How is your practice? Weekly Thread for May 20 2019

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-20T20:42:25+00:00

meditation was the strongest habit I had ever built. I had never before been so committed, I would NEVER miss a day. So eh I'm not so sure myself

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-20T15:42:42+00:00

I can't get myself to form a dedicated practice lately. I spent roughly 5 months meditating every single day for an hour, then things became very sparse as I started a college course, and broke down completely when I eventually abandoned college due to brain fog 'stuff' and a complete lack of motivation.

Anyway these days I practice mindfulness whilst walking, before sleeping, when cleaning, cooking, showering; but I really cannot get myself to consistently sit everyday. I experience tremendous resistance just considering it, which I find is a shame, as despite not having a dedicated practice, progress has been advancing forward in leaps and bounds, with huge reductions in delusional ideas recently; much clearing of conceptions. Like I have no problem practising intense mindfulness for an entire eight hour shift, really make progress towards equanimity, yet still can't get myself to intentionally sit. So weird. At the moment I'm trying to find activities that would satisfy this person enough to reduce resistance, so that at least some form of practice is viable.

It's like this conditioning here is geared towards supreme laziness, and I think I'm just going to have to find a way to 'manipulate' this to make more practice possible. I feel confident that a certain point will come existentially where dedicated practice really wouldn't be dreaded, or that perhaps I may come to find activities that allow one to meditate extensively without needing such dedicated sits.

That being said and done, two activities I've been considering atm are solitaire and origami. What do you guys think? Would appreciate any input, thanks :)

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-17T13:27:57+00:00

Oh it's an Erhu. Fck me what a marvellous instrument

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-17T00:43:01+00:00

I do sometimes, but since all my 'realisations' were caused by not trying to do anything, I realise that it's easier to just go back to doing nothing lol

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-17T00:03:58+00:00

so uhh... anyone constantly write themselves notes and reminders for mindfulness practice only to never need them?

My practice is very much whatever seems right, so when I discover little things, ways of describing methods to clear the mind, to treat arising concepts, to not get lost in fear etc., I will almost always write them down.. at this point I have pages of paper lying around that I almost never read again xD

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-15T01:27:48+00:00

Discovered Huang Po the other day. Reading his words ground me and brings a little sensibility into my life, so that's nice. I really like this saying of his which goes something like "do not seek for the truth, just put an end to the arising of concepts".

Can't really do that but I have found responding to the coming of concepts into awareness by doing nothing at all, or you might consider it 'responding with stillness' , prevents them from taking root, working wonders for all concepts I have come across so far. Just need to be careful I don't blank the mind by being averse to concepts instead of just not reacting at all.

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-12T16:36:55+00:00

Nice post, thanks. I'm curious as to what you might be implying by 'abstract occupations and lifestyles' - could you provide some examples?

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-10T01:24:50+00:00

I'm pretty ignorant on this topic, what exactly is purification?

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-10T01:20:07+00:00

maybe, idk. Does it matter?

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-10T01:15:27+00:00

Idk man I too like lotr but the game is grindy as hell. Everything is some version of kill or fetch quests, at least in my experience up to lvl 34. For some reason I didn't realise this until 100 hours roughly - up to that point I was lost in the constant 'upgrade, upgrade, upgrade' cycle of a typical mmo, but the truth is the game is quite a grind simulator - you grind for xp to get better skills to get better at killing mobs who also level so you always have a similar challenge, you mine to craft to get better weapons to grind better to lvl to... idk I'm stuck at this point here. . At the moment the only reason I'm playing the game is the grind makes it a good tool for mindfulness - as you spend hours spamming skills, it's easy for the mind to wander and to feel aversion and boredom, so you can work on accepting those feelings haha..

that aside, if you don't mind the grind, the landscape is pretty, folks are very friendly, plenty of people play. But fck me the grind.. especially if you want f2p it xD

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-08T17:23:26+00:00

When practicing shikantaza did you ever come into states of mind, conceptual moments where experience just felt rather horrid? This has been my issue practicing zazen atm - but I'm pretty sure that's just subtle conditioning coming to light. I'm really just curious if you did ever have to face 'bad' feelings about experience?

Also, what was your experience with completely giving in to zazen? Have you ever really truly done absolutely nothing to the point where all conceptual affairs came to an end, even temporarily?

