There’s a great community built around this idea of the Winter’s feast for the Soul. It’s a 40 day long spiritual practice period in the beginning of the year, which can be spent in any daily spiritual practice though it’s mostly geared towards meditation.
While I’m not formally joining this year (mainly because I have a teacher and am on a fairly specific meditation path) – During this time I am staying mindful of the idea of a winter’s sojourn towards inner work and journeying, and am with the group in spirit.
Winter is really the season for me where the outer world goes quiet and my inner world starts to sing a bit louder. In the quiet it’s easier to hear.
In that spirit, I started out this year with a 5 day sitting retreat. For 5 days I sat for 2 hours, ate breakfast, sat for 4 hours, ate lunch, listened to dharma talks, took walks, and sat for 2 more hours in the evening all in silence.
I had some deep and profound experiences on this retreat. I started to see with clarity the purpose of the labeling, even though I personally have never been interested in it. I can sit and note and notice, but I find labeling too disruptive for my concentration.
The instructions for one of the days was fairly extensive 4 part Mahasi style noting, which then branched out into dual 4 part noting – which was just too much for me. I instead focused on only noting “gone”.
Things became one pointed on the first night, and while in that state I noticed a flicker in my awareness. To be more to the point, it wasn’t a flicker in my awareness but a flicker OF my awareness. There was an energy build to investigate the flicker, to investigate the nature of awareness itself but I was too afraid.
I spent the next day trying to release my fear around cessation. So much fear, which I can talk about in another post. I had some deep insights around my fear of further growth, and fear of how the world might change (even for the better).
I felt like there was a lot of effort put into cessation on that day, which is clearly not the right way to go about it – but there was something so URGENT about having this experience on retreat in a safe bubble that I couldn’t let effort go. I had a very near miss where instead of cessation I ended up in the 8th jhana according to my teacher. After that all sense experience was muted for the rest of the day like everything in awareness was happening to someone else next door instead of to me.
I started to feel the vibrations all around me, vibrations of sense doors, but I was also drilling into the mind states of compassion and metta and seeing the vibrations in those. I spend a while contemplating if these are vibrations or flickers – or does it matter? A vibration is ultimately just as unstable as a flicker, but in my opinion a flicker by it’s nature blips in and out of existence – which is more like no self rather than impermanence.
Either way, I am back now and deep into equanimity. After a few minutes of concentration practice each morning I find myself landing in what I’m guessing is the 4th jhana – spacious equanimity. My body and sense of my body starts getting mushy and floating away.
I’m balancing the floating away with the going to work, and home, and planning my life – while feeling much clearer around my decisions. The equanimity seems to be suffusing everything with a clarity I’m not accustomed to. I want to hold on to it and never let it go, and my new task is to find equanimity with the loss of equanimity.
There’s more, but that’s all for now.
Thank you for your practice
S
the Good Heretic 