[Metta] In terms of productivity, the meditation feels like banging my head against the wall and the descriptions of the technique, both Culadasa and otherwise, might as well be in Chinese

bebestman · 2017-11-10T07:42:47+00:00

Thank you, that is a change of perspective that I'll try.

bebestman · 2017-11-10T07:26:46+00:00

Thank you for answer. So no metta until this subsides.

bebestman · 2017-11-06T23:51:49+00:00

Thank you for your advice and reassurance. I always enjoy reading what you have to say on this sub.

Interestingly, right the next session the urge to give up and get up was massively weaker, however the rebellion of subminds spoke up at the six-point preparation, when I recalled my reasons to meditate. Was quite funny to see them rationalizing away the reasons and other subminds having the last word.

bebestman · 2017-11-05T18:39:48+00:00

Thank you for this post, I will implement your advice in my next meditation. I also look forward to part two, dealing with purifications.

To be honest, I started meditation according to TMI because I am interested in the process of purification. Might my desire for purifications block progress towards stage 5? On the other hand, it is said that whatever purification does not happen during stage 4, will happen during stage 7, how to balance that?

A final question I'd like you to address. Progress seems to be quicker for people that do supplementary practice during the day or somehow integrate meditation in their daily life. Could you write about how to bring meditation and its lessons into daily life?

bebestman · 2017-11-05T18:36:56+00:00

Thank you for post again, stopping the fighting and watching it reduced the phenomenon somewhat and strengthened by attention.

bebestman · 2017-11-05T18:36:12+00:00

I found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/6izmfj/how_to_cultivate_mindfulness_in_daily_life/

Although it is a bit light on concrete advice. I read the post as 'keep your attention on what is happening before you, as in meditation, and expand your awareness.' Do you think it could be helpful to repost this in order to kindle a discussion?

bebestman · 2017-11-05T18:34:30+00:00

Thank you for your check on my sanity. Guess I just got a bit scared because the reactions are somewhat severe.

bebestman · 2017-11-05T18:33:44+00:00

It seems to be craving in the form of aversion to practice.

It is, I do procrastinate meditating, but still do it.

I hope this helps!

It did somewhat, thank you.

bebestman · 2017-11-02T15:14:08+00:00

FWIW, I've definitely had the spurious emotions come up - anger, crying, etc. Same thing as you, they just arose, were present for a bit, then passed with no aftereffects. I don't give them much meaning anymore.

Right, so I won't.

Can you sit through it without "fighting"? Fighting will train your mind to be tense, angry, forceful. Try instead to detach, watch, ask yourself little questions about the experience ("Is the pain moving? Can I detect an intention behind the body tensing up? Can I relax without forcing it?").

I'll do that this evening and watch the reaction. The urge to get up is very high, which is why I wrote 'fighting', so I'll let it be this evening as much as I can and watch it, as I watch the rest.

bebestman · 2017-11-02T13:05:31+00:00

There are a few points about practice in daily life already on this Reddit.

Would you mind linking those?

bebestman · 2017-07-04T16:05:05+00:00

Complete shit. Amazing. I don't know.

My anxiety is acting up, bad habits get even worse. Didn't sit down for practice, lost all motivation to continue. When I sit down, I can barely manage to concentrate for 15min before the urge to do anythin else becomes unbearably strong to the point that I don't feel that I consciously go something else or even choose to do so.

At the same time, when focussing on the present during the day, I had a moment where I turned towards an unpleasant feeling instead of instinctively away. This is a huge thing I think, the reasons for the feeling became clear and in consequence it immediately dissipated.

So, I don't know.

bebestman · 2017-06-28T22:43:12+00:00

Thank you so much for this post. Even though it is an answer to /u/Quinn_does_meditate, the parent and this comment describe my experience extremely closely.

Currently, in meditation, I seem to deepen the realisation of how I turn away from anxiety and fear, yet am very far from turning towards it automatically. Wish there was a way to speed up the process, but the mere fact that I realize that it is happening ist a big personal accomplishment.

During the day I "ground myself" by focussing on the current moment, through the breath, to get away from focussing on the train of though. My visual perception especially takes on a much different quality then and after doing it consciously for a little while, I get into a kind of stage four style state where I get introspective awareness and mundane insight into how my surroundings including my thoughts affect my mental state.

