January 2021

Everything is (or can be) part of the practice.

Including writing a monthly log.

How I approach this – I have the intention to write about my practice for the past month. I wait to see what comes. I look at it, and put it into words.

This is similar to how I approach sits: having the intention to sit or to lie down, I sit or lie down. Then wait to see what comes. And I look at it. Also, looking at what’s already there.

I started the new year in retreat with the Springwater center. It was a 4-day retreat – my third with them, and the shortest one (the other 2 I have attended were 7 days each). The practice / approach recommended there is exactly this – this simple looking at what is, listening to what is, wondering about what is – sometimes throwing in a question and then waiting more. The question I use the most is “what is this?” when something arises – and the second one is “what’s here?”.

I see this approach as essentially the same as what U Tejaniya recommends – but without the Theravada framework. At Springwater, it’s a more post-Zen one.

So – I attended the retreat – as I think of it, I remember a beautiful walk in the park near the place I live – one night, I could not sleep, and in the morning I took a shower and went for a walk in the park – it was foggy – and the scenery was dream-like – I was walking, attuned to the body and to seeing and to what was developing emotionally – sometimes stopping to look at what was breathtakingly beautiful. At one point, I stopped when I saw rays of sunshine coming through the fog – looked at them and walked towards them and stopped there, under them. At that point, I realized that the fog has condensed upon my eyelids, and each drop was a prism reflecting the rays. It was as if I had jewels on my eyelids. The tactile feeling was very close to what happens after crying, when the tears are becoming colder. It felt as if the universe itself has cried for me, in my place, leaving the mark of tears on the body. I stayed there, with that feeling, and continued to walk.

The rest of the retreat felt like retreat does for me – some days more difficult, some days easier, with less access to spacious / less fabricated states than before the retreat, and when I had access to them it was usually during the night sits (in my timezone, the last round of sitting ended at 4 a.m., and I usually went to sleep right after that).

After the retreat ended, I visited my mother to help her with a project I promised to help her with. The whole thing ended taking up 2 weeks – what I remember about that is that I continued to take any moment as an opportunity for practice – trying to be attuned to what happens – and the more settled state I had after the retreat helped with that. So – working, talking, working again, cooking together, talking again, working again, and so on, day after day. Sitting 25 min right before sleep, and taking time to have lying down sessions when I was feeling it was the case – that it was what the system needed, a period of lying down quietly (or sitting quietly in the armchair) for a while. In the same weeks, I started a private conversation with a friend on the streamentry sub – and partly due to it, I started writing more extensively about my own experiences. A response to another friend on the sub ended up as a 5.000 words essay that I posted as an autonomous thread. These reflections about longer periods of practice feel helpful – a lot of the stuff that happens makes sense only retrospectively. As I was sitting during these 2 weeks period, there was less access to this less fabricated mode that I was mentioning, but it wasn’t bothering at all for me.

When I returned to the place I live alone, I started sitting more, and for a couple of days the less fabricated layer returned. Then, I had a conversation that made me feel unstable. And it energized me. I went for a walk, did some yoga, and then decided to sit for the whole night. The sits themselves are not important; what was seen were a few expectations I still had from sits – a kind of implicit desire for sitting to “change” me, and for sits to have a particular flavor to them, and a lot of other vague, romantic stuff. At least part of this was dropped. And it is nice to know that the development of my practice basically means dropping preconceived ideas about practice. I don’t know how many still remain – but it feels there is much less than when I started practicing, around 15 years ago, and much less than 2 years ago, when I took up “serious” practice. And it feels there is a much clearer relation to what practice means to me – and a pretty integrated view of it.

So – periods of sitting less, periods of sitting more, according to how it feels and to what feels skillful at the moment.

Over the last few days, a wave of sleepiness / tiredness hit hard. So I sleep / lie down as often as I feel like, and the “formal” sits are more foggy; yesterday, it was the first time in a long time that I felt asleep during a sit, and I even had a dream – something about walking through a cemetery with someone who seemed to be a romantic partner.

During this month, I took up 2 new practices: yoga and focusing.

With yoga, I do yin yoga, following Bernie Clark’s videos. It is very close to my U Tejaniya / Springwater influenced view of practice: going into a posture until the first “edge” – the first moment where new sensations are felt due to the posture – and simply waiting there, attuned to the sensations, for around 5 minutes; if the body is called to go deeper, go deeper; if it feels like too much, get out. I was overzealous with some backbends (even with this gentle practice), so I had to take a couple of days off.

The other practice – focusing – is Eugene Gendlin’s take on attunement to a “felt sense” – it developed out of his clinical practice. In its dialogic form, it involves 2 people, one “focuser” and one “listener”. The focuser attunes to what is felt in the body and speaks from there. Sometimes just describing what is felt, sometimes going deeper. Sometimes, when speech resonates with what is felt, there is a definite shift in the body, and one gains access to a new layer that can be felt and talked from / about, leading to a new shift, and so on. As the focuser speaks, the listener (if they are not trained) just listens – attuned to their own body – offering the gift of presence and openness. If the listener is trained, they can reflect back to the speaker what they heard – helping the speaker to go deeper into what is felt (and also offering them the gift of being understood / accepted).

I had exposure to various dialogic practices before, including some that come from the same roots as focusing. And, a couple of years ago, I had a couple of focusing sessions, in the hope they would help with a post-break-up depression. The 2 sessions felt nice, but not at all different from what I was already doing in my meditative practice. So I decided not to continue. But the interest in focusing still remained, and at one point, during the last year, I attended a 2 hours workshop. This time, I connected much more, and was able to speak from this embodied state.

And, because the interest continued to be there, I decided to take a long online course (6 months), which will involve a lot of practice. This time, it goes much deeper than my previous attempts, and much deeper than I even thought possible.

The body reacts in a very deep way to being listened to in an open way when it speaks from this embodied layer. It goes in a snap from anxiety to settled-ness and calm. Just in 2 minutes of being listened to, when it speaks in a way that is attuned to itself. Also, after the session, just after I closed the zoom, I became physically aroused. This came as a surprise to me. It is as if the body was interpreting “being listened to” as a kind of very intimate acceptance, that I already know has erotic overtones to me – I never experienced such a deep acceptance of me as embodied as in several erotic encounters. And the arousal that I experienced after the last focusing session on Monday had the same quality of “melting” to it. So yeah, curious to see how this will develop. And how the body’s relation to being listened to and to intimacy will develop.

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February log -- March 5, 2021

I’m writing this in the last day of a week-long “integrated daily life” online retreat with Andrea Fella, in the tradition of Sayadaw U Tejaniya. So it makes sense to start with the retreat itself. (Which was not that different from my daily schedule – except for having live access to a teacher, a sangha to practice with 2 times a day, and my decision to limit internet use).

I have around a year of practice in this tradition (complemented with the Springwater / Toni Packer approach – which is the same practice, in my opinion) – and it was my third (online) retreat with Andrea (I also had around a month of self-retreat in May 2020, when I was using her retreat recordings a lot). Overall, my fifth “formal” retreat in the Tejaniya tradition (+ several daylong retreats with Alexis Santos) – totaling more than a month of “formal” retreat in this tradition, plus around a full month of “informal” retreat over the past year, using recordings from the same tradition. The quarantine and the switch to online have been invaluable in this context; most likely, pre-covid, this would have been both impossible and unavailable for someone living in Eastern Europe and not affording trips even to the USA, and even more to Myanmar or Thailand ))

What was the most surprising about this last retreat is what it showed me about my practice habits / attitude. Apparently, what was cultivated over the past at least half a year was a very “organic” approach to practice. Even if, when I just got started with this approach in April 2020, I was applying what felt like “techniques” (Andrea never calls them techniques, but “tools” – tools like “relaxation”, “connecting to awareness”, “receiving what’s already here”, “checking the attitude”), they, already at that point, felt more like a way of “living with awareness” from the moment of waking up till falling asleep – with occasional periods of “intentional tuning into awareness” – sitting, lying down, or walking without anything else to “do” except open up to what is already here.

During my previous retreat with her (September 2020) the way of presenting the practice as “applying tools when needed” still felt something useful to me. That is, it made sense to structure my sits in this manner. I started the formal sits with a period of “relaxation” (sometimes expressed as a body scan, sometimes just as informal checking whether there is tension in the body and releasing it), followed by “connecting to awareness” (that is, checking if I am aware) and then by “connecting to what awareness is aware of” (contents of experience). Occasionally, I was “checking the attitude” – explicitly looking for mindstates, such like greed, aversion, delusion, equanimity, spaciousness, joy – states that color the meditative attitude. It made sense to do that step by step.

During this retreat (Feb 27-March 5) I found myself preferring a much more “formless” and “fluid” approach (maybe influenced by the Springwater community – but it feels more like an organic development of the practice as such – and this possibility was also confirmed by her). So almost like a resistance to “applying tools” instead of “just connecting to awareness and the form it takes at this moment”. It was strange – the “tools” approach felt already somewhat contrived, although I know it was helpful for me at the beginning. In trying to follow it, I found myself already aware most of the time (so no need to explicitly check for awareness being present or no), and then – simply letting awareness receive what it already receives. In the retreat context, the usual mode of “receiving experience” was pretty spacious and wide. Not a “deep concentration”, but pretty deep equanimity and ability to receives “wholes” of experience, with multiple aspects at the same time.

There is the tendency to interpret that as a “mark of progress” with the practice – it started feeling totally organic, with no discrete elements – just the practice of simple awareness, simple opening to what’s already here, on cushion or off. Or it might be simply a preference for a mode of practice that has these characteristics of “simplicity”, “fluidity”, “openness”.

Another thing that happened during this month was a strange experience with anti-anxiety medication. As part of a cocktail of meds for another condition, I was prescribed anti-anxiety stuff (the doctor’s hypothesis was that an old nasal infection – more than 10 years old, as far as I can tell – is was maintained also due to the difficulty of the nervous system to relax – so she prescribed anti-anxiety stuff).

This has revealed something about how my system works – and, apparently, how this drug works. I realized that the anxiety I was aware of “normally” as part of experience – intermingling with other parts of experience – was “pushed away in the background” after I started taking the drug. And I also realized that my practice has made me acutely aware of what happens in the background of the mind. So anxiety – pushed back – felt more intense than without the drug. It is as if, due to practice, the system is much more acutely aware of what happens in the background while letting other parts of it deal with daily tasks in a more “matter of fact” way. Normally, anxiety intermingles with that, is noticed, and goes away without being made into a thing. The medication seemed to “clear anxiety from what is in front of me” and push it to the periphery – but as I was acutely aware of the periphery already, it pushed anxiety right into the spotlight )))

I thought this was funny. It wasn’t a problem for me, it was just a reason for another “awwwww” at how the system is working; my experience over the last couple of months at least has been one of continuous fascination with what the system is presenting on a day by day basis – regardless if it is painful or joyful – so this mode of being was... at least curious?

Still another aspect of my practice this month was the work with Eugene Gendlin’s “focusing” in a class I am taking. It feels to me that focusing – which I conceive of, now, as basically a form of embodied, mindful speaking and listening “from the felt body” – is exploring a similar ground as the type of meditative practice I am into. The basic difference, at this point, seems to be the use of language. In meditative practice, I usually sit wordlessly with experience (sometimes throwing in a question to investigate – something I wrote a post about – a post which I also think of as part of my practice).

In “focusing”, what I do is become aware of the body – in the presence of a listener who is also aware of the(ir) body – and there is a movement of finding, in the body, a place to speak from. Speaking from that place – a knot in the stomach, a trembling of the eyelids, a constriction of the throat – becomes a way of gently holding that place and investigating it. Sometimes, “processing” it. When I sit meditatively / wordlessly with such bodily stuff, there isn’t the feeling that I am “processing” them. The sitting itself is a container, and what is processed is processed outside the layer of the conscious mind. In speaking, this kind of bodily occurrences starts to “unfold” more, and maybe connect itself explicitly with a story, sometimes a very old one; sometimes not. Sometimes something becomes clear; sometimes not. But it feels like a way of bringing to language something that was never in language -- and some of this stuff was longing for being brought to language, if that makes sense. Not just wordlessly sat with, but caressed with words, being brought into words, finding the words that name it -- and sometimes it just goes away, sometimes dissolves into the rest of the body, sometimes just becomes numb.

In the listening part of the “focusing” process, “feeling the body” (which was my favorite practice for a long time) merges with listening (instead of speaking) – a pure listening, it is as if my body is the container for the other body which is speaking, almost merging with the room, or with space as such – that in which the other’s words resonate. Sometimes the other’s words stir something in my own body, sometimes there are just the “normal” processes of a body sitting and listening. But, so far, what is learned is a kind of stillness and openness and equanimity and ability to hold / contain the other while they are processing something which might be painful to them – without immediately reacting, and without getting caught in my own processes. I had glimpses of that before – but never to the depth that is taught in the practice of focusing.

The last aspect I would mention is my posting here. It is expressing my increasing trust in a very simple way of practice – which does not feel like a technique any more, and it increasingly feels like not a technique at all. I am still exploring that – but in my experience, what I “do” (sometimes there is no feeling of “doing” at all, but at other times it is still present) is definitely not a technique, and not a method. It is a being-(with)-awareness-(as-experience) – this is the closest way to put it; and framing it as a technique seems to lose the simplicity, naturalness, and organic character of the awareness-knowing-experience. Maybe, indeed, it is “learned” as a “technique” – like I did with U Tejaniya’s approach – and then the “technique aspect of it” is let go of. But maybe the technique has nothing to do with it. This is something I still explore.

Aaaaaand – tomorrow night I go into another week-long online retreat. With the Springwater center. I will try to make it fully silent – so the last week was like a “light retreat” almost like a prelude for a week of “full retreat mode”.

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March 2021 log – April 7th

Looking back at a period of one month seems fuzzier than when I used to write weekly updates. At the same time, this means there is less of a story that’s being created.

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Right after a retreat with Andrea Fella, in the style of U Tejaniya (I wrote about it in the previous log), I attended another one week retreat with the Springwater center (both online).

The retreat facilitator – Les Schaffer – spoke in a way that really resonated. The idea of embodied speaking, of using impromptu speech to process stuff that is murky, basically of using speech as a way to look (and bring to language) what is going on (or has been going on for a while) is something I am also fascinated with. Also, what I enjoy about the Springwater people is their openness and lack of conceit – and the idea of “attainments” seems to me, even more, another story – a trap or a fantasy. There is an obvious change in the way some people who practice a certain way carry themselves both when they are alone and when they interact with others. But what I see in the Springwater people I interacted with so far is an ethos of radical honesty and faithfulness to how “stuff” appears in the moment. Right now, there is some clarity (or no) – let’s look! together, while speaking, or alone, sitting quietly, trusting the possibility of the body/mind becoming aware of what’s going on. “Attainments” seem irrelevant to that.

A moment that stands out when I recall the retreat is sitting, with eyes open, in my usual spot – leaning against the wall, seeing the unmade bed, and everything having a “mundane” character. The same old bed, I’ve seen a thousand times. This lump of flesh, sitting. And in the background, a feeling of dissatisfaction with it. So I started questioning that – what feels wrong with the ordinary? Apparently, the system wants something “interesting”, and “new”, and what was appearing to it was interpreted as “already known”, so boring. So I continued to question the “already known” character of what was happening – of the lump of flesh sitting in front of what it looked at as the bed. Examining both the perceptual layer and the affective one of “wanting something else”.

So there is a clear preference for more “airy” states, for the ones in which there is less fabrication, when the body is felt as just a solidification of space, and the visual field – just a field. But that’s just one mode of experiencing. Not the only one. And not one that can be maintained ad infinitum. So it was good to sit with the ordinariness of it all, and to see the dissatisfaction.

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I also finished the first 8-week segment of a focusing course (Eugene Gendlin’s approach to embodied therapeutic speaking / listening). I’ll continue with the next 8 weeks.

