mental health

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Vipassana Notes: Body, Change, Thought, Feeling

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There are a whole bunch of different types of meditation practices. I believe these notes are from a lecture on Vipassana. Provides some thoughts and frame work for meditative exercises and how to work with your attention.

Mindfulness of the body:
Be aware breathing in
Be aware breathing out
Breathing knowing short and or long
Experience the whole body breathing
Experience the wholeness of the breath
Calm the breath
Calm the body

Identify other bodily feelings
Meditate on them
Notice their length, Can you sustain you attention there
Do they shift to other places
Does they intensify, or subside

Changing nature of elements
“I am” identifying
What calls your attention becomes the object of the meditation
Notice how things are
How long until it changes
How long until your attention drifts
Be aware of the drift
See if u can catch the drift
As u send your attention
Around the body
Drift and return
What remains
When u are gone
Sounds happen
Sensation is effortless
Return to the breath
Open to your changing sensations
When do you drift
How long have u been gone
Calmly,  softly, gently w humor return and breath and be aware of breathing, there is a body.
End

Mindless of Feeling
Pleasantness, unpleasant, neutral
Feeling tones, habitual desire
Neutral is delusion
Clear recognition of feeling no judgement
Feeling from the physical body
Pleasant and unpleasant and neutral feelings
Contemplating the disappearance
of those feelings

The mind free of wanting
Mindfulness of heart/mind
Be aware Mind states and emotions
conditions
Desire, Greed, aversion, delusion or absence of.

What is and is not skillful. Leads to happiness or suffering.  What to cultivate?
Noticing the mind states. What is the minds attitude right now. Receptive or rejecting, clear or delusional, wanting or not wanting?
Concentrated or directed? Joy, boredom.

When you drift
Return to the body and repeat

Mindfulness of thought
I am aware I am thinking
It wanders naturally
The wandering mind is not the problem but the attitude.
Not prevent thinking but recognize when it arises giving u more space to integrate them
Unaware we act our thoughts
They become our inclinations
Skillfull Mind habits
What is the content of my thoughts
What is a thought
A passing thing
Notice the patterns
Am I Planning
Am I Judging
Am I Remembering
Am I Fantasizing


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Notes on Mark Epstein's, Thoughts Without a Thinker

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This year I invested in reading, studying and practicing meditation. One of the best books I came across was Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker . Rather than try to regurgitate everything I’m just going to share a set of questions/quotes/statements from my notes.

  • Even pain can be interesting. Sitting in meditation is often about investing in the examination of discomfort. When it hurts is when you start learning. Pulling a way, trying to hide from pain gives it leverage. Welcoming it, trying to look at it closely, it transforms.

  • Other people, our own minds, and death. These are our challenges. Our greatest fear.

  • What are we afraid to learn?

  • Resistance, you are that which u resist.

  • Transitional space, your teddy bear, the security blanket. The totems that carry between the maturation points of our lives.

  • These weeds, these waves, they will help u. The things that obstruct you, you need.

  • Powers of observation, not judgement.

  • How do u contribute to your pain?

  • When something could have happened but did not. This lives in the flesh not the words.

  • Meditation on your mother...carefully tread.

  • The family is the worst invention of God that never existed

  • Meditation has a certain culture bias.

  • Am I lovable? Estranged or enmeshed?