Just Sitting

Today I attended a practice day on the Just Sitting practice at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, led by Satyaraja.

I'm just leaving these residues from the day in the blog for my own benefit.

The five "Justs":

1. Just settling.
   
2. Just waiting.
   
3. Just watching.
   
4. Just enjoying.
   
5. Just sitting.
   

Bhavana, meditation, is usually directed (as in the mindfulness of breathing and the metta bhavana), but may also be undirected (according to the Satipatthana Sutta). The undirected bhavana is the just sitting practice.

The talk by Subhuti that inspired Satyaraja to lead this practice day may be found at http://media.libsyn.com/media/dharmachakra/podcast35.mp3 (about 40 minutes).

Trying to study

I'm in a study group, a Dharma study group. I've been in this group for something like four or five years now and while the others slowly have been replaced over the years, I'm still here.

At the moment we're looking at the Dhammapada, an very early text which is part of the Pali Canon. The particular translation we're using (there's 50+ translations of the Dhammapada into English) is that by Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order (which was until recently the Western Buddhist Order).

The way we run the group is that one of us volunteers to summarise a particular text or seminar, and on the evening he gives the summary as a short presentation. We usually pause the presentation every now and again to ask questions or to discuss the contents. The study leader might bring out further points for discussion that he thinks are important.

I'm doing the first summary this year, on Thursday this week. It's on a commentary on first few verses from the chapter called Buddhavagga, or The Enlightened One (chapter 14, verses 179-187). Currently I've got as far as reading the commentary and making a mind-map of the main points (using FreeMind, a quite good piece of mind-mapping software, IMHO). I now have to re-read the commentary a number of times to make sure I know the flow of the text and can talk freely about it without resorting to reading from it too much.

I'll leave it at that for tonight, blogging-wise I mean, I still have a lot of reading to do. I'll finish with a favourite quote from this material, Dhp 14:183 (in translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu),

The non-doing of any evil,
the performance of what's skillful,
the cleansing of one's own mind:
  this is the teaching
  of the Awakened.

Be well!

[Image adapted from original at WikiMedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tipitaka_scripture.jpg]

Moderation

It is easier not to eat than to eat in moderation.

Water fasting experiment, day 7+1, breaking the fast

In the beginning of my water fast I did some reading on how to break a fast. It is serious and complicated business.

I now understand that it is important to break a period of fasting in the right way. One of the texts that I read (well, most of them actually) laid out a schedule for breaking a fast, stretching over several days after the "end" of the fast. I will not follow its advice strictly, but it has alerted me to the fact that I need to be extra careful with not over-eating and to closely monitor my reactions to food in general over the first days (maybe even the whole first week), not eating things that my stomach may disagree with.

I broke my fast with diluted juices, yoghurt, and bananas. I have some baby food (I was not going to purée anything myself) which got to be ok to eat, much dried fruit, and I believe I have some vegetable soups (the powder variety) lying around as well... The first batch of food went straight through in an hour (no surprise, my guts are clean enough to use for sausages), but the rest stayed for longer. Just hoping I won't get too constipated later.

Also, I would actually discourage anyone reading this from water fasting for extended periods (more than a week), unless supervised or well experienced, especially if doing it for the first time. A four-day water fast would be quite enough to have to work with discipline for the sake of dealing with the effects of craving, which, being a greed-type of person, is partly why I did this. As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, the only obvious change from day four onwards was that I was getting physically weaker, and this was worse than any positive change, mental or otherwise, during the same time.

In the future, I may fast again, but I will probably keep to short three or four-day water fasts, or longer fasts on liquid diet (soups and juices). The next obvious opportunity for me to try a longer fast will be in the end of December when I have two weeks of solitary retreat planned.

If I ever do another water fast of this length or longer, it will have to be in the summer, under the conditions of a retreat, preferable with other people around, and most importantly, with ample of time to manage the transition into and out of the fast.

May all beings be happy!

Water fasting experiment, day 7, looking back

Today is the last day of my seven-day water fasting experiment.

It's been interesting and I have learnt things about myself. I will probably continue to notice how this period of fasting has changed the way I'm living.

These are the effects of fasting on the way I behave and on how my mind works, as far as I can tell at present: