Jigme Sengye's practice journal.

hey! Thanks for the link at the beginning of your journal...also this helps me resolve/see more clearly to do and how to do this note-ing practice.

Glad you're posting!!

Thanks and you're welcome. Though I have to say that I'm having some trouble writing about my practice if I don't do it immediately after sitting. I did 40-something minutes of rising and falling this morning, the 4 foundations earlier tonight for about 48 minutes and about 20 minutes of rising and falling just now. The first sitting tonight was dominated by sensations of body-wide vibrations (mostly of the circular kind) and upward pulses from the base of the spine, which would actually push me up and support me. Despite this making my spine essentially perfectly erect, I still had uncomfortable pressure on the lower back. I didn't detect much going on during mind states other than occasionally entering into brief dream states (and the imaging thoughts that mostly went with them when noting thoughts), which I wouldn't try to escape from but would rather just note. I noted calm and equanimous, but I don't know if it fits as there was an edgy impatient reaction as the session went on (I noted see how it feels impatient towards the end in the bystander section). As I was doing the bystander, the impatient get off the cushion feelings got much stronger in the last few minutes, with intensified feeling of leg numbness (I usually don't care that my legs go numb) and the silly insistent paranoid worry "what if I didn't set the alarm right" that make me want to stop sitting and check what time it is.

I did the rising and falling briefly just now and my head started feeling stuffy from an odd pressure sensation.

Kenneth had told me that the n̈anas are lenses. All sensations are seen through the lens of the n̈ana one is at. The same spinning body-wide vibrations that felt just fine during most of my sittings today felt very edgy, annoying and restless as I was trying to sleep just now. My mental state as I was not quite dozing off and then coming back to wakefulness was basically "Arghh!!! Stop bugging me!" There was an itchy, skin-crawling restlessness to my mental state. Being fully awake and at my desk has toned that down quite a bit. It is normal for me to feel vibrations from meditation very intensely when I try to go to sleep, but the sensations are usually pleasant.

I woke up too late to sit this morning. The day was filled with restless aversion for no particular reason, which entirely went away with exercise in the evening. I just sat for an hour and did the four foundations of mindfulness with at least half an hour of the bystander. I started out with body sensations and said most of them out loud, same with vedana. As usual, the dominant sensations were pleasant vibrations and some itching and a bit of unpleasant lower back pressure. In mind states I was able to fairly consistently note when I would go into dream states and had moments of drowsiness (not too many, I was fairly alert) and just stayed within those deeper states and continued noting without drifting off in dreams for more than an instant (which I'd note). The thoughts in these states were mostly imaging with a bit of mental talk, most of which I caught and noted. In the bystander I felt myself going into a deeper than normal state that felt a bit dreamlike without the dream and had no problem noting within it. I also had more vivid persistent image thought memories coming up for a few minutes (they'd get noted, went away, came back with another image, noted, etc...), followed by the mind getting absorbed in the vibrations in the belly for a few minutes. I continued having the usual pleasant vibrations throughout the body and a shooting vibration going up the spine that briefly canceled out the minor lower back pain and spontaneously made my spine completely straight and erect, supporting me for a few minutes. Leg pain appeared along with numbness, and eventually a slowly spinning mildly soothing heat sensation throughout the legs that seemed to reduce the numbness and pain (which started coming back with a vengeance towards the end of the sitting, but also turned mostly vibratory) and some impatience at the end which made me get up.

I sat for another 26 minutes and followed rising and falling along with a bit of vedana. The mind was initially drawn to (more like sucked into) the very fine and pleasant vibrations in the belly. The vibrations were more pleasant than during the earlier sitting. I remembered the resolve to attain the highest n̈ana I had access to (I'd forgotten it in the earlier sitting). I again noticed occasional gaps between perceptible parts of rising and falling. My mind wandered a bit during these gaps (the beginning of the sitting was focused, but became less so, as it was rather late and a bit of sleepiness crept in) and came back to the rising and falling at the start of every breath. In one of these instances of wandering mind I got into something like a mildly pleasant dream state and spread the sensation of that throughout the body (I've done this several times since speaking to Kenneth last Saturday), it tends to make me go into a deeper state of mind. I've noticed myself getting into these dreamy mental states spontaneously a fair bit and still managing to maintain a focus on the object of concentration, albeit a looser one. I hope I'm doing this correctly. The vibrations didn't stay so pleasant and shifted down into neutral. I got a lot of leg numbness and some discomfort and ended the sitting.