It connects really well with my fascination for embodied speaking – finding a place in the body that is able to speak itself out – and a kind of spontaneous swaying seemed to help with finding that place and holding it. It felt like the edges of the body were softening, and thus were able to gently hold the more painful places that were brought to language. In listening, being attuned to the body and to the other was making possible both resonance and distinguishing what comes from my own conditioning from what is the echo of the other’s speech in my body. For these 8 weeks, we just either spoke, or listened in silence. The next 8 weeks we’ll experiment with verbal reflections. But simple, silent listening feels immensely powerful.

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It also seems there is a preference for – and a movement towards – simplicity in my practice in general.

On one hand, what can be simpler than just sitting, or just being aware of what’s going on as one is continuing with their day?

But there are a lot of possible movements of the mind and attitudes that appear, during sitting or during informal practice, even if one “just sits”. And some of them seem to run counter to each other.

There is the movement of “investigating”, of getting one’s fingers dirty, as Les would say, by digging in the psyche.

There is the movement of “opening towards” and sitting in a relaxed way in this openness, with the stuff that appears.

There is the movement of “dropping everything” and seeing that even if everything is dropped, everything continues – hearing is happening, seeing is happening, thinking is happening, and all these are known as they are happening, in a much easier and natural way than through the habit of mind that clings to some aspect of experience. But the clinging can also be seen.

There is the movement of “throwing in a question” – and waiting. I liked one of Andrea’s metaphors: this kind of questions is like ringing at a doorbell and then sitting by it, without knowing if anyone, or anything, will respond. And how will it respond.

There is the movement of “simply abiding” – as the inseparability of “content” and “awareness”.

All these seem like different flavors.

Initially, there was the feeling that I should “choose” and “settle” for just one. Now that is not so obvious to me. Even if all these movements of the mind feel different – they all seem at least part of the same “family”. And each of them reveals something – in its own way.

And I like the Springwater ethos of finding out for yourself what practice “is”. Or rather, what is “the work of this moment”. Starting from a place of not knowing even what “practice” is supposed to be – and meeting – and seeing what arises in the whole of the moment, which includes not just the content, but the attitude itself.

So I’ll see. For now, the desire to “settle on cultivating just one movement (or lack of movement) of the mind” has disappeared.

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Soon, I’ll start a 6-week online course with Guo Gu on “silent illumination” – yet another take on “just sitting” that I was drawn to for a long time. I enjoy his take on the practice being thoroughly embodied – and this was one of the factors that made me decide to explore it. In a way, exploring the roots of the mainly Springwater-influenced approach to sitting that I have now – and checking a hypothesis that I have about the role of “open awareness” in Buddhism in general (the Tejaniya approach and the Springwater approach feel to me like independent discoveries, in different contexts, of a similar mode of practice – that has clear resonances with Tibetan stuff – and with early Buddhist stuff – so it might be just the “other stream”, so to say, a practice that is neither “vipassana”, nor “samatha” in their usual presentation – but I won’t speculate more about this).

As a preparation for the course, I started reading the Lankavatara Sutra – my first longer primary text from the Mahayana tradition, knowing how central it is for Ch’an.

I am not satisfied with how I was reading it – basically, a Napoleonic tactic of advancing and advancing and advancing, without pausing to reflect and to investigate resistances (mainly to “supernatural” stuff, to the Mahayana superiority complex, to what seems to me as logical leaps and games).

But the core of what I got from it is fascinating. I got a clearer grip on what Yogacara was proposing – which feels like an expansion of the model of consciousness proposed in early Buddhism, spelling out something that was implicit (they add 2 layers of consciousness beyond the classic 6 ones); and the mode of practice that is anchored in that also has clear resonances with early suttas. Basically, what I take to be the main message of Yogacara is that what appears as “the world” is a projection of a layer of consciousness that is even deeper than what we take to be “the self”. So it’s not at all “I am creating my reality” – but the show itself is impersonal, and there are impersonal forces of habit that compel “grasping” at appearances and solidifying them as “existing objects”, and habits of view-creation – mainly suppositions of “existence”. The main practice seems to be learning to contemplate awareness as awareness while refraining from “grasping” (having in the background of the mind the idea that “it’s all projection”). Which is a good enough take on how I interpret the early suttas meditation instructions – learning to stay with appearances while maintaining equanimity in regard to them, and refraining from clinging to views – and also not automatically regarding them as “solid objects in the world”.

Part of me wants to reread it (as there is a lot of very neat stuff in it – and very different from the sense of “contact with what’s there” that seems to be cultivated by the mode of practice I am entertaining now). Part of me wants to move on – either to Shurangama Sutra, or to return to the Pali canon. I’ll see ))

March 2022

so, a retreat story –

it was my sixth online retreat with the Springwater center – founded by Toni Packer, they practice in a post-Zen context – a very simple form of open awareness combined with spontaneous inquiry (when something awakens the interest, one drops a question in the mind and continues to look at what’s there – or simply wonders about what’s there) – given the situation in Ukraine (my country is a small post-Soviet state to the West of Ukraine – part of its territory is occupied by Russia since 1992 – and we might be the next target of Russian aggression) i thought a retreat would be one of the best ways to deal with all that is arising here –

but, well, i did not set the boundaries around it the way i usually do –

my mother is taking the situation in Ukraine in a very upset way – she is very destabilized – and, lately, i visit her quite often to help her with work and to talk/listen/let her vent out – so i decided to spend at least part of the retreat at her place – reassuring her and helping her a bit –

