[Doug TatarynMember]

Hello Claudio

I wonder if the difference in your ability to sit between morning and evening have to do with the context. Do you find yourself more agitated and or stressed from the day activities in the evening compared to the morning sits? If so I would suggest you spend some time tuning into and acknowledging the emotions and feelings that may be activated from your days event. Even naming them will give you some freedom from them, while actually feeling and expressing them will give you even more calm and freedom from them, and they won;t be trying to grab your attention when you go to sit.

All the best

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hey Alex, I am glad you came to see that what you are going through is fairly normal and expected and that is comforting. I am not sure what you mean by “<I am> now worried that I had developed essential tremor or something”, other than it sounds like your are concerned that there is something wrong with you that isn’t normal. I doubt that, but it is your life and body and such and you have to make those kinds of decisions. I would continue to encourage you to try and find the feelings behind your concerns, perhaps even make that a focus of your meditation for a session or two. Best of luck

Doug Tataryn
Teacher in Training.

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hi Alec

Its great to hear you have managed to settle into some early jhana states, particularly with the level of anxiety and insomnia that you seem to have been living with a long time. The symptoms that you are describing suggest that the meditative process is doing what it tends to do, shake loose the internal emotional and psychological debris that tends to get repressed or dismissed and ignored in our journey from childhood to adulthood. This topic of “purification” is something that we have spent a lot of time discussing in out Teacher Training program with Culadasa. It’s an important process to understand and to work with.

The simplest suggestion I would give is to try and find the feeling and emotional elements that might be associated with the trembling (fear?), and tense jaws (hard to speak you truth, express yourself?). The kinds of thoughts that might fill your mind at night while you are unable to sleep may also give you hints as to the emotional content. For example, constantly thinking about what you should have said to your boss or significant other might mean you are feeling insignificant, inadequate, helpless, abused, used, etc. What we ahve learned over the last decade or so is find the feeling and express them, usually with a good cry and you will find yourself much more settled in general and also while trying to meditate.

I hope this was helpful. Good luck with things and let us know how it goes.

Doug Tataryn
TMI Teacher in Training

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hi Alex, Chloe has provided wonderful context and perspective for the question you asked. There are some implications of your question however that I would like to point out. Mediation is providing you with two skills, the ability to focus your mind where you want it to so that you stop feeding the anxiety. In the process you will also learn to dis-identify with the anxiety and not take it so seriously when it arises. In a sense you will stop being your anxiety and start just noticing the activation of your body which used to make “you” anxious.

Now the not so good news. As you continue your meditation and progress through the stages, your will have to face your “anxiety” more directly, ideally with more tools and understanding than you have now, on top of the concentration (distraction from anxiety) and the dis-identification you will earn in the earlier stages of meditation.

I work with this all the time with my clients. In my clinical work I define anxiety as a cultural construct which we use to interpret the sensations of emotions and feelings as “bodily sensation and cognitive activity outside of our control”. A deeper analyses of anxiety is those symptoms are actually symptoms of unresolved feelings and emotions that need to be addressed and resolved. I would suggest trying to find the feelings giving rise to your anxiety and spend time experiencing them and learning to stop fearing them. Ideally feel them deep enough to find the tears and cry them out of your system. As you do that the anxiety will subside and eventually jsut become feelings you need to process instead of symptoms you need to run from or control.

Hope this is helpful. All the best

Doug Tataryn, Ph.D.
Teacher in Training

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hi Allen, can you clarify where the confeusion or conflicting instructions are between the two. I may just be that there are many ways to purify the subconscious mind and also perhaps, that they are just emphasizing slightly different aspects of the same overall process.

The Goenka instructions seem valid to my experience, though the challenge is in the last injunction “accept all sensations with equanimity”. Easier said than done in many instances. There is a reason we have our own particular fears and demons… because they are what we have not reconciled in ourselves yet, hence the challenge of finding equanimity while in them. Pass them along to someone else and they may laugh at that set of “demons”, not even need equanimity.

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hi St100

Its good that your apparently repressed anger is starting to make its way out of your shadow and into the light of awareness and you seem to be handling the arisings quite well. One technique I have found very useful in helping to resolve anger is to ask your self “How is this person/ situation HURTING me?” If you can shift from attacking the attacker to processing how you feel attacked and potentially hurt by the interaction you will likely move towards acknowledging you are sad and perhaps even cry about it and this tends to be much more healing then constantly having to discharge the activated anger.

Best of luck.

Douglas J Tataryn, Ph.D.
Dharma Teaching in Training

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hey Nelson, not at all and I am sorry that wasn’t clear. I was basically speaking to the issue that Samuel brought up, and kind of streamlined it to him, since he expressed that he was very upset by Culadasa charging so much money, that it now felt like a cult, and that he no longer felt comfortable sending his friends to the website (hence the parallels to rioting and boycotting). I felt the metaphor to the restaurant might put what Culadasa was doing in an appropriate context wand help him understand why its fine for Culadasa to charge high fees for private consults.

In terms of your saying the parallels to nutritional food does not work, that the teaching are more about love and friendship, I don’t feel that’s true. The teachings are about reducing suffering. It has taken a lot of time and perseverance and personal agony (I may be projecting here, but I suspect these are universals) for Culadasa to become as wise and clear as he has. He may be motivated to teach by love, but as many teachers throughout history have demonstrated, the teachings often do not feel like love and can feel quite ruthless to a highly identified and self-focused ego structures; they are about helping you see the true nature of reality at increasingly deep layers. These are highly technical skills and go way beyond love and friendship, even though love and friendship can be associated with teaching them.

