[Julian SMember]

Hi Chris, cool topic. I often have wondered the same thing.

My understanding is that what you’re talking about is metacognitive consciousness, in that it is consciousness of what attention is doing. Now, as you know, consciousness can be further broken down into attention and awareness. So whether you are metacognitively aware or metacognitively attending would depend on various factors. The “strange loop” that Hofstadter talks about would be metacognitive attention. In reference to his earlier work ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach” (a great read!) Hofstadter remarks that the book is “[an] attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?”. This magic trick is one played by attention, and awareness in most of us just goes along for the ride. The reason it’s such a dizzying, vertiginous experience is because attention can only metacognitively introspect on itself by changing its object from (e. g) the breath, or driving, to “knowing that it’s driving”. This involves creating a story out of “driving occurring” and assigning the role of protagonist to attention… which perspective immediately collapses, because attention isn’t driving any more, it’s attending to knowing that it’s driving. And then what? 🙂

Metacognitive awareness on the other hand is the way of knowing that, when projected into consciousness, enables knowledge of what attention is doing without disrupting the act of attending. It’s in awareness that arises the experience of attention strange looping “over there”, and I suppose (but can only suppose, not having seen through the veils of ignorance myself yet) that it is this experiential knowledge, repeated often enough, with enough unification, that eventually leads to disenchantment with that recursive hall of mirrors and (or so I’m told) it’s cessation and freedom.

With love,
Julian

[Julian SMember]

Very interesting reddit thread and videos, thank you for the update! Have you heard of the “long breath” as taught by Buddhadasa Bhikku? It is a technique I’ve been using for my own energy imbalances at the start of sitting, to good effect, on the chance mention by a fellow teacher trainee of mine.

Here is a link to Buddhadasa’s book “Mindfulness of Breathing”. I believe the long breath is studied in Lecture Two.

Just to add (Buddhadasa’s interpretation of) the satipatthana to the mix 🙂

Salutations,
Julian
Dharma Treasure teacher in training since Jan 2018

[Julian SMember]

Hi Black Ghost, I just came back to this thread and wondered how practice has been for you this last week? You needn’t feel pressured to reply — but if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out.

Best wishes,
Julian

[Julian SMember]

Hi Black Ghost, great question. The experience of getting to our destination with no memory of the journey is something I think we can all relate to. The process for me during those times (which I’ve had to piece together by reviewing it afterwards, and by watching the process of being distracted over shorter periods and extrapolating, combined with the information from The Mind Illuminated and advice of other teachers etc) goes something like this: during the journey, some compelling thought or idea engages attention. The idea is compelling enough that conscious power is diverted away from awareness to focus on the thought. This reduced awareness means that I lose context of what I’m doing (driving the car). This hyperfocus on the thought becomes a train of thought, which is classic mind-wandering. My body is still engaged in working the pedals, shifting gears etc, but these movements are largely automatic and happen mostly outside of consciousness (such as looking where I’m going when there are no hazards to avoid, no corners to turn or anything like that). When some new event occurs, it will arrive first in awareness and given a rough measure of importance. If the new occurrence is important to my journey (say, a traffic light changes orange, or my turnoff is coming up), then it may periodically interrupt attention until resolved (attention will either take the act of slowing down or making a turn as its primary object, or alternate approx 50/50 between the train of thought and the actions).

(are you scared of driving with me yet? 🙂 )

If a hazard appears, or some other unusual event such as roadworks, then it’s more likely that attention will be diverted away from the train of thought and begin alternating between the many actions that must be taken to navigate the new situation.

Interestingly, driving while lost in thought is similar but also kind of the exact opposite to what we try to achieve in meditation. While you were driving, your attention was captured by the thought and took it as its object. Excepting the examples above, your attention was probably fairly stable on the thought process for most of that time. In my early years as a meditator, I was somewhat puzzled by this. I knew that day-dreaming wasn’t the same thing as meditating, but at the same time it had similarities. My attention WAS strongly focused — on the train of thought! Continuity of attention is one of the main characteristics of Stage 4, right? So what is it about meditation that makes it so special (and so much harder!) than continuity of attention on, say, a plan that I’m making for the weekend?