which did not really work the way i intended to –

and, more than that, due to various things happening, i took 2 days off the retreat container –

so the week i planned for silent retreat was reduced to just 2 days by myself –

i’ll go day by day –

opening night + day 1-2 – since it was my first retreat in company of my mother – who is not a practitioner – the fact of me being on retreat while she was around was another source of stress for her – not knowing how to act around me. so i tried to be natural and listen and talk the way we use to – which was not necessarily “the best thing to do”, because at least part of my intent was to use silence as the main container – so, the fact that the silence was not there, and i was working (editing), and my mother was making small talk and asking me about recent events in Ukraine made me “not fully inhabit the silence” –

the sits themselves were quite nice – very little selfing going on, and a feeling of natural “distinguishing” between various aspects of the body/mind without claiming ownership over any of them – a feeling of the absurdity of claiming ownership over this-body-here sitting, or over the thoughts unfolding like a ball of yarn a cat is playing with, or over the awareness noticing that as happening, or over the image on the screen during the group sittings when i had the camera on –

so a very simple abiding in a way that was making ahamkara / mamamkara not happen at all –

but the need to return to conversation and work was felt as a kind of inconsistency –

i was sitting formally for about 3-4 hours each of these days –

day 3 – i was already planning to take this day off the retreat container, in order to attend an “authentic movement” group i practice with – and, given that interaction with my mother felt not supportive for my retreat, and that it was not likely that Russian forces would move so far as to demand my presence at my mother’s house, i decided to go during the night at my own place – to use the late night group sitting as a “re-entry point” into the retreat container –

(just a note about my movement practice – meditative dancing, for me, is a way of bringing awareness to the body in a very natural way – i practice butoh and authentic movement – and i regard them as part of my meditative practice. they both bring awareness to the body and reveal layers of the body/mind that would otherwise be unavailable. and they also bring awareness to interpersonal relating – in a different way than bringing awareness to speech & listening does – so, it was a day of practice, just not in the container of the retreat –) so, the night of day 3, i was meditating at my own place, and the neighbors decided to throw a party until 4 am, when the formal meditation period was supposed to end )))) – and i spent all this time vaguely smiling – it wasn’t disturbing or aversion-generating, just, again, less quiet than i would prefer to –

day 4 was my first “full retreat day” – sitting formally for about 7-8 hours, and spending the rest in silent awareness too –

the sits themselves felt very “ordinary” somehow. just the simple being there with the body/mind unfolding – sitting felt very “easy” – nothing disturbing, nothing distracting, nothing in me preferring that i would do something else – very simple abiding in presence. well, the only slightly disturbing thing was pain in the chest region, arising during one of the late night sits, pretty intense, but awareness was a good container for it too, and it disappeared by itself during the walking period after the sit. i did not feel like avoiding anything or turning away from anything – so, i’d say, mostly equanimity –

and the neighbors that threw a party the day before started fighting. hearing them fighting triggered fantasies of me doing something to stop it – i didn’t, other neighbors called the police, and the aggressive person ran away – but then, after the police left, continued to knock on the door, yelling threats. there was some building up of restlessness – but also with a wide enough awareness to not make it into a problem and to smile at my reaction of not going out to smoke my occasional cigarette in order to not let the aggressor in – continuing to watch the desire to smoke and how it goes away –

day 5 was a “full silent retreat day” too – with the same “simple sitting” quality – the availability of awareness for anything arising – the simple abiding (it was surprising for me that investigation did not kick of like it usually does in the last years – but, apparently, simple abiding is what the body/mind recognize as the most skillful thing to do right now – there was even the implicit feeling of this being possible with bombs falling around – the most basic practice of sitting quietly and opening up, sitting still enough and quiet enough so you see what is there and hiding from what is there becomes impossible, and sitting/awareness becomes the container for that – so yes, spending 2 days with this very simple sitting reinforced the full trust i have in this mode of practice which does not feel like practice any more, feels like the way of being that i cultivate while sitting, moving, and sometimes talking) –

i had a meeting with the retreat leader that day, in which there was a lot of joy arising – it was funny to notice how i would bliss out speaking – and we talked a bit about how the retreat is unfolding (it is the third retreat i attend with them, and we also meet outside retreat – so it was more like a friendly check-in) –

the most surprising thing during day 5 was the arising of erotic imagery – and some bodily reactions to that – lust has not arisen in my practice for quite a while now, so it was like “oooh, you again, let’s see how this is unfolding and how it is stopping” – and it was there just in a couple of sits, it did not come in others – but it might, of course –

the only intentional movement of the mind that i was leaning into was to gently expand when i was sensing i am contracting around something – a kind of “what else is there? ahhh, there’s the body, there’s seeing, there’s hearing, and there’s sensory content, no need to become preoccupied with this thing that is pulling me inside it” –

and there was a feeling of satisfaction related to these 2 days of silence –

“i had at least these 2 days, i created a boundary around them, and there was a quality in which this body/mind established itself during them – and simple easeful sitting is there again as the most obvious thing i could ‘do’” –

day 6 was again a day i took off – this time, unexpectedly. together with some friends, we are organizing an exhibition which will mix photography and poetry – and we were supposed to record some of the poetry we will use – and the person who was going to record decided to leave the country for safety reasons, and it was the last day in which it was possible to record the poetry we planned to – so we spent the day reading poetry aloud with a very close friend – it felt very intimate and open, and the days of practice before that were making me very sensitive to her and to the friend who records all this and to the other friend who was taking photos – a feeling of being very attuned and sensitive – well, when i say “a day off”, this does not include the last group sitting of 2 hours – so this was the least i was sitting daily – at least these 2 hours, with short periods of walking – and with the listening to the day’s talk – aware of the talk and of the body/mind as it listens to it – i count that as “formal practice” too, as the container of awareness is established while listening – and for the last day of the retreat i came again to check upon my mother –

