thymamai said:
...I get antsy and have the usual doubts everyone else has, like what is being accomplished and how many other things I could be working on with this precious time, etc...
When I decided to begin practicing meditation as a serious discipline 37 years ago (at the ripe age of 19), I often times would get the same feelings. However, I persisted (and read a crapload of really good books about meditation at other times of the day when I wasn't working)and it would subside eventually.
Back then, I read all about the "levels" of mind and "benefits" of regular practice, even though I experienced only a little tiny bit of any such phenomena after the first 6 months of serious, disciplined, get-up-at-4:00 a.m. and sit for at least 45 minutes, if not a full hour type meditation. If I remember correctly, I started off with the observing the breath technique, generally trying to figure out whether I could actually pull that off for any sustained amount of time. I tried different focal points of the breath to see if perhaps one particular technique suited me better than another...First I focused on the sensation of my breath passing in & out of the tip of my nose; next I tried the feeling of the air passing through my third eye once it was inside the nose and at its highest point in the body before it descends into the lungs; then I tried watching my belly go in & out as I breathed...I found that I actually liked all 3 of these techniques and could pull any of them off after a few months of letting go of the desire to control my "monkey mind", which of course would run amok with thoughts at first, but after a few months I could noticeably feel that gradually begin to subside. In the long run, the breath-through-the-third-eye technique became one of the most ingrained meditation techniques in my repertoire of them (I later went on to be instructed in tons of different techniques that I would evaluate over time, keep the ones that really worked for me & forget the ones that didn't).
These days, it comes so automatically that I am meditating most half the day, whether that is doing farm work, washing the dishes, mowing the weeds or sitting with our goats. Over the decades I have, without really consciously thinking about it, melded together several different meditation techniques into a "flow", so to speak, of, well...I guess I'd call it, perhaps, "no mind"; where the mind is very still and crystal clear and anything that I put my attention on is my full and unwavering attention, like a sharp knife cutting through all the bullshit that would normally get in peoples' way of actually
doing an activity fully engaged, without any static mucking the picture up, so to speak. It is difficult to explain in words, that's for sure.
thymamai said:
...But the prospect of there being a definite progression of experiences as one continues with the practice is extremely encouraging...
At first, I was very skeptical about this. But I was lucky to have a lot of encouragement along the path, especially the Buddhist monks that I trained and studied with in Sri Lanka & Thailand back in the early-mid 80's.
At some point it hit me that it was really all about being able to do absolutely nothing (like really, sincerely, truly nothing & not even think about it) and not to seek or look forward to any kind of future "reward" or "benefit" from it, that defeats a whole purpose of meditation. It tends to be very difficult for those raised in Western culture to wrap their heads around this concept. I know that psychedelics played a major role in helping me "get" this concept; that all there is is infinite space/time; that there really
isn't anything "to do".
