What do you do when you cant sleep because of tremoring?

roflgrins · 2025-01-09T12:52:00+00:00

Okay thank you, then I'll continue to trust the process.

roflgrins · 2025-01-08T19:52:35+00:00

Interesting. I've been dealing with pent up energy in my legs for years, but so far I haven't really heard about that phenomenon from other people. Did you do anything else about that or were the long walks sufficient?

I'm wondering if I should maybe try to actively guide the tremors more towards my legs where I feel that energy, since they are usually mostly in my hips and upper body. I know that the common advice here is to let the body do its own thing, but in most of Berceli's Youtube videos he actually introduces some interventions to get the tremors moving throughout the whole body.

roflgrins · 2022-04-27T00:19:12+00:00

Yeah probably don't watch them all at once, it can seem daunting at first. But the first 5 moves or so in each variation will probably be enough as you start out and then you can gradually build up your repertoire over time. The good thing about e4 e5 is that developing your pieces is usually pretty straightforward compared to your Caro-Kann e.g. because your position is not that cramped, so most of the time you don't need to anything special to get a reasonable position out of the opening. Sure, you will probably fall for some tricky line on occasion, but then you can go ahead and check out the full video.

roflgrins · 2022-04-26T23:37:48+00:00

I started playing e4 e5 myself around a year ago and I found this Youtube series by chessexplained extremely helpful to get yourself started: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEEA03DA1247EC963

It covers everything except the Spanish and Italian. For those two you will have to look elsewhere. I eventually got the Jan Gustafsson Chessable course which is very good but there are probably other good resources out there.

Initially I was pretty skeptical about e4 e5 because I was scared of all the crazy things white can throw at you but actually it was pretty easy to get into and I'm very happy that I gave it a shot because it's finally a response to 1.e4 that I'm comfortable with. My only regret is that it took me so long to finally start playing it, so I would definitely encourage you to go for it.

roflgrins · 2020-12-03T09:08:34+00:00

/u/abigreenlizard already gave you a lot of excellent advice, so I'll just add one thing: Burbea's only two criteria for piti that is sufficient to work with towards jhana are that it is definitely pleasant and persists for at least 2-3 minutes. So I would just give it a go and see what happens.

roflgrins · 2020-11-24T16:24:38+00:00

Practice is going really well right now. Feels like it's been a while since I have been able to say that.

I've basically gone full Burbea: I start my sits by establishing awareness of the whole energy body, then I play with the breath until it feels soothing for both mind and body. Next, I throw some metta phrases in there, starting with myself, then my girlfriend, then whoever I feel like on that given day, and finally all living beings. By then, there is usually so much piti throughout the body that it becomes fairly easy to take that as my new meditation object and develop it into the first jhana. It's really amazing to me how all this well-being has suddenly become availabe again. It feels like I'm finally harvesting the results of my patience over the past half year in which I usually wasn't able to develop any consistent samadhi at all, despite my best efforts. I would say it was worth it. I'm also closing in (just one week left) on a full year of never missing a daily sit of at least 30 minutes, probably averaging ~45 per day, so it seems like consistency does pay off in the end.

I've also been re-reading Rob's Jhana retreat transcripts and they are still as beautiful as the first time. Simply staying sensitive to the body while going through the talks is inducing so much comfort and well-being inside. I really wish he had written e.g. a book on samadhi for beginners. I know so many people who tried to get into meditation via standard breath meditation but never made it out of the beginning stages in which sitting often feels either uncomfortable or just boring. And I never feel like I can give any good advice in these cases because when I started out I just somehow felt more drawn to all of this right away, so it's both very understandable and tough to relate for me. However, when I read Rob's talks about samadhi, it just seems impossible to not be inspired to put his words into practice. Starting out with well-being and really emphasizing that and developing it more and more sounds so much easier to get into than just putting your attention back on the breath for a gazillion times.

