Feel good techniques

This appears to be a common pattern. We do our mindfulness course expecting to be transformed, we feel a bit better on the course, a week after the course we find that nothing has changed. There's also the case of people who have been doing meditation for ages and yet they still feel as depressed and angry as they did when they started.

So then, what is going on?

The mind is a tricky beast. It is used to taking action and seeing immediate results. Mindfulness is more subtle than this. It is about seeing the relationship between body, feelings, mind and thoughts and how they come and go. There is no explicit result to be found, just an on going relationship with the thing that is us. However, the longer we observe ourselves the more likely we are to see wisdom arising. That is to say, we begin to see what is beneficial and what is harmful to us. We begin to take responsibility for ourselves and our own happiness - we are no longer simply victims of circumstance. We know what we nee…

A mental factor is psycho physical state that we can recognise - e.g anger, anxiety, doubt, bliss. There are wholesome ones and unwholesome ones. We meditate to cultivate the wholesome ones. After a while we arrive at the seven factors of awakening - these are the factors that underpin a truly wholesome mind. They can appear in any order at any time, but there is a causal sequence that we can follow.

- Mindfulness - we establish bare attention and clear comprehension of our experience. If you have mindfulness established it is difficult to behave badly.
- Investigation - we use mindfulness to see how things change in the mind. We see emptiness, thinking, joy and many other things.
- Energy - with mindfulness and investigation, the unwholesome states of mind of reduced. This allows energy to manifest. This feeds into further investigation.
- Joy, rapture - after bouncing around mindfulness, investigation and energy for a while there is an intensification of physical pleasantness. Even…

I like listening to Beethoven's string quartets - it took me a while to appreciate them but I think I'm getting there now. Here's the one they call number 7.

First movement - the days of afternoon tea are behind us. It starts off quite nicely - there is a strong promenading feeling of enjoyment, a jolly man walking down an Edwardian street. We are soon lost in moments of introspection that take us on a little voyage into somewhere more thoughtful. These moments of inward reflection continue but they are slowly injected with a sense of anxiety - the pleasant beginning is being eroded. Our afternoon stroll gradually transforms into a psychological, paranoid, edgy episode. We are left realising that life is not a basket of flowers. Bad things happen to good people. Beethoven has broken down the good mood.

Second movement - the sense of disquiet continues as we are plagued by sharp, stabbing notes and a feeling of not being quite right. Beethoven takes us to the brink of a gl…

Well, this is quite an interesting phenomena that I see quite a lot on the news. The journalist finds a hapless member of the public and asks them about Brexit, or political policies or world events and the poor hapless person responds with an opinion that is clearly just a rehash of something they've heard on the news already. Then, I find myself having an opinion that is equally without any first hand knowledge of the situation and ask myself where did that come from? I am talking out of my arse.

Then it becomes clear that no-one knows what they are talking about, especially politicians, and all we have are these opinions that are founded on media junk that we've been fed over the last few months. Then you see people getting all bent out of shape because of these opinions and it becomes clear that something is not really right. It's this flow of information that is shaping the world we live in, not the actual world we live in.

Does anyone know what they are doing? I thi…

A relatively empty contemplation

I'm going to be jumping about a bit with this blog as I randomly accumulate written material for various projects. However, stick with it and you'll be transformed in no time. I've been mastering Buddhist techniques for a while so that's what you're going to get this time.

Deep down in the fourth foundation of mindfulness, we find the six sense bases. Here we are asked to contemplate the five physical senses and the mind as the sixth sense. The contemplation goes something like this:

- We get very still and calm
- We place our attention on one of the six senses - I like sound best, or sight if I am doing staring meditation
- We observe contact with an object, e.g. sound - It all happens very fast and at the same time, but we observe contact, consciousness, feeling, perception, initial thoughts and then mental proliferation (thoughts on thoughts). Now this is a continuous process so stick with it.
- We also are asked to observe fetters that arise with sense contact.…

I've had a lot of free time over the years - quite a lot where all I can do was listen to music. Now, if you listen to a lot of music you begin to realise that, by in large, there's not a lot going on in modern music that will keep you interested for long. So you begin to explore all kinds of music and you find that Beethoven has produced some particularly interesting works of art. If you take the time to combine Beethoven with meditation, you then begin to realise that his music is a profound expression of mood and/or mental states the likes of which you never thought possible - it's like he has written his mind into music.