The difference, as you’ve probably already guessed, is that in meditation we are learning skills to keep continuity of attention (with ever-decreasingly significant interruptions up to Stage 6) on an object that has no inherent appeal. When one is day-dreaming, lost in thought, it is because the mind has found some *compelling* topic to ruminate over (that’s why I started my example above this way). Because this thought is so compelling, there is no special effort required to stay on-topic in your head, so the oh-so-efficient cognitive functions divert conscious power to the thought process itself. And where do they get conscious power from? They take it from awareness.

When we meditate on an object that has no inherent appeal, there is (a lot!) of special effort required to stay on-topic — at least before the Adept stages. At first, those oh-so-efficient functions try the same tack — “divert power from awareness and force attention to stay on-topic using the increased power”. But we all discover eventually that this doesn’t work — because attention can’t track its own movements at all well, leaving it vulnerable to gross distraction and from there to forgetting and mind-wandering. Tracking the movements of attention is something that only awareness can do in real-time. This is why, when awareness collapsed while you were driving, you couldn’t remember any details about how you got to your destination, even though clearly you were driving with enough attention to remain safe. Because awareness had mostly collapsed, you just weren’t tracking the movements of attention that took place in order to accomplish the act of driving and thinking “at the same time”.

If we persist with meditation, and are fortunate enough to have teachers such as Culadasa to guide us, we can train the mind to keep awareness bright with enough conscious power that we can notice the movements of attention more and more often (developed in Stages 3 and 4), then continuously (during late Stage 4 and 5), eventually leading to the ability to catch input (thoughts, sounds etc) in awareness before they take attention off the object (progressively improves through Stage 6), and ultimately for this to be effortless (which I understand from what I have been taught is developed by the end of Stage 7, although I am still working on that when I’m not doing earlier stages). Let it be a growth-driven process, not a results-driven one, develop strong conscious intentions (“any information held in consciousness is communicated to the unconscious” –> see TMI page 27, First Interlude) and take joy in all the learning and mistakes required.

Hopefully some of the above is helpful in that regard.

Best of luck with your practice and continue to keep us posted!

Julian
(DT Teacher in Training since Jan 2018)

[Julian SMember]

Hi Black Ghost,

Verbal chatter is something that I encountered for many years of practice. You’re on the right track with trying to notice how it affects attention, and whether the chatter is in awareness or attention at any given moment. That approach doesn’t necessarily “get rid” of mental chatter — which would be an unhelpful way to measure progress anyway. What it means is that the chatter progressively causes less and less disruption of attention, while continuing to go along in the background. If you persevere, at some times, you may notice that there has been a greater level of quiet in the mind for a period of time — but you don’t want to be doing it for that reason. At other times, even most of the time, you may notice that the chatter is as wild and loud as ever — in which case, you can continue using it as a tool for practising your skills of watching how attention moves. The level of chatter is not in itself anything to worry about — what matters is whether you can find a way of working with it skillfully.

“When I snap out of the distraction it feels like I’m still with the meditation object and it doesn’t feel like I forgot I was practising but I have no way of knowing whether my breath was also in attention or whether the breath, or anything else was in awareness.”

This is a very important point. I would say you *do* have a way of knowing — you already stated that it ‘feels like’ you’re still with the mediation object. Attention and awareness are two ways of knowing: attention is the one we are most accustomed to, and involves a lot of cogitation, knowing that you know what you know and analysing that etc. Whereas awareness has the quality of knowing but perhaps “not knowing how you know”. It’s a lot less refined, a lot more broad and perhaps has more of a feelingful quality to it. Both kinds of knowing are valid. So, you feel like a part of you was still with the object — great! What you experienced was a gross distraction. That is different from the Forgetting characteristic. Notice attention is now back on the breath, and be especially vigilant for the return of mental chatter or any other distraction for the next wee while.

A technical note with regard to distractions (defined as movements of attention), the movements of attention are not what we try to overcome until Stage 6. By then, the mind system is primed with intention, and distractions are more attenuated, making them ready to be worked with. Don’t attempt this too soon, it will only cause frustration (speaking from experience here 🙂 ). For now, movements of attention are part of your practice. But realize that if attention moves, it’s because something came through awareness with a strong enough charge, *and awareness failed to notify the mind system* until it was too late. Try with great effort to notice this happening in your experience.

