Jenny’s Early Practice Journal Entries after Quitting a Traditional Gelug Center
Offered here are selected early practice journal entries from 2013. These entries were written during a period of independent study and practice from Theravadin jhana manuals after I left the local Tibetan center, where I had studied and practiced from 2010 through 2012. One of the reasons, among many, that I left that center was its overemphasis of doctrinal study and buy-in at the expense of adequate meditation instruction.
This period of independent study and practice preceded my reading of Daniel M. Ingram’s book and his mentoring me, both of which happened in 2014, which I will begin publishing in the next post. Consequently, these entries are spare in comparison to the rich practice and journaling that having Ingram’s maps and phenomenology later made possible.
Fits and Starts
(15 Jan 2013)
First sit in months. I felt almost hypomanic all day after having the blues yesterday. I was agitated and even nervous at moments. I kept thinking I saw Liana, who lives in England.
I kept directing myself back to observing the breath. It felt blocked at the level of my throat, the chakra governing communication and truth-speaking, according to Eastern energetic theories. Finally, I lowered focus to my navel area. I tried different speeds of breath but never got it just right. I was just beginning to relax into focus when the bell rang and I jumped, startled by the sound. Twenty minutes of sitting had passed, and it felt fast.
Physicality and Thoughts
(16 Jan 2013)
Tonight was different in that my breath was not blocked at the level of my throat. But I noticed all kinds of pain and discomfort. My legs held much tension and went numb. I should sit not in half lotus until I am more limber and less sore from working out.
I did have moments of recognized comfort in my arms and was able to spread it to my legs and back for a few moments. I found it difficult to direct thought without being sucked into thinking in general. But I did notice and kept returning to my breath.
When I first started meditation practice, I observed moments when I felt shaky, like I would explode. That weirdness recurred last night and tonight.
Dissolution of Physical Pain
(23 Jan 2013)
This sit proceeded with less obstruction. I started with a lot of pain. Long, slow breaths and focus on spreading comforting breath energy to the painful parts of the body helped. I ended, in fact, with almost no pain.
I ended relaxed, too, although I still had intrusive performance-anxiety thoughts and mental plans to journal this sit, which is kind of funny in hindsight.
I did experience longer blocks of focus. I was surprised how easy it was to dissolve pain and tension by using the simple techniques in Thanissaro’s and Ajahn Lee’s samatha meditation manuals.
I saw in my distractions that my current feelings of disgust with my friends is coming, inexplicably, from my hunger for a more meaningful lifework.
Inauspicious Beginnings
(30 Jan 2013)
Pain and roughness of breath entered the mind when thoughts, hopes, and fantasy surrounding Kerry’s going to UNC rose up. At first it was hard not to follow these thoughts and slow to realize I had strayed from the Breath. Time went fast until the final 3 minutes and then dropped to a crawl. Bell made me jump. Ears rang but I seem to be able to make that prominent or faint.
Breath and Winds
(31 Jan 2013)
I noticed again how breath energy directed at pain points can dissolve them. Especially effective is moving energy from comfortable body parts to painful ones. Usually when there is pain, I automatically send my mind to reside there with the pain and don’t even notice the parts of my body that are comfortable. The emphasis can be reversed. And pain can be simply dissolved.
Is this the nature of all pain, or only of aches from muscular tension?
I also did notice at the end of the sit how refreshed my mind felt, calm but keen.
I am still noticing distractions, usually thoughts about friends. Today I noticed fewer yet longer followings after these distractions. I didn’t apply fierce pressure to return rapidly to the Breath. But I did notice my mind’s fabricating even though the fabrications weren’t interesting.
It seems to help to ask questions of the breath. I felt less pressure put on the meditation, less expectation.
It is storm-windy today. I could hear the wind chimes from the other end of the house, the kitchen porch. The meditation bell made me jolt again!
Sponge Breathing
(02 Feb 2013)
Mind sneaked off after Vicky at first and some thoughts of death because of the brutal death of her husband. Right hip hurts as usual from my SI-joint dysfunction.
Breath was smooth and comfortable the whole time. Breathed pain away. I hold a lot of tension in my legs. Sit went deep when I started inhabiting my whole body and breathing through all pores, like a sponge.
I had three or four moments of bliss that resembled hitting a funny bone or mild orgasm. It is somewhat disorienting. I rush back, recoil from it.
Pride and shame are that obstruct sustainable bliss, which must scale back to pleasure, I know.
Anger as a Type of Planning
(05 Feb 2013)
During this sit, my legs were falling asleep. I decided not to put up with it, even though during my last sit I had no numbness. I moved my leg.
Just as I was getting into the whole-body-breathing sponge thing, my son banged on the door and wouldn’t leave. He seemed to be doing this on purpose and then Kurt joined in. Anger arose and was difficult to calm. I decided to observe the sensations of anger. This was also hard. All I noticed was that anger is a type of planning.