and i am writing this reflection before the group sitting and the finishing talk –

let’s see if i will have something to add after the retreat finishes –

well, during the last talk, when there was the possibility for any of us to read out loud fragments that resonate, there was a bit of anxiety bubbling up – and i noticed it there as i read a passage from Luce Irigaray –

also, maybe i should say something about the talks – the Springwater way of giving dharma talks is something that has become very dear to me – the speaker speaks anchored in experience, listening to experience as it is going on, and, in a sense, the talk itself becomes practice for them – a live example of how practice can look like – of how experience can be met, and of how speaking itself can become part of the practice. in most retreats, there is an opportunity for group dialogue in which to exercise that – speaking while listening to oneself, listening to others while listening to oneself – but in this retreat he decided to not do that, but leave the possibility for private meetings open between all participants – if someone wants to set up for others, that’s good, but, as with all things Springwater, nothing is mandatory except silence outside meetings with a teacher or during group dialogues – so i decided to opt out – the feeling of the end of this retreat comes with a bit of agitation – i am at my mother’s place – there is, again, a sense of lack of clear boundaries – and i am not too well physically; the sit before the last talk was also more agitated than others –

it is interesting to notice how the first couple of sits of the day feel –

since getting started with this style of practice in 2020, it does not matter at all how an individual sit feels like – the next sit will most likely be different – or if it won’t be different, who cares – at some point something will be different – and i don’t expect anything any more from any particular sit – there is just curiosity about what will come up and what will be seen – and, overall, this retreat taught me two things –

• that, if i want a retreat to be “a certain way”, i have to set clear boundaries around the retreat time. this is something i was doing previously, but i did not do now – and i notice i prefer retreat to be “clean”. to not go in/out – but to establish a container and abide in it –

• and, regardless of that, the container of sitting itself / awareness itself is already there, established. and it is possible to bring it up to the surface. the rediscovery of the simplicity of sitting felt particularly reassuring these days. it is possible to just sit anywhere, regardless of what happens, and it can be a refuge in these times. it feels a bit like downshifting – no inquiry, no contemplation, no arising of jhana factors, just simple abiding – but this simple abiding is the ground from which anything resembling inquiry, contemplation, or jhana can develop.

April 2022

a few notes --

after tasting simplicity (or openness, or effortlessness), forms of practice that involve some kind of directed effort feel contrived and pointless.

what feels like home is letting everything be as it is while not being engrossed in anything in particular.

this is what feels natural in "sitting practice". awareness is there on its own. body is there on its own. feeling is there on its own. perception is there on its own. intentions form and are maintained on their own. in sitting, everything is let on its own -- as it already is -- and this shows that it is already on its own, it needs nothing from "my" side to be as it is -- the body/mind are already functioning selflessly -- and "simple sitting" is abiding in a way that shows that to already be the case. if you will, simplifying experience so that its simplicity is obvious -- and the proliferation is obvious.

in my own story of practice, this involves sitting for a good stretch of the day. not necessarily long sittings -- but anywhere from 3+ hours a day of sitting quietly, resting in silence and stillness, simply being there, until the need to do anything is dropped. and then it continues to be dropped as one moves or does stuff.

i noticed that when i don't live alone (i visit my mother for long periods of time to help her with work -- sometimes up to a month) and when i work a lot, there are certain habits of mind that leak into sitting. the mind starts "doing" more when i sit -- regardless how much i sit -- instead of simply being. it acts as if awareness can be brought about by desire to "be with" something that is there -- and this desire to "be with" or to "bring awareness to" is covering up the fact that the body/mind is already self-transparent.

i also noticed that this more effortless mode of explicit self-transparency gradually gets reestablished in "self-retreat" or "seclusion" -- living alone and abiding in non-activity, the effort disappears both from "everyday activity" and from "awareness practice". the simple being there -- being coextensive with awareness -- comes to the surface again. it takes a couple of days of interacting with others / working for a kind of "subliminal doing" to appear when i sit quietly too.

in this sense, the point of cultivating seclusion and reducing activities (or "duties" as a householder) is quite obvious for me -- and i notice this again and again for the past year, enough to consider seclusion and renunciation as a prerequisite for "serious meditative work".

and it is not like "serious meditative work" needs doing either. it develops organically out of sitting in seclusion -- if one does not have anything to do [and does not give in to the impulse to find something to do out of boredom] and simply sits quietly, self-transparency emerges. attempts to "make it emerge" obscure it.

for the past year or so, i've thought of this in terms of identity of view, practice, and lifestyle. one can equally call "spiritual work" a matter of adopting a view, adopting a practice, and adopting a lifestyle. they come as a package deal. the view grounds the practice and the lifestyle (and aspects of the view that were not clear initially become clear due to practice and lifestyle). the practice gives life to the view and is made possible by the lifestyle. the lifestyle gives rise to the possibility of extensive practice and the deepening of the view. they are interrelated. i've thought about writing an OP about this -- but i'm not yet moved to do it.

