ardacigin

These are my notes on Bio-Emotive Framework which is pioneered by Doug Tataryn. I'll be adding a lot of my own teachings and techniques. This is a highly advanced shadow work practice that I recommend to people who are in intermediate-advanced levels of spiritual training. A beginner meditator has little to no tools to understand and contact the processes required to do bio-emotive work. The Essence of Bio-Emotive Training: 1- Any intense, inter-personal encounter that is not fully experienced and expressed in 3 modalities - emotional, intellectual, experiential - will become a part of your sense of self and core worldview, instead of something that unfolds in consciousness or something that happens to you. --- Alexithymia means 'no word for emotions', a dysfunction where individuals who suffer are unable to experience and express their emotions (both intellectually and spiritually). Mr. Spock or Data from Star Trek would be considered a good example of a person with alexithymia. Psychologists and researchers of alexithymia estimate that just under 10% of the general population suffers from alexithymia. Alexithymia is highly correlated with many mental health conditions and also co-occurs with a number physical health conditions. ---- Let's be frank here. All of us, to various degrees, are suffering from alexithymia. Try this: Next time you are talking to someone who is upset by something, ask them (assuming you have a close enough relationship) how they are feeling. Most people will talk all about the event, who did what, who said what, how mad they are, etc. 'She did this, She said that. Then she went to bring up that event from the past, that got me really triggered and then I said...' etc If they do get past just describing the behavioural details of the event, most people tend to use words from one of these three categories: General Activation Words: e.g. Upset, distressed, frustrated, anxious, mad, etc Cognitive Counterparts: e.g. Confused, worried, concerned, etc Behavioural Metaphors: e.g. Pissed off, trapped, heavy, feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, etc None of these perceptions and techniques are productive or effective in the following recovery process. ---- How to do Bio-Emotive Practice: 1- The Emotional Examination Seldom will people use feeling words, like “I feel rejected”, or “used”, or “inadequate”, etc to describe how they are feeling about the interpersonal relationships or events that happen to them in life. - First of all, you examine the sentence or the idea that rattled your psyche to generate fear, sadness, anger etc. to the situation and then describe your emotional knee-jerk reaction as accurately as possible. This is usually said by another person or it can be your own ideas rising up from the unconscious mind. Let's say somebody told this to you in this in an argument - 'You might think you are better but you are actually a useless arrogant selfish fuck!' The emotional reaction in the intellectual form: 'I felt inadequate and hurt with anger and tints of sadness'. - To do this properly, examine multiple traces of your past experiences and childhood which imprinted 'an emotional impression' to your mind where your worldview and perception were significantly altered. Ex. Someone with a perfectionist attitude needs to examine his childhood where his elementary teacher said 'You can do much better than that' to his painting where that response has generated a shift in self-perception and dissolved into causes and conditions where the OCD and perfectionist dysfunction was slowly formed in the next 10 years. Then go deeper into the emotion and make sure no other key-emotion rests at the core of it. Then make the sub-emotions as clear as possible. For example, you can do the identification of core and sub emotions in the following way: Core emotion: The feeling of sadness where I feel powerless and insignificant. I feel that nobody pays attention to what I say or do! Sub-emotions: Anger and rage whenever someone doesn't listen to what I say or command me to do something in an authoritarian way. After this initial imprint of idea and emotion is clearly seen through your past experiences and after you poinpoint the core emotion, the energetic and emotional pull of the trauma is reduced and the emotional mind is experienced more fully. (But not completely, yet!) --- This is merely a healthy emotional integration of the event. We still need to address 2 more modalities of conscious processing to complete the bio-emotive training - Intellectual and Experiential. 