[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Prashant,

I also recommend reading the Mindful Review in Appendix E of The Mind Illuminated.

You might also take a look at this thread.

https://dharmatreasurecommunity.org/forums/topic/awareness-in-everyday-life

Best Wishes,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Tony-James,

Thanks for the follow-up, and I am glad that I could be of service.

Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Alec,

I have had similar experiences in meditation where my teeth chatter and I have difficulty sleeping, particularly on retreat. I (and the teacher I was working with at the time) attributed it to a side effect related to piti (meditative joy). You might want to look up Meditative Joy (piti) in the index of TMI. While piti is meditative joy it can produce quite a few weird side effects (like spontaneous movements) while it is developing, and you may not necessarily have much joy at first. It can also raise energy levels and feel like too much coffee, and can also feel pretty similar to anxiety.

Metta practice is a form of samatha practice which can cause quite a bit of piti to arise. I recommend trying to get your sleep back to normal. Grounding activities like exercise, heavier food, and long walks can help bring the energy levels down. You might also consider not meditating in the evening if you are currently doing that, and maybe cutting back on your total meditation time until things stabilize. If you are susceptible to this type of energy, doing a meditation technique while going to sleep can be counterproductive because it raises energy levels.

Best Wishes,
Blake – DT Teacher

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Francis,

We will definitely consider your application, but so far we have 142 applicants for 60 spaces. We evaluate students based on past dedication to meditation, TMI, and spiritual practice. We will let everyone know in about 2 weeks.

Thanks,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

As a reminder, the deadline to apply for the Dedicated Practitioners Course is September 15th at 11:00 PM PST. We are pleased to announce a very limited number of partial scholarships for the course over and above paying at the scholarship level. If you are interested, please apply for the course and mention that you need a scholarship on your application. If you are accepted, we will ask you to fill out a separate scholarship application form. You may apply for the course here.

https://dharmatreasure.org/dedicated-practitioner-course/

We were unable to add a weeknight class, but we are now offering an audit option which may work for some of you who are unable to attend a course on the weekends.
The following are the terms and requirements for auditing the course.

Limited number of students will be accepted to audit
Fee is 80% of regular course fee
Must be accepted to the course like everyone else
Must meet all requirements except attending the live class (like meditation)
Complete a statement of why he/she wants to audit instead of fully participating
Auditing will not count as prerequisite for Teacher Training class

YES
Access to live recordings — audio
Access to all course materials
Access to Mentors — one-on-one not office hours, Dana to support mentors requested
Agrees not to share the course materials.

NO
No access to live class video discussions
No access to buddy groups
No access to mentor office hours
No access to the course online forum / discussion
No prerequisite credit toward Teacher Training with Culadasa

Thanks,
Blake – DT Teacher

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Tony-James,

I don’t try to pinpoint the breath within specific parts of the nose, nostrils, or upper lip. I just have the intention to feel any sensations in the nose region. Your attention will probably naturally be drawn to the sensations that are the most vivid.

I would refer you to this post by Culadasa about attention and awareness for clarification.

http://dharmatreasurecommunity.org/forums/topic/questions-and-clarifications-about-peripheral-awareness

It sounds like you might be trying too hard. If you have your visual attention focused on something do you have to try to make peripheral vision happen, or is it pretty much an automatic process?

For the body scanning I recommend a more relaxed approach. I am not sure what you mean by “rather than looking”, but I have found that directing my eyes and allowing a visual image to arise can be helpful to locate a body part and start noticing sensations. Once you connect with a body part and start noticing sensations, directing the eyes or a visual image may not be necessary. For me the subtle image that arises seems to be part of the intention to notice sensations at a body part, but I am definitely favoring sensations over the visual image.

It is up to you how long you want to leave attention on a body part. I usually stick with a body part until I have have connected and noticed a few sensations there. You will have parts of the body where you may not feel much or anything, but if you wait there patiently you may start to notice something, but if you do not that is also fine. The lack of sensation is a sensation.

You don’t necessarily need to get through the entire body in a session, but I recommend at your next meditation session starting with body parts with which you did not scan last time, so over time you get full coverage.

I just rest my attention on an entire body part (like my whole forearm) an explore what is there. Some sensations may be on the surface, and some may be more internal. Some may be on the front and some on the back.

If you take a more relaxed and accepting attitude you may find body scanning more pleasurable. Any time you are struggling is a good opportunity to examine you attitude, expectations and motivations.

The loving-kindness practice in the appendix can be pleasurable once you get the hang of it.

