Category: Everything

Lately I’ve been feeling a little off-kilter energetically.  It’s interesting that the longer I meditate the more familiar I become with my personal energetic flow and when something is a bit off.  Only now, when things are a bit off they feel so magnified and hard to ignore – like I’m crawling out of my skin.

I’m starting to realize why strict yogis of all traditions minimize or eliminate stimulants such as caffeine – after years of feeling  fairly immune to the effects of caffeine in the past few week I’m noticing more and more the energetic shift in my body that it causes.

When there’s any disruption in the force at all I have a hard time staying focused in meditation or maintaining that feeling of connection that’s so apparant otherwise.  Lately it’s shown up in other more overt ways as well – snoring, nonsensical and anxiety laced dreams, and occasional bouts of nausea while meditating

Right now work has been fairly intense – I’m finally doing my dream job and loving every minute of the actual work, but it’s longer hours and a bit more pressure than I’m used to.  I also have travel coming up today for thanksgiving where I’ll be visiting my partner’s family.  While I don’t feel overtly nervous or stressed about the trip I think it’s rippling out into my consciousness anyways, and revealing some insight about how I am feeling unsettled over it.  When you add the ongoing political turmoil and drama that’s been unfolding over the past few weeks I can see why things feel out of sorts.

I feel all of this disturbance as a white noise in my field of awareness.  The buddha said that our mind is like a pool, and any disturbances to the pool will make meditation difficult.  I think this is what he means – I feel like the wind if blowing strongly across my pool, just enough to disrupt the stillness without being over the top.

I didn’t do a very good job of updating this weekend – which is basically compatible with every other attempt I’ve ever had at journaling or logging my experiences.

Sits lately have been pretty good, whatever that means – they waver between nice deep concentration and thinking.  I’m noticing my patters a bit more clearly – that it takes about 5 minutes to really settle in and get concentrated.  I’m better at strictly following the breath, I see the familiar sequence of phenomena play out each time I sit – so I think it’s good that it’s all getting more familiar.

On Sunday I sat for concentration and felt very much in my body and able to get into it. Conciousness opened up to  bright white field of vision with strong equanimity for a few moments before I popped out of it.  I always feel pulled to healing while in these states and while I’m there I’m convinced that healing is my life’s purpose.  I’ve even heard voices telling me so.  Then I return to the normal world and think maybe not in the traditional way – but maybe in other ways.  Namely in counseling and advising – mental healing rather than physical – I’ve always had a knack for that.

Off the cushion my dreams have been getting more active in the past month or so.  I wish I could say they all had profound messages for me, but they seem to be fairly mundane dreams about work and such (outside of the aforementioned dream in which I became a tree).  Sometimes I wake up feeling like I have just dreamt of something very important and symbolic but then it slips away almost immediately.  So I think something is whirling around in there, I’m just not sure what!

 

Had some difficulty getting concentrated, I kept feeling my ego dragging itself to the party and pushing me out of concentration

In noting feeling states I practiced this time stepping back and noting things come up from a space of distance – practicing not getting carried away by feelings.  I noticed I had some difficult feelings come up that seem to be below the surface – sadness, jealousy, anger etc.  Often about a particular situation in my life.

Today for a brief moment I had an insight on how those feelings arose and passed away like everything else if looked at from a distance.  If I don’t get enmeshed and surfing those feelings it’s easy to see them only stay in awareness for a moment.

Outside of that, the sit seemed fairly soft today, but the Q&A was good and we discussed feeling emotions as vibrations on the surface of the body.  I sat for a while longer and noticed all the areas of my body that would subtely vibrate and tried to pick out their corresponding emotions.

Mostly I just got frustrated that my meditation wasn’t that great, and realized how much my ego is caught up in expectation and judgement in regards to my practice.

I had a dream last night where I became each of the elements.  I was a snake and connected with fire, a bird and connected with air, a dolphin and connected with water, and then in the end I was a pig and connected with earth.

When I came back into my regular form I buried my fists deep into the earth, they sprouted roots, and I grew into a tree.

When I was on my meditation retreat I had an energetic rising experience (I’m assuming similar to a Kundalini type experience though I know little about kundalini) – where the energy rose from the base of my spine.

