Jordan94

Recently i feel like my practice is quite weak (low focus), and i've realized my breath is also quite shallow, which gets my focus even weaker (i guess it works in both directions effect/cause cause/effect) and also make it harder/more rushed to do the pranayama since i have barely like 7seconds to chant the OMs in each chakra Would you guys advice me to work on that and try to make my breath longer/more calm ? Or just accept the reality and don't overly try to unnaturally change the breath ? Also my nose is often half clogged due to airconditioner, that might play in that, maybe i should also try to fix it in some way ?

pretty interesed about that as well, if anybody knows something like that

Either be satisfied with less money (or move to a cheaper place and work online) or make more money hourly, so that the time required for job diminish

That's flow more than enlightemend tbh, i don't think they are simmilar

What about just enrolling in a monastery/ashram ? You'll get around the same benefits in getting a lot of time to focus on meditation and all the logistics will be solved

Nice post thanks that's inspiring As for the duration, I feel like it's a good thing to be kind of slow, it means more calm/aware pranayamas rather than rushed I'm doing 108 pranayama (the ones with chanting om in kutasha) in around 30-40minutes and my practice is not too good now, often times i'm only half-consious of the pranayama and half in my thoughts, the times where i've been a bit slower (as a result) were the times of better practice I would think it's also way better to do like 48 nice slow pranayama in a session than twice more twice less conscious

I find it as well that when i listen to music (I listen to mostly hip hop/rap and pop) it can easily get me into my ego and into future fantasies, as well i put the music in the background of my mind on repeat One dude on another topic said something really interesting about that, that the goal is not to escape but rather put ourselves in challenging situation and then try to in that case detach/undo those bad habbits, and there could be a nice growth from that So one thing you could do (and i'm trying to do now) is to have meditation sessions where i listen to music and instead of going into the ego i try to stay present and conscious/aware of sensations in the body

That's some really broad statements, she could say that to anybody and have decent chances of being rights, especially if you count children that you don't have in order to match the reading she made

I'm interested about this topic as well So far I did one hour morning + 1 hour evening, and i'm thinking to move to 1 hour morning + 1 hour a few hours after before lunch because it would suit more my schedule, but not sure if it would change or not the quality of the 2nd hour to move it there or not From my experience first most important is to have the meditation placed at times where the stomach is quite empty or at least not too full, so definitly not after meals and before meals is good, and besides that sometimes I find my morning meditation being "bad" if i'm overall tired and therefore too tired in the morning, and if not maybe better in the morning because there is no train or thoughts/happening going on there is kind of the wake up reset going in our favor

Just observing the sound of the music in your head would be a totally good meditation

Such a awesome video thanks for the share man

That sounds really good thanks for the share, I'll check the ebook

He was also quite old no ? lol For now if I do it also I don't feel pain in the knees but quite a lot in my ankle of the leg that's above, I don't know if that's normal

I'm not sure exactly but I think I saw once somewhere some words that the lotus position could be harmfull long term if done too much or something like that I don't remember exactly where it was, and if it's bullshit or not, so is it ? Like would it be harmfull for example to sit daily a 1 hour sitting meditation in lotus without changing posture ?

About body facing east, why is that ? I already didn't understand what was the point/reason for that when I read it first

So I defintly find it a great value to have strong determination sittings, and right now i'm meditating 2 times 1 hour daily and I want to have sometimes strong determination sittings as well But the problem is, even if i don't change posture and open eyes/legs/hands during one hour, I don't really feel much pain due to not moving, I meditate on a sofa or bed with a pillow so it's too soft to hurt after one hour (in vipassana retreat after 45m it definitly hurts quite a lot on their meditation setup) And if i meditate on a pillow on the floor, it hurts a bit but in a weird way and I feel like my blood doesn't flow in a way that might be bad long term, so I don't love this option neither So basically i'm looking for another option that would add some pain for sitting one hour without changing position, so that it is somewhat painful in the end of the hour

