the new meditating problems thread for girls and boys (& those beyond the binary)

good morrow pals

let us poast abt our ways we are trying to be contemplative or mindful or still & chill beneficence

I have no actual practice and have had none since I stopped chanting the mahamantra in the early aughts. the stray time I spend in prayer is very helpful and precious to me and I have a desire to locate daily practice but it is difficult. I have a prayer partner -- we reach out to each other irregularly, usually in time of crisis -- which is lovely but I yearn for daily union, which for me would probably mean "do this at the same time every day" and maaaaaan the life I live has not proven an ally in establishing any post-Catholic/post-mahamantra regular spiritual practice

that is where I'm at

lately i am all over the place

for most of 2017 i was meditating half an hour daily, leaning into the thai forest tradition of buddhism & its reliance on the calming and concentrative powers of simple breath following

then i transitioned into deeper vipassana type practices following along with the incredible Rob Burbea book Seeing that Frees -- it's a very very good book, but i ran out of steam part way through

now i'm casting around for a practice i can feel committed to; burbea has this weird new syncretic thing ("people are calling me a heretic saying it's not dharma") that he calls 'the path of the imaginal' that's just not connetcing with me. i'm finding some tibetan-based practices appealing, but i also know this kind of ala carte thing isn't what's best.

Most of yesterday was spent intensely contemplating numerous works of art (thank you SOFA Chicago, u never let me down). I find that I am often mesmerized by the craft involved, trying to work out not just how a thing was made but how much time must have been invested in honing the skill(s) on display and in practice runs leading up to a finished piece, the amount of patience and painstaking attention to detail dedicated to a well-made piece. Feeling much more still and grounded afterwards, I wonder if my constant anxiety might not benefit from dipping my toe back into that world that I went to school for and then basically abandoned wholesale.

Oh, you guys are talking about legit meditation, nm.

Mindful contemplation of art or music or any kind of sense experience is a kind of meditation practice.

yeah i was kinda deliberately broad in OP

you only take out of it

what you put into it

wait, take away from it

i'm trying to remember the one-on-one advice a meditation instructor gave me after class, one time

I'm really not a synchronicities guy HOOS but it is eerie to me that you're doing Thai forest reflections because I've had this tab open for about four days, and came to this thread to say "these monks really feel like people on whom we might reflect in these time"

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/index.html

Oh hello

I just came back from a ten-day retreat based on the approach from The Mind Illuminated (basically building concentration, mindfulness, joy, tranquility and equanimity before pursuing insight practice.)

and um I'm doing a two-month retreat starting in mid-December

I like my practice (there's metta in there too.) I want to have a much better grounding in it before exploring other practices so I'm pretty single-track in my current knowledge.

yeahhhh i really like ajahn lee in particular, i do a lot of listening to talks on YouTube by Thanissaro Bikkhu who's an American student of his

hey look at you go lukas, good shit

where was the TMI-style retreat?

a two month retreat! i am jeal

A retreat center outside of Tucson that my meditation teacher (Tuck3r P3ck, he studied with Culadasa and blurbed TMI) picked. Some lovely quiet+birdsong out there in the desert.

Oh I sit an hour in the morning and do an hour walking+metta meditation in the evening. Because life. It's definitely had an impact. It can be really fun too and that increases the further in you get afaict

Yeah I am excited and anxious!

i got a lot out of The Mind Illuminated when i first found it -- it's so patiently and deliberately cumulative in the way it invites you to move through the stages it outlines. i should revisit it!

Yeah I like it, obv. One of the co-authors came to the retreat and asked what he didn't like about the book, he talked about how it's all "BEWARE subtle dullness, and LOOK OUT for this or that, or you'll be DOOOOOMED" and he said look, yeah you have to watch out for a couple things, make some simple adjustments, but largely the mind just naturally inclines towards greater refinement as you sit more. Also the stage-based approach can lead people to striving, rather than just appreciating whatever stage you're in (like me, I have re-learned this many times.)

Like on this last retreat! I spent the first few days sitting happily with low expectations "la la la, distractions whatever, it's just the first few days who cares" and of course I enjoyed my sits and made rapid progress

Then the last few days I'm all "oh shit I have to make shit happen" and starting pushing and frustrated myself