(btw, when i say "practice" i don't mean "technique" or "method". i came to see the focus on technique as detrimental. there is no technique or method involved in simply being there and letting the body be the body, the feeling be the feeling, the perceiving be the perceiving, and awareness be awareness.)

so my practice over the last year has been about taking breaks, in a sense. just as a period of sitting can be interpreted as a break from doing inside the day, a period of retreat / seclusion can be interpreted as a break from doing inside one's week or month. at least i, at least at my current level of seeing, need periods like these in order to recalibrate. in order to connect again to the simplicity-ease-openness that are already there, but are so easily obscured.

this is more or less where my "sitting practice" is at.

but i also took up dancing as a spiritual practice, and i am in awe with it. the forms of dance that i practice have explicit meditative connections -- it is butoh and authentic movement (both of them, oddly, come from the same root -- German expressionism).

what dancing does is bring to the surface layers of the body/mind that are simply not there in sitting.

one of them is the sheer physicality. in sitting a lot, one tends to get a very "airy" view of the body as mainly the layer of what is commonly called "sensations" which dissolve into space. but the body is not just that. it is live flesh that moves and sweats and shits and trembles. i guess in certain schools this is shown, at least in part, by the thousands of prostrations they do.

another is the relational dimension of the body. the body behaves differently when it is with other bodies. in dancing, this is made obvious. the simple presence of someone looking at you changes the way you move. bumping into someone when you are both dancing with the eyes closed makes you aware of reactions to contact that you have. seeing someone you desire makes you aware of desire -- and, if there are boundaries in place, gives you an opportunity to investigate desire without being tempted to go with it, and learn to endure desire without either expressing or repressing. you won't make erotic advances to someone with whom you meet once a week in a group based on trust -- so this is a very good way to set boundaries around something you can continue to bear and look at. the same way, the smell of people around you, even if it is off-putting, is something you learn to deal with -- continue to feel it while being with the other (and with yourself) in an open, receptive way.

another is the imaginal body -- especially in moving spontaneously with eyes closed, inner imagery is awakened. it can vary widely -- from the feeling of being chained to the wall to that of being smoke dissipating in the air to that of escaping someone's grip. these come with emotional experiences that i guess people around here would call "purifications" -- i think it is more about gaining access to layers of experience that were previously closed to you, and you have no way of conceptualizing them, so they overwhelm you. [and in creating the container of dancing with eyes closed while someone is watching you, they can be very intense without being necessarily overwhelming].

another is the anatta of the body. the impulse to move is not yours. the body is there on its own. what unfolds in the body is not yours. its joys and sufferings take you by surprise. what the body can do and what it cannot do is not yours -- it is determined by its own possibilities you know nothing about, really.

and i find what dancing is teaching me extremely interesting and useful. just as i find what sitting (and seclusion) is teaching me extremely interesting and useful.

9 August 2022

in July 2022, i attended 2 weeks of intensive Butoh practice in Italy with a teacher called Ezio Tangini – a 71 years old dancer, a student of my favorite Butoh dancer, Masaki Iwana.

Butoh is a style of dance, which arose in the avant-garde milieu of Japan in the 1960s – a kind of rejection of both European modern dance (while still taking elements from it) and of traditional Japanese dance – and the form it takes now, at least in certain lineage of practice, is very interesting to me.

one typical way of dancing Butoh is starting from a sentence – or an image – and then letting that image do its work on the body/mind, becoming expressed through movement. the teacher with whom i worked this summer used quite a lot of Eckhart Tolle and Krishnamurti as starting points – for example, reading the sentence “the essence of all things is the Void”, then letting it work on your body/mind for 20 minutes as you live it in a bodily way.

this involved a deep attunement to what is there as body – and what arises in the “mind” as a response to that sentence. it wasn’t about pantomime, but living in that sentence and letting something that it evokes unfold in the body, without breaking it and without distracting oneself from it.

in Butoh, one starts inhabiting layers of the body that are not available in “sitting meditation”. the very real sweating lump of flesh and bones that moves and aches and intends and senses. and, also, understands.

one “tool” that the lineage in which my teacher works uses (and one of his favorite tools for getting his students to attune to a different layer of the body/mind) is ultraslow movement. like, getting up from lying on the floor to standing, in 10 minutes, careful not to break the movement, and then taking another 10 minutes to get from standing to lying down. the slowness is, in a sense, a training tool to learn continuity of an overall intention, to see usual reflexes of “doing something fast”, to see the mind’s tendency to run away – and to hold that in the background while continuing to inhabit a very simple intention of movement.

in dance, what the teacher was calling “non-intentional” movement is just as important as this. for him, good dance is unpredictable to the dancer too, even if it derives out of an inner necessity -- of how the previous movement unfolds into the next one. you don’t know how the body will move in response to your starting point, even if the whole dance is implicit in your starting position – you just carefully unfold what is there in the body/mind as a response to your starting point (the sentence or image that you are living / exploring). and slowness, a very special take on concentration (carefulness to not get sidetracked by some unrecognized impulse, thus “breaking” the “thread” that one is unfolding), and determination are a kind of training tool: one learns to see the impulses to “move”, the impulses to “do”, the impulses to “reflect” or “express” something in a certain preset way – like using “moves” that one has seen in other dancers. one also starts seeing the mind’s tendency to flee from the immediate context in which it is.