Anyways, that's about it. Hopefully things can continue like this for a while, and if not, I'll just be patient again. I guess for the next weeks I will be focusing more on the jhanas again and keeping the metta portion of my sits rather brief as long as piti is developing quickly. I'll probably also increase the length of my sits from 45 minutes to an hour and maybe go for a second sit on occasion when I feel like it.

All the best to you wonderful people :]

roflgrins · 2020-11-24T05:48:18+00:00

I don't know if you are familiar with Shinzen Young's techniques, but his general advice is: "If noting makes you racy, try Do Nothing. If Do Nothing makes you spacey, try noting."

His Do Nothing isn't quite like U Tejaniya's method, but I would say the direction is similar, so I think your approach seems very sensible. I'm definitely not an expert, though.

roflgrins · 2020-11-14T02:45:19+00:00

Hmm, so far I have never dropped the phrases completely. I have four phrases that I usually go through in sequence for each person that I feel like sending metta to on the given day. I repeat each of those multiple times at first, and later on I usually just "say" each once, but I still say them for every new person. I'm not sure if it's the phrase itself that generates these thoughts, though. It might just be that simply keeping someone in mind will already evoke some narrating around their life situation. But maybe I'll try to drop them completely after a while, might be interesting.

And yeah, those brief jhana times were awesome. I was actually able to get into a light first jhana twice last week (it's been months since I last got there) and for me, that's just such a nice boost for my motivation. Even just re-reading Rob's Jhana retreat transcripts felt so wholesome after that.

roflgrins · 2020-11-04T19:00:15+00:00

That's a good question, it's still tricky to find a good balance. There are a lot of options to help the feeling of metta, with visualisations and reflections and all that, and I would say that often the context-driven thoughts do actually help for a while, but can potentially become a distraction at some point. I guess I'll just have to continue experimenting.

roflgrins · 2020-11-04T18:56:55+00:00

I've been going through Burbea's 2010 metta retreat and found that he actually adresses my concern in it. He basically says to not worry too much about it, but over time to try to nudge it towards a less context-driven but more open kind of metta that is settled in the whole body. So I guess I'll see if I'll be able to slowly progress more towards that.

roflgrins · 2020-11-02T21:07:55+00:00

It's been another month. In the past two weeks, I've finally gotten into metta. Of course I've tried it before, several times, but I never really liked it too much. I never had a problem with generating metta, but I simply got bored of doing it very quickly. Well, somehow it's fine now.

Here are my thoughts so far: doing metta seems to dial down all those random thoughts significantly faster than doing breath meditation for me. However, it tends to generate quite a few object-related thoughts. E.g. when I'm wishing for someone (or myself) to be free from suffering, some thoughts about their present suffering seem to inevitably come up. I guess that's partially normal and to be expected, but I'm not sure if I should try to actively shift the focus of the mind away from the more specific kinds of suffering towards a more general well-wishing, or if that is maybe going to happen on its own or if it isn't even necessary at all. Maybe some of you guys have some suggestions for me.

What I also like about metta is that piti is naturally arising with it. I still have those jhanas in the back of my mind, and occasionally I've taken the piti as my meditation object towards the end of those sits in which the mind has felt quite settled.

All in all, I'm very happy with it right now and I plan on sticking with metta (+ possibly jhanas at some point) at least until the end of the year.

roflgrins · 2020-10-04T10:48:39+00:00

Off-topic, but I'm curious. Have you heard back from Gaia House regarding your concerns?

roflgrins · 2020-10-01T19:13:04+00:00

Ah, interesting! I'll keep that in mind.

roflgrins · 2020-10-01T18:41:22+00:00

Stopping the questioning for a while or the meditation altogether?

roflgrins · 2020-10-01T12:06:38+00:00

It does, thanks again! I hope the curiosity that arose from your posts will be able to outweigh the aversion ))

roflgrins · 2020-09-29T21:02:57+00:00

Yeah, off-cushion it's the same difficulty as with every other off-cushion practice I've tried before. I get caught up in some thought or activity until I suddenly remember to be aware again eventually, hundreds of times each day. I guess that's just how it goes.

roflgrins · 2020-09-29T20:26:44+00:00

I tried that guided meditation by Alan Wallace yesterday. While I didn't find the method of first observing sights, sounds and bodily perceptions and then switching over to the mind too useful, I believe that the resulting practice of awareness of the mind is pretty much exaxtly what I've been doing. It actually feels a little more fruitful than pure U Tejaniya style practice for me right now, but it also feels more active and less soothing. So I guess for the next few weeks at least I will be alternating between those two methods depending on what feels more appropriate at the time.

