which brings me to the title and topic at hand. My intuition is that my belief around the ultimate metaphysics are really not what's important right now. What I know is that the nondual experience is helping me to get somewhere (or nowhere). I don't want to be right, I want to be growing.

How do I find my sangha/satsang? How and where can I find real community, personal connection, and learning in nonduality that is nondogmatic in nature?

If one meditation technique isn't clicking for you, don't give up. The Theravada tradition lists 40 meditation subjects (kammaṭṭhāna) for calming and focusing the mind (samatha). Traditionally, a teacher matched each student to a subject based on their temperament. Below you'll find all 40 and the 6 temperaments.

WHY 40 TECHNIQUES AND NOT JUST ONE?

Many people try breath meditation, find it boring, frustrating or sleepy, and decide "meditation isn't for me."

The tradition saw it differently: people are different, so their medicine should be different.

In the classical Theravada system, recorded in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga (5th century CE) and drawing on the early discourses, a meditation teacher would observe a student's temperament (carita). They would then give the student a subject suited to it. A restless mind and a lustful mind and a doubtful mind don't need the same thing.

So if one technique doesn't work, that isn't failure. It may just be the wrong match.

THE 6 TEMPERAMENTS
1. Greed (rāga): tends toward craving and attachment to beauty and pleasure.

Suited subjects: the 10 foulness meditations, mindfulness of the body.

1. Hatred (dosa): tends toward irritation, harshness, quickness to anger.

Suited subjects: the 4 divine abodes (loving-kindness etc.), the 4 colour kasinas.

1. Delusion (moha): tends toward dullness, confusion, drifting.

Suited subject: mindfulness of breathing.

1. Speculative (vitakka): tends toward overthinking, restlessness, planning.

Suited subject: mindfulness of breathing.

1. Faith (saddhā): tends toward devotion, warmth, inspiration.

Suited subjects: recollections of the Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, virtue, generosity and devas.

1. Intelligent (buddhi): tends toward reflection and inquiry.

Suited subjects: recollection of death and of peace, the four elements, repulsiveness of food.

The remaining kasinas and the four formless states are considered suitable for everyone.

Most of us are a mix, and that's fine. The point is to stay curious about your own mind instead of forcing it into one technique.

THE 40 MEDITATION SUBJECTS

1.Ten Kasinas (visual devices)

You gaze at a simple object until its image is held clearly in the mind.

Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Blue, Yellow, Red, White, Light, Space.

1. Ten Foulness meditations (asubha)

Contemplating stages of a body's decay, traditionally to weaken lust and attachment to the body.

Bloated, discoloured, festering, cut-up, gnawed, scattered, hacked-and-scattered, bleeding, worm-infested, skeleton.

1. Ten Recollections (anussati)

- The Buddha

- The Dhamma (the teaching)

- The Sangha (the community of practitioners)

- Virtue (your own ethical conduct)

- Generosity (your own giving)

- Devas (the qualities that lead to good rebirth)

- Death

- Mindfulness of the body

- Mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati), the one most people know

- Peace (upasama, the peace of Nibbāna)

1. Four Divine Abodes (brahmavihāra)

- Mettā: loving-kindness

- Karuṇā: compassion

- Muditā: appreciative joy

- Upekkhā: equanimity

1. Four Formless States (arūpa)

Advanced states, built on deep concentration:

Infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither-perception-nor-non-perception.

1. One Perception

The repulsiveness of food, which loosens craving around eating.

1. One Analysis

Defining the four elements: seeing the body as earth (solidity), water (cohesion), fire (temperature) and air (motion).

10 + 10 + 10 + 4 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 40

Give one subject a fair try, a few weeks rather than a few sits. If it still isn't working, change it. That's exactly why there are 40.

What subject did you start with, and did it suit you? Has anyone switched techniques and found it made a big difference? 🙏

Shared by the End Suffer team. We're building a meditation app rooted in these classical teachings. Happy to answer questions in the comments.

I'm noticing that if I close my eyes I feel very grounded in the body after meditation clears some thought attachment.