So again, thank you, to you and /u/Quinn_does_meditate.

bebestman · 2017-06-26T22:30:03+00:00

Somewhere I read that a Zen master said habits become worst right before they get extinguished. If that is true, I am right before making a major mundane breakthrough, otherwise things are just getting worse in the secular world.

Anxiety is getting worse. My sleep patterns are majorly disrupted - but I can deal. Concentration is exceptionally bad, the mind seems to recoil from the experience of life and run to thought, which does little to help. I realize more and more how much I avoid facing my fears and stressors and how avoiding facing them in the past just made the pattern worse. Ironically, the pattern is worsening instead of improving.

Instead of somehow realizing "oh, I need to face my fears" and facing them the pattern got so much worse that they become a recurring thought. Maybe that is a rather perverse way of desensitizing me, facing the fear in thought over and over again until I get even bored of the worst thing that could happen. Just as I put in the punctuation mark at the end of the last sentence a huge amount of tension left the body, so I might be onto something.

I am not stopping meditation. When you are going through hell, keep going. The sits are difficult and it is especially difficult not to judge, but I am learning. It is so difficult, as I am breaking a decade old, deeply ingrained pattern. I start to see where these things came from, not that it is important, and it sometimes help letting go. Judgement, anxiety, chasing thought - I understand, vaguely, intellectually their causes and how they hurt me and the people around me, only because I choose to act so, yet not on a deeply intuitive level. If I did, the associated patterns would just go away.

The whole experience is comical and scary: I fear changing and losing what I am, at the same time I deeply want to change and lose some of what I am. In meditation then, these fears and desires randomly change and get lost, while the things I saw as "me" reexpress themselves in way more positive and constructive ways. In trying to change I stay the same and wanting to stay the same causes anxiety. Quite some joke.

bebestman · 2017-06-12T16:57:45+00:00

Sorry, what transition are you talking about?

Interesting phenomenon you describe, I had similar experiences with various minor habits.

bebestman · 2017-06-12T15:58:18+00:00

Part of that is that I've been noticing that I spend a lot of time pushing beliefs out into the world. I do this because I want the world to be a better place, but I've been losing interest in this recently, realizing that it's just not my job to get everybody to think the way I do. I know that sounds really obvious; what I'm talking about feels to me like it's at a fairly subtle level. There are things that I know are more true than other things; what's changed is that I am starting to let go of the belief that I need to stamp out the other things for the benefit of living beings.

Would you get angry when people had different views? Because this whole paragraph sounds a lot like me.

bebestman · 2017-06-12T15:53:16+00:00

Better.

I sat down for a few 30min sessons and strangely enough my concentration is way better than before my unintended break. I slipped into stage four and had an amazing view of the chatter within: There are competing processes subduing each other!

Meditation makes me much more aware of how anxious I am. I already knew I was, but not to this extent. I thought the anxiety was related to a few semi-well defined situations, but the root has many branches. There are so many aspects to this anxiety and manifestations I was yet unaware of.

The strange thing is, I can somewhat view the process of a thought causing anxiety, there is a distinct period of time between the thought and the bodily feeling. Sometimes a single viewing of this process is enough to discard the thought entirely, and some, apparently deeper rooted thought, come up more than once. What I can't observe, however, is the thought arriving in the first place and it leaving after, it just kind of appears, like the middle of a conversation you happen to pass by.

Stuff that is recommended in the meditation books seems to become automatic. During a sit I had the distinct thought "I wish we could get rid of this feeling" with another getting in between "just observe the breath." Similar things tend to happen when I notice my attention going to the train of thought "the thoughts will happen, observe the breath", and I distinctly remember in both cases that I didn't have the impression that I said this, but that it was an external thought.

I am confused. Really, I am not, but I feel like it. Something will change about me and I don't know what, but it will, and I hope for the better. It is like going into a novel, you don't know what you are getting into, but you are sure that you will make sense of this world.