I sat for 10 minutes this morning and 55 minutes tonight. I tried to follow rising and falling, but for most of this sitting I either couldn't stay concentrated on it or couldn't focus on it even when I was trying hard and repeatedly. I was plagued by thoughts at first and some drowsiness. My concentration got a bit better (or clearer, I got a surge of pleasant mental energy) and I followed the rising and falling closely for a brief period and then lost it again as I got lost in thought. I had a brief moment of fearful imagery. The usual turning vibration I always get started rght away when I sat and changed at one point in a way that made me sway from side to side. I actually opened my eyes at one point and saw that I was indeed swaying. This went away for a bit as concentration got tighter and then came back with just my head swaying. I tried briefly switching to just noting physical sensations for a brief period, this was very easy (vibration, vibration, vibration...). I switched back to rising and falling and had trouble again. Later after another attempt at following rising and falling, there was a brief falling into a pleasant dreamy "deep" state that I came out of as I felt the uncomfortable slump in my lower back. As this went away, following rising and falling became easier, the upward spine-straightening vibration turned on for a bit, followed by some restlessness, and again good following of rising and falling. At some point during the middle of the meditation (I can't place it in the chronology, but it was while I was having trouble following rising and falling) I felt vibratory echoes of the rising and falling even when I wasn't breathing, that felt like fast rising and falling vibratory feelings going up in a line. It was easier to concentrate on these than the actual abdominal movement. In the past these have died down fairly quickly in a long gap between breaths, but this time I could feel it for several breaths.

While I'm afraid of mistaking the effects of drowsiness for dissolution and mapping things in ways that really don't fit, I can discern something like the jhanic arc in last night's sitting. It may have been that I was mostly in dissolution, got a bit of knowledge of fear, went back into dissolution, back down into A&P, had a bit of 3C.
I'm not feeling the happy chilled out description of dissolution that Kenneth has given in kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/The+...sight+%28Part+One%29 , which matches what I've read in Mahasi Sayadaw's "The Progress of Insight". On the other hand the description of dissolution in MCTB (page 183 of the pdf version) of the periphery of attention dominating and frustrating attempts to focus on the center matches exactly what I was experiencing last night.

I've been procrastinating sitting until late at night for the past three days, really for no good reason. I've noticed I tend to do this on weekends. I sat last night for 40 minutes from around 11:50 and did the four foundations of mindfulness. I wasn't drowsy last night, though it was a challenging sitting, as I've dropped noting vibrations, which I was sort of using as a concentration crutch.

This morning I sat for around 50 minutes. I think I may have gotten a second of fear towards the beginning of the sitting (I can't remember what the fear was about). Every time I tried to lightly feel and note the rising and falling there was a mildly unpleasant reaction and a tightening that made me want to back off from it, I couldn't find a way to comfortably approach it to note it. I then found this with most sensations. I switched to 4 foundations for a very short while and had no problem noting and then went back to my attempts at noting rising and falling but with a light amount of 4 foundations thrown in (thinking, unpleasant...), especially vedana. There was also a fairly constant desire to give up and go back to bed and get more sleep, which I kept noting and not giving into. I can't say I was particularly lucid. Also, it was tricky to find things to note in a way that consistently worked (there were long gaps where I just waited to just tune into the rising and falling or sensations peripheral to it in a way that wasn't uncomfortable or too tight).

I haven't had much time for journaling this week and my time for sitting slipped on Tuesday and Wednesday. I just did short sits at night. Last night was 59 minutes. The only detail I can remember from it was a very wide (in the sense of a feeling of mental space) and mildly positive sort of rapture feeling, which I'd also gotten instances of earlier in the week. Tonight was 56 minutes during which I did the four foundations. There was a lot of restlessness and mild but consistent unpleasantness to physical and mental sensations and sharp itching sensations. I'd occasionally slip into short dream states from drowsiness and noted out loud for half of the sitting to stay awake. I also continued to briefly slip into concentration states, but I can't remember them well enough to characterize them at the moment.