2- The Intellectual Examination: The intellectual expression involves 2 steps: 1- External: Your forming of words, intentions and relationship with this person regarding the event that happened. If possible, you talk with this person. How well can you express the true emotions you've felt to this person without activating emotions constantly. 2- Internal: Your systematic and contextual understanding of the causes and conditions that lead to the argument or event with this person. This includes: - Why this debate and argument came about and in what environmental conditions. - How you've used your mind and emotions to interpret this person's words and actions. How this mental state and perception directly influenced your reactions and response. - How you've viewed other person's mental state, emotions and thoughts at the time. How they really felt and thought after the fact. The most important: - To what degree have you been able to COMPLETELY let go of your own worldview and conditioning which allows you to completely see the perspective of the other person? If not, it is time to do this entire mindful review and intellectual analysis to make it really clear why you and this person felt the way they felt and said the words they said. 3- The Experiential and Spiritual Examination: The spiritual examination has 2 key components to it. 1- The Complete Experience of The Emotion: In meditation, stop 'down-regulating' negative emotions with joy and happiness (which arises as a result of your continued practice) and allow mental states of sadness, anger, fear and anxiety to express themselves fully pertaining to the event that disturbs you. All forms of conceptual analysis regarding the event are put to rest. We have already allowed ourselves to do that with the intellectual examination above. This will be a purely emotional observation. Give yourself the space to feel the negative sensations pertaining to your core emotions above. In meditation, allow yourself to feel the dukkha and suffering of wanting things to be different than what they are and find the dissatisfaction regarding the event. Remember the event, visualize it briefly and come back to pure emotional feel space. - How do feelings and sensations arise in my body? - Are they stable or moving? Permanent or Impermanent? - What location do the feeling expresses itself and what emotions arise in my mind? - Chest? Stomach? Legs? Head? - Anger, Sadness, Anxiety, Fear ? - What sort of texture the discomfortable sensation arise with? - Pressure, smoky blurry myst, heaviness, blocky discomfort? Try to have as much equanimity with sensations as possible and allow each aspect of the experience to fully express themselves. 2- The Insight Perspective: Focus on 3 characteristics of the experience above: 1- Impermanence: If the sensations are stable looking, encourage yourself to see more of the arising and passing away of micro sensations and 'movingness' of sensations as a whole. 2- Craving: Realize that your suffering and dissatisfaction come about due to wanting things to be different than what they are on a momentary basis. Try to open up to each moment of experience and accept it without wanting it to change. 3- The Sense of Self: Realize that the self-narrative is your own making. Also, try to see there is no seer or observer to these negative sensations in a state of reduced craving. Attach less 'I'm experiencing...' mindset to changing sensations as they unfold. This will generate equanimity and tranquility and allow for your trauma to resolve itself with continued practice. You don't do this process once or twice but many times. As much as you need. ----- This entire process is my re-working of bio-emotive framework taught by Doug Tataryn. Hope you get value from it. Much love, Arda

