FAQ: Why Do I Feel So Average In Daily Life After Years of Meditation?

[ardacigin]

In this post, I'm going to help you figure out why the moment-to-moment experience of your daily life, activities and behaviors have seen no improvements or changes after years of meditation. Then I'll provide you with a technique you can practice in formal sessions and bring it to daily life.

This transformation requires deliberate daily practice and effort. You won't find much value here if you are looking for magic tricks.

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Contrary to common understanding, meditation is not actually about cultivating exclusive attention (concentration) to a particular object. That is one aspect of the practice you can do for the development of certain skills. That's it.

A more central part of meditation is the development of metacognitive awareness, equanimity, joy and their sub-skill - whole body awareness. We'll focus on these aspects and try to spread the concentration muscle to the whole body with breath sensations.

 But before we get to that, we need to understand why this is important. Ask most meditators and they will mostly tell you that it is about generating focus to a particular object. Rather than approaching the practice from a narrowing of attention, let's start with a more solid foundation.

As you contract attention to an object in daily life, it collapses awareness of everything else.

When you are watching Game of Thrones, the unconscious mind system doesn't see much value in projecting the sensations of the couch and the feeling of  hedonic comfort that currently lies in your posture. It bypasses and filters all that information to make your life simpler. It is easier to focus on Game of Thrones that way.

Well, it looks that way at least. See, regardless of whether you naturally filter these sensations or not, the unconscious mind needs to project something to the conscious awareness. Unless you are mindful in the process, what you are going to experience will be annoyance, boredom, striving, grasping and discontent.

All of these mental reactions have a deeper source you can completely yank out after years of practice BUT first, you need to develop the skills which will enable you to do that.

Our default option was to bypass and filter as much information unrelated to the task at hand. Well, let's practice not doing that and allow more sensory information to be generated in the entirety of mind and body. Instead of collapsing awareness with concentration, let's strengthen it.

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Experiencing the Whole Body with the Breath: Very-Lite Jhana System

It’s possible to become an advanced meditator by just focusing over and over on the breath at the nose and ignoring subtle distractions until they fade away, but that can take a very long time. Learning to enhance awareness each time it collapses can be a torturous process.

Experiencing the whole body with the breath is a faster and more enjoyable method that makes it much easier to completely ignore distractions.

This practice involves clearly defining then gradually expanding the scope of your attention until it includes sensations related to breath throughout the entire body all at once.

Make sure that you are not dealing with lots of sleepiness or dullness prior to engaging in this practice. Try to remain as alert as possible. Fortunately, this process will enhance energy levels and develop conscious power in the long term.

The method itself builds on the body-scanning practice you learned in Stage 5 in Culadasa's book 'The Mind Illuminated'.

1- Just as with the body scan, you first direct your attention to the breath at the abdomen. Then, making sure that peripheral awareness of the breath at the abdomen doesn’t fade, you shift your attention to a particular body part, such as your hand.

Define your scope of attention to include that area only. Then further refine your scope to include only the breath sensations in the hand. Ignore all other sensations by excluding them completely from attention, but let them remain in peripheral awareness. Next, move to another body part, perhaps the forearm, and do the same thing.

Each moment of attention should include a very strong intention to focus clearly on breath-related sensations and to exclude everything else.

What is important in this process is to enhance awareness of hedonic feelings. Even if you focus on breath sensations in a particular location, that will either feel pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. There is no other option. So, let's add a flair of vibrancy, joy and pleasure to the process.

2- As you experience (and generate) changing and flickering sensations to various parts of your body, smile physically and try to experience the exact same sensations as more pleasurable and exciting. You don't want dryness to pervade your mind and body. 

Serene, changing and pleasurable breath related sensations are starting to be experiened in arms, legs, forearms,head. In each in-breath and our-breath.

3- You are not constricting attention to the breath at the nose just yet. Keep the awareness open and after you are comfortable with this process, try to feel changing and pleasant sensations in the whole body. Not in particular locations. 

Feel it more holistic as the awareness and pleasantness spreads to the whole body along with clear changing sensations in various parts of the body. You will lose some of the resolution power from before but this time the object is the entire mind and whole body. This process is going to train conscious power to the next tier of strength.

4- Finally, bring the attention to the breath at the tip of the bose WHILE continuing to experience the whole body, pleasure and changing sensations in various parts of the body. 

