Progress on meditation

[nancylebov]

I think I've found something useful.... every thought and sensation has a feeling associated with it, and it's working for me to pay attention to the thought and its feeling. So it's not just observing the stream of thoughts and physical sensations, it's observing my reactions to them, including that the determination to pay attention is also a thought with associated feelings.

Ok, I've just tried this out for one session, I didn't have any dramatic experiences. However, it's feels much more connected, joyful, and interesting than trying to force meditation without noticing that part of what I'm doing. I suspect I'm not the only person with an unobserved idea of what meditation is and what I have to do to make it happen-- this approach at least has a better chance of letting that stuff into consciousness. And I let go of a chunk of throat tension.

I don't *think* I've seen quite this advice elsewhere. The closest I can remember was a bit where a student asked his teacher what to do... the student was distracted during meditation by thoughts of how to rewire his house. The teacher said to pay attention to the pleasure brought by the thoughts of rewiring.

So, what feelings appear as the thought of geek meditators crosses your mind? At at the thought after that?

Comments

[twistedchick]

That's vipassana, as I was taught it. You can observe thoughts, feelings, the connections between them, physical sensations in the body, any or all of the above, and how one proceeds to affect another.

[nancylebov]

I wonder if you were taught a more sophisticated version than anything I've seen, or if I failed to notice the fine points in what I was told.

What I'd heard about what more like labeling thoughts and sensations as they went past, and the examples were never about your thoughts about meditation.

Also, I seem to be getting some good out of the question of "what am I doing?". It would be consistent with everything I've heard about meditation that if I persist, both "I" and "doing" will dissolve, but that's not my current situation.

[twistedchick]

Some of it I learned at the local Thai Buddhist temple, some of it from books by Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornblat from the Insight Meditation (Vipassana) center in Vermont. The main point is observing, sitting still and noticing how things move, how they're connected, and you work with whatever's there at the moment. Much of this is also part of the preparation for what's called Centering Prayer, though I forget the authors of the books (I also took a workshop with them and could give you a physical description but that wouldn't help much.)

[zenlizard]

Welcome tot he world of eastern meditation. There are many names for this form of practice, each of them having slight variations of this whole idea.