The way we overcome distractions is by training ourselves to pick up on these inputs that arrive with strong charge while they’re still in awareness, and rededicate ourselves to the meditation object more and more quickly. Movements of attention will gradually decrease in both frequency and duration, but that’s a side effect of having an awareness that is yoked to a strong intention to notify when strongly charged inputs arrive.

Once you can notice attention has moved and redirect it to the breath in about the duration of an in-breath or less, and you can sustain that for five or ten minutes, that’s my criteria for Stage 5 practice. Sometimes this is my experience, at others it’s all about the gross distractions. There’s so much to learn!

I hope some of that helps.

Keep us abreast of your practice 🙂

Cheers,
Julian
(DT Teacher in Training since Jan 2018)

[Julian SMember]

Hi Tim,

I would agree with Frederic and Salina. I just wanted to chime in with a message of solidarity. I too have ADD and my sleep patterns are pretty delicate to say the least. Insomnia for me tends to be the same as it is for you: waking in the early hours and having difficulty going back to sleep. I can empathise with the irony of knowing that practices such as yoga nidra or body scanning will help, but finding the mind unable to settle into them due to tiredness or the time of night. It sounds like you are doing all the right things. I like to remind myself that, even though sleep is elusive at times, I am probably saving myself worse sleep / ADD symptoms by all the work I do to manage it. In my own experience, samatha-vipassana can also help subside the intensity ADD, sleep and anxiety disturbances, but it’s a long-term game.

A couple more things to try if you haven’t already:

• maybe combine Salina and Frederic’s advice and do a couple of short sits with walking meditation in between? I learned this method from Nick Grabovac and it helps me for periods of strong dullness. I usually go with a ten minute sit, then straight into a five or ten minute walk, and then another ten to fifteen minute sit. You can repeat that pattern twice for a one hour session.
• just in case you haven’t already tried them I can anecdotally attest (with no professional qualifications or ability to recommend them whatsoever in your particular case) that 5-HTP, a high dose of magnesium citrate and regular Vitamin D supplementation helps me. But it all depends on your tolerance of course.
• another thing I can suggest as a yoga teacher is legs up the wall pose, which I frequently fall back on when nothing else helps. My partner has become accustomed to me lying sideways in bed with my feet up the wall at 4am 🙂

Finally, let me ask what the quality of your attention is like in the tail end of each sit, when you feel more wakeful? How much gross / subtle distraction is present during those times? Do you have an idea of which of the ten stages you tend to gravitate towards?

I hope that some of this helps.

Best of luck with your practice,
Julian

Dharma Treasure Teacher in Training

[Julian SMember]

Hi Becky, excellent questions! (and wasn’t that Q&A insightful as always). Thanks (on my own behalf as a new teacher trainee) for your enthusiasm to pitch in and build the community. There are a few volunteer initiatives at present along the lines of making it easier (through tools and guidelines) to connect and engage through the site, between teachers and practitioners, teacher to teacher, and student to student. In the meantime though, I think simply reaching out on the forums as you have done is the way to go.

Others may be able to advise if there is a policy regarding conversational content vs meditation-specific topics on the forum here. I’m personally just happy to see people interacting, and am not overly concerned about the form it takes. But I suppose once we have a lot of traffic there could be advantages to segregating things a bit.

If you want to have a video call sometime, send me a message.
Maybe it becomes a regular thing, maybe not, but I’m always up for a dharma chat 🙂

Kind regards,
Julian (teacher in training since Jan 2018)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by  Julian S.

[Julian SMember]

Hi Steve,

There is certainly a lot we don’t know about the mechanism behind energy currents and meridians. The understanding I have from speaking with others (I haven’t investigated to any great depth myself), is that systems like kundalini yoga and Taoism / qi gong have far more sophisticated ways of working with, directing and storing these “energies” than does TMI or most flavours of Buddhism, which tend to lump it all as pıti (with a few grades) and instruct practitioners to “merely” develop equanimity with it. That’s not to say one approach is better than the other, just that it’s something of an open question. Certainly, my own experience with pranayama and qi gong, and anecdotes from others, would indicate that a degree of energy work in one’s background makes it easier to detect subtle sensations (such as in TMI style Stage 5/6 or the Goenka body scan).