The energy rise was translated in a vision of a tree growing through me, out my mouth, my forehead, the top of my head to the sky and pushing the energy along through all the channels of my body.

Afterwards, I felt like I could energetically talk to the trees on the property – which I know sounds crazy.  But it was such a profound connection that I had never had before or since, just one of those strange and interesting experiences that only exists in the retreat space.

Looking forward to going back on retreat in January!

Yesterday we did our first day of compassion practice.  It’s so cool to dive into these new practices like an investigator and pick apart experienes.

I found all the different subtle flavors in the compassion practice and how compassion energy and metta energy differed.  For one, compassion is warmer, and a little bit more tingly in the throat.  I also feel like because compassion is about holding another’s suffering it’s a bit more earthy and grounded where the metta was more lofty.

One of the things that became super apparent in this sit was that same white noise block to concentration that I’ve described before.  It’s not a specific train of thinking or processing necessarily, it just feels like a bit of a disconnection from practice – like practice is over there and I’m over here and there’s  scrim in between us.  I remember in class on Monday one of our mentors mentioned that his current struggle is trying to bring too much of himself into meditation and how that can act like a block.  This came to me while I was sitting, and in the moments that the compassion/concentration weren’t stable and one track of my mind was wandering off, I just tried intentionally getting out of the way.

When I was on retreat one of the things that led to my crossing the A&P and dissolution experiences was the intention for 5 days to just get out of the way.  I placed an intention to just let experience happen directly without my inner narrator giving me a play by play.  So I practiced this in walking meditation and sitting meditation and was able to achieve some very concentrated states of practice just by doing my best to allow things in without sending them through the thought filter.

This is something in the months since retreat that I’ve somehow lost a bit.  Mostly because this is not a practical way to be out in the constructed world and at a job etc.  So part of me forgot.  But I remembered yesterday, and I found that in just stepping to the side and getting out of my own way I was able to go deeper in my meditation and maintain more stable concentration.

 

More metta for difficult people on Saturday – it went well, and I found myself very much carried away into the metta jhanas.  Occasionally while I go up the ladder, I get to a point where I feel like my head is opening up and I’m climbing out of it and up into a place of great light and equanimity – J3 maybe?

So that happened which was great.

On Sunday we didn’t have prescriptive practice, so I chose to do a meditation in honor of the supermoon with the Moon card from my new tarot deck.  I had some intense visualizations of getting sucked into the card, then heading back to basic concentration.

Then as I climbed the concentration ladder I arrived at a woman reclining on a chaise, dressed in full renaissance garb, with a headdress occluding her hair.  She had no face, but was talking to me – one of those murmurs that you can’t make out.  My intuition told me that she was a guardian of some sort, but I’m not sure of what or if my creative mind is just being over dramatic.  I’m tempted to write it off as a crazy nimitta, though at the time the energy pulsed intensely, my heart started racing, and my breath went almost into full hyperventilation mode.

Then I popped up into J3 (or4?) which was light and bright and stable and felt like it went on forever.  It’s there that I experienced  bit of dissolution, with my body seeming to float away a bit out from underneath me.  Not a huge dissolution experience, it just felt like the start of one.

This morning’s sit was concentration coupled with insight into auditory hear space and the emotional and visual arisings that come from recurring thoughts.

I talked to my mentor last night about how I don’t have “clear talk” in my head during these practices – so I don’t have any voices talking to me that I can label as recurring thoughts or one-off thoughts etc.  I do have one caveat to that, which is that I do have a voice in my head that is seemingly tracking my meditation progress and giving me a play by play on how well I’m doing.  Outside of that however, I don’t find myself having any “clear talk” thoughts – often I’ll escape into visual images instead.

However, I do have incoherent murmurings – my mentor labeled them “subterranean murmurs” which I think is the perfect description of my experience.  It’s like hearing a TV on in the room over – you can tell someone’s talking but you can’t hear what they’re saying.  It’s coming from a deeper level of conciousness than I’m currently accessing – and it creeps me out a bit.

So what happens to me is that visual thinking takes over and I start seeing various things. I tried to take my only recurring clear thoughts down into emotional space, and didn’t get much out of that outside of feeling like I’d fallen deeper into consciousness.