Best Wishes,
Blake – Dharma Treasure Teacher

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Alex,

You might take a look at these threads where this topic is discussed.

https://dharmatreasurecommunity.org/forums/topic/piti-arising-earlier-in-practice
https://dharmatreasurecommunity.org/forums/topic/agitating-piti-and-confusion-of-the-object
https://dharmatreasurecommunity.org/forums/topic/time-to-switch-to-other-practices

Best Wishes,
Blake – DT Teacher

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Chris,

You are certainly not being annoying. We have about 45 applicants so far, and we are still accepting applications for another month. People have applied based on the days and times that we have published. If we have a large enough demand we might consider adding a third section on a weekday evening, but we would have to line up new teachers etc, so it is probably not that likely to happen.

However, we plan to offer this course again in 9 months or so, and we will strongly consider a weeknight class.

Thanks for your understanding,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Jhapeti James,

I have read some of Ajaan Lee’s writings a few years ago, and I believe he influenced Thanissaro Bhikkhu. I have not really combined this with TMI, and I never really liked controlling the breath. It was just one more thing to do, but it sounds like you found an effortless way to do it. TMI does teach using the whole body breath as a way to enter a lighter version of the Jhanas.

Best Wishes,
Blake – DT Teacher

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hello All,

I think we have some good ideas here, and I have been pondering the pros and cons of each. I also have an IT background, although it has been a few years since I worked in the field. I wanted to cover the proposed ideas at a higher level without necessarily worrying about implementation details.

1. Alex M.’s idea of dividing each recording into parts, and tagging them. Recordings are search able. Clicking on a search result starts audio/video player preset to play this fragment.

Pros
Most convenient user friendly solution
Most elegant solution

Cons
It will take a great deal of work to manually divide and tag the audios
Will probably require a large number of volunteers or it becomes a for
profit web site
Technically more complex than some other solutions
Alex is not sure if he will be able to complete the project
Many technical unknowns

2. Take the work that William has started and apply the keywords and descriptions to all existing audios. Add some sort of search engine to the pages.

Pros
May be the most likely to get implemented
Fairly simple to implement
Cons
The user might need to go through a large search result set, depending on the topic
User would have find the topic within the video unless we add time stamps to topics
which would be quite a bit of effort.
Would take some effort to apply tags/keywords to existing audios

3. Transcribe audios to text and add full text search capabilities. This could be done with automation like Dragon Speaks, or it could be done manually. There is also a hybrid solution where a person listens to an audio on headphones, and repeats the talk into her own microphone. It then produces a text file. This eliminates the issues with poor recording quality and difficult to hear questions on the audios. They claim that there would be less manual editing.

Pros
Would make these teachings very accessible to the students
Once audios are transcribed the rest of the project would be pretty straightforward to
implement

Cons
A manual transcription would take a lot of effort, and volunteers do not tend to stick
with this project very long.
It is not clear how well speech to text recognition would work with the existing
recordings even with training to Culadasa’s voice, and how much manual editing would be
required
A hybrid transcription might not take much longer than listening to the audio, but still
a lot of work.

Any feedback or additional ideas are welcome.
Thanks,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Prashant,

When selecting applicants we look at several factors in addition to retreat experience. If you have a strong daily practice, it could offset your lack of retreat experience, and we would encourage you to apply.

Thanks,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Alex M., William and All,

I think that there are some good ideas here, and I feel that Dharma Treasure and Culadasa would probably be interested.

I am serving as the Executive Director of Dharma Treasure, and from my perspective, I would prefer to see an indexed, searchable recording list reside on the main Dharma Treasure web site or DT Wiki, instead of on a separate web site.

The work that William has done indexing the talks is quite amazing, and would be a great start to this sort of project. Ward’s work from Jhana_Insight would also be great to include.

I am not sure if any work is currently being done on the transcription project. William, I can talk to Culadasa about training DragonSpeaks. He made most of the recordings with a portable audio recorder. Do you know if it can import an audio file for training or if you need to record directly into the software? Do you know its accuracy, and if it can work with a specialized vocabulary like Dharma terms?

I will discuss this with Culadasa, and get back to everyone.

With Gratitude,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Culadasa and Dharma Treasure are supportive of this project if someone, or a group, wants to take the lead.

Thanks,
Blake – DT teacher

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Hi Chris, JavaJeff, and InD,

Thanks for the feedback regarding weekends. It is difficult to schedule this event, because, in the current course, we have students from throughout the world, some in vastly different time zones. For example, we have students in North America, Europe, India, Japan and Australia.

We considered a week night, but it would not work very well for time zones outside of North America. Even within North America the times would not be ideal. For example, 6:00 PM PST would be 9:00 EST.

We do allow students to miss up to three classes and still receive the certificate of completion. Recordings are available, but we do want students to attend in person and contribute to the discussion.

We will consider a weeknight class in the future depending on overall demand for the course.

Thanks,
Blake

[Blake BartonKeymaster]

Thanks for the information Chris. I have removed the old post to avoid any confusion in the future.

Blake

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