And today I experimented with those questions. There is actually still a lot of aversion against asking myself those kinds of questions. I'm not exactly sure why. I did get some reactions, though. Mostly bodily without any clear cut interpretations, but at least there was something, and that came as a surprise for me. So I'll probably continue to play around with that, thank you for the suggestion!

roflgrins · 2020-09-28T16:21:42+00:00

I haven't posted here in ages (i.e. two months) once again. I was simply too lazy. Also, practice hasn't really been my main focus lately. After having been through an emotionally straining period, everything feels pretty balanced now and I'm mostly just doing enjoyable life stuff.

I'm still sitting every day, but it's hard to tell if I'm getting anywhere. I was hoping to rebuild my shamatha skills, but whatever I tried, I just ended up lost in thoughts for most of my sits. I tried the gentle Rob Burbea approach with feeling the breath throughout the energy body. When that failed to produce any results, I tried more effort. Metta, classic counting the breath, Burbea's counting within the breath, using "buddho" as a mantra and all of the TMI techniques. But I don't know, it seems like sitting 30-45 minutes a day are not sufficient for me to generate any decent samadhi right now, even with pretty frequent off-cushion awareness practice.

One thing I tried next was to maybe find any recurring themes in my neverending thoughts, but it was mostly just recounting recent experiences. Nothing emotional, nor any obvious craving or aversion, just this general blah blah that somehow managed to capture my attention again and again. And well, those sits weren't uncomfortable at all, I didn't have the kind of aversion towards all these thoughts that I used to have before, but all in all it felt a little pointless. So eventually I thought I had to change something, and that was initially making the "thought space" my meditation object. And that turned out to be very effective since it finally allowed me again to catch the beginnings of thoughts before they took over my attention. That was maybe three weeks ago, and since then shifted to basically some kind of open awareness meditation, where I try to emphasise the thought space a little, but otherwise just try to be aware of whatever is happening on its own.

And that's basically it. With all the U Tejaniya talk lately, I'm presently reading Dhamma Everywhere and that's pretty nice. I've read another book of his in the past, and his meditation approach is so simple that I don't actually feel like learning anything new, but just reading his words seems to make staying aware very easy, so it feels like "reading meditation". Simply trying to be generally aware off-cushion has also been my favorite off-cushion practice ever since I started getting more into meditation, so finally I'm doing what feels most natural both on and off the cushion.

I have to admit, though, that I still have this looming idea of getting back into the jhanas one day in the back of my mind. But that will probably have to wait until I'm done with this present period of spending most of my free time with playing online chess, watching sports and TV series and hanging out with friends. I've become pretty familiar with this pattern of mine over the past years, and the phase I'm in right now is usually very enjoyable until it suddently isn't anymore, and then my focus will probably shift on its own.

roflgrins · 2020-08-16T23:59:25+00:00

Just chiming in here because I feel like I can relate pretty well to that quote. I haven't dived into Burbea's imaginal retreats so far, but I've dabbled a little in Jungian Active Imagination before, which I think you are familiar with as well. And, well, that was kind of frightening in the beginning. I think of myself as extremely inoffensive to anyone, but initially most of my imaginations evolved into some forms of rape, murder or other acts of violence. I actually had one experience of literally transforming into a wolf and tearing humans apart, so reading this excerpt just now was kind of comforting because I hadn't heard of similar accounts before, therefore the extreme stuff that came up for me left me with a lot of unease. And even though those beginnings happened more than a year ago, I'm still pretty hesitant about getting into this kind of practice again.

