Meditation people roll call!

🙏🧘‍♀️🪔

Good weekend to have a practice.

Did a longer sit than normal this morning, 90 minutes. All kinds of pain and tension and annoyance and blahhhhhh. Felt great when I got up though.

90 is nice!!

For a long time it didn't feel like there was much of a point in going longer, because I'd started to get a lot of dullness. That's a lot less of an issue now, though. No idea why.

90 was about as far as i ever got at my most obsessive just after getting sober, doing 2 or 3 of those a day just to stop thinking about liquor, but that feels real distant these days where 20 minutes is an accomplishment

Never gone for more than the usual 15-30 minutes myself. Not sure if I am scared of one of those psychotic breaks I've read about or...

Yeah, I have some free time right now, and I feel like I notice a difference the rest of the day.

Is anyone else doing zazen and can anyone recommend any guided zazen? (Or is that a contradiction in terms?)

I've used the usual Headspace / Calm options on and off for the last few years but nothing really stuck. In the last year I've been investigating Zen as a broader philosophy/religion in a much more involved way and started doing twenty mins of zazen a day back in February, eyes open, no guidance/music. Some days it feels amazing, some days it's boring and fidgety. I feel like a lot of the stuff I've read about zazen seems to point towards not using music, guidance etc as these are all distractions. I might be wrong on this? Basically, would love some pointers from anyone here who's doing it as well!

re: music, calm/headspace, etc, there's nothing wrong with relaxing but I wouldn't call it meditation.

"some days it's amazing, some days it's boring and fidgety" sounds like it's working as designed

agree with that.

my #1 pointer is to find other people to practice with or at least talk with about your practice. this thread in a pinch but real-time humans even better.

this looks cool (Kozan is a wonderful person): https://www.upaya.org/program/the-ease-and-joy-of-mornings-online-version/?id=2470

Many zazen teachers are down with counting breaths if you need an anchor.

BH you may like Treeleaf Zendo, who's been doing the "online meditation" thing since like 2007 somehow

https://www.treeleaf.org/

Thank you everyone - some really useful pointers all round here, very much appreciated.

🧘‍♀️

Things to think about:
Second arrows
Mustard seeds

🙏 😊 🧘‍♀️🧘🧎‍♀️

Short moments, many times.

Glad to have my practice right now.

Tell me about it

Life is just A LOT right now and having an hour a day where I'm just kind of holding space for myself is so helpful. I kind of establish an intention at the beginning of the sit to create a warm and welcoming environment for all and sundry to arise. Sometimes that feels impossible, but it's a good direction.

Somebody on another thread complained about the term “holding space.” I didn’t want to get into it with them and could perhaps guess what context they had encountered but it is enormous useful and beneficial in this context.

Bringing the meaningful into the mundane.

Somebody on another thread complained about the term “holding space.”

truly we live in the age of pointless complaints, "holding space" is a good term.

Teacher the other day explained why she prefers “may you feel at home in your body” to “may you be healthy.”

Because ill health is inevitable?

Something like that yeah. She specifically mentioned people with chronic conditions.

Being at home in your body is a good framing. Tangentially, one way I think about the practice is about being less alienated from your own experience.

Yes, exactly!

I can't get the phrase 'alienated from your own experience' out of my head. I think I understand (and am profoundly moved by the notion) but would you be able to explain that?

I'll try. I'd like James to give it a go.

There are grosser and subtler forms of alienation here. On the grosser end, some parts of your experience just don't make it to awareness, maybe because you're multitasking, on autopilot, or maybe because there are things you're repressing. On the more subtle end, there can be experiences that you're aware of that come with a conceptual overlay or a proliferation of mental activity that obscures them. Or experiences that you're resisting, things you set up in opposition to yourself (a self that is constructed only in this opposition.)

I hear this loud and clear - in both iterations. Something to ponder, certainly.

This isn't fair to ask, really, so please feel free to ignore or deflect! Do you think this kind of work is possible through meditation alone, or does it need some kind of accompanying therapy (the way you conceptualised it, implies a depth psychology framework of some description - the way I read it, anyway)?

I don’t have time to answer now but I will later. This is a subject that is pretty important to me, I think.

But lukas’s responses so far were really good.

I wouldn’t say that some sort of therapy or psychological framework is needed per se for what lukas is describing, that is a complementary approach. Of course people should be doing that if they need it. Not to do so in such a case is known as a spiritual bypass.

Back to the original question. One way meditation teachers might talk about it is that is the nature of the mind to be wild, to wander. So the way to offset that is by grounding oneself in the body and in experience, by paying attention to the breath and then the senses and then once again to the outside world in what is known as open awareness meditation. One way to think of it is that there might be all sorts of noise in the head about the way things should be. By dedicated constant practice over a period of time, it doesn’t have to be that much every day, one can reduce the volume of such noise and reawaken and reconnect to one’s own innate sense of aliveness and curiosity that is easily observed elsewhere in, say, an animal or a small child.

I’m not a meditation teacher so please take what I say with a grain of salt, but I’ve found that this stuff has really worked for me and I can do it more and more easily, except when I am really, really stressed.

No doubt I will get trolled into some flame war on some other thread tomorrow, seemingly disproving whatever I typed here tonight, but so be it. There will still be some tiny part inside of me watching, saying “hmm, how interesting, I wonder why you are doing that again?”

I almost got into a war with an inanimate object today.

Zen master Dogen (and many others) have spoken about intimacy with yourself and your experience as a goal of the practice. I think there are qualities that the language of intimacy and alienation covers that my analytical explanation doesn't. James's comment gets at these.

Oh, and big fan of therapy over here. I'm at a place in therapy and my practice where they seem very connected.

Thanks for your responses, James and Lukas. I'm always 'waiting' for something to happen, but I feel like I'm in the early stages of some revelation with meditation, waiting for the right teacher or opportunity to appear. I sort of 'confessed' to someone at work that I was making practice more formalised and regular and they initially looked surprised and said 'how's it going'. I was surprised at my own answer, which was 'something's happening'.

I think that 'something' speaks to what's been said here - some kind of realignment, perhaps, maybe some kind of refiguring of the elements of the self and experience. Just simple things, like James said, having more space to notice my interactions and my reactions to things. Also very conscious that I can leave a meditation practice and find myself reacting in the same old ways to things. It's a long road.

I keep thinking about Peter Matthiesen's *The Snow Leopard*. I'm probably explaining the obvious here, but if you don't know it... Matthiesen was a practising Buddhist and had recently lost his wife. He takes the chance to go on an expedition into the Himalayas to search for the snow leopard but the book is really about tracking his practice and his spiritual awakening while he's there. It's a beautiful book and the insights he receives while meditating in the high, thin air form the core of the text, but the thing I often think about is how the book mirrors the process of practice. No matter how mind-altering the insights, when he 'returns' to civilisation, he is grumpy, sullied, agitated; it's pretty much instant. I assume this was intentional but he never makes it explicit.

(The fact that he leaves his now motherless kids behind to go on the expedition, and is out of contact for months, is another story altogether.)

there can be experiences that you're aware of that come with a conceptual overlay

Listening to a Q&A with Joseph Goldstein and he talks about this, saying “… the reason this distinction is important is that the concept is not changing.”

(but the experience is)

Anyway that one line kind of blew my mind.

Well yeah.

I know, meditation teachers say the same things over and over, but ... sometimes it hits different.

No worries, I get it.

Think my teacher said something today that was essentially the same actually.

Might have something to report

Maybe not

I like Zazen. The emptiness

What I was going to say was I was in a situation that is typical challenging for me, namely sitting in a restaurant for hours not being able to participate in the conversation in any meaningful way.