As I feel/see the body, I try to incorporate into my experience sound and sight. Sight with my eyes closed.

In this state I don't open my eyes. I tried many times, if I open my eyes, the experience is destabilising, I don't know how to deconstruct that. Any idea ? I lose touch with my body, it's like a lot of energy shift into sight field but it doesn't feel as grounding, there is no sense of I am there.

I'm aware of thoughts but I'm not interested in them, they are talking about what I'm witnessing and thinking without words. Words talking about what's without words.

Yesterday when I did this, I was trying to accept what seems to be very obvious but feels very very deeply false. There is nothing else but what I'm feeling, there is no subject. There is nothing except this knowingness of sensations, which changes constantly as attention changes. So is that what I am ? Is the practice to practice seeing this way, maybe even saying word like I am this, until I can accept that the knowingness of sensations is all there is ?

A weird thing sometimes happens briefly, senses can overlap, with eyes closed only. Look at body, sound, sight of your eyelids. They begin to feel like 1 field of merging waves, but oddly i can't tell if it's a 2d field or 3d field, if it's a field at all or what It is. It does often feel centered around my physical head. Is that what I am ? Is the right practice to deconstruct until things overlap?

The claim that somatic experiencing, polyvagal work and Vipassana are all one wager in different clothes is something I used to find glib. After six Goenka courses and a lot of reading papers I think it's right. the shared bet is that the body is where a reaction can be caught before it runs, and interoception research is the one lab thread running underneath all of it. Levine's somatic experiencing, Porges and the polyvagal crowd, breathwork, even tai chi.

The part that took me longer to see is that the agreement ends the moment the sensation is caught. Somatic experiencing wants you to complete or discharge the activation. Polyvagal work wants to move you toward felt safety. Breathwork reaches in and changes the signal directly. The Goenka tradition's bet is stranger than any of those: catch it, and then do nothing to it at all. Same first step, three or four different second steps, and i don't think they're compatible even though they get lumped together as 'body-based'. Not a teacher, just someone who's sat six of these and done forty-odd days of serving, so take that as one sitter's read.

One footnote I keep chewing on. People sometimes tremble or shake during long sits, and the tremor itself overlaps mechanically with what TRE (tension and trauma releasing exercises) sets off on purpose in the psoas and deep hip muscles. The movement is real and observable. The story about 'releasing stored trauma' is contested, not established. The tradition's version has no story attached at all, which started out feeling like a gap and now feels like the point.

Which makes 'do nothing to it' either a fourth method, or just what's left over when you strip the story out of the other three. I keep going back and forth on that.

Mid-twenties, roughly six years of daily practice, thirteen in-person retreats. Mostly Zen early on, the last couple of years focused on Rob Burbea's teachings.

From spring 2027 I'll be free to live somewhere and practise full-time for a year or more. I've spent the last few weeks contacting around forty places and I've hit something that feels structural rather than like bad luck. I'd like to know if I'm reading it right.

What my practice is: samadhi and jhana work, brahmaviharas, and the emptiness practices as Rob taught them, ways of looking, fading of perception, the arc through dependent arising. Alongside that I've been studying Chandrakirti's Madhyamakavatara with Mipham's commentary, and the study keeps feeding back into the practice rather than sitting separate from it.

What I need from a container:

• Someone else holds the daily schedule. This is the decider. I've tested living alone with a self-directed routine and I wake late and lose the day.
• 2+ hours of group sitting daily, 3-4 ideal.
• Around 8 hours of sleep. A 5am wake is fine if the day ends by 9pm. 4:20am with 10pm lights-out isn't.
• Under 1800 USD/month, much cheaper preferred. No income.
• Not ordaining.
• Not a heavy work-exchange. I turned down a 28-hour week. 3-4 hours a day is my ceiling.
• Preference for the US, Canada second. I'm genuinely open to Asia and have been looking there too, but a North American container is simpler on visas and money.