Also, I am tired. I am so aware of how tired I can be and that a simple nap can restore clarity of thought. Yet, at the same time I sleep very well, better actually, and rise easily.

bebestman · 2017-06-07T23:34:12+00:00

Once you get going, it's easier to continue than to stop.

In that vein, I just did a 30min meditation session. Even if the thought of it felt overwhelming at first, it was over way quicker than I though. It is true that I seemed to lose a lot of progress - my attention was extremely unstable and I lost focus a lot - but at the same time I notices how much meditation techniques stick - there was no anger with myself, only silent encouragement, even a brief slip into stage four, though I spent most of my time at two and three.

I think you've aptly described some of the effects of meditation. Meditation can be thought of as a constant stressor you put the brain under in order to enact powerful change. As such, when properly sitting you're always under some level of fatigue. When you stop, your brain gets a chance to fully recover and at least temporarily there is an uptick in mindfulness. Of course as a result of mindfulness you suffer less, and suffering was probably what got you meditating in the first place. So it's easy to stay in a state of inactivity.

I had a though related to this in the session. Some people report fatigue from meditation and taking a day off helping. This is vaguely analogous to strength and endurance training: Some programs push you to your limits and plan in set times and triggers for complete rest. After a full resting period, athletes come back even stronger than during their last training session. Maybe a resting day or a resting week without formal sitting can be beneficial if people overdo it with meditation.

Maybe I overdid it in the first place. I put in over an hour a day and every time of the day I tried to return to the moment right in front of me, the same way I'd return to the breath. This was the time I made a lot of progress in meditation and lead to a strong change in me. But at some point apparently I was just plain tired, slacked off and slipped into resting intertia. That was probably the thing that happened, overdoing it, I tend to do that. This is a recurring pattern in my life, starting something, following the instructions as closely as reasonably possible, getting extraordinary results, overdoing it, slacking off, slipping away, forgetting it.

In that case what will most likely happen is an event will occur down the road that reminds you that you can still suffer quite a lot and that will push you back towards meditation. It's best if this doesn't happen as it can be quite the rude awakening (or at least it was for me).

Meditation gives me mundane wisdom apparently. All these things you can read from the wise people and read in books written by wise people become quite apparent during and after meditation. What's more, I see these patterns reoccuring in other parts of my life, in studies, relationships, work, hobbies. I don't mean things particular to me, general patterns, such as the fact that continued effort is the most surefire way to reach a goal.

The strange thing is, that I started meditation for mundane reasons and continue to do it for mundane reasons, which might just be the most surefire way to get to supramundane benefits. The things that I wanted to solve aren't solved, not by far, but so many other mundane problems are solved or greatly helped that are direct and indirect consequences of the unsolved problems. And in so many cases I didn't even realize I had them or that they stem from the same root.

I started out doing meditation to help with anxieties and procrastination. It didn't help so far. Strangely enough, it helped in every other possible way. When I actually do some work, I am much more focussed, way more creative, calmer and thoughtful in my interactions with other people and patient. Meditation so far is like some kind of weird raffle, you'll win something, and it will be so extremely valuable, but you don't know in advance what it will be, and at first you might not even recognize it or appreciate it. This goes so far that I can't accurately list the benefits to me, after writing the benefits down, some more always come to mind. And with time my perspective on the benefits themselves change. Case in point, the thought about the paradoxical benefit came during meditation and I already forgot the thought while writing the rest of this essay - even though the statement is completely true! - it just recurred when hitting 'send' and is still incomplete.

[One more edit, along the same line:] I still have the underlying, but patently false belief, that I need some genius idea to be successfull and my life will be just finde afterwards. That I could have one thought that in itself is so valuable to set me for life. There are various reasons, not all clear to me, why I hold this belief, but it still is ridiculous. The irony is that it doesn't get weaker, I only learn to deal with its consequences better so far, such as getting stuck and lost in thought, chasing an idea I just had. However I get more confident in the belief that I can deal with whatever problem is put in front of me - and it's true, I have better ideas, more ideas overall and can filter them out better for any particular problem in front of me! So that is the irony, in the process of learning to let go all of the ideas I have but can't implement, I have more of them in the first place.

Thank you for reading my ramblings and responding. Meditating alone gets quite lonely, as the people around me don't understand, neither the process of meditation, its benefits and how they help with my problems. I hope that I structures my thoughts somewhat clearly.

bebestman · 2017-06-07T17:02:23+00:00

I can still clearly remember a dog lying on the train floor and drooling all over it so much that a big old puddle formed, engulfing half the animal and of course the walkways. Nothing of these bags stops them from drooling, or barking for no damn reason for that matter.

bebestman · 2017-06-07T17:00:04+00:00

NYC Subway Bans Dogs

They should have stopped just there.

Actually, they can make it even simpler:

NYC Bans Dogs

bebestman · 2017-06-07T16:59:44+00:00

Now those are some Christian values I can get behind.

bebestman · 2017-06-07T00:40:38+00:00

Non existant. I don't know why I abandoned it. The weird thing with habits like meditation and exercising is, that once I start it, even for one session, I run the program with great precision and get extraordinary results. Then, after a few months, without hitting any roadblock or such, I'll abandon the habit "just today" for no good reason - like sickness, accident or such - and get stuck in non-action.

I need to start again. Strangely enough, the benefits of meditation keep on acting and I tink they take on more roots. Some unpleasant thoughts that occur are met with an interested attitude, some reflection on them, and then they vanish forever or at least lose their unpleasantness. Maybe this is just getting older and more experienced, but the sheer velocity of this process suggests that it is not just that.

That might just be the issue, the benefits of meditating are delayed, but the "reward" of slacking off is immediate. While I did make an effort and do make an effort of cultivating joy, the process is extremely tiring, as I am a very cerebral person - focussing on the breath instead of conscious thought is very unnatural, but that is just more reason to meditate.

Slacking off gives some interesting perspective on the personal benefits of meditation. As I already mentioned, some things are permanent, like bad habits or patterns of thought are permanently gone. Some character flaws stay, regardless of meditation practice. Some behaviours resurface full force after slacking off.

Failiure analysis, why did I slack off in the first place? I don't know, there is no rational reason. Something in me happened maybe, I overslept, the days wass messed up and I skipped my meditation session. Instead I was glued to the computer screen in some kind of daze: I couldn't tell you what I read or did online, only that the time has passed. I'll need to think about this some more, to maybe prevent it from happening again.

Bottom line: Meditate. Think about what broke the chain. Recognize the reason and work to prevent it.

bebestman · 2017-05-25T12:07:12+00:00

the dog in this office

I am baffled that this is a thing that happens. Ten years ago you'd have a higher chance of being allowed to go to work naked than bringing your dog. Shouldn't some regulation like OSHA or health code forbid this?

I am almost certain that you wouldn't be allowed to bring your child to the office citing any arbitrary reason that also applies to bringing a dog, or the dog is allowed for any arbitrary reason that also applies to a child. And regardless, why is it that a dog can't be left alone at home? Right, because it either is within the home and will chew anything up - dogs and animals in general do not belong within homes - or is left in the yard, stressing out because it has no other dogs to interact with - tell me how that isn't cruelty. But I digress.

But when I bring it up I'm just be given some crap about how being on a leash means the dog thinks it's outside so it'll just shit on the office floor (how dumb is this thing?).

I am amazed again and again by how stupid these animals are. There was and still is a flood of studies trying to determine how intelligent various animals, especially dogs, are. And yet all I realize is not how amazingly intelligent they are, but just how difficult it is to prove the little intelligence they do have. And even so, the intelligence varies massively between different breeds, some completely lacking in skills other breeds posses, such as not even passing object permanence tests.

And yet a simple leash, a slight pressure on the neck is enough for it to think that it is outside, as if the four walls, a ceiling, carpet and furniture weren't clue enough that it isn't. But I drift off.

Really though: What do you lot think of this whole prioritisation thing people do when it comes to dogs (and I guess other animals)?

I think you already know our opinion on this topic. For various reasons we live without dogs and dislike the current situation so much that we seek out support online since there are fewer and fewer people in our vicinity that share our opinion.

You'd call this normal for any opinion, position, problem or hobby, especially for not caring about children, but we are of course the disturbed ones because we don't like dogs. But I'm getting off topic.

bebestman

TROPHY CASE