Thanks for the answers some good stuff Cold might be a good option, i could meditate shirtless now in winter or put AC cold when i'm in thailand/whatever, i usually don't do that because I don't want to sneeze and get my nose cloged, but i might try That's kind of the type of stuff i'm looking for, in the end what did you find most interesting between all of what you tried I don't really like the idea because it happens sometimes that I meditate tired for example, and it's really bad for focus so I don't feel like it's good meditation, dehydrated might be kinda similar, hungry is a bit different could be good but i'm really not that sensitive to hunger pain (to a moderate extent) Could be pretty good actually thanks, I'm really weak at spicy food as well so it might be really effective actually, and should not be too difficult to find/buy some cheap spicy little food (especially when it's really fast too spicy for me) One other thing I've been thinking is to sit 1 hour in full lotus position, I definitly do have pain if I do that for one hour so that's perfect, but I'm not sure about mid/long term harm for bones/ligaments/whatever, I've seen somewhere that the position is actually quite harmfull for the body if done too much/often, not sure if it's bullshit or not, somebody knows more about that ?

Yea that would definitly be a working option But planningwise i'd rather stay mostly with one hour sittings (twice a day), so a way to make 1 hour sitting more painful would be better still

Hello, I'm a bit stuck against a wall now Because in terms of my goals of life I put meditation on number one, right now not for a desire to seek truth/enlightenenment, but just in terms of the benefits, I realised there's nothing that could be better for my hapiness/life/enjoyment than getting to a good level of equanimity/presence/thoughtless state (ego orange based desire i'm aware of it, probably will subside later but it's fine for now i think) But in terms of actual practice, the idea to put in 5-10 hours of seated meditation everyday doesn't thrill me at all, but that's what necessery in any domain to get really good, put in 35-70hours weekly of good/smart practice and that's how good progress will come, however in meditation as I said the idea of puting 35 hours of seated meditation in a week does not thrill me at all But then there is a gap between what I 'want' and the reality and I don't think I will improve and get good without increasing the amount of time and effort I put in (for a long time i did 2 hours seated vipassana daily so 14 hours a week, and i've been doing a few vipassana retreats and meditating 30m-2hours a day for like 2 years and a half now) So I thought the solution would be to find a practice or something that would benefit me in terms of meditation progress, but that would also be ok for me to put hours and hours into, in other words a practice that I would overall enjoy/like doing What's your thoughts on that and then which practice you think could fill those criterias ?

I can sit during x hours but it doesn't mean that my practice are always really qualitative, far from that, usually on my 2 hours daily of vipassana I would say that barely 20-25% of the time i'm actually having an ok focus doing the technique (meaning not laser focus, sometimes it's just half focus on the background of the mind), sometimes even lower than that Seems quite low to me, although I don't know what would be the norm here ? As another example, I tried leo's concentration technique focusing on a metronome, after like a week, I was not able to keep focus for 1minute without any 2secondes+ interuption), and even 30s I often wouldn't be really clean on having a 30s focus without any 1s+ interuption Yea true, especially when I feel that my quality of meditation is overall quite bad (except during and up to a few weeks after retreats) But easier said then done, how to improve the quality then ? Yea there is definitly a great power and potential into implementing more mindfulness/non-sitted meditation I think, so i'm gonna do just that About shinzen, does his technique/material have something more/special to it ? Or it's basically just mindfulness meditation ? There's the 2 parts that they teach us in vipassana, awareness and equanimity, it's funny, and I already thought during retreats that there is a 3rd component that I would call "time focused" that was the last part of the equation, so we get exactly that here it's great I feel like yea it's pretty good for the position I'm in since I do like the principle and benefits of vipassana, it's basically the same thing here