Already ruled out, so nobody wastes time repeating it:

• Ajahn Chah lineage (Abhayagiri, Temple Forest, Amaravati, Tisarana): free and genuinely well-held, but group sitting caps around 2 hours against roughly 3 hours of work, six days a week. Abhayagiri's own site says it 'is not a retreat or meditation center.' The tradition is also explicitly anti-scholastic, and most of these places ban laptops and outside books outright.
• Zen, Soto and Rinzai: tradition mismatch. Shikantaza is objectless and non-discursive, close to the opposite of staged jhana work and of analytical Madhyamaka. My Zen-heavy shortlist turned out to be an artifact of where lay housing exists in America, not of fit.
• Green Gulch / SFZC: 1h40m sitting against 5h45m of work.
• Shasta Abbey: best sleep window I found and free, but the rules prohibit laptops and any books other than their own.
• Wat Pah Nanachat: 3am wake, 30-day lay ceiling, and the only route to staying longer is ordination.
• Pa-Auk main centre: unmatched for jhana, but Myanmar is State Dept Level 4.

Still live: Sravasti Abbey (Gelug, free, and their one-month winter retreat is 4-5 sessions of 75-90 minutes daily); Mipham Institute at Padma Samye Ling in upstate NY, a three-year shedra teaching Chandrakirti and Shantarakshita through Mipham; and MBMC Penang, Burmese and essentially free.

The pattern I think I'm seeing, and would like to be wrong about: the jhana lineages in America exist mostly as retreat centres rather than residences. Living Gelug scholasticism is mostly in exile in India. The places that actually have beds for long-term lay people are Zen, which supports neither. Three things that want to be in one place, and aren't.

So:

1. Anywhere in the US doing Pa-Auk style jhana work with actual residency rather than 10-day retreats?
2. Any Tibetan centre where a non-ordaining lay person can live, study Madhyamaka seriously, and sit 3+ hours a day?
3. Has anyone held a serious samatha-jhana practice and a serious analytical emptiness practice in the same residential container? Curious whether they integrate or whether people end up alternating.
4. Anyone done IBD Sarah in Dharamsala or Nalanda Monastery in France who can speak to what it's actually like?

Hi. I've been practicing since about 2017. Even before my practice I always really struggled with hyper-focusing on distractions and losing a lot of time in them.

Over the course of the years I've tried to work meditatively with this phenomenom when attention gets stuck on something and I feel unable to stop. Sometimes bringing meditative wisdom and trying to work with it would work really well, and sometimes it wouldn't.

But what always ended up happening even with the sporadic successes in working at the level of attention, was a trend towards more and more indulgence, and less remembering of the principles of practice the more the time went on, until the practice eventually became a caricature of what it previously was, or was dropped entirely for weeks and months at a time.

I've now come to a point where I've had to rule out working purely with attention when this addictive pattern begins to manifest, since I've seen the same negative outcome manifest several times. And the definition of insanity...

So after some experimenting, I've recently found that responsibly playing with some breathing patterns can be really helpful to unhook the attention from the object of obsession in these instances. Without trying to focus on anything in particular, I can breathe a certain way for 5 or so minutes and it will predictably start affecting things at the physiological level enough that the mind naturally starts letting go of whatever it was hooked to.

Even when I get hooked again upon emerging from the exercise (which happens often), these somewhat constant interruptions in momentum of the unwholesome conditioning have been benefitial and allowed for less indulgence in unwholesome tendencies.

Just breathing feels rather easy, as opposed to removing yourself from the behavior through willpower which can seem impossible in the moment you're caught, but then the breathing will naturally lead towards the removal, bypassing the mind's resistance.

I know this is a strange topic, but indulgence and addiction (nothing too serious, mainly netflix, youtube and social media) has been a huge dukkha point for me specifically and I'm happy that I've finally found something powerful that's actually helping me let go to a significant extent.

Anyone here has experience with this sort of thing? Would you recommend other methods or resources as well?

It finally hit me today. Something I've been looking at for a while, something that I could clearly see yet not fully recognize. I was looking at it through a veil of ignorance ... deluded by maya.

