The dream of the girl who could see the holy grail

On the Anapanasati retreat a few weeks ago I had a peculiar dream on the first night (2nd-3rd of April). It is quite common to have all sorts of interesting dreams when one is on retreat. They can be due to all sorts of things, but often nothing more strange than sleeping in a unfamiliar bed in a dorm together with other guys that you may or may not have seen before (some of them possibly snoring).

The dream went something like this:

The Anapanasati Retreat 2010

On the 1st of April this year, I went on my second Anapanasati retreat at Padmaloka. The retreat is a 10 day long meditation retreat, most of it in silence, and quite intense.

The first time I attended the retreat, in 2009, I had never been on a long meditation retreat before, and I had a completely unhelpful approach. To cut a long story short, I was far too willful, which led to getting stuck, which led to frustration and ill will. Meditators will recognise this as an easy to make mistake, for some people.

So, this time around I approached the practice from the direction of the Just Sitting practice. One might say that I let the structure of the Anapanasati practice guide my Just Sitting practice. This was, for me, precisely the right way to practice at this point.

Lots of useful small and large insights made themselves known during the week, and I'm hoping to write a handful of shorter blog entries around them. Some of them might only be a few sentences long and mostly for my own memory's sake.

I'll start with the structure of the retreat.

Three Minute Breathing Space

For a friend: A simple method for being.

Awareness (30s)

Deliberately adopt an erect and dignified posture. If possible, close your eyes. Then ask: What is my experience right now... in thoughts... in feelings... and in bodily sensations?

Acknowledge and register your experience, even if it is unwanted.

Gathering (90s)

Then gently redirect full attention to your breathing. Observe each in-breath, and each out-breath, as they follow, one after the other.

Your breath can function as an anchor to bring you into the present and help you tune into a state of awareness and stillness.

Expanding (30s)

Expand the field of your awareness around your breathing, so that it includes a sense of your body as a whole, your posture, and facial expression.

Reconnect with your surroundings and with the general direction of the day.

[adapted from instructions from Segal, Williams, and Teasdale]

What I've learnt from meditation

There's a couple of things that I've learnt from meditation, and that is that people, things, and events are generally more interesting than what they first appear to be, and that creativity surfaces in the space left by doing nothing.

Therapy

I haven't written in a while again. There's been a period of quite a lot of work. I volunteered to take some extra responsibilities at work for a limited time (until the end of February), and it's been taking up too much head space for any serious reflection to take place.

What I have been thinking about is, amongst other things, meditation (and Buddhist practice in general) in relation to science and therapy.

I think it's great if people get interested in meditation from a scientific point of view, or because they see it as some kind of therapy (they meditate to become calmer, more focussed, etc.), but it troubles me when meditation is pitched in this way to people by some Buddhist practitioners.

(a week or so passes here)

Now, after some further thinking I believe that the issue is not that there are Buddhists that try to pitch meditation as therapy, but rather that I feel uncomfortable with it. It can not be bad to have more people practising meditation, and if they are engaging regularly with their practice there will definitely be results beyond the narrow scope of their therapeutic needs. I will need to further ponder this.


Time to sleep a bit.
Good night.

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: