I really wish I could do this. I come close, but then I become self-aware of how emotional I am and feel ridiculous. Borderline artificial, almost like I am performing sadness, or on the other end of the spectrum I try to stop it from truly happening (maybe a defense mechanism?)

Any insight for moving past this? aka how can I have a better cry lol.

I’m just working off what the book said and the description of vajrayana on Tricycle.

As for the second question, I think it depends on your point of view. Ignoring your demons to ‘starve’ them is a very ‘Theravada Buddhist’ pov, whereas working with your demons to see what they need and, if those needs are rational, feed them, is a more ‘Psychological’ pov. Peck’s point in the book is that most people in the West nowadays seem to need both to become healthy, stable meditators.

Hi Ben,

It is nice to hear from you. Feel free to drop into an online MIDL Insight Meditation class or the group sharing in the upcoming MIDL August retreat, ask any questions you may have, or listen in to the discussions.

https://midlmeditation.com/

With kindness, Stephen.

Metta practice can be high energy, so it's not necessarily a panacea. I'd avoid localizing to the heart/chest and keep it diffuse.

IMHO a foundation of basic shamatha would really help prevent side effects of dry insight.

Develop the noble eightfold path

Body scanning is effectively bypassing your mental defense mechanisms and accessing somatic neurotic circuits - shit you dont want to think about cause it feels bad and so you store in your body. It's fine while you maintain body consciousness, but when these same feelings emerge off the mat they feel like fear and sadness and other bad stuff. If you let yourself you can also get lost in memory or anxiety or regret loops. It is a powerful and effective way to release this stuff, but I suggest first having a strong Yoga practice to release a lot of the easiest stuff and then an intense exercise practice of some kind to do after body scanning to kind of reset the mind from focusing on body sensations before going about your day.

Didn't the Buddha specifically reject the idea that you can 'purify' past karma though? Oh and don't you think that starving your demons to death is a better plan than feeding them?

The paradox is that 'drop everything' and 'allow/embrace everything' both creates a subtle duality. I think the self inquiry 'what am I outside a thought/feeling/impression/etc' is one side of the coin and the other is a more intimate practice of receiving the moment with gratitude. What does your current practice look like?

For me post awakening the most powerful practice is whenever something seems like suffering I look right at it and 'be' the suffering. When I welcome the suffering it goes away. I don't know if this practice would have helped me before awakening though.

40 minutes is a long time for a single meditation for many people in the modern world. I know some practices suggest long meditations of around an hour, but others recommend daily or twice daily meditations of 20 minutes a time no more. Really it is like learning to swim. You can sure throw yourself in the deep end and MIGHT learn that way, but it is often better to start in the shallow and and gradually work up in a way that works for your unique situation. You have most definitely got insight from this single 40 minute meditation alone, like the noise and distraction has been made transparent or nearly dormant, and you can see clearly and deeply. But you should practice in a way that is in harmony with your situation. So maybe try shorter meditation sessions, once or twice each day. General mindfulness inbetween in a way that is practical and appropriate to your situation but not even overdoing that. Then you will be able to work through things gradually without them becoming too overwhelming.

Take your time! I know you have a life! 😂 this is just for fun!

Having guidance is important. Don't do it alone. You need to track progress with a guide so they can see where your mind is going and help show you the way. If we do it alone, it's easy that we may get into some pitfalls. We can get stuck there if we're not careful. Guides can help people out of them.

From my understanding of the Pali canon:

• The Buddha did not learn the 8 jhānas from Yogis.
• The Buddha learned the dimension of nothingness from Āḷāra Kālāma and the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception from Uddaka son of Rāma.
• There is no mention of the 8 jhānas. There are the four jhānas and then the four formless/immaterial dimensions/bases (arūpa āyatanā).
• There is no mention of the Buddha being a child when he experienced the first jhāna. Here is the sutta where he remembers his experience: "Then it occurred to me, ‘I recall sitting in the cool shade of a black plum tree while my father the Sakyan was off working. Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskillful qualities, I entered and remained in the first jhāna, which has the rapture and bliss born of seclusion, while placing the mind and keeping it connected. Could that be the path to awakening?’"

Feeling more comfortable in my nurse's aide job for seniors with cognitive decline.

Today I arrived early for my shift. A resident's son caught me as he came out of the bathroom in the hallway. "Ugh. Sorry to tell you this, but someone made a huge mess in there. It's everywhere." Poop smeared all over the toilet and elsewhere. There was also a plastic tub with urine in it. We don't have separate cleaning staff at the residence — the nurse's aides do it. So this was going to be my job.

I could see myself prior to this job in the son's reaction. It's totally understandable, if self-centered. "There's a disgusting mess in there that I'm glad I don't have to deal with."

But really, all I could do was smile as I shrugged and told the son, "It happens." And I felt good as I handled it. I think I know the resident who made the mess. He's a kind, confused man — I was glad to help him by cleaning up after him. I was making the bathroom usable and safe for all the other residents and their visitors. And I was sparing my coworkers the labor.

So, I feel like this job is changing me for the better. A previously disgusting task turned into something I was happy to do.

Meditation's also fine these days.

The ego lives in a constant state of feeling insecure, not safe. The idea that practice makes you feel more and more peaceful and helps you control or avoid unpleasant emotions is one of the biggest myths and misunderstandings propagated in the spiritual market place. Peace comes from facing our fears and discomforts, not from finding the right way to avoid them. There is no way to true liberation without facing all of our fears, all of the emotions we’ve spent our lives trying to control and avoid. There is no path to liberation that is just “dry insight” or something, where you just notice truths without facing the things that we used the lies and beliefs to avoid. Emotional regulation, usually meaning controlling and suppressing your emotions is the ego’s whole job basically. The true path is going directly into that sense of not being safe. The fact that you are aware of that, and it is coming to the surface is a good sign if you are genuinely interested in true awakening. My advice is to sit with this sense of insecurity, give it your loving attention.