Yea I thought already that maybe vipassana isn't the most effective technique in terms of time/results, and that kriya might be way better at it I discovered and tried kriya for the first time a bit more than 3 months ago, first week I got good and engaging results, then after that I went into a phase of big focus in work (60hours a week) untl now, so i still did 30minutes a day of kriya but really mechanical and with my mind/ego focused in my work even during meditation, so the results were way less good but it was because of this intense work focused period I have a 10 day vipassana retreat in 2 days, then I will have the retreat momentum as well, so after that I'll do at least 2 hours seated daily probably splitted between different techniques experimenting what would be best for me, and also experimenting and implementing differents 'out of seated time' meditation practices as well, and for sure i'll do at least 30minutes kriya daily @non_nothing Ok thanks for the answer, i'm familliar with all of these techniques, some of them seems more appealling to me than other, at least if I do them sitting I would be in the position that I described earlier where I don't really want to do any of these for hours daily, so either I could try to implement them in 'non seated meditation times', or maybe find other techniques that would be more enjoyable for me to do even for long periods of time Thanks really good advices I've always been interested about the idea of martial art/fighting, but never really went into really finding a club/whatever to do so, the fact that I change city/country (i'm digital nomad) every 1-3 months doesn't help a lot though About Yoga you're talking about hatha yoga in particular ? And totally agree for the books etc, I find my meditation going soooo much better after I spend some time reading an Eckhart Tolle book or watching one of Leo's video for example Maybe putting more consistent time on that is also a good idea Sounds interesting yea, same benefit as with Kriya yoga can be more engaging and then a bit better on that part Are all of those only included in paied programes or I can find them somewhere ? @InfinitePotential yea already the name dynamic meditation sounds like something that could be in the direction of what I'm looking for Could you recommend me some content/ressources/techniques about it ?

Thanks I really feel like improving and getting unstuck on that That is the point by learning to meditate with stuff that triggers monkey mind and ego you progress faster because the resistance is higher and you push through that. Okay makes sense and that's really interesting then, I'll try it with music and try to stay aware of sensations or sight then, do small timers of it, if it's too hard also have easier ones with just beats with no lyrics Yea great idea, it's funny I thought about it as well just a few minutes ago thinking about this, one way is to add more hours of 'meditation practice', but another way even smarter is to turn already existing hours doing xyz into meditation practice One belief that I kinda always had about it is that in order to do that correctly (meaning some actual %age of the time that is focused on the meditation technique), I need to already have a good enough quality of meditation during seated meditation, as a prerequisit kind of, and if that's not the case it'll just be too hard/distracting implementing the meditaiton in activities In a way that if my quality of meditation is not good enough in seated yet, the way to improve has to go first during seated meditation or at least 'comited meditation time' let's say But it's probably just a limiting belief, and puting effort/focus (and some structure I think, meaning specific times specific things) into improving the 'during an activity meditation' probably just works as fine as improving the seated meditation time Edit : Also about Shinzen Young, I googled his name and found that his work is basically about mindfullness meditation, is theer also some other material in his work like premade drills/tools/exercice/whatever that you were pointing to ? Or it just meant mindfullness meditation basically ?

Thanks for the answers, some good stuff I do like music, but usually the music I like (hip hop) is heavily lyrics oriented so I just get thinking a lot and in my ego, and actually overall hurts a lot my meditations so I actually tried more and more to reduce it Might be totally different with musics with no lyrics though I guess Yea that's the type of stuff that I'm looking for, something where I can meditate through it but would also be engaging and fun in itself I'm not too much into learning to play an instrument, I was thinking about something simillar with a video game, called osu, basically it's a simple game where you have to click targets in rythm with a music let's say, I can use that as a focus/presence/awareness exercice and that could be exactly what I'm looking for because I can play it for hours Although when I try to do that I usually just fall out of meditation practice into ego/thinking, maybe it's actually too engaging and can not really be good enough for meditation practice in that way ... One other thing I thought about would be to do walking meditation instead of seated, already more fun/engaging for me, although still i'm not sure if I would be able to just do hours of it I do feel clearly really strong and good results after a 10 day vipassana retreat, but then my benefits usually gradually go down (after like a month, while still doing 2 hours sittings a day) and after i lose the momentum of the retreat, there is definitly some results (it's also really hard to mesure it honestly), but I would say not worth 2 hours per day, I don't manage to get to a decent level enough so that I can actually be aware and equanimous of sensations enough in daily life (and even during the seatings it's a lot of monkey mind) Maybe vipassana is not the most cost effective technique in terms of time/result, maybe i'm also not too 'talented' at it (I think that I have a really smart and fast mind/brain, which is good for a lot of things, but is actually used to do the opposite of focused/slow/deep attention, so maybe i'm not too gifted at meditation naturally, or maybe it's a false excuce and i'm normal for it I don't know) I will try more kriya again, but again I feel like if I want some good good results as puting meditation of my top goal in life, there has to be also a good amount of time/efforts that goes into it

Which Kriya Supreme Fire are you refering to ? When I search I find two differents exercice that people sometimes refer at with that name, what does the one you are refering to consist of ?

Okay got it thank you