One system of vipassana that is doing some things along those lines is the Thai lineage of Ajahn Tong, who was one of Mahasi Sayadaw’s students. Several mnasteries in Chiang Mai teach this style, which incorporates touching the mind on up to 28 “touching points” in sequence. These points coincide with various acupuncture points, according to the monk I learned under at Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep. Students are introduced to them one at a time over the course of a retreat. For me, it was doing one of these retreats in 2009 that coincided with me first detecting subtle sensations. If you’re already experiencing energy flows then presumably you are “past” this point, but it is an interesting coincidence nonetheless.

It’s worth reiterating, though, that the underlying mechanism for these energy currents / pıti / prana / chi is still unknown. The natural intuition of course is that they are located in the body somewhere, but there has actually been no success finding a testable phenomena that coincides with them. Of course, very little science funding has been dedicated to it 🙂 however, I believe Culadasa considers them to be in fact mind generated. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t real, in the same sense that thoughts and emotions are real. But simply that they may not have a physical correlate, or if they do, it quite possibly may exist in the interaction between neurons in the brain’s somatic “maps” (the somatosensory cortex). From the work I’ve done on chronic pain, which also implicates a strong somatosensory component, I find this theory quite plausible.

It’s all food for thought, of course, which will only take one so far 🙂

All the best with your continued explorations, we welcome any further updates you wish to share.

Best wishes,
Julian

[Julian SMember]

Great conversation. Just to show some solidarity with the southern hemisphere sangha, I am writing this from my home here in Christchurch, New Zealand 🙂 I know of at least one TMI practitioner from Perth doing the teacher training with me Bernadette, I will let her know you are nearby!

Julian (teacher in training)

[Julian SMember]

Hi Steve, I have been following this thread with interest, thanks for the update. I practiced Tai Chi and Qigong here in New Zealand for four years and when I stopped (due to a whiplash injury) I noticed a sudden increase in convulsive pıti. Coincidence perhaps, but I have always found the possibility they’re connected very compelling. Your update adds another data point. I am currently receiving acupuncture but it’s Western style, not the traditional Five Elements constitution style. I will be interested in any further reports you can give us.

Some questions (forgive me if you have already answered them earlier) about the pıti you’ve been experiencing: you mention off the cushion contractions (of face etc). I presume that these also occur at times during sitting meditation? If (during sitting) you shift your intention away from attending to the breath, and towards ceasing the contractive movements, do they cease easily and quickly? Off the cushion, do these movements persist for seconds, minutes or longer? Again, can you bring them under control through intention (which may involve conscious relaxation for example) or are they spontaneous and uncontrollable? I just want to be sure there isn’t some more physiological / less subtle reason for the contractions.

In addition to the compassion and understanding you are developing, I would encourage you to work with mindfulness in daily life. It has helped me to have less distinction between “normal life” and “meditating”, which in turn can take some of the shenpa out of the path. Mindful Review (in the TMI appendices) can be very helpful here. But I would probably start by trying to notice when the sense of being a separate self is very strong in daily life, vs when it is weaker. Ask yourself how strong it is from time to time throughout the day, and then ask yourself “how do I *know* that it is strong (or weak)?”. Remember that all experience consists of either sensations or mental activity – that’s all we have. What combination of sensations and mental activity makes up that sense of being a small “I”? What combination makes up grasping and aversion?

This can really help with equanimity towards these sankara. At least that is what I have found in my own experience.

There are other daily life practices aside from the one I describe, e.g. on the spot metta /compassion. I have seen the HEAL method mentioned in this thread and others and am curious about it, do you have any links to further information on that?

All the best with your learning, keep us posted if you can.

Julian (teacher in training)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  Julian S.

[Julian SMember]

Hi Alex, it is inspiring to see you pursue this issue and seek to get clarity on it. You’ve asked about some very important points. Just to add to the excellent answers from Darlene and Michael.

Also by the books definition of dullness, is it not technically impossible for anyone to actually consciously experience dullness because it is an unconscious moment, or is it actually a perception in its own right that I become aware of, because how can there be a pleasant sensation associated with something unconscious.

The term “non perceiving mind moment” is preferred over “unconscious mind moment” because it is closer to the truth and helps avoid some pitfalls.