Thanks for asking me to clarify who I was talking to Nelson, I would not want you to feel like I was attacking your personal post and sharing.

[Doug TatarynMember]

So you are invited to a restaurant which offers lots of low cost and nutritious food and even lots of free food for anyone to enjoy. The owner also offers vegan protein smoothies and incredible vegan main courses for a premium price, for those who can afford it and who want to subsidize the low cost and free food.

Do we really think it would be appropriate for you (and the poor people who have been coming to eat there for years) to decide to riot and boycott the restaurant because you can not afford the smoothies and premium dishes. I don’t think so!

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hi Samuel. Sorry to see that you are so upset by this but your position and reasoning perplexes me. Culadasa has offered to share his wonderful insights and teachings in written and oral form, much of it for free and easily accessible all over the internet. Why are you upset that he is willing to charge someone for personal services to someone?

He has not taken vows of poverty, nor is his welfare, room, and board being looked after by a community, which would be the case if he were a monk, so why would you expect him to not charge people if they want, what I consider, the privilege, of one on one personal time with him. People routinely pay more than this hourly rate for lawyers, for medical doctors, for life coaches with decades less experience in their area.

As I see it, providing some members of the spiritual community with the option of getting close personal time with him outside of a meditation retreat is a wonderful and noble gesture on his part (particularly given his age and health conditions, which make his time and energy a valuable and diminishing precious resource). How does this make him a cult leader? He does not owe you or anyone anything, let alone your particular version of what “appropriate” fees should be for completely optional services that are not being forced on anyone.

In terms of value. Imagine spending a few years or decades trying to work out the nuances of shamatha or how to facilitate a breakthrough-type insight experience, and not getting any real results and ask yourself if $500 or even $10,000 would have been worth it to save you those years of fruitless effort and make them more beneficial to your life and relationships and spiritual evolution.

I suspect you may have some issues around cults and feeling duped and taken advantage of. I would suggest you work those out a bit more before (taking on the karma of) implicitly trashing such a fine and noble being as Culadasa.

Metta

Douglas J Tataryn, TMI teacher in training

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hi Black Ghost, Schema therapy sounds like they are pointing in the right direction but given its a descendant of CBT and more traditional lines of psychoanalytic therapies they may be a bit too much on the talk and not enough on the body and the emotions. There are some lineages of therapy that have specialized in accessing the more raw emotional material. These include bioenergetics, somatic release therapy, and at the more extreme, rebirthing, which use the breath to access repressed material. If you can access one of these types ot may give you the leverage into your system you have not previously. Newer, more experimental therapies that are gaining a good reputation for helping chronic depression are ketamine therapy (administered intravenously) and trans-cutanious electrical stimulation therapy.

Also to really get the stem-cell inducing benefit of exercise my understanding is it needs to be more intense than tai chi. Something that gets you heart going more strongly, power walking, weight lifting, etc.

I will PM you on the forms I mentioned.

All the best,

Doug Tataryn, Ph.D., Dharma Treasure Teacher in Training.

[Doug TatarynMember]

Hello Black Ghost.

I’m sorry to hear you are having such difficulty and also amazed that you have persevered so long with so little apparent progress. I have a few suggestions that look at your challenges from a number of different angles, hopefully one of which may resonate with you and help.

The first, especially since you are suffering from depression, is to perhaps find a nice relaxing and yet inspirational youtube meditation to listen to. I have found the taking the burden of guiding your process yourself and giving it to the voice you are listening to, can make learning to meditate much more effortless. You will know its time to find a shorter induction method or to just do it one your own when you start ignoring the voice because its slowing you down, you are moving forward into the sequence before the voice gets you there.

The second is your lack of being able to sense your breath or breathing sensations or bodily sensations suggests you are not that well embodied and may benefit from adding something physical to your meditation regime. That might mean doing some power walking, biking, or jogging. You would likely benefit more however from doing some Yoga which places emphasis on slow and connected breathing and sensing. Or even better, find someone who does expressive movement type sessions, which are designed to bring about embodiment and expression. Studies have shown that doing anything physical that stresses the body to grow either cardiovascularly or muscle wise will improve mood and concentration.

The third suggestions speaks directly to your depression and anxiety and expression. I have worked in the Mind-Body area for decades and make my living as a therapist and life coach and I have come to see most depression as resulting from some unresolved issue being constantly activated but never properly expressed and resolved. Most talking therapies do not do a good job at accessing and helping the emotional system express itself and that is ultimately seems to be critical for any major healing to take place. That one reason I suggested the expressive therapy and expressive movement, besides helping with embodiment they can also help with your emotional healing. You might also try out a psycho-dynamic therapy such as emotionally focused therapy, EMDR, etc. You can not talk or rationalize yourself out of most depressions or anxiety states, but you can learn to clear and resolve long standing emotional traumas and feeling beliefs that may be hijacking your life. If you want to explore what feelings may be bothering you I have an online form I have been developing that may be useful. Let me know and I will post it for you.

All the best

Doug Tataryn, Ph.D., Dharma Treasure Teacher in Training.

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