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. He thought: 'What a buffoon. At least, I got away with these clothes.' The Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, ” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.” ----- A solid understanding of systems theory + a practical spiritual integration of its primary principles is essential for the investigation of truth. In fact, for a life dedicated to greater understanding, fulfillment and happiness at the deepest level. As you view reality through the lens of systems theory, you'll see avenues you have yet to explore in your spiritual journey. It is a forever open feedback channel that is left within the system until your last breath. Spoiler Alert: Your entire mind/body system and reality structure is expressed within the core principles of systems theory. Here are some of my explorations and studies into systems theory. The Essence of Systems Theory 1- Understand the Key Harmony of the System Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. This guideline is deceptively simple. Until you make it a practice, you won’t believe how many wrong turns it helps you avoid. Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others. It’s amazing how many misconceptions there can be. People will swear that rainfall is decreasing, say, but when you look at the data, you find that what is really happening is that variability is increasing—the droughts are deeper, but the floods are greater too. It’s especially interesting to watch how the various elements in the system do or do not vary together. Watching what really happens, instead of listening to peoples’ theories of what happens, can explode many careless causal hypotheses. Every selectman in the state of New Hampshire seems to be positive that growth in a town will lower taxes, but if you plot growth rates against tax rates, you find a scatter as random as the stars in a New Hampshire winter sky. There is no discernible relationship at all. Starting with the behavior of the system directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static, analysis—not only to “What’s wrong?” but also to “How did we get there?” “What other behavior modes are possible?” “If we don’t change direction, where are we going to end up?” And looking to the strengths of the system, one can ask “What’s working well here?” Starting with the history of several variables plotted together begins to suggest not only what elements are in the system, but how they might be interconnected. And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. - The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, we don’t have enough salesmen. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town? Listen to any discussion, in your family or a committee meeting at work or among the pundits in the media, and watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in “predict, control, or impose your will” mode, without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it’s doing it. 2- Explore Your Mental Models Clearly (After Direct Experience) When we draw structural diagrams and then write equations, we are forced to make our assumptions visible and to express them with rigor. We have to put every one of our assumptions about the system out where others (and we ourselves) can see them. Our models have to be complete, and they have to add up, and they have to be consistent. Our assumptions can no longer slide around (mental models are very slippery), assuming one thing for purposes of one discussion and something else contradictory for purposes of the next discussion. You don’t have to put forth your mental model with diagrams and equations, although doing so is a good practice. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems. 3- Respect Data & Information Channels Information (both conceptual and non-conceptual) holds systems in harmony whereas delayed, biased, scattered, corrupted or missing data can make feedback loops malfunction. For instance, decision makers can’t respond to information they don’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information. 4 - Attend to What is Important, Not What is Immediately Perceivable and Quantifiable Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality. If quantity forms the goals of our feedback loops, if quantity is the center of our attention and language and institutions, if we motivate ourselves, rate ourselves, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live. Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So don’t fall into that trap. Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality. Be a quality detector. Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality. No one can quite define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t directly experience and radiate them, if we dont point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist within the social reality the system is based on. 5- Generate Feedback Policies Within Feedback Loops President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately, he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn’t understand feedback. Let me explain: Carter was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped. That never happened. This is a failure of feedback policy. You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting feedback system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy. It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system. Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops—loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process. 6- Value the Good of the Whole Remember that hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, not the top. Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. Don’t, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easily measured or not. 7- Listen to the Wisdom of the System Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Notice how many of those forces and structures are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Don’t be an unthinking intervenor and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there. Get a feel for what to play with and what to allow its maturation process to unfold at its own pace. 8- Locate Responsibility Within the System & Open its Feedback Channels That’s a guideline both for analysis and design. In analysis, it means looking for the ways the system creates its own behavior. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another. Sometimes those outside events can be controlled (as in reducing the pathogens in drinking water to keep down incidences of infectious disease). But sometimes they can’t. You need to accept that. And sometimes blaming or trying to control the outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system. “Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. In a sense, the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions. Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe. It could mean that neither insurance companies nor public funds should pay for medical costs resulting from smoking or from accidents in which a motorcycle rider didn’t wear a helmet or a car rider didn’t fasten the seat belt A great deal of responsibility was lost when rulers of a nation who declared war were no longer expected to lead the troops into battle. These few examples are enough to get you thinking about how little our current culture has come to look for responsibility within the system that generates an action, and how poorly we design systems to experience the consequences of their actions. 9- Always Stay a Student Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring- out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know. That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.” It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors 10- Embrace Complexity Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity and uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, and that’s what makes it beautiful. There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems. Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us. We can, and some of us do, celebrate and encourage self-organization, disorder, variety, and diversity. Some of us even make a conscious moral commitment of doing so. 11- Expand the Time Axiom One of the worst ideas humanity ever had was the interest rate, which led to the further ideas of payback periods and discount rates, all of which provide a rational, quantitative excuse for ignoring the long term. The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments. Don't make the same mistake. In a strict systems sense, there is no long term and short-term distinction. Phenomena at different time-scales are nested within each other. Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago. The couplings between very fast processes and very slow ones are sometimes strong, sometimes weak. When the slow ones dominate, nothing seems to be happening; when the fast ones take over, things happen with breathtaking speed. Systems are always coupling and uncoupling the large and the small, the fast and the slow. When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system. 12 - Defy the Disciplines In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines. To understand that system, you will have to be able to learn from—while not being limited by—economists and chemists and psychologists and theologians. You will have to penetrate their jargons, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their particular lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses. They won’t make it easy for you. But you can do it. Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary,” if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct. They will have to go into learning mode. They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system. It can be done. But, ego gets in the way if not careful. 13- Expand the Boundary of Care - Empathy - Compassion - Love Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails. As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to experience that which they know. --- Hope you get value from this post. Let me know your thoughts. Much love, Arda

