![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I just tried to do my evening meditation, but my upstairs neighbors were being louder than usual, so I gave up pretty quick into it. I was reluctant to do it at all, but forced myself to try; usually when that happens, I end up having a very good, concentrated session. And, as I'll explain below, noisy upstairs neighbors can actually be an aide to certain types of meditation that I practice! But alas. This morning's session was pretty bad, too. I just couldn't get my posture right--I kept wavering back and forth and side to side--so I gave up after fifteen minutes. Bad discipline for me today.
But I usually have bad meditation days immediately after really good ones, and I just had a little breakthrough. And hey, bad meditation is better than no meditation at all!
So, my breakthrough was finally, after 25 years of off-and-on meditation practice, getting cittānupassanā right, or at least the way I've heard it described. This is one of the many, many times in my life I wish I had a proper meditation teacher to talk this over with. Anyway, I'd always thought it was just a matter of being aware of what state the mind is--concentrated, distracted, etc. So, if I'm sitting there, distracted, just acknowledging that I'm distracted and trying to turn the attention back to the breath. And as far as sensory experience goes, when my senses are stimulated during meditation, I've always just tried to pay attention to them, be mindful of them, and be nonreactive to them (and if any reactions did come up, to turn my attention to those).
But I'd read in a couple of places, most recently in Mahasi Sayadaw's Manual of Insight that the mind itself is supposed to become the object for mindfulness-of-mind. I never really understood that. I mean, back when I did LSD in my early 20s, one of my favorite things to do was to sit still and try to find the origin of consciousness, and turn my awareness back on itself, but that's not something I've tried in a few decades, and not really what mindfulness-of-mind is actually about. So, while trying to practice mindfulness-of-mind, it's really only been me noting something about the quality of mind while attending to other objects. But then there was the line about how, when noting/observing in mindfulness practice, the next step is to note the noting mind, to observe the observing mind.
So I finally did it. My neighbors were being noisy, as they usually are, so my evening session two nights ago involved a lot of being mindful of the noise and my reactions to it. And I said, "hearing, hearing, hearing," and then realized that the act of hearing itself or the sound-consciousness itself could be made into an object of meditation, and there I was, observing my consciousness as it heard the sounds, rather than attending to the sounds themselves. And I was able to extend it, then, to other consciousnesses that were arising and falling away, such as the thought-consciousness. It was pretty rad.
I was able to do it a little bit yesterday, but not as solidly as two days ago. And today was just hopeless, as I said at the beginning.
Man, I need Buddhist friends and a Buddhist teacher.
But I usually have bad meditation days immediately after really good ones, and I just had a little breakthrough. And hey, bad meditation is better than no meditation at all!
So, my breakthrough was finally, after 25 years of off-and-on meditation practice, getting cittānupassanā right, or at least the way I've heard it described. This is one of the many, many times in my life I wish I had a proper meditation teacher to talk this over with. Anyway, I'd always thought it was just a matter of being aware of what state the mind is--concentrated, distracted, etc. So, if I'm sitting there, distracted, just acknowledging that I'm distracted and trying to turn the attention back to the breath. And as far as sensory experience goes, when my senses are stimulated during meditation, I've always just tried to pay attention to them, be mindful of them, and be nonreactive to them (and if any reactions did come up, to turn my attention to those).
But I'd read in a couple of places, most recently in Mahasi Sayadaw's Manual of Insight that the mind itself is supposed to become the object for mindfulness-of-mind. I never really understood that. I mean, back when I did LSD in my early 20s, one of my favorite things to do was to sit still and try to find the origin of consciousness, and turn my awareness back on itself, but that's not something I've tried in a few decades, and not really what mindfulness-of-mind is actually about. So, while trying to practice mindfulness-of-mind, it's really only been me noting something about the quality of mind while attending to other objects. But then there was the line about how, when noting/observing in mindfulness practice, the next step is to note the noting mind, to observe the observing mind.
So I finally did it. My neighbors were being noisy, as they usually are, so my evening session two nights ago involved a lot of being mindful of the noise and my reactions to it. And I said, "hearing, hearing, hearing," and then realized that the act of hearing itself or the sound-consciousness itself could be made into an object of meditation, and there I was, observing my consciousness as it heard the sounds, rather than attending to the sounds themselves. And I was able to extend it, then, to other consciousnesses that were arising and falling away, such as the thought-consciousness. It was pretty rad.
I was able to do it a little bit yesterday, but not as solidly as two days ago. And today was just hopeless, as I said at the beginning.
Man, I need Buddhist friends and a Buddhist teacher.