Now you are also investigating in-breath and out-breath while step 3 activates at full force. This will add another layer of training for your conscious power circuits.

Make sure you don't lose joyfulness, pleasure, relaxed ease and happiness in any of instructions. Awareness of mental states is a key part of mindfulness and can't be discarded. When feelings of annoyance, impatience etc arises, re-generate some ease with smiling and relaxation of tense muscles.

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Do this practice everyday in formal sessions. But how am I going to bring it to my actual life?

You are going to intend to bring this whole body open awareness while watching Game of Thrones, playing the piano, and eating. When you fail and get obsessively focused on an activity, strengthen the whole body awareness again and re-train your mind to maintain it while doing these activities.

In all activities, this awareness can be practiced. There are no exceptions apart from sleep states.

Whenever you feel things are so hard and require so much effort, just remember the ease and pleasure in whole body awareness and try to replicate that mental state again as you are washing the dishes.

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Hope this helps. I suggest doing this system of training for 30-60 days straight.

With many hours of formal and informal deliberate practice per day. (2-6 hours) Then the results will speak for themselves.

Much love,

Arda

 

 

 

Edited March 24, 2022 by ardacigin

[_Archangel_]

@ardacigin Wow. i was just corrently thinking about you posts about TMI and then THIS comes at hand
I spent 1.5 years practicing Kriya Yoga, and for several reasons i decided to switch to TMI, i think i'm at stage 4 by the descriptions in the book.
i'm 2 weeks in with a 45 min daily sit, following the breath at the nose with I. M. Awereness

Yet, i have a "problem".
every time i sitted, i had signs of energy activity(vibrations, tinglings, poppings, sounds), with pleasure and without, which are not yet mentioned at stage 4, and should appear later on.

The activity increase by the minutes, but had its peak with my earlest sits in terms of intensity. now it kind of subdued.

i suspect this is due to the Kriya practice i've done, where i'm already familiar with energy stuff.

i'm still dealing with gross distractions tho, little strong Dullness.
i will probably increase the duration of the sit to 1 hour soon.

any tips? Should i go by the book and ignore everithing?

[ardacigin]

@_Archangel_ Hi there,

You can easily have these persistent piti sensations (energy, movement, flickering sensations) along with some level of pleasure and joy in any stage of the practice. But that doesn't mean you are stage 8+ for example.

Definitely use the open awareness, pleasure, joy and piti to strengthen mindfulness. Make sure breath attention doesnt chip away at your pleasure, piti or anythin else. Keep peripheral awareness at MAX for whole body while stabilizing attention.

Gross distractions will get eliminated after your awareness develops further. Dullness is an habitual issue that will also resolve itself when more conscious power is available to the mind.

Body awareness is key. Dullness means your awareness collapses. Do the technique I've described here. It will help you. It is a stage 6 technique but still, practice it with clear intentions and a joyous attitude.

Edited March 27, 2022 by ardacigin

[_Archangel_]

@ardacigin Thanks

[softlyblossoming]

@ardacigin Hi, Arda, great thread . Is piti the most important factor for developing mindfulness? I feel like I have the most control over my mind when I have lots of piti.

Thanks and all the best,

Robert

[ardacigin]

14 hours ago, softlyblossoming said:

@ardacigin Hi, Arda, great thread . Is piti the most important factor for developing mindfulness? I feel like I have the most control over my mind when I have lots of piti.

Thanks and all the best,

Robert

Piti is important but not required. In samatha vipassana style of training, piti is how the mind slowly releases its tension, develops some pleasure, joy and as a consequence, equanimity.

[softlyblossoming]

@ardacigin Thank you. Is equanimity the most important? Do we know if there's an in-general sort of order of importance, or if it varies from person to person? 

[ardacigin]

8 hours ago, softlyblossoming said:

@ardacigin Thank you. Is equanimity the most important? Do we know if there's an in-general sort of order of importance, or if it varies from person to person? 

Equanimity is absolutely essential.

The way you develop is through both samatha and insight techniques. They develop equanimity in different ways.

Samatha trains the mind to generate and sustain pleasant sense percepts, get into flow states and strengthen concentration + awareness.

Insight allows for the deepest recesses of the psyche to reprogram itself based on no-self, impermanence, emptiness, causal interdependence and non-craving.

The result is ever-increasing depth and breadth of equanimity.

Edited March 31, 2022 by ardacigin