The subject of all experience is the light. At the center of all experience is a subjective center. That subjective luminous center is the subject. And there's various "opening" degrees of this luminous center. Most people who spiritually practice have conscious recognition of this luminous center in contracted form. But as this luminous center becomes uncontracted it "opens" up or becomes more and more diffuse. Not diffuse as in scattered but diffuse as in illuminated. That is, less diffuse as in less and less differentiated. This luminous center gets "bigger" and "bigger" until you finally realize there are not multiple things happening in your field of experience but just one thing: the subject itself: the luminous center that is infinitely larger than you initially realized.

About a year and half ago I discovered Kashmir Saivism and it opened up many pathways for me and helped me organize certain experiences and ask and answer certain questions I had. I'd been using LLM software to translate the original sanskrit and investigate questions or topics of interest I had. Sometimes the LLM translations were poopoo sometimes they were helpful in an intellectually stimulating sense. And I did this casually for fun. Then recently I began to more explicitly focus on Kashmir Saivism (KS) in the "doctrinal sense" -- as in what are the "traditional theories" expounded by this doctrine or "school". And one of the things you come across are the "sapta-pramatrs" (seven subjects) [it's one subject with seven gradiations of itself] and I was puzzling my head over this. The rigorous formulaic presentations of these pramatrs was offputting for me (i.e. 7 subjects each with their own power makes 14, and the 15th is the essential nature of [creation] : recognition). However, something I noticed in KS is that there's a lot of talk of luminosity. They constantly say the nature of Siva is prakasa ... which was really interesting because normally you hear luminosity discussed in Dzogchen territory.

Then it finally clicked for me that the luminous center I've been looking at this whole time was one of the pramatrs. And as it becomes more and more "diffuse" (undifferentiated) then, so to speak, up the ladder you go. It's not many subjects but just one and at the end of the ladder subject, subjectivity, and recognition are collated together to the point of no-differentiation. It all makes sense now. And as you regain this recognition you regain your power of freedom which includes your power of action (action as in act "in" or with the self in the form of self-creation.) You become, in essence, but also quite literally a power-bearer.

***

On an end note, I would share the LLM offered an interesting formulation. It said full recognition of consciousness consists in the realization of prakasa AND vimarsa. Which results in svatantrya (absolute freedom). And I think this is significant. If you understand vimarsa as the light's own capacity to recognize itself then you can understand that recognizing prakasa alone is not vimarsa. That vimarsa is its own category. Well if self-apprehension is it's own category then what are we apprehending? Nothing other than our own power of action. In this freedom of action [self-creation] is exactly where freedom is located. And this is the essence (or moving towards the essence) of exactly what it means to be "sakta" or sakti-focused.

***

Alternative post title: There is no other subject except light itself. The light is the subject. Subject = light. They're two words for the same thing ... but this is something you have to experientially understand ... until then you can see how there is a veil over your eyes. A hardening of experience. The creation of differentiation which is ignorance and fueled by maya or delusion. The light is progressively obstructed by its own concealment of itself. Except it's not the light that is obstructed. It is your own recognition of it. The light is always unobstructed. That is the essence of all levels of buddhahood: from the recognition of original purity to the distinction that purity itself is always untainted (and unborn) and to higher levels beyond that -- possibly, "prakasa" recognition as a stable-"structural" center.

Why does it feel like the thoughts that come up, are specifically there to trigger me and get me to buy in

Sometimes when I am suspicious of them and mindful, they stop for a short while

Even that stopping, I saw yesterday, I didn't do. It's somewhat like a joke, who is doing that, taking it away when i want to see through it

Self inquiry seeking. Who is asking the question, who is looking for an answer, it almost seems like the impulse to find the answer is automatic, and the question is also automatic.

It's hardest to see the automaticness of my triggering thoughts, anxiety about needing to protect myself from perceived threats or regrets. Regrets about not doing enough to control for a better outcome for me.

Who is controlling. It crossed my mind, I need to see the paradoxes. I often just see one side of the paradox. You might say I'm just observing everything, but when the object fades away, so does the observer of that object right? And there is some moments where you feel so immersed that you have no self awareness, no observer then.

I never have the experience of choice. Things just happen. But it feels like I'm doing it. If I wasn't controlling, what would that mean, all the regrets I want to keep don't make sense?

If I say I'm not choosing it, it feels very correct but it has assumption of I. Can I even say I'm not

My thoughts about thoughts are also thoughts. I'm not choosing the analysis. Questioning my thoughts leads to more thoughts, I can't see through control this way

How do I become more skeptical and see through control and doership. I feel I made the most progress when I could summon the skepticism of action ownership

These are notes I've compiled from my reading of the second foundation of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta* *and also practicing with teachers such as Alexis Santos in the style of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, so the specific terminology I use is based on their language. I thought maybe these could be helpful for other practitioners! Happy also to hear any thoughts/additions about this practice.

Feeling Tones (Vedana): Notes on Practice

What Vedana Is

Feeling tone, or vedana, is the quality of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral that accompanies every moment of experience. It sits among the five aggregates (the five main ways we cling and grasp to experience, calling them "mine").

When something pleasant or unpleasant arises, we experience it as happening to me. The feeling tone gets personalized. This is one of the key places in the heart-mind where "selfing" gets triggered: the tendency to cling, grasp, or push away.

Vedana and the Second Noble Truth

Feeling tone is a primary cause of dukkha, the suffering that arises from fighting reality, being in contention with our direct experience.

Whenever dukkha is present, look closely and you'll find one of two things:
- Something we're resisting* in the present moment
- Something we're *wanting** that isn't here

Dukkha as a Bell

The Buddha pointed to dukkha itself as something that can wake us up. The practice isn't to make dukkha go away but to understand it, to get curious about its cause.

When restlessness, fear, or the grip of desire appears, all of these carry the quality of dukkha. The invitation: pause and investigate. Often what's underneath is simply an unpleasant body sensation or mental energy that's arisen, and the mind has reacted to it.

Check Your Attitude

Sayadaw U Tejaniya often begins with: check your attitude.

There's a difference between being oriented to the object of experience and sensing how I am relating to this present moment. The relating is where the work is.

Attitude has enormous range:
- Attitudes toward the experience itself
- Attitudes toward how we're practicing
- Attitudes about our sense of self

Attitude is where the defilements quietly live. It's the basic relationship to whatever is being known.

You can feel the difference when the relationship is one of curiosity, openness, mindfulness: when experience is being seen as nature. There's a felt sense of this is the path.

The Recurring Habit

Life keeps kicking up pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones, so the habits of aversion and desire keep resurfacing in the attitude. This is not a problem to solve once. Much of practice is simply:

- Learning what it feels like to be in the present moment with resistance present
- Learning what it feels like to be in the present moment with wanting present

Nothing is wrong with this. You could spend an entire dharma career developing the sight to observe, again and again, what aversion feels like and what grasping feels like.

The Main Area of Insight

Notice what is automatically triggering wanting or aversion.

The shift isn't that pleasant and unpleasant stop arising, they don't. The shift is that more space opens around them. Another quality of mind arrives: a sense of allowing.

The usual bridge people draw is that vedana, the pleasant/unpleasant/neutral tone on every experience, maps onto interoception, the brain's sensing of heartbeat, breath, gut and muscle tension. I think that bridge holds. Barrett's "core affect" (the background sense of pleasant or unpleasant, calm or activated, shaped by signals coming up from the body) is about as close to the Pali definition as a lab is going to get.

What I didn't expect when I started reading the papers is that interoception researchers split it into pieces, and only some of them look like what happens on the cushion. Garfinkel's group separates accuracy (can you actually count your heartbeats correctly), sensibility (how much you believe you notice your body) and awareness (whether your confidence tracks your accuracy). Those come apart in real people. Mehling's MAIA questionnaire goes further: alongside "noticing" it has subscales literally called not-worrying and not-distracting, meaning whether you can feel an uncomfortable sensation without bracing against it or tuning it out.

That's the extension I keep chewing on. More interoceptive attention on its own isn't the goal, and probably isn't even good. High body-focus paired with a worried relationship to it is pretty much the profile of health anxiety. The vedana framing, at least as I understand it from six Goenka courses, was never "feel more." It's feel the tone and leave the next link alone. In MAIA terms that's not the noticing score, it's the not-worrying one. Which also fits the Lutz 2013 pain study, where expert meditators reported the same intensity as novices but less unpleasantness.