My 'self-hood', perceptions, assumptions and most importantly, the truth behind reality. But any system theory behind any subject you enjoy as a hobby is also a fun practice to do. I like analyzing video games like Last of Us Part 2 and Red Dead Redemptions 2 where the end product becomes an exquisite art form for people like me. Those experiences require lots of analysis and introspection to extract their beauty. Here is my spoiler-free post you can read here: I invested in Ethereum but my understanding of systems theory does not exempt me from making bad decisions (although it reduces the odds). Thats a great motivation right there

Try Leigh Brasington's jhana instructions in his book - the right concentration. In simple terms, just try generating pleasurable sensations in the mind and body and sustain attention on it until it amplifies. When lost, try again. I use smiling to reinforce this process but eventually, you won't have to move a single muscle and joy and pleasure will pervade your mind and body. Not initially, but after some proficiency and unification of mind is attained. Start today :))

What do you mean by flavour from intro to systems thinking?

The following understanding is formed after my recent direct experiences regarding determinism and free will. Ultimately, both are false. The answer is more complex than most people care to admit. Let me explain. First of all, let's get free will out of the way. There is absolutely no entity separate from other causes and conditions that can exercise an independent will and go against this nexus of causality in the moment. Free will is an illusion. No doubt about that. However, all of the future moments being already pre-determined is not the natural conclusion that arise from this understanding. Even if you knew the entire locality and movements of all particles in the universe, you'd not foresee its exact unfoldment in a scientific manner 5 years from now. This system is designed in non-linear complex causality, not in some predictable linear ('b comes after a') causality. Understanding the system's theory is important to get a feel for what I'm saying. But ultimately, direct experience of this interconnected causality will allow you to see how determinism is not the answer. The universe, your life, your decisions, the way your life unfolds is probabilistic. I will make a practical connection to your life to illustrate my point. Everything in the universe is playing a role in shaping us, however, this particular system we have in each of us (the mind/brain) is at the center of this nexus of causality. It has the potential to literally shape and design itself. What it CAN'T do is to determine with exact precision how this probability wavelength is going to collapse in a particular moment as the present moment unfolds. But it has the ability to determine which way the probability wavelength (which exists in each moment) will collapse in future moments as a potentiality. Your mind generates both past and future in the present. After all, some present moment decisions are made with 49,9 - 50,1 sort of probability. It can go either way. Tipping the scales one way or the other is a potential our minds can utilize to shape our future selves. With the way we respond to the world and form intentions, our 'self' is designed and re-designed in each moment. That is what the training in spirituality is all about. The fact of observation and seeing the consequences of our actions/decisions allow our minds to shape its programming and change the future by accumulating micro-adjustments. This is one of the things we do in meditation. Try to become conscious of what you are doing :)) You are a self-organizing system. You are an unfolding series of probabilities that are contingent on absolutely everything that has happened everywhere throughout all time. What 'you' do, matters! What intentions you form before you take an action, matters! What decisions you make and what response you choose to adopt after the consequences of these decisions, matters! It is rather ironic that the toxic self help industry platitude 'You can create a different future self' is not all that off the mark here. Sure, self help methods of actualizing this potential is highly toxic and ineffective but it does contain a kernel of truth you can be conscious of in direct experience. ---- At this time, I'm not sure what sort of a specific practice I can recommend you to help you directly become conscious of this understanding. Just continue practicing and examining your mind. Eventually, the insights will form by themselves. When I do have a practice I can recommend, I'll post it here. Hope this was useful Much love, Arda

You are right. You've probably misunderstood me :)) That is exactly what I meant. In spirituality, these are the qualities and attitudes we let go of to see things clearly. It is literally the opposite approach to the self help paradigm.

Well, it is toxic because the way you 'work' on yourself in self help industry is brute force, full of craving, suffering, self-clinging and should statements. The way you work on yourself is incomparably different after spiritual insights are seen more clearly. There is no longer a self that you experience as solid and real, objective etc. Allow for direct experience to inform your ideas about it. Don't accept my claims at face value.

