drelamore

@WelcometoReality yes, back straight. Aside from that it's your personal preference where you do the meditation

Prepare for it to hurt, but with no long lasting effects, so try not to interrupt your sit because your body is hurting. Notice your thoughts everytime your body sensations change, especially when it hurts.

I've been really close to having some insights during long sits, in which my mind was "exhausted" from "Do nothing", while asking myself "what is true right now?", which is an exaggeration, since the only true thing is in the present moment. In addition to that i am using these experiments: http://www.headless.org/experiments/pointing.htm, which have been posted before, with the only difference that i imagine my hands pointing. Generally i find also useful to "see" what is NOT true, rather than starting from zero, but i'm still a newbie at this so i may be wrong and it may not be enough.

2 things: Meditate everyday Meditate and sleep enough everyday No need to cut your sleep to meditate if you are serious about it.

Morality is based on the concepts of good and evil. If you wanna be enlightened, FUCK CONCEPTS! Become enlightened and then decide for yourself what you wanna do. Do you wanna rape everybody? do as you like. Becoming enlightened is EXTERMINATING everything that is FALSE. You are talking about a list that leads to a certain lifestyle, this is bullocks. Since you may become enlightened while starring at you computer screen, there's no certain path to enlightenment, just moments of realization, which may come at any time, whichever way you can imagine...

There's no "we".

Monkey mind will never stop, maybe slow down a bit but that's all. The reason you should do meditation is on one hand unload your mind of thoughts that keep "buzzing" in your mind, but on the other hand, with meditation you will observe yourself on how you're thinking, why you're thinking something and change your relationship with thoughts (and emotions). How and why is something you will see for yourself once you meditate consistently for at least a month, for 20 minutes minimum. As for what to try first, you could do the kind of meditation in which you try to quiet the mind, just to see that you actually cant :P. So you could do that, or if you see that as a waste of time, begin with the "do nothing" meditation, which is enjoyable and practical if you let yourself release everything fully, or with "mindfulnes" meditation if you feel in the beginning that do nothing seems like a waste of time (which is not...but anyway...) Keep in mind that because 20 minutes is a pretty short time, you wont be really able to mix techniques if you want. To do that you should raise your meditation time by 5 minutes each week, so once you reach 1 hour for example you will have the time to mix those 2, or anything else you want. Also, don't be too hasty mixing them, try practicing each one for 2 weeks consistently so you know exactly what they are about.

First of all, it seems you're doing the method correctly, if when you wrote "feeling" you meant "emotion". Aside from that, don't waste your time categorizing and theorizing experiences, i used to do the same mistake with you. Keep working until you discover all your hidden (lying) beliefs and see beyond them.

Your ego is reacting to the changes you're after. Don't worry about it, keep going. I have similar experiences when i'm about to experience something and soddenly my stomach and belly vibrate furiously, it's perfectly normal.

Elaborate more on that... What does paranoid mean to you?

If you don't experience it right now, it's a story, it's not true, even yourself when you were writing that post 10 minutes ago, is not real.

@Leo Gura Does it matter if every meditation session is "strong determination sitting"? I mean does having a timer any extra benefits?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTGUm_LEVB8

Keep calm and carry on

It's true that after a while you stop noticing the benefits of change you make in your life because of habit. It happened when i first began meditating that i didn't do meditation for 10 days and i felt worse than before when it was a habit. Also, when i started again, i had a better understanding of how it should be done and why i should do it everyday, so don't worry too much about slacking off, it could be a necessity for your personal growth

"Be the change you want to see in the world" Think about all the benefits exercising and health have to you and as a result to other people you interact with, which creates an endless feedback loop between you and the world. If you can't do it for you, do it for the world That's what YOU need to hear at this point...

This low-high consciousness business is bothering a lot of people in this community, NOT for no reason of course... But do you really care how conscious you are when you have to achieve a goal? I mean what are you trying to achieve with a particular task? enlightenment? getting shit done? what? Do you think that someone who i enlightened doesn't drift away or as you say, go with the flow? I hope you see that, what i am trying to say is that exercising awareness is a think on it's own, mixing it up in situations where it doesn't matter doesn't offer anything more than exhausting your brain for no reason. That's how i feel currently about such questions, hope it helps :P

Deep thinking is amazing, overthinking is subjective, although you should always have a purpose when thinking deep in my opinion. I believe the reason you are tired when doing deep thinking is because you are not aware how you are feeling with every thought you are having and that creates a mental and physical blur. Try being aware how you are feeling when you are making thoughts, it's gonna benefit you a lot.

So recently i managed to do 1 hour and 20 minutes of strong determination sitting, which was feeling pretty good. The only reason i stopped was because i was worried about the pain and whether it would cause damage to my body or not. I think it would be useful to collect everything that is dangerous during long sits, but most importantly what is not! So next time we won't interrupt our session because of ignorance.

So i remember one time 3-4 months ago i decided to watch Leo's: "Enlightenment - Part 3 - Creating An Experience Of No-Self" video again, just to see if anything happens now that i had established a 30 min. meditation routine at that point in time for the past 2 months or so. What happened was a really weird and nothing-like-it experience which felt like lasting 1 to 2 seconds. I managed to completely relax my body, it was very easy for me to accept the instructions Leo was giving in the video and i literary reached a point where my mind was completely silenced (or so i was able to notice). At that point i was starting to feel that everything i knew about myself, didn't exist anymore and while this was happening, Leo was asking what the colors in your closed eyelids are. Then it happened... A BIG question mark arose within me, like a felt the real fabric of having a question, it almost felt like i was a 6 year old kid and had a question! And when that question mark arose, i felt like i gained mass all around me, like i wasn't my body only, i was an orb! This orb exploded almost like arm length (that's how i felt it) and immediately started coming back to me and felt like i was my body again. At that point i have to mention that i started to have a little amount of monkey chatter, which at that point i didn't have AT ALL( as i said, i felt my mind completely silenced). Now, i'm VERY sure that i didn't fell asleep and i didn't move my body because i have done those things before and i am sure that i haven't felt anything like it before. So what was it? and if it was an enlightenment experience, why didn't it last longer? P.S. I wanted to recreate the experience so bad that for the next month i was doing that guided meditation everyday in addition to my meditation routine, but unfortunately nothing happened.

Thanks for the responses people!

As Leo said, make him/her sit stll for 8 hours straight, he shouldn't have a problem with that :P

I would guess that it could work as a type of mindfulness meditation, because if you focus on the words and movements you make during different kinds of prayers, you might become present.