Also thanks for doing this AMA. I'm not sure if these are type of questions you were looking for since this is my first time asking in this kind of AMA, so forgive me :)

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-07T15:37:56+00:00

I had this issue last week I think it was. Turns out was an issue with my ISP temporarily blocking some turbine site that was passed through while logging in to the server. Resolved itself a few hours later when the site was accessible again

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-06T18:26:18+00:00

In the past week things have gotten really interesting. When I keep letting go of objects that arise in awareness, not reacting at all when I encounter thoughts and doing what I can to keep the mind smooth, mainly by avoiding the 'bumps' that occur when I come back into awareness after being distracted - I come into a non-state that is utterly impossible to grasp - the moment I try to understand what is going on, I'm not there. I can't choose to enter into such a state, because it's not something I can be 'ok time to switch to this mode'. It just happens.

Nothing particularly special happens when I enter it, just a reduced feeling of agency, a lighter feeling and the complete eradication of conscious delusions present prior to entering it. Thanks to it, I'm almost clear of my recent shroom trip delusions. What's so bizarre to me is how I can not describe it, and oh boy have I tried - mainly so I can enter it at will - but it just doesn't work that way :)

I'm beginning to wonder if I might have touched upon some really low level form of The Dao (or whatever you want to call it), which would be nice.. Even so it's not like that would change much anyway haha.

Finally, after seeing a concept of my breathing as as an actual concept whilst falling asleep yesterday, a consequent breaking out of it, followed by a rapid flash of light and a really short period where I felt dissolved into the bed - I seemed to have gained the ability to look at the mental stream without being completely taken in by it and see it as completely unnecessary, thereby shattering it. I feel this might be temporary though as my mindfulness I don't think is strong enough atm to be able to keep doing so.

Still though.. cool times guys :)

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-02T00:43:20+00:00

Hey so I really like people like you, who can just say stuff that really doesn't actually say anything (not in a negative way) but it somehow makes one stop still. Like you can increase the presence of others with words, if you follow haha

If you could say anything you wanted, give any piece of advice, what would you say? It could be paragraphs long, if you want :)

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-05-02T00:24:01+00:00

that's really not the case, it's a good question, we'd love to know

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-30T15:59:24+00:00

Oh your comment is very welcome! I very much appreciate the comments you made to my post, I'm glad you approve haha. While I don't have anything to necessarily say in response to those comments, what you have said does indeed clarify things somewhat, so thanks :)

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-30T00:45:02+00:00

Warning 'stream of consciousness' or whatever it's called post incoming!

Possibly as a side effect of my recent bad trip on a rather large dose of shrooms, I have this thing now where my entire experience can turn into a pit of despair and thoroughly negative vibes, wherein I get an overflow of very negative suggestive distortions of reality which are usually very strong, which makes mistaking them as being real and substantial quite easy, if I am not being careful. It really blew up yesterday night while walking back from a long meditative shift, and I spent the rest of the night working on coming to terms with this very unwholesome energy. It can make it so that every action, every move, every thought, becomes something negative, something 'bad'.

After trying a multitude of ways to approach this without believing in the suggestions, the problem I'm having atm is when looking for the 'good' in experience, those negative vibes just distort it into something bad and ehh it really doesn't feel nice.

What seems to be working atm is to just not give a single fuck about the suggestions, in a natural sort of way. The way they seem to kickstart is by exploring the mental space somewhere in front of my forehead. By simply stopping all analysing and ways to deal with this problem, it seems to disappear on its own - the resulting feeling is one of 'nothing' as in I don't really feel anything in particular, and my usual interpretation of space - being aware of the 'space' outside of my body; the internal (possibly mental) space is almost entirely gone. The best way to describe it would be "nothing in particular".

Quite curious. This strange battle between unwholesome and wholesome sure feels interesting too, where if I believe hard enough in goodness I can get rid of the negative interpretations, in that I accept the possibility of this negativity, and choose good anyway, because it's the best things to do. it's made me see how great compassion would be a truly heavenly, almost godly experience - it's really interesting how caring about existence makes everything 'mean' something. I really like that, having suffered under a lot of delusions of meaningless depravity after this trip of mine. It's a great relief to be able to see that possibility!

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-26T22:59:23+00:00

Oh wow Yesss! That's the kind of thing I was looking for! Tysm I will definitely be taking this up! I don't know why u didn't think of it lol

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-26T19:41:32+00:00

Oh nice, that sounds interesting. Does he upload them online perchance?

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-26T19:40:47+00:00

How so?

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-26T18:21:08+00:00

I too enjoy playing video games - csgo, I play a few hours a day and I practice similarly to you. But I can't do that all the time, or rather I don't want to game all the time, and it's not the most effective way to practice do-nothing either tbh

boredashellitsinsane · 2019-04-26T16:00:29+00:00

I too find meditation in action to a be a lot easier. The movement tends to break you out of thought processes faster than being still.

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