Front Page › Forums › Meditation › Confused about introspective awareness and concentration depth (stages 4-5)
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Pop 8 years, 4 months ago.
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February 9, 2017 at 1:37 pm #1806
Hi! I’m practicing around level 4-5, and sit from 1 hour to 1 hour 20 minutes 1-3 times a day. I’ve started to revise my meditation process as after 3.5 months of working on level’s 5 body scanning I still can’t feel the breath sensations clearly in the body, though it seems my concentration skills have been improved.
One thing I became confused is working with introspection awareness and thoughts. Usually I notice the thought and quickly bring my attention closer to the breath so the thought quickly disappear from the awareness.But recently I’ve discussed this with a one experienced teacher and he said this is incorrect way to deal with thoughts. The correct way is to keep them in awareness and wait until they fade away by themselves. I can’t do it right now as my process already is semiautomatic. As I remember one of the reason I’ve started to do it quickly was that the thought usually become gross distraction if keep in awareness for a long time.
I’ve tried to clear this question by rereading stage 4, but got also some controversial suggestions as in one place it’s said “..often students try to suppress these by focusing more intensely on meditation objects” and this is the mistake. In other place it is said that in the case of distractive thoughts ones needs to reengage with the breath using connecting and following. For me these sounds pretty similar, as when I try to reengage with the breath it suppresses the thought process and removes them from awareness rapidly.
Any thoughts and suggestions about this?
Thank you, Andrew
February 10, 2017 at 5:14 am #1807Hi,
I’m working on the same level as yours. Here’s my two cents (notes from my personal log):
– When the mind stabilizes, I found fruitful to observe the start of thoughts. That cuts them off, for a while. And when they appear (words, images, emotions, sensations), it is necessary to observe when they end, and to enjoy the later moment (be it a tension release a la Bhante Vimalaramsi, or a Rest Moment/Gone Moment of Shinzen Young). It is just staying stuck in that word/image/emotion/sensation that shoots other words/images/etc. It is not to recognize the Impermanence. And the Self requires that non-recognition in order to be able to sustain itself in time: “I think (and re-think), therefore I am”
– What I see is working now is focusing on the absence of physical sensations and thoughts in the two gaps of breathing. It is even possible to remain “connected” with the “place” (or memory?) of that absence during the other two moments of inspiration and expiration. Works like a kind of substratum (basement) where all things are perceived.
February 18, 2017 at 4:30 am #1819Thank you Pablo. I’ll try to observe the end of the thoughts and see what happens. As for the gaps between breaths, I noticed that usually attention shifts to thoughts or other distractions during these gaps, so I try to sustain attention even on the subtle sensations between breaths and it helps me to feel more concentrated.
February 18, 2017 at 4:29 pm #1825Hi Andrew, as for the gaps between breaths, I either watch the absence of strong/sharp (focused) sensations or the change in broad & peripheral sensations suchs as skin pressure, body temperature and sounds.
I have also tried to calmly wait for a diffuse tension to arise in the abdomen just prior to the inbreath. It’s interesting to see how much we (I) accelerate the inbreath, not allowing for that tension to arise. It’s like eating because it’s dinner time, even though you’re not hungry yet. It’s specially interesting that this jumping over that pre-inbreath tension can happen even if there’s no verbal thoughts, that this puts in evidence how intentions and other non-verbal thoughts hijack the concentration.
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