Anyway, let's start at the beginning with his first string quartet. I know very little about Beethoven or his life or why he wrote the music he wrote - I just listen to the music and see what comes up. I also dislike sleeve notes that get too technical. So what you're getting here is just raw interpretation of the music through my rather stubby…

I am enjoying google keep at the moment - try to guess my state of mind from this

Instead of the gradual path, you could have a crack at the zen path. It's a bit more straightforward:

1. Get your sitting posture stable - it's import to get the right posture
2. Just sit
3. Keep sitting

At a certain point, something will trigger a moment of perfect clarity in the mind. You may be out shopping, you may be at the zoo, you may see a leaf flutter out of the corner of your eye - it could be anything.

It just happens by itself

I thought I'd jot down some of things I've encountered on the gradual path of mind training. This is probably why most people don't bother...

Practice daily
Observe the body (repeat)
Observe the senses (repeat)
Practice eating
Practice listening
Observe sounds
Notice pain
Notice pleasure
Observe moods
Observe thoughts
Bare attention
Clear comprehension
Observe the breath
Notice tension
Notice relaxation
The relaxation moment
The in breath
The out breath
The resting moment
Notice the whole body
Relax the whole body
Allow pleasure
Notice wanting
Notice anger
Notice anxiety
Notice doubt
Notice weariness
Thoughts are not you
Behind thinking
The observing mind
Observe patterns
Observe reactivity
Accepting you don't know
Going deeper
Wandering mind
Mental proliferation
Calming the body
Calming the mind
Notice (5 elements)
Notice (32 body parts)
Notice initial attention
Notice sustained attention
Notice pleasure
Notice bliss
Notice unified mind
Notice hatred
Notice love
Notic…

That's it really. Have a thought, let it go. Where do they come from? Well, that's where it gets interesting. We are all in this soup. Who is in your bowl?

Anyway, take a step back and breathe. Then you will know what to do.

Notice the body and forms
Then notice the space

Don't get too excited about it. Just know that it is there.

Calm
Breathe in,
Pause,
Breathe out,
Rest in the gap,

....

Breathe in,
Pause,
Breathe out,
Relax,
Rest in the gap,

Slowly, slowly, slowly
I yield

Here's what I'm going to be doing over the next month in the spirit of meditation training. Generally I'll be following this typical meditation sequence every day:

- Scan through the body, relaxing muscles, breathing into tension
- Get the body relaxed and establish awareness of the whole body
- Breathe into the whole body - this is very refreshing
- Join the body, mind and breath together - this means I feel the breath and body in my mind - I'm not thinking about anything else
- Once I've reached this point I feel like I've cleaned out the rubbish and I can relax into the next bit
- If I'm still a bit jazzed, I'll do four elements or body parts for a few cycles
- Next I'll switch to mindfulness of breathing - watching the breath come in and go out again. Just a simple practice
- I'll maybe count my breaths just to ensure I'm not deluding myself  - 1 to 10 then back down again
- I'll do this until it is time to do something else

Also dur…

If you've been following what I've been doing this year, you'll know that I've restarted meditation practice from scratch and am working through all the various techiques that have brought some relief from the difficult thing that is me. So far I've been doing practices related to the body.

So, now we come to the point in our lives where we ask ourselves - is meditation just something I do to relax or is it something that I want to take seriously?

Ask yourself that question. Then ask yourself: does your life feel shit?

If it does then your mind is in the wrong place and you can benefit from meditation practice (or you can spend a few years doing therapy). Ultimately, you will find that the change only happens from within yourself and learning to meditate will show you how.

Anyway, let's say you've been doing some meditation for the last month or so. If I was a meditation teacher I'd now be telling you to keep sitting every day no matter what - meditatio…

In case you are wondering, I'm going through a progressive set of meditation instructions in a number of different posts that take you to the very essence of your own mind and being. I'm doing the exercises as I go along so it's kind of in real time. We've started with some body meditation and some ideas about mindfulness.

