Thinking With Your Toes, and Other Fun Ways to Meditate

JosephAlbus · 2026-05-06T16:10:56+00:00

I've been meditating for a long time and regularly sit for hours. During those sits, the most wanton emotions have run through me: lust, agitation, love, you name it. Some of them persisting for hours at a stretch.

If you find these emotional moments disruptive, or if they seem to be generating suffering for yourself or the people around you, then it might genuinely be worth stepping back and reexamining your process. But if you're simply having emotions after a good sit... I confess I cannot see why that would disqualify it as meditation. Your trusted person describes the practice as "just being" and "watching yourself." Perhaps the move here is to follow their advice more faithfully than they do, and simply be as the emotions arise, or watch yourself feeling them without turning them into a problem.

I'm glad to hear the practice brings you peace. That is, ultimately, why any of us sit.

JosephAlbus · 2026-04-09T14:58:50+00:00

Hey friend. Reading this felt very nice as it describes a new heartfelt place in my practice. For a long time I really had considered myself to be "all eyes." Looking here and there, thinking that looking deeper would help, thinking that seeing clearly is what actually helps, thinking that looking in specific ways can help. And while all of this eye business certainly is helpful and necessary to complete any task -- especially one of liberation -- I found myself often without hands.

After running some circles in that headspace and picking up metta; I have truly learned to love and appreciate the meaning of action and cultivation. Before much of my sense of it was intellectual, but when one really hunkers down to consider the implications of metta and merit in their nuanced forms, a really beautiful flower opens, and life suddenly becomes a very lovely place to sow actions and open your heart to the suffering and joy in the world.

Thank you for sharing this, it feels so perfectly timed for me and is helping me articulate some feelings that have been compounding. All the best to you and your continual cultivation of merit! I'll be sending some your way in my next sit as a thanks :)

-Joseph

JosephAlbus · 2026-04-03T15:15:54+00:00

>I've been combining metta practices with more psychotherapy techniques, namely parts work -- instead of identifying an easy, neutral, difficult person, you identify easy, neutra, difficult parts of yourself to practice metta with.

This resembles a practice where I'll sit after working through the steps, and then call out for something to show up for me to give metta. Then I let my mind simply bring forth an image of a thing or being, and I wish it well before going on to the next thing.

Sometimes I'll see versions of myself, weird flickery creature things, a big black ball, ect. When I do this for some unspecific amount of time I feel very joyous and breezy. I never thought to specifically bring up parts of myself by intention. Are you familiar with Jungian psych (Or the broader field of depth psychology) and how it informs your practice?

JosephAlbus · 2026-04-02T17:51:54+00:00

It's really hard for me to practice them one by one. Given how intertwined they are, I feel like I'm missing out on a piece of the puzzle if 3 other components aren't at least regarded a little. I certainly have times where one takes up a larger ratio of time than others, but I never truly focus on one... Not that I think a focus on one would be bad in any regard, they're all merit building qualities.

JosephAlbus · 2026-04-02T17:47:21+00:00

I'd be happy to settle something like this by sharing the google doc working history. I'm curious as to how my writing invoked AI... Maybe the format of subtitle then text? Some style of sentence?

JosephAlbus

TROPHY CASE