You are 100% correct that it’s not possible to experience the non-perceiving moments themselves. But dullness isn’t the same thing as these mind moments! Dullness is the effect that non-perceiving mind moments, those sneaky blank spots in our perception that slip beneath the radar, have on our conscious experience. And speaking from my own experience, it’s 100% technically possible to consciously experience dullness 😉

How does this happen? The book explains it better, but here’s my take on the longer story. Anyone else more qualified in the cog sci stuff please weigh in if I go astray…

So mind moments happen extremely fast — much too fast for an everyday consciousness to detect the individual moments. Our experience consists of dozens and dozens of these moments stitched together every second by our mind-system. This “stitching together” is what creates a seemingly seamless flow of consciousness.

Say for the example that today, this hour, this second your bodymind is capable of generating 100 mind moments per second (100 is a round number). Now say 10% of them are non-perceiving. That leaves you with 90 moments of consciousness during which some sensation or other was present in attention or awareness. What happens if 25% are non-perceiving? 50%? You’re left with fewer and fewer perceiving moments with which to experience this one second of time that we’re talking about.

Realistically there may always be a few non-perceiving moments in each second of experience. But there may be more or less of them. Once there are enough of them, they push out the perceiving moments and that is what we call “dullness”.

Dullness is what it feels like to have many non-perceiving moments scattered within the stream of moments that make up experience. It is not the non-perceiving moments themselves (which as you rightly point out, by definition cannot be perceived).

I hope this helps, good luck with your practice and keep asking questions!

Julian
DT Teacher-in-Training

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by  Julian S.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by  Julian S.

[Julian SMember]

Seems like a worthwhile idea. I’m not sure if you’re interested in reviewing the extant literature, but i find this article pretty relevant http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176239

Not specifically TMI, and clearly more resources poured into it than our community may be able to muster but might give some insights into question format etc.

The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists

Abstract
Buddhist-derived meditation practices are currently being employed as a popular form of health promotion. While meditation programs draw inspiration from Buddhist textual sources for the benefits of meditation, these sources also acknowledge a wide range of other effects beyond health-related outcomes. The Varieties of Contemplative Experience study investigates meditation-related experiences that are typically underreported, particularly experiences that are described as challenging, difficult, distressing, functionally impairing, and/or requiring additional support. A mixed-methods approach featured qualitative interviews with Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan traditions. Interview questions probed meditation experiences and influencing factors, including interpretations and management strategies. A follow-up survey provided quantitative assessments of causality, impairment and other demographic and practice-related variables. The content-driven thematic analysis of interviews yielded a taxonomy of 59 meditation-related experiences across 7 domains: cognitive, perceptual, affective, somatic, conative, sense of self, and social. Even in cases where the phenomenology was similar across participants, interpretations of and responses to the experiences differed considerably. The associated valence ranged from very positive to very negative, and the associated level of distress and functional impairment ranged from minimal and transient to severe and enduring. In order to determine what factors may influence the valence, impact, and response to any given experience, the study also identified 26 categories of influencing factors across 4 domains: practitioner-level factors, practice-level factors, relationships, and health behaviors. By identifying a broader range of experiences associated with meditation, along with the factors that contribute to the presence and management of experiences reported as challenging, difficult, distressing or functionally impairing, this study aims to increase our understanding of the effects of contemplative practices and to provide resources for mediators, clinicians, meditation researchers, and meditation teachers.

[Julian SMember]

PS the collapse is a total loss of mindfulness. It’s like night and day. Re-establishing mindfulness afterwards requires a LOT of effort and usually uses up the rest of my sit. But I’m at least able to re-establish it now (most of the time), which is an improvement.

[Julian SMember]

Thanks for this Wiley, I’ll try it 🙂 I’m still getting the collapse of attention but your idea to keep breath-body sensations in PA while attention is on the breath at the nose might yield interesting results. That’s kind-of how I practiced Goenka body-scanning but in reverse (with that, I would keep breath in PA and use attention to actively scan the body).

With my most recent “near-miss” of Sotapanna as I think of it, which took place on a silent retreat in 2015, I had a profound experience of capitulation — I surrendered my goals and my striving and my meditation in an act of what I thought was despair but turned out to be wisdom — acceptance of “me” as a process being “done” by the Universe. Maybe this is all the enlightenment I will ever get / there ever is. There was a kind of dropping away sensation as “what I might get” swapped places in my mind with “what there might be”, while both remained equally clear in my mind as fabrications of mind not anchored in the present.