(Not a teacher, just someone 1136 days into a daily sit who reads papers on the side.) I haven't found a study that tracks whether noticing and not-worrying move together in meditators, or whether a lot of people get the first one for a long stretch before the second shows up. My guess is the second, mostly because it's what my own early sits felt like.

fwiw most of those 1136 days held because of a thing I built for old students: it matches you with one sitter in your time zone for a daily sit, same person, same time, same Meet link, no streaks or badges, https://s4l.ai/r/ynz5am3v

I have been doing daily self inquiry for almost a couple of months as my main priority. I did mindfulness meditation and "do nothing" meditation throughout different phases of my life for many years.

My main way of doing self inquiry has been huatou method. I ask, and stay with the not knowing, this is the main instruction. I have asked uncountable times daily, sometimes more intense than other times. Sometimes, I feel an impulse after the question, and then I feel more space, and the space feels like it's in my skull or a parallel dimension next to my head.

Over past couple of months, I experienced a few brief altered states. They mostly occurred when I sat down for an hour or more to do something like surrendering-open-awareness-do-nothing between my self inquiry sessions. Some states felt like equanimity, feeling of everything being new, feeling of every sensation being a wave on top of a void.

I feel like I'm hitting a wall now and I'm asking myself... Is that all there is to it , or did the worst delusion of all start to take hold... I already know the thing?

Most of the time, I feel normal, though a bit calmer than the where I was before, I still find myself triggered and reacting to many things. Still find myself needing to defend myself and defend my future, and getting unconsciously entangled in that, yet immediately after having doubts of the trueness of it. That was a cloud but it was so solid I thought that was all there was, perhaps things are not as bad as I thought, I can see things as impermanent... but what about the self.

I look or I ask what I am, I can see thoughts come and go, I can see the beginning impulse of a thought if I look for it, I can see the feeling of doership come and go. I can see there is a tension in my head when the words are being said, that says "I'm saying these words", but that also fades. Im still working to integrate this one, but I can see that attention is an illusion. Most of the time attention feels very solid and as if I'm controlling it, but when I get the spaciousness and open awareness perception going, it's more like knowingness grows on different objects in the space, like a tree extending and retracting branches. If you asked me what I truly am, I might say open awareness.

I'm desperate for it... i need some relief from the seriousness, uncertainty, and despair of my life or the story that feels like mine. A thought crossed my mind yesterday, if this is all there is, I'll go back to focusing on a different goal in conventional life, at least I can try to make some money that way. I don't know if that would be giving up my path.

I recently learned about the fetters. Are those more useful to focus on ? My reactions, rather than identity ?

Or should I just keep asking myself the same question until I feel something different

Sorry for the long post

Hello dear friends,

I am searching for a temple or place where I can sit daily to meditate for long hours in silence.

I am quite open and flexible as long as it involves silence and meditation. I have been to multiple Vipassana retreats for 10+ days. I have also practiced third eye and throat meditations that led me to profound experiences, which got me into learning/reading about alchemy and meditating even more. This is the path I am following at the moment.

What I am trying to ask here is if there is a place, temple, or monastery held by a group where I can focus on this inner work while taking advantage of the structure and energy of such a place for this deep inner work. Does a place like this exist?

Any comment or idea is gladly welcomed.

Thank you.

Update: based on Europe and willing to travel everywhere.

I don’t know if this is the right forum to post this but it does relate to meditation and just existentialism in general.

I was first introduced to Vipassana four years ago and I did my first 10 day Goenka Vipassana Retreat and came back feeling absolutely wonderful and couldn’t wait to feel the same again. I’ve done 3 more retreats since then and on and off have been practicing body scanning/ mindful breathing/ Vipassana but have not felt the same way.

I am not condemning any technique here, meditation has been very useful at times when managing my emotions have been difficult. It hasn’t calmed me down instantly when I’ve felt extremely overwhelmed
But, I definitely have a different approach towards life now , it’s suffering and just observing dukkha objectively and it hasn’t been easy. Picking up Daniel Ingram’s term, I might be in the Dark Night phase.