In that space I started seeing images from the perspective of lying down.  I sensed I was outside on the grass though I didn’t see it.  I started to see flashes of mountain tops, and flashes of running through moss covered forests.  These things felt so deeply familiar, and I sensed they were connected to the images I saw last friday.  I doubt at this phase in my practice these images are attached to past lives – I dont even necessarily believe in past lives – but they felt so familiar it was the first experience I’ve ever had that gave me pause in my aforementioned doubt.  More investigation necessary.

I found it very difficult to rise from this state, and felt glued to the cushion.  It took me 15 minutes at least to be able to get up.

Well, this certainly couldn’t come at a better time – though it is advisable to not chose the MOST difficult person you can imagine since you still need to be able to connect with Metta.  I chose a difficult co-worker, I felt something not election related would be less distracting.

I came in and out of focus a few times, then popped in and out of Metta Jhana1, and hung out in MJ2 for a while as well.  I really managed to connect with the practice this morning better than last night.  I’m assuming it was a case of getting good rest, and having the dust settle from the past few days a little bit.

I really needed that metta this morning.  I’ve been a bit distracted lately by concentration practice and the wild experiences I sometimes have – but the metta this morning just felt like such a comfort.

Grateful.

much metta,
Sophia

The past few days have been a whirlwind.  I wasn’t able to sit on election day, since I was standing in line at the poles (with Craig Robinson of the Office Fame! (true story)).

The evening was a blur of tears and whiskey – and I woke up the next morning with a vibration in my head and a pull to sit, for a long time.

I sat for an hour yesterday morning, and truly deeply sought refuge in my sitting more than I have had before.  It wasn’t about playing around in concentration states or having wild experiences – it was about simply taking refuge.  It was beautiful.

Last night I went to ATS and sat again with the community.  It was healing to sit with the larger group, and we did a metta practice for all sentient beings which was appropriate.  I was just so buzzed with emotion that I had a hard time staying focused, though by about 20 minutes in I was settling in.  I was also sleepy from staying up to late, so I was fighting that as well – but so happy to be with other people.

Despite my difficulty in focusing – it was such a powerful evening.

We spoke about the difference between action fueled by anger, and action fueled by compassion.  Action fueled by anger burns itself out quickly, while action fueled by compassion has a deeper well of fuel to burn – and it’s able to be sustained for longer periods of time.

We should not be passive, the buddha didn’t teach passivity.  We should reach down into our unending well of compassion and light a flame to burn us through the next 4 years, or god forbid 8 years.

We should connect in deep love with one another, vulnerable communities, and difficult people.  Connect with their suffering, as even those who oppose us suffer in their fear of the future.  Connect and feel compassion for the suffering of all beings everywhere, for the health of the planet, and the safety of the world.

Let that fire of compassion and connection burn, and resist.

Resist the greed, hate, and delusion.  Stand up in resistance against the destruction of our rights, our country, and our planet.

Connect in love, and resist.

This morning’s insight practice involved noticing each thought as it appears and labelling it as a one-off, or a recursive (repeated) thought.

This will eventually lead further into associating emotions in with the thoughts etc, but to start it was just identifying which were which.

The concentration portion was so/so – no one pointedness or strong piti this time.  I felt concentrated but not really “locked in” if that makes sense – I’d loose the breath count and then come back to it a few times.  I felt really concentrated on the breath, but counting felt like such a burden that I gave it up…. and got pulled away somewhere else.  So I guess it’s there for a reason.

In the insight portion I got super concentrated and really good at identifying when thoughts were coming up, but I kept forgetting the labeling aspect.  Instead I just labelled the emotional content behind them.  That seemed easier and more straight forward for me than noting whether or not it was a recurring or one-off thought.  Next time I’ll try and do better with sticking to the instruction.

I really discovered today how regularly I think in images.  For the most part the audio portion of my thought process was actually quite silent – but the visual portion of my thought process was making a strong showing. All the standard lights, swirly smoke, geometric patterns etc.  I also sometimes see myself sitting in the room, or see the cars drive by outside on the street.

In the Q&A after the meditation someone asked about visual thinking, and the response was that the majority of people think in auditory space they typically start there while teaching this technique – and save visual thinking space for later.

I love being an anomaly.

muchas metta
Sophia