The present moment then revealed itself as eternal and all-embracing. Awareness was watching myself experience each mind-moment of all senses arising and passing in synchrony, even including mind-door experiences of distraction, without any perturbations in the awareness that was watching the experience.

Then everything shrank down to a point of light in a field of darkness. From that point arose a featureless mask of a face staring back at me. Featureless not because of being empty but because of being everyone’s face at once. And my face. And then the face shrank back into the point of light and normal awareness returned.

There was no stopping of mind the way others describe it. Maybe I was just tripping 🙂

The other near-miss experience was a long time ago, but similar expansion of awareness beyond any kind of scale that I normally can comprehend.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by  Julian S.
• This reply was modified 8 years ago by  Julian S.

[Julian SMember]

Hi @wileyfox, sorry for my delayed response to your insightful comments. Let me go through them and respond inline…

“It takes a few weeks to realize that sotapanna has occured, as one notices the mind in a constant process of synthesizing its concepts and ideas, bringing order to itself to avoid insanity, frankly. Curing ‘cognitive dissonances’.”

This sounds intensely familiar to me — I assumed it was because I was cycling from bhanga through “the shit side of insight” (heh) and into equanimity, whereupon the cognitive dissonances are cured (temporarily). I don’t think I’ve had sotapanna — perhaps quite close a couple of times. There was a rich stream of profound insight and I stepped outside of myself both times, but I took “me” with me if you know what I mean. I never asked the question what was observing me step outside of myself.

“You are in exactly the right place practicing at Stage Five. Do page 47 before you practice body scanning, but take the four-step a bit further than descibed in TMI. In the fourth step, the breath is still conceptual, you are aware of BREATHE IN/ BREATHE OUT…you are THINKING! Let the breath experience slide from the conceptual to the exclusively SENSUAL. Get so involved in the experience of feeling EVERYTHING at the nose that there is no room left for ‘thinking’! Turn over all your mental bandwidth (attention and awareness) to THE SENSUAL. Thoughts there arise only occasionally, and you are distinctly aware of each arising. This YOUR SPACE… what you are looking for every time you sit, where thoughts are few and thin.”

This is pretty much *exactly* how I already practice. Which is reassuring synchronicity 🙂 I totally get what you mean by “getting so involved that there is no room left” for thinking. I can maintain this for ten minutes on a good day. But the problem I have is, perhaps due to just lack of mental stamina or disunity of sub minds, I run out of peripheral awareness — it “collapses”. Attention remains strong but without PA, my attention becomes ensnared in subtle distractions (this is aka hyperfocus, a classic ADHD trait). And once that happens, suddenly they’re not so tiny any more, and I’m floating in Stage 3 or 4 with not enough peripheral awareness to pull myself out (I describe this in way more detail here: http://dharmatreasurecommunity.org/forums/topic/slipping-backwards-from-stage-5).

“You will have to learn to restrain your sensual experience to your nostrils, because your sensual attention will want to spread randomly to other parts of your body. FOCUS! Then practice the body scan exercise in Stage Five of TMI, which will be greatly enhanced, without so much thoughts.”

I find this quite easy and as described in the link above I can sense subtle breath sensations with ease (even in daily life, while walking, driving etc). But it’s only easy until PA collapses, and then I sink into gross distraction and progressive dullness.

“In the second step of the four-step, you can work at squeezing “thinking” and conceptualization out of your attention zone by trying to hear EVERYTHING in your sitting environment (and in your body as well) at the same time, trying to feel EVERYTHING in your body AT THE SAME TIME, even the clothes hanging on your body. Smelling and tasting are valuable also, because these are sensations for which you have little concepts or descriptions. No “labeling”, as that would be “thinking”! Aggressively emerse your attention in the sensations. How long you can do this will be limited, as whole body practices are quite tiring to the mind. You will feel your limit.”

Are you suggesting just to work with whole body / step 2 and not progress to step 3 or 4? That’s an interesting idea that I haven’t tried. I could do that until I “feel my limit” and then end the sit, slowly increasing the duration, which initially would be quite short but perhaps the effort to lengthen them will stretch and strengthen my PA.

Or to do it until I feel my limit (which I’m already noticing with the way PA collapses) and then move to steps 3 and 4?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by  Julian S.

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