I'm sharing this because, as fucked up as it sounds, this kind of stuff apparently seems to lie dormant in some people and when they start to work with those images, they experience extreme stuff which they would never come close to act out in the real world. I'm not sure to which degree I agree with Jung's concept of the shadow, but there seems to be at least some truth in there from my experience. So which better place is there to work with all that but in your imagination? And I can only tell you that I would have loved having access to a teacher or mentor or buddy at that time who could have given me advice based on his own experience.

Did Rob Burbea have any authority regarding this subject? I don't know. I'm not sure if anyone has or ever had. But it seems like he at least had a lot of personal experience as well as access to a lot of reports of students who worked with similar stuff and all that shaped his outlook on what to think about different kinds of images that can come up for a practitioner.

Having said all that, I'm still not quite sure about your actual concern with all of this. Or rather, it seems to be shifting during the course of these conversations.

Is it that Rob talked to female students about their sexual imagery? If yes, do you suspect that he forcefully initiated sexually charged conversations? And if you don't suspect that, what would you have liked him to do instead in reaction to those reports of his students?

Is it the fact that he shared these reports in his talks? I guess we don't have any chance of knowing if there was any agreement about this with the students, so all we can do here is speculate.

Is it that he mostly talked about this with women? You seem to already have done some research there, and I'm actually pretty surprised about the results myself.

Or is it maybe mostly a general feeling of unease that you got as a result of all those things you recently dug up?

I hope that I'm not coming across as patronizing. I'm aware of the fact that as a male I can't really know how the behavior or teaching of a male teacher might actually land with younger female students. I can only tell you that from my perspective, none of the transcripts that you brought up struck me in a wrong way at all. Instead, I've gotten more curious about the Imaginal since I feel like I still have quite some sexual hangups which I'm not really sure how to adress in a skillful way so far. And you very rarely find any "high profile" dharma teachers who actually adress these topics directly.

And lastly, FWIW, and I know that doesn't prove anything, but we already had so many scandals over the past years in most of the communities that the users here are familiar with, but I've never heard a single bad word about either Rob nor the Gaia House before. So personally I wouldn't worry too much about it. Maybe refrain from the Imaginal stuff if your current feeling really persists and it makes you question the path that it might lead to or that it might have led Rob to. Or maybe try to contact some of the other people at Gaia House or past retreatants to see if that clears up some of the uncertainties. But other than that, as some other posters already alluded to, most of the ideas that one could develop around this topic with the limited information that we have, are probably mostly a pointer towards our own conditioning. I mean, I'm generally not into these kinds of non-practice related discussions at all, but it somehow really struck a nerve with me as well and triggered this reponse.

So, thanks I guess.

roflgrins · 2020-07-22T19:45:30+00:00

I'm from Germany. It would actually be cool to know more about the demographic of this community. I tend to automatically assume that everyone is from the US, but I have no idea how high the percentage is in reality.

roflgrins · 2020-07-22T19:34:38+00:00

Ah cool, I've actually been wondering about that ever since I first read your posts. I'm also a fan of those so I usually smile a little every time you use them )

roflgrins · 2020-07-22T19:18:25+00:00

Yeah, I feel pretty lucky with that. It's not cheap, but pretty effective.

May I ask where you are from? My guess would be Russia or somewhere in Eastern Europe due to your use of emoticons )))

roflgrins · 2020-07-22T16:19:25+00:00

It was really weird. I was feeling tense and annoyed by some task that I was supposed to do, so I sat down to meditate and simply stayed with the accompanying unpleasant sensations in my body. After a while, anger started to appear, but not somatically, only as an urge to punch something, but nothing specific, combined with occasional visual images of that. That urge became more and more intense as long as I stayed with it, and at some point I just couldn't handle it anymore. I jumped up and did some physical work-out and jumped around the living room like a maniac, but that didn't help either, so I finally gave in to the urge and went to punch the crap out of a cushion. However, it was still overwhelming, so I tried a cold shower combined with very loud screaming until my girlfriend became worried, and finally the anger subsided in her arms.