Now we move forward to start investigating the interface between mind, body and concepts (especially in relation to compactness which I will explain later). The launch pad for this type of  investigation is the four elements - earth, wind, fire and water - but let's not get hung about these labels. This meditation is derived from Buddhist meditation practices that were devised thousands of years ago when they hadn't discovered electricity and they hadn't figured out what a quark was - but they did have fire, earth, water and wind. In essence, this practice is nothing to with these elements - it's just a way of looking at experience th…

The mind has lots of faculties and one of the most interesting of these is its ability to investigate phenomena and see what is going on. People who are new to meditation have something called beginners mind which is a natural curiosity driven by the novelty of what they are doing. Old lags like me, tend to need a bit of effort to regain interest in something they've seen a thousand times before but once we get going the pleasure of seeing stuff soon lights things up.
Anyway, that's not really what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to say is: investigation is a key mental faculty in meditation. You don't have to believe me, I'm just planting a seed in your mind for later on so that when you realise you are investigating phenomena you'll say something like: 'sheesh kebab, this is investigation and that blogger dude was right - it really is a thing'.
Then you might say, "I'm investigating and I know I'm investigating. This is what knowing is…

Who would have thought?

You know how it goes:

- notice the energy rush as you breathe in - nice isn't it
- notice the release as you breathe out - lovely

Now rinse and repeat. Like a massage.

Are you mindful?

If not, use the body to establish some sort of awareness.

Keep at it until stuff comes and goes. Now, here's where it gets useful. We train ourselves to notice that nothing (absolutely nothing) lasts - then we rest in that place behind the coming and going of experience. No problems in that space. Find this experience.

Once you've got this nailed down tight (maintain it for 10 minutes or so), we are ready to get molecular on our minds.and experiences. Then we can start to express the truth through the twinkle in our eyes and the complete lack of regard for all the nonsense that people call life.

We know it's already happened. Calm down already. Find the space.

Meditation is a skill that is learned over time but it's a skill where training and doing happen at the same time - i.e. we are learning on the job. As we allow the hindrances (distracting mind states) to drop away, we find ourselves meditating but unable to direct our meditation - we rely on intuition and short, felt experiences to direct us (occassionally guided by words). One such felt experience is the idea that we are resting inside a bubble beneath the surface of activity. We sit in our bubble and observe mental experience coming and going. We are at rest, simply being aware of what is going on. Interestingly, if we try to solidify our bubble by directing thought at it (look at me in the bubble), then it pops. It's a case of being in the bubble and not getting involved. This is the training.

One interesting thing to do once we are in this still, observing state is to notice what takes us away from this state. Perhaps it is a thought, a sensory experience, part …

You might like to try this short but illuminating experiment. Resolve in your mind that will observe your breathing for 10 breaths. Pick an area of your body where you will be able to observe your breath; the belly is a good place. Close your eyes and start observing. Breathe in, breathe out, count one. Now see how far you get before your mind wanders off. Did you get past three?

Invariably we seem to lose our focus after one, two or three breaths. This is the momentum of our everyday mind railroading the processes of our mind and body. It is fired up and churning through the all the things it needs to churn through. We might think this is who we are, this compulsive thinking engine, but this is just one state of mind that we seem to operate under as a default - there are other states of mind.

This is the beginning point for meditation. We try to open a window behind the everyday mind and alter our default state of mind to something less demanding. We try to unlock our habitual proces…

Let's face it, we all want to control our minds in some form or another. The good news is: you can! The bad news is: it takes a lot of preliminary work.

It's a tricky business but here's a few ideas to get you started.

The first thing you need to do is establish that the thoughts in your mind are not who you are - they are product of various circumstances, they are a process of your mind. The modern way of seeing this clearly is mindfulness. You can do it now - observe your internal dialog, watch it change and repeat itself, watch it wander off, etc. You may have noticed that there were your thoughts (which may or may not have been useful) and there was the wider observation of those thoughts. Perhaps you noticed that this observer was not affected by the thoughts, that it was behind experience, that it has been there all your life. Let's not get into the existential nature of this aspect of your life - just acknowledge that you have one.

To summarise then, establish t…