When I did calm down, I thought I was at most halfway through the session. Then the bell sounded. I didn’t jump (for once) but was nonetheless shocked. Usually I am waiting for the bell and yet startle when it sounds; this instance was vice-versa.
The False State?
(08 Feb 2013)
This sit brought no pain or numbness, but my ears were ringing. Distractions weren’t so much numerous as persistent. The meditation was deep, as I was even almost drooling, but I wonder if this was what they call the “false state.”
I am not sleepy but I wonder whether sitting some other time besides bedtime might bring some helpful change. Something holds me to this side as though the joy on the other would be fearsome.
Early Nimitta and Jhanic Bliss
(10 Feb 2013)
Kurt and Kerry interrupted my meditation, which is funny because I am usually ignored. I remembered what one teacher said about the use of distractions as resistance.
I continue to work with Thanissaro’s Thai Forest breath meditation methods, after having left the Tibetan Gelug tradition in December 2012, and I can consistently stop pain and numbness. I still have distracting thoughts, but they are few and languid. I need to catch and abandon them faster, but there is an overall rhythm and that in itself may be worth observing.
Filling the whole body with the Breath, the sponge breathing, is when all becomes profoundly altered. Twinges of bliss arise, but something in me suddenly doesn’t want to be dislocated, so I shrink, which snuffs out the bliss twinges.
Tonight I saw a brown fog or cloud slightly light bearing. I am unsure whether it was coming from the lamp through the images on the backs of my eyelids. Now I am as though one on opiates, with afterglow.
Lost and Seeking
(11 Feb 2013)
I lost a lengthy entry to an apparently hungry computer application. The entry was off topic anyway. I’m mad at a couple of my friends. Disenchanted. I need to cultivate solitude and seek the company of the wise.
Lost but Tripping
(12 Feb 2013)
I just lost my entry again, which angered me and then made me laugh.
I had no pain or numbness tonight. Breath became still, but energy hummed along limbs and buzzed in my head. Enlarging the Breath to fill the body largely dissolves the body. And then the meditation becomes like this rapid visionary trip: Layers peel off. Sharp bliss twinges, but better calm prevails.
I realized that I wanted to sit longer. At one point I opened my eyes and saw some swirls but couldn’t really control them. I decided not to fully trust them, because I know I create them yet they didn’t listen to my overt intention.
Drowning in Air
(13 Feb 2013)
It took quite a while to quiet my mind, which tells me that I am not sustaining that centeredness that Thanissaro writes of. But when I fill the whole body with the Breath, everything calms and I want to stay. Tonight I felt a sense of drowning, drooling, and having no air, but I remembered from reading that this is an illusion: Thanissaro speaks of a “drowning” sensation during meditation. But the body will take what it needs from the surrounding energy.
Passion
(14 Feb 2013)
[This post is an excerpt from a much lengthier entry.]
The Seclusion
I think Tharissano is correct: It is necessary to cultivate seclusion, to make that really solid, to be unafraid to be alone, to befriend oneself in a truly unconditional, not-backward-looking way.
I have long known that most social media is poison. In fact, it was mainly while engaging in online convenience friendships that I first felt the stirrings of compassion for myself, that I simultaneously felt distanced from and sympathetic with my fellows on this ship of deluded fools called the Facebook newsfeed.
The skill of content seclusion and nonpublicity is the most important life skill for me to work on now. I will be tempted to turn to others, but I need to keep this resolve firmly in mind, no matter the siren.
I am so grateful for finding Thanissaro, because he has taught me how to find meditation so pleasant and interesting. He has taught me that it is in fact good to be mightily attached to the practice, for now. For how else can I slacken the pull of more poisonous forces?
During tonight’s meditation, my mind chased after past and future scenarios, and I could not find the moment of arising, the seam of becoming. I don’t even know whether what I decided to say to L today was mostly skillful, or mostly unskillful or even harmful. But I think it had to come out somehow, and at any rate it did.
The Black Howl
During tonight’s sit, suddenly all this black howling grief arose. It came as from a bottomless black pit in me, astonishingly fast, all at once, full force. I was crying. I never heard the bell. So the sit was in chaos. Yet I noted afterward, and even during, that somehow I don’t feel the searing shrinkage at heart that I normally would. I feel sorrow, but not the fear of sorrow.
Compassion and derailment both come from my relationship with my long deceased father, from his pain and the karma that was and is my family of origin. How do I behold others’ weaknesses and neither engage to save them nor boredly/smugly note to myself the gulf between us?
Is this sense of separation part of the path? Yes, and it is saying that I need to retreat for a while. Do I need to literally cultivate aloneness? Yes, and break my participation in the cultural addiction to self-publicity. Did L need to hear my criticism? Yes, she did, even if she doesn’t understand it at this time.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.