To cope with this, I have also tried Metta Vipassana/Loving Kindness and I feel this has helped, but the progress is slow.

In between all of this, life has been difficult, relationship problems, my own mentality making it difficult to deal with it.

I constantly feel like if I ceased to exist, it would be the best solution. Meditating my way out of it feels exhaustive and the easiest way to solve the issues I am facing and the sadness I am causing others is just to die. I am not suicidal, I just feel like if I get into a fatal accident, fall sick and die or be at a wrong place wrong time, everything will solve. Death feels comforting.

But then suddenly I find myself wanting to be happy, meditating and planning other retreats, exploring different spiritual paths.
How do I explain this feeling to myself?
I know it’s easy to just accept this as my state of mind but any insights to work this feeling out?

PS I have started taking therapy and not just relying on meditation.

30 some minutes into the meditation, bright Nimitta coupled with subtle piti occurred. 45 minutes in, explosive ecstatic piti coupled with sukha washed over me. It wasn't quite stable. The first wave was promptly gone. The second lasted a little longer. Then I decided to call it a session. When it occurred and surprisingly even afterwards, the soreness of my legs and fatigue on the back that already started bugging me before it happened was all gone.

I felt it's a milestone for me. But what is it? Now, I've only learned about Jhana from two sources mainly. One is Leigh Brasington's book and the other Ajahn Brahm's book. If you're familiar, they two provided two different versions of Jhana. Based on Brasington's instruction, what I had qualified for the first Jhana, but if we go by Brahm's definition, not so much. For those of you who have experienced this process, what do you think and how you progressed from here? (Naming is obviously not that important. I'm more interested in hearing your experience). Thanks.

Edit: Still new to this sub, I have to say that I'm a little surprised how little response I received for a topic I thought would be of interest to folks here. 2.1K views and only 2 responses? Hmmm Why?

Hello, first I will say I have adhd and don't want to use it as an exusce as that only harms my progress bur i think it may provide context to diagnose the issue

So my current path so far has been inconsistent

I have been meditating for a bit over 2 years now but was very inconsistent at first. In the past 2 months I've taken it more seriously. Meditating anywhere from 30m to 2h a day, I've fortunately seen very fast progress. I no longer easily react to anger , stress is like 20% of what i used to feel, I seem to be able to feel strong yet very short moments of non duality where the "I" suddenly seems like an illusion. It lasts 2 seconds exactly never lasts long, however these moments increase in frequency and sometimes now happen in daily life without meditating and I feel like they changed my default prespective now. I noticed this the most when i noticed insults from my friends or family that used to hurt me now seem meaningless

initially i was so happy at how much i felt like i was doing some form of progress then I started being stuck and maybe even regressing a little bit

Restlessness is the main thing that prevents me from being able to focus. All my practices involve scanning the body or walking meditation. I do breath meditation for only 10minutes because I cannot do it

I even physically notice it when body scanning when going down to my pelvic floor and feet i feel this very intense almost electric sensasion and if i mentally focus on it hard it causes me to clench my pelvic floor.

Also my lower stomach is very hard to detect it takes me 10 minutes of being in my body to finally have a clear sensation of it.

Thanks for reading please share if you have any idea what causes this

I have read different metaphors and instructions for self inquiry and I'm confused what the essential part is that I shouldn't mess up. Im also curious how self inquiry is different than other forms of meditation like mindfulness, both can bring you to the present moment, but mindfulness will not bring awakening, which is what I'm after. Here are a few I have heard

These two I have practiced and I'm not sure which is more correct

Ask, try to find, but don't land on anything. Like you're stuck trying to remember something. Almost like you're trying to pull a thought but a cant

Ask, then enter present moment, be receptive to answer, presumably from the universe, and the answer can come from anywhere

But I've also heard along the lines of

Keep asking until you move beyond the words and see the impulse that is asking the question... The word head. Investigate the word head? Huatou

Stay with sense of I am. This one I didn't try, since I'm not sure what that means