I came back home yesterday from a 32-day retreat at TMC in San Jose. Case Study # 5 from The Idiot's Guide to Dharma Diagnosis describes exactly what happened to me this Monday, with the blip happening during Sayadawgi U Pandita's dhamma talk. I had way too much happy unfocused energy from the cool afterglow for the next day to meditate properly (or really at all, just couldn't concentrate after being handed what felt like a new brain), sensations felt like silk and I had this lovely cool sensation in what felt like the center of my head. As it mentions in the case study it felt like a big weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I got equanimity the day before, also during Sayadawgi's U Pandita's dhamma talk (because of the translation, the talks were quite long, so those were the longest and generally the best meditations of the day, great opportunities for progress). I was able to get equanimity because I'd just spoken with Sayadaw U Khemika who had translated anatta as "uncontrollable" after I'd asked him exactly how you know that you're really experiencing the actual three characteristics. That word unlocked the whole thing from me. His very generous hour-long explanation went through all the ñanas (I'd forgotten the physical aspects of that part of the map) and made me realize that I'd just gone through the dukha ñanas. I'd previously thought I'd just spent the last two weeks in A&P and being completely bored with it. The dukha ñanas lurk and play a subtle game, if they had made me properly depressed at all, I'd have been extremely happy as I'd have spotted them immediately and gone "aha, gotcha, Dark Night!", instead they threw boredom with mildly pleasant and extremely strong unending fast vibratory sensations and doubt at the instructions and any notion at progress. (continued)

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When you're observing vibrations, impermanence is a gimme. I spent those last two weeks just telling the vibrations, "Hey! I just noted impermanence, craving and vibration for the billionth time, get on with it already, give me some dukha ñanas, this object is a waste of time, I'm bored!" Clear sign of the dukha ñanas, I was just being too caught up in the narrative of "the instructions of following the strongest sensation are wrong, I should ignore the Sayadaws and just note rising and falling".
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Armed with "uncontrollable", in addition to "unsatisfactory" (and "craving, and "aversion) and the obvious impermanence I just noted all of the objects (which were either thoughts and emotions or vibrations), which were really all over the place, throughout the body whizzing by, showing up, leaving right away and then coming back after I'd noted the next thing. It was like a packed dance floor with strobe lights. I experienced two phases of equanimity. The first was a very gross (as in not subtle at all) happy state where my mind would look at every sensation and say "hey you sensation, I don't care! Haha!". I knew immediately what nana I was in, I was having some fun and I assumed this silly happy state with the big goofy grin on my face wouldn't last and I'd calm down. This state had the three characteristics written all over it. Another odd aspect was that my area of observation actually wanted to be bigger than the body and was trying to push out of it. Part of this manifested as some pressure on the ribcage (from the inside pushing out) and a reluctance (or confusion) to reduce the area of attention to my feet or even the length of my legs during walking meditation, which I found I just couldn't do. I just wanted to stand and bask in this ridiculous-feeling and fun state. I calmed down entirely for the last sitting of the day and got into what struck as an actual equanimity state. The pleasure of arhats and avoiding indulging in desire made sense. I decided to aggressively note the three characteristics of every single sensation to get stream entry in that sitting. It didn't happen, and I realized later that even having a strategy at that point had been a dumb idea. The progress of insight takes care of itself as long as you follow the instructions. I had too much energy to sleep and cursed myself for not getting sleep (two and half hours) and missing this grand opportunity.

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I managed some equanimity in the first and possibly second sitting of the day, but then the feeling of sleep deprivation hit and the recriminations with it. And then in the 3 to 4 sitting I recognized Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance (wanting to stop sitting and sleep!). For the first time in the retreat I recognized a dukha ñana (not counting the very obvious two one or two second bouts of fear I got waking up one morning), in this case re-observation. In the 4 PM juice break and walking meditation, I purposefully calmed down and gladdened my mind by smiling. I may have thought of some jokes. I don't know how much I was noting during the 5 PM dhamma talk, I don't think I was doing it very intently at all. I dozed off maybe four times, each for a second and got these very vivid dreams, each a short movie, including dialogue and characters. I had one last one second dozing off movie and woke up to a little rush down my neck and then a few seconds later the blip happened. There was no dream, no blackout, nothing. I think I saw a slight and quick vibration in the visual space immediately after and I felt completely different. Any feeling of drowsiness was gone and I had the coolness and mental energy I described. I asked myself, what just happened? Oh my god, was that it? As I tried to doubt, doubt didn't work. There was no logical reason why it could be something else.

I did mention all this in the last interview, the next morning, but didn't get any confirmation and didn't press for one. I've had some minor doubts, but I just can't think of anything else it could be.

Pop.

Congrats jigmesengye!!!!!!!! Smells like significant progress.

Congrats! Well done. (And a helpful post, thanks for typing all of that!)

Thanks for the congrats. The retreat report is incomplete as I didn't go into what I did over the first two weeks, though it also occurs to me now (after having spoken with Kenneth) that my assessment of it may have been just as inaccurate as my assessment of the last two weeks of the retreat was while I was experiencing it (I thought I was in A&P and was actually in dukha ñanas). Time will tell. As I get to get a better feel for each ñana, I'll have a better idea of what some of that stuff was, as opposed to what I thought it was at the time.

One gem from Kenneth that I forgot to mention is "see how it catastrophizes". Always worth a chuckle and seriously useful. I recommend to anyone to note that if they are spinning nasty or depressing scenario thoughts, it's worth a try. It wonderfully disembeds from negative thoughts. It may be one of the reasons the dukha ñanas were no dark night for me, at least not this time. It was much more useful than my brief attempt to note intense leg pain on my first vipassana retreat as "banana", which was also worth a chuckle the first time, but I learned from that experiment that deliberately noting incorrectly with joke labels doesn't produce the desired emotional response of decreasing aversion, though actually noting aversion for the emotional response to pain was extremely useful to me in this last retreat. I figured out one night that nearly all of my sensations had craving and aversion networks tied to them (or were the product of those two). At one point in walking meditation I started mentally welcoming mosquitoes to have a drink (that really didn't last long) so I could test out this new toy by aggressively noting aversion. The power of appropriate words when noting is fascinating.

One other interesting thing I found is that each new trick of this type or nuance to the technique I discovered was extremely powerful the first day I tried it, but then faded in effect (like noting the movement and sensation of each joint in the leg in walking meditation or counting steps up to ten to keep the mind present, like the Zen breath counting exercise where you start back at one if you miss one, probably not good walking meditation, but better than a wandering mind) and became another tool in the toolkit to pull out when needed. As I write this, it's only just occurred to me to note and take apart novelty factor.

I just sat for an hour, from 11:37 to 12:37. I've been struggling to write reports this week. I'm still doing the exercise from the retreat, which is to note the strongest sensation until it passes away. Kenneth has told me I'm in the review ñana. while I can note everything I feel, it's a bit confusing. The sensations behave differently from before stream entry. Specifically, they don't stick around for very long and feel shallow. I feel very little investment in them when I feel them and apart from itching and minor leg numbness they all feel slightly pleasant. I do feel several things that feel like ñanas and others that feel like brief spurts of entry into 5th jhana. Because of how late I sat and how late I've been sitting in general (though consistently for an hour a night since Sunday, 30 and then 40 minutes the last two mornings, 30 or so minutes the nights before Sunday) drowsiness is a factor, but I'm much better able to note it than before and also note other things when feeling its effect. There is very little or no dozing off. What extremely little dozing off spurts I may have had one or two nights ago (I wish I'd stayed up later to write about it) may have been fruitions, I'm not sure. There was a feeling of a reset, a suddenness of something and a clearing of drowsiness, but I do remember having dozed off in similar ways in the past and I can't detect the clear progression that Kenneth described to me, for lack of being able to clearly recognize the symptoms of all of my ñanas. (continued)

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Tonight, I did feel bouts of itchiness, which I associate with the 3rd ñana, a gentle rush up of pulsing vibration, more softly flowing vibrations, some vibrations in the belly, soft vibration in a point at the top front of the head, a short but strong bout of feeling love (I had a memory of the metta chant from the retreat and the love came up), turning vibrations, several brief bouts of body swaying from side to side, short bouts of thoughts, short and weak restless thoughts at the end of the sitting, minor right leg numbness and heat from the East Coast heat wave. None of this stuff lasts long at all.

Wow, just read through your journal here, very inspiring! Congratulations!

I also saw a few mentions of chi flow during noting, and the (really interesting) description of the energy circuit up the back and down the front of the body on April 30 notes seemed probably chi related to me. If you have the chance, I'd love to hear more on how you see the two relating, and also what kind of chi kung you practice.

Are there any feelings that are chi kung specific that you find coming up during noting? As you asked on my notes, what sensations of chi kung do you notice persist with noting practice?

Also I am quite curious if you've noticed any changes in your chi kung practice since the "pop". : )

My apologies, Ian (and thanks for the congrats!), the description I posted to your thread had to be heavily edited to meet the 2000-character limit on this board (not that I'm complaining, it's discipline to keep my posts to the point). When I'm posting here I'm trying to fit within the terminology of vipassana and this community, rather than my previous practice, but I can describe the sensations with the chi kung terminology. The two circuits in front and back are the du and ren parts of the microcosmic orbit. My previous practice opened up the front two years ago (but not through deliberately tracing a line down from the top) so that it always flows down when I'm in a good state of rest (except when it circles in a slow horizontal pattern, which for me might be a sign of dissolution, not entirely sure). This feeds the dantien, which bounces or vibrates like a superball (frequently fast, sometimes slow, but it's a ball) or changes phases (becoming less solid) and buzzes. Yogic-type breathing practices (not following rising and falling) make it go electrical and I'm currently avoiding that. The back opened up from vipassana practice (again, the body just did it, I was busy noting according to Kenneth's instructions) a bit starting in the practice you mentioned on April 30 and stayed for a few days and way, way more, like a fast, furious pounding river, during this last retreat. I really think the most valuable thing I got from my previous chi kung practice was a good meditative base, rather than the observable chi effects. From a chi kung perspective those things are always the tip of the iceberg of some deeper process, which I'm better equipped at this point to understand from a vipassana perspective than anything Taoist. The flow gets fed from the baihui and xingmen points and a point at the top of the head towards the back.(continued)

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I feel a thumping pressure at these points and occasionally it felt like the whole top of the skull was being opened up fully and my brain was fed a heavy mass of pleasant energy. The flow of chi (or vibrations, depending on how you see it) during the retreat would go straight down from these points, seemingly to the dantien and up ren and down du, sometimes at the fastest speed I could note, sometimes too fast. Kenneth doesn't emphasize fast noting and the Sayadaws don't like fast labeling, though they told me as long as I could fully take in the sensation, I was noting it, despite the lack of a verbal label (I found stopping labelling makes my mind wander). I'd keep on going to the sayadaws to report these sensations. I was tired of it (but it's really easy to note), but they thought it was a sign of progress and good concentration and kept on telling me to continue or just work on quality control so I could note everything else as continuously. I have greed for chi so I felt noting the craving might do some good. (continued)

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As of stream entry (or maybe just during this review phase, I'm not sure), I'm just not feeling these sensations in the same way. The weight that got taken off of my shoulders (and still hasn't come back, though it's only been ten days. I've gone back to work and had my habitual verbal sparring matches with my manager, but I wasn't invested in it and it just didn't bug me nearly as much as it usually does.) also took the intensity of everything with it. The chi sensations are there , the accumulation in the dantien is still there, the vibratory itches, numbness, etc... is all still there, but it's all muted and doesn't stick around for long. It's not the strobe light fast paced arising and disappearing of sensations effect of my experience of equanimity, but rather the sensations that used to stick around for the better part of a sitting show up for a few minutes, make a half-hearted effort at grabbing my attention and then it's the turn of the next sensation. These are all the same physical sensations and patterns I had throughout the month-long retreat except they don't have much power. I'm sure all this is going to change again. (continued)

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For what it's worth, the second and third samatha jhanas have a chi kung feel (I'm barely familiar with them, my assessment may change) to them and the 5th is actually the basis of the meditation I'm supposed to do throughout zhineng chi kung (I haven't tried it that way yet). Once I can do those reliably on cue, once I have time for daily chi kung practice again (not until I'm much better at vipassana), this should make a big difference in the zhineng chi kung practice, which I intend to return to eventually for its anti-aging and medical effects.

One last note on this subject. I've read reports from other people that they got pain in the third eye during the dukha ñanas. I didn't. I don't know what people mean by the third eye exactly, but I did something like samatha for over a year with the yintang (mid-eyebrow point) and again got more accumulation there during the retreat, but only mild unpleasantness on occasion when it overflowed. Maybe having well-defined energy patterns helps with some of the unpleasant physical stuff that people experience during the dukha ñanas. At this point, I can't be sure, it's just a vague hypothesis. On the other hand I did get some nasty stuff in my first Mahasi vipassana retreat, because from a chi kung perspective, I thought it was chi going in the wrong direction, got scared, tried to fight it and ended up with some weird blockages, which I later cleared with zhineng chi kung and which in this retreat arose again spontaneously and then cleared themselves through more vipassana. One sayadaw told me to ignore it, when I followed his advice, one retreat later, it worked out. Kenneth told me to become an expert in this phenomena and I figured it out, it was just panic because I was holding on to my limited understanding of my previous practice. Possibly my first taste of the fear ñana.