for the teacher with whom i trained, all this is an element in what he sees as a sacred mission of the dancer (he used the word “sacred”, and i think it fully makes sense). for him, true dance is a spiritual practice and not a form of entertainment – neither for the performer, nor for the audience. the performer learns to inhabit a way of being characterized by a deep attunement to what is there at the level of the body/mind, and, at the same time, by detachment rooted in a kind of recognition. one learns to recognize a lot of previously unrecognized impulses – and to abstain from them – continuing to act from a different layer of the body/mind, one of radical openness, authenticity, and presence. and the fundamental intention is to challenge the audience, not to entertain it: to show the audience that a different way of inhabiting life is possible. this reminded me of Rilke’s final verse of Archaic Torso of Apollo: seeing a fragment of an archaic statue, the poetic voice feels challenged by it, and the “message” it gets from looking at it is “you must change your life”. for my Butoh teacher, this is the fundamental function of art: to challenge the audience to live differently by inhabiting a different way of being while on the stage.

i deeply resonated with all this. and i intend to keep dancing with this attitude – and maybe writing about it. of course, there is a lot more to be said about all this -- and about its implications for how one sees practice after having been exposed to all this. but i have yet to metabolize )))

[and i might add that all this deepened my appreciation for Eckhart Tolle lol. on my way back, i listened again to an audio program of Tolle's that i purchased as a gift for someone a couple of years ago -- and was surprised that, while it still has stuff that seems misleading to me, it seems waaaay less misleading than 90% of the stuff i read or listened to in the 2 decades i am interested in "spirituality".]

[and adding a link to a video of a Butoh performance in a style that is quite close to what i studied with my teacher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw5mF5in80Q ]

15 November 2022

i'm in a period of cluster headaches. they started a bit differently this time -- so i tried to see if i can bear them without medication for the first couple of weeks -- not a really smart move.

both the headaches and the medication have an effect on how the mind works. the headaches create a mix of exhaustion and irritability; in good conditions -- when i am alone or in company of someone who knows how to not express anxiety -- they were unexpectedly bearable at an emotional level, even if they were physically very taxing. the way of "managing" pain that i came to trust -- not going into details, not letting attention be pulled into the details of pain, which would deepen the aversion, but trusting the habit of dwelling with the body and of recognizing the wider context -- is the healthiest one that i know. there was irritability, there was desire for pain to go away, there was desire for finding ways for it to go away, it was still taken personally, so it was a good reality check. illness is always a good reality check. illness is one of the ways the body is showing up as not being under our control -- not being the way we want it to be, when we want it to be.

the medication -- an antiepileptic which is also used for the treatment of migraines, which i also used in 2020, when i had my last cluster episode, so i'm familiar with how it works -- is showing a different side of the body/mind than the pain. what shows up first is difficulty concentrating. it is actually very funny to watch it. the unfocused state, if awareness is present, is not restless, as it is when one is not aware. it is characterized by subtle movements of thought -- and now i couldn't care less about these movements, except when i notice something that i investigate (like lust, for example). another aspect that shows up in a similar way as 2 years ago is forgetfulness -- forgetting from hour to hour or from day to day certain tasks that i propose to myself. this forgetfulness does not affect, though, what i regard as practice -- i don't forget to remind myself to watch and learn ))) -- and i actually don't need any rembembrance of the context of the body-there -- pain, which is still there, albeit milder, takes care to remind me of itself, and the habit of body-awareness is quite strong. another effect the medication has is on speech -- it becomes disjointed, i beat around the bush, looking for words, or have to make longer pauses, looking for words. also, because i am distracted, i make more unfounded assumptions than in my "normal" functioning. so, again, all this is seeing "how the body shapes the mind" -- how taking the medication for my condition is shaping how the mind reacts. and part of the practice is seeing that.

with all this, the field of relational practice is becoming another essential part. seeing how am i with others, given that the body/mind are stirred in the way they are stirred. and trying to stir in the others as little unwholesomeness as i can. which is quite the ride now. conversations in which something is stirred in myself, in another, or in both -- seeing why this was stirred, what made me bite the bait and run with it, what defuses it, what are the patterns -- are part of this work. ideally, i would need a container of seclusion for that. i don't have it now.

in my sitting practice -- which is basically sitting in silence and sensitivity, letting what is there be there -- i noticed a very interesting phenomenon lately -- the coming up of "resolves" that are very reminiscent of early Buddhist texts. as i sit there for a while, not being alone in the house (i live at my mother's place for the last couple of months), the very strong desire for seclusion comes up. the very strong desire for living in a very silent environment. or the very strong desire for renunciation (which makes me then question why i don't renounce yet -- and how a renunciate life can look life for me -- even a partial one). this does not come up with a desire to change the way i am practicing -- but with a very deep confidence in it, and with a desire to deepen it -- to take it as far as it can take me when i am secluded, resolute, and renunciate -- which am not yet. so this is the fracture that i see in myself now, and the place where the striving is, and what i still have to figure out. there is a part of me that thinks that, ideally, for the full fruit of the mode of practice that i cultivate, i need seclusion and full renunciation. but i practice without it, and i see some fruit without it. and i also see the leaning towards seclusion and renunciation forming itself, by itself. what i am not sure yet is if that is a striving towards a projected future state of an imagined "me without a problem", or a natural leaning towards release, that will find its way of expressing itself. i guess i will see. occasionally, the context of remembrance of death comes up as well -- knowing that i can die at any moment does not change much in how i see practice, and does not create any additional desire, but gives more weight to the resolves of seclusion, renunciation, and "deepening" of the practice -- wanting to taste its "full fruit". this "wanting" is something i'd like to explore further.