[JoeyMember]

The manifestations that happen during meditation also starting to happen in daily life.
I noticed it before, but now it is getting more intense. The last few days I couldn´t sleep much because of the energy and lots of thoughts. After my meditation today there is in daily life pressure between my shoulders, in my neck and chest. It makes the breath shallow and jerky. Sometimes I am gasping for air. I also notice that my mouth is more dry. This all is unpleasant and makes me more irritated. There is distance to all of this, there is calm, equanimity and even little joy. But I wouldn´t mind if these would increase:D Any advice for practicing in daily life at this stage? Also Nick, do you still note in meditation and daily life?

PS: I couldn´t edit this into my previous post, thats why I had to write a new one.

[JoeyMember]

Hi Ted and Nick,

I am really grateful and appreciate that you are taking the time to respond in such a thoughtful matter and for taking this question to your class with Culadasa. I have and probably will reread your posts many more times.

Ted, you gave a nice overview of your class with Culadasa and I will take the advice and sources you have pointed to.

Nick, it is nice to have someone who has gone a similar path and so that we can relate to each other from personal experience.
When reading your piece about gauging the progress, I was in doubt whether I really was in stage 7. So I read the piece about mastery stage 6 and then meditated for one hour to evaluate my experience. So this was my experience in meditation.

I sat on the cushion and the mind immediately became relatively quiet. There was just the attention of the body and peripheral awareness. There were vibrations in my feet, little pressure between my shoulders, buzzing sound and sometimes jerking movements. There were almost no thoughts, just the verbal commenting of what was going on(normally I don´t have this, but now I was really evaluating and don´t wanted to miss something because I wanted to write a clear observation here on the forum). I rested attention on the body but allowed it to move freely if there was an stronger intention for an object to become the object of attention. When I shortly observed the abdomen, I noticed a slow, shallow breath. There was no real effort, just sitting, just being.
Then there came more thoughts but I could just observe them, some were images and some were verbal. Sometimes in the mid of an sentence I would simply return attention to the body. Sometimes in the end I would return to the body and sometimes I would observe the beginning of a thought. I also could observe the feeling tone of a thought, pleasant or unpleasant. There was a stream of presents. My eyelids became brighter and the vibrations began to spread to more parts of the body. The pressure began to increase to the neck, chest, legs and buttocks. The jerks became more frequent and the energy increased. Meditation became less pleasant. During this I was still present of sounds but these were less dominant. When getting up of the cushion, there was a real pressure felt in the buttocks but this subsided in a few seconds.

Extra information: When I would take the abdomen as the primary object of attention, there are immediately several jerks in the in-breath and several jerks in the out-breath. Often there are four jerks during the in-breath and four jerks during the out-breath. I intentionally don´t investigate this further because of the warning in ¨The Mind Illuminated¨ in the chapter about Close Following and the insight into impermanence. This is probably the way how I entered the knowledges of suffering in the past.

Question: So were do you think I am on the 10 stages?

When reading the stages in ´The Mind Illuminated´ I think, these experiences correspond with stage 8. Quote page 299: ¨You can consistently pacify the discriminating mind and enter a state of mental pliancy. In other words, you have effortlessly stable attention and powerful mindfulness. Each sit it can take a while to reach effortlessness, and sometimes you´ll stay at stage six or seven the whole time. But you should be able to reach mental pliancy fairly regularly and remain there for the rest of the sit.¨

Pleasure jhana´s: When I sit and watch the abdomen, it becomes immediately slow and shallow. Then I search for a pleasant sensation(almost always some vibrations in the feet or hands because they are almost always present and best perceivable). When sticking with this sensation I tend to get lost in thoughts more easily and dull. Do you have any advice to help me progress into the 1st pleasure jhana?

Again thanks for your guidance!

Joey

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