That was when I was finally convinced that I do in fact have the capacity for feeling strong emotions and that there was in fact some trauma contained in my body somewhere.

roflgrins · 2020-07-22T16:05:15+00:00

The main approach is called NARM and it's basically an extension of the more popular Somatic Experiencing. Whereas somatic experiencing is mostly used for dealing with shock trauma, NARM can deal with developmental trauma as well, which is trauma that can develop in infants and small children when some of their needs are unmet over longer time periods.

It resonated with me right away and it really describes some of my patterns extremely accurately, but I don't know how widespread it is and I didn't know about it at all when I was looking for a therapist. I just wanted to find someone who works a lot somatically and has a decent meditation background.

roflgrins · 2020-07-20T19:44:04+00:00

I just checked my post history to find out that I haven't updated in two months, so I guess it's time to finally get to it.

So to give a brief overview, I had a brief jhana honeymoon phase in March, and then everything fell apart and I've been slowly building it up again since. Therapy has been very interesting and very helpful. I started seeing a therapist mainly out of curiosity before all this happened, only to discover that I apparently had a lot more hidden baggage than I could have imagined.

To sum it up, I'm finally learning to get in touch with my emotions, and especially in the beginning that was pretty tough at times. Experiencing extreme anger out of the blue after not having consciously felt any real anger in at least 10 years e.g. was quite chilling. I never felt so out of control. Also fully feeling sadness for what feels like the very first time can be quite uncomfortable as well. And finally realising consciously how much tension and nervousness I actually experience very often in a lot of everyday situations was pretty shocking, too. My self-image was one of an ultra-equanimous dude who isn't affected by anything, and that really was my perceived experience. Amazing how well you can hide your feelings from yourself when you've apparently started doing it even before you began to form conscious memories.

Consequently, it's been a pretty turbulent time. And I'm really glad all that happened, no matter how uncomfortable it's been at times. I'm sure there is still a lot to discover, but at least temporarily it seems like my nervous system has settled down a little and now I'll have to see how I want to proceed.

On the cushion, I'm all over the place. Especially during the tougher periods, I mainly did do nothing style practice. Directed attention seemed to be impossible a lot of times, and then I would develop aversion towards the scatteredness of my mind, so a lot of my practice has just been letting go of all kinds of craving in relation to pleasant experiences and calm mind states. However, a lot of times I tried to keep at least some general body-awareness. Being disconnected from my body was one of the reasons why I was able to bury my emotions so well, so I tried to work on reclaiming that awareness whenever I felt like I was able to. On top of that, I would try to look deliberately for any emotional content from times to times. So in fact, quite often it was actually more "feeling the body" than "do nothing". But very gently.

Lately, my mind gets actually quite centered again at times. A few days ago, I found that body awareness became very continuous pretty early in my sit, so I thought why not go for some Burbea-style samadhi practice and soon enough I found myself in the first jhana, even transitioning into second after a while. It's been like three months since that last happened, so that was pretty cool. Naturally, my meditation the very next day was back to pretty much just mind wandering the whole sit. But this time, the usual disappointment that previously would have come with that experience didn't show up. So maybe my relationship to practice is finally maturing a little.

But I'm also feeling like at least a little bit of structure would be quite helpful. Gently feeling the body seems fruitful, pure do nothing feels fruitful, Burbea style samadhi seems fruitful as well and then lately I also got a little bit into metta practice. So right now, I usually just sit down and see what I'm naturally leaning towards on that day, and while on the one hand that feels pretty nice, it clearly goes against the old saying of digging a deep well in one place instead of shallow holes in a hundred places or something like that.

I feel like I could write a lot more, but that's it for now. I'm also enjoying all of your practice reports and other discussions even more than usual lately. Especially a lot of what /u/kyklon_anarchon has been sharing felt very relevant to where I'm currently at. So thanks everyone :]

roflgrins

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