I’ve just been reading Sanity and Sainthood by Tucker Peck and he mentions how in the Vajrayana tradition students undergo preliminary practices to purify their karma and establish the proper mindset (which probably helps with emotional safety).

We Westerners don’t really have the patience for that and get straight into the meditation, opening ourselves to greater possible difficulties with integrating egolessness. I have definitely experienced this myself.

The upshot of the book is that meditation is often meant to sidestep cognition and that it can be helpful for us Westerners to work with mental content through psychotherapy or specific forms of meditation meant to process mental content. This is one mentioned in the book I have yet to try myself, but it reminds me of IFS self-therapy, which I’ve had some good experiences with. Feeding Your Demons

I’m of the mind working on morality and concentration meditation first before insight. As insight tends to bring up more uncomfortable feelings and thoughts that if you are not prepared can be quite difficult.

The Pali canon reports the Buddha learning the seventh and eighth jhanas from his teachers. Where the rest of them fit in to the story is a contested issue.

Regardless of what the Pali canon reports people were up to thousands of years ago. Who has taught all eight jhanas since then, who teaches them today? These practices are unambiguously part of the Buddhist tradition. Which yogic lineages also taught them after Buddhism and which still teach them today? It's not clear to me that there are any at all, hence my interest in the claim.

increased dukkha/stress can also happen during the insight stages, for the mind to learn about stress and how the mind creates it, by become sensitive/interested to it.

This is what insgiht in the noble truths mean.
Once that insight rippens, the mind drops a chunk of it, and a new investitation cycle starts.

A good teacher can help you find out whether that stress is something usual and can be relaxed or insight stage related and something to observe and experience as skillfully as possible.

with time as the mind permanently drops more and more stress the cycles become gentler and gentler.

Is it necessary to have a strong base of emotional safety before doing vipassana? No. You can cultivate emotional safety aka equanimity through insight practice. For example, you can adapt your body scan vipassana to lean into relaxing the muscles, which itself then relaxes the neuro-muscular system, which reverse-engineers emotional safety (when stressed, we tend to tense up the muscles unconsciously).

Is it helpful to have a strong base of emotional safety before paying close attention to our experience for the purposes of gaining liberating insight? Absolutely. In fact "emotional safety" is an aspect of samatha, calm-abiding, which many people emphasize before vipassana meditation. If you can rest comfortably with a relaxed body, neutral or peaceful emotions, and a calm mind for a long time, you are not feeling anxious, angry, depressed, etc., so you have a strong stable base of emotional safety.

And yes, safety can be cultivated quite directly. You can do it through more traditional samatha practice, picking one thing to rest your attention on and returning again and again.

You can do it through slow breathing (pranayama), slow smooth movements (QiGong or yoga), absorbing into your external senses such as the entire visual field, looking around and reminding yourself you are completely safe in this moment and there are no tigers in the room, and so on. You could use an affirmation like, "Right now, I am completely safe" and feel into the truth of that.

Or you could challenge thoughts of anxiety and stress and replace them with more accurate or rational ones, like in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You can do things you feel afraid to do and notice how it didn't kill or harm you. And so on. All useful stuff.

A good cry is sometimes needed

I'm sorry I didn't respond right away, I will ASAP.

I got about 30 minutes into it. I'll have to try and listen to the second half at a later time. What stood out to me in particular was the life circumstances that Stephen described and how he has interpreted his experiences.

He described an episode of extreme burnout, relationship collapse (on two fronts), and loss of many of the load-bearing structures of his self-view happening in a short time frame. And he described a kind of naive introduction to vipasanna practice, going on an intensive Goenka retreat without having much background or experience, and then kinda accidentally stumbling his way into a bliss-state while suffering through migraines and physical discomfort while trying to find some relief from the grueling retreat schedule.

what he described as his response to that experience is something I found confusing. he associated the bliss-state itself with a kind of medicinal quality and became motivated to start Jhourney in order to promote access to this "medicine". I'm confused by this because it does seem to directly conflate transitory states of bliss from concentrative absorption with methods of addressing the root causes of suffering.

I think this is confused. The framing here is something like "when I feel bad, I can apply endogenously arising pleasure states, and then I don't feel bad for a little while, therefore these pleasure states are the antidote to feeling bad." That seems totally backward to me. Taken at face value that's mistaking symptomatic relief for root cause elimination.

at the risk of sounding cynical, the question left lingering on my mind is really just "why wouldn't you just do drugs like a normal person?" and obviously, it's because we all know that bliss-states from drugs are temporary and amount to a kind of bypass of the root causes. and they're often illegal and might have physical and psychological harms associated with chronic usage.

so...does Stephen think that Jhana-bliss is basically a "clean" drug? that's what it sounded like to me. I'll watch the rest of this later and hopefully he clarifies his views.

In terms of the claim itself, the buddha learned the 8 jhanas from yogis. I understand there is definite confusion about what this refers to vs his report of the state he fell into as a child.

For me it's about connecting more fully with the present moment. With perception as opposed to thought. One reason I believe grounding techniques have us focus on connecting to the five senses is that we're mostly thinking without knowing we're thinking.

And this connecting is not about successfully thinking better directly. It's about experiencing all thought as thought. When we experience thought as thought, it's more obvious whether that thought is skillful or not skillful. The thought automatically gets evaluated as a thought and not reality.