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Vipassana August 2018 (Blind spots not such an issue (In fact learnt to be…
Vipassana August 2018
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Progress with posture
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This idea on continous improvement was at the forefront of my mind, this belief that I have that things can constantly keep getting better. This is a bit of an aside but resonates with what I was reading about the differences between amber and orange in the Ken Wilber's model. That things aren't fixed and should stay they'e always been done but that they can get better all the time. This led me to experimenting a lot with my posture and I think I found a pretty solid one in the end
I found a simple cross legged position worked best, with only one cushion needed. I also found that varying the leg that was in front really helped to balance out the pain i was feeling
Progress with my hand posture came aswell. I found that a posture were my thumbs touched, not the top of them right next to the nail like I have been doing, but the fingerprint side of them up against each other whilst one palm cupped the other, was a really solid posture that allowed to stay still for a long time
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Pain threshold higher
I think reading the meditation book really helped a lot in this regard, the fact that I knew that sitting cross legged would get easier the more I did it was a good motivation in the moments where it was painful
I think also from the meditation book, knowing that sitting still is of paramount importance for good concentration, really helped me to be as serious about it as possible
Big lesson: Keep moving the attention from spot to spot otherwise I will get really bored and lose concentration
There was something about the perfectionist in me. I found that when I was able to feel subtle sensations over a whole area of my body then I would expect to do the when I came back to that area. So I would try to feel sensations in really small areas in my body, however the sharpness of my mind had changed by that point and so I was not able to feel the subtle sensations as before.
Yet I didn't recognise this in myself and so I kept struggling to replicate how I had felt earlier. This just lead to frustration at an apparent regression in my practice. Now I know that this is not the case.
A bit of theory helped me a lot here actually, Goenka said that you should not compare yourself to your past self at all. Subtlety and dullness of mind will come and go no matter what I do, just like passing clouds, and all I can do is adjust my practice to it. If I am dull, then I need to adapt the practice to my present state
There is something here about the variability of how I am practicing. That I have to be consciously aware of the sharpness of my mind at each and every single moment and that I should adjust my practice (the size of the area I am trying to feel, how quickly I am moving round etc) to match my mental state. This will in itself help me calm my mind, in turn allowing for feeling of subtler vibrations (not that this is the point!!!)
One thing I realised is that I have been avoiding and in a way scared of blind spots. Whenver I would be going throuhg my body if I knew an area was coming up that is usually blind I would develop aversion to it and actually avoid it sometimes
Now I know that the thing to do is the opposite, to actually embrace the blind spots, to seek them out, be with them with calmness and equaminity, not wanting anything to happen and then whatever happens move on after a few minutes
Another big theme of this retreat was the concept of easing into activities which I learn from the Heaspace run meditation
The first few days were not very good, yet I knew that I was coming from a completely different mental space (my normal day to day life). I didn't panic when I was feeling lots of resistance, oversleeping, not feeling being here because I knew that I was going through that tranisition and that it would get better before too long... lo and behold it did 🙂
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Sensations are not the name of the game, blind spots make up just as much of the practice 🤓
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