Hi everyone. In this post, I wanted to share my current practice if any of you would like to follow along or share their own practice. I've seen immense value from it. With my recent modification, I've been doing it many days back to back and the amount of progress and depth I've uncovered is too great compared to my usual practice. --- This practice rests on the principles of 1- Craving is the innate desire and aversion for things to be different than how they currently unfold. The sense of being a self is reinforced primarily by craving. 2- The only truly satisfying state is the one that has no craving of any form. 3- Impermanence (in this sense, the changing nature of sensations) can be observed in all modalities of pleasure, neutrality and pain with clarity in order to reduce the immediate cause of suffering which is craving and self-clinging. The stable perception of sensations slowly dissolve. Initially, this is traumatic but the more you accept that this is the case, the less suffering will eventually arise. 4- The use of jhanic factors like happiness and joy allow for deeper and more consistent investigation into reality. While knowing the impermanent nature of these sensations, they still allow for a more effective and accurate spiritual investigation. 5- When the conditions are ideal (with the above principles), doing self enquiry clarifies the innate sense of being a self and allow for the deepest recesses of your unconscious mind to re-write their false innate programming. The result is a direct experience of seeing the illusion we all live under: The self is one mind/body, enduring in time and space, separate from everything else. --- The Practice Steps: 1- You start your practice by slowly increasing the power of awareness. The usual jhanic factors like joy and happiness arise with stable attention and strong metacognitive awareness. 2- Slowly, you start to observe the changing sensations that arise moment by moment. There is nothing overly advanced about this instruction. Make sure to observe there are MORE arising and passing aways in all objects and the usual stability we experience with 'states' and objects (breath, body etc.) are much more fickle and moving than we normally perceive. Do this in open awareness but with momentary concentration. - Note: This mode of perception is rawer processing of binding moments of consciousness. The part of your brain which constructs 'things' out of processes is temporarily disabled. 3- Now, use this perception of impermanence to significantly reduce your desire for pleasant sensations and aversion for unpleasant sensations. Initiate this perception by noticing how the medium of sensations are all changing, somewhat vibrating rather than solid and stable objects. In all pleasant, neutral or unpleasant sensations. Your alertness and clarity of mind needs to be higher than the sober state of consciousness to be able to tune into it. Realize that you don't have to pursue or run away from sensations which constantly change in each moment. Impute less of 'wanting' to the conscious experience. 4- Now, pour all of your investigation and energy into this experience of craving in open awareness. This innate feeling that things need to be different than how they unfold to be satisfied. Remind your mind that to reduce suffering, all you have to do is to reduce your desire and aversion for things to be different than what they are. The only satisfying state is the one where there is no craving. Tune into what you experience and train the mind to FULLY accept all sensations and open up to them. You'll experience a different state of consciousness compared to your usual resistance paradigm. Unless this shift occurs noticeably, you'll need to continue investigating what exactly you are not allowing to exist and let go of that. (ex. pain in your legs, a sense of boredom, not wanting to see sensations in detail and wanting to stabilize, wanting for more joy and pleasure to spread the body than whatever exists right now etc.) 5- With the heightened understanding of reduced craving and seeing more of the detail and impermanence of objects in conscious experience, now move to the final piece of the puzzle: Self inquiry. Since craving reinforces self-clinging, we are now in an incredible state of mind to see the self as it is. Ask the question: Who am I? Allow the unconscious mind to feel a particular tug in awareness. A release of further resistance of how things are will occur as self perception reduces. Then it will re-group as a block of resistance. Ask the question again to release it again. You need to feel SIGNIFICANT equanimity rising and SIGNIFICANT resistance dropping. If this is not happening, go back to the previous step and do the non-craving process again. Try to maintain this level of reduced craving and allow for the unconscious mind to re-program to its deepest parts. --- When you close your eyes, feel the burden of being a separate self dissolving and your self-boundaries getting less stable with 'Who am I?' When you open your eyes, defocus your eyes and resist the urge to make objects out of processes and see the interconnectedness of everything in a state of open awareness. Resist the urge for attention to contract on objects like TV screen, floor, house, breat, body etc. When you maintain this investigation for as long as you've intended, complete your practice by resolving to replicate this perception as often as possible in daily life. DONE! ----- Let me know your thoughts about the practice and share your own practices. Feel free to ask questions. Much love, Arda

Hi there Let me point out that all of this happens simultaneously. You only initially go through the sequence in maybe 10 seconds and then maintain all the insight experiences and clearly perceive them as a whole. Yes, exactly. Those stages are not experienced like moving up or down the stages. I've written them down like that to teach what to do intuitively. The entire practice happens simultaneously and should be practiced in daily life constantly with metacognitive awareness.

Hi Brandon. As craving reduces, doing metta will be intuitively easy. You can use it to enter into jhanic states. Try the technique I've outlined above as well. Metta definitely has a lot of positive extended effects on morality. Let me know how it progresses. But continue to progress on your formal practice as well. In fact, bring the loving qualities you've developed in metta to your breath practice and develop that aspect of awareness.

Good luck Ethan and let us know your progress on the forum :))

Hi Ethan. Seeing the impermanence in pain and pleasure while reducing the desire for things to be different than how you are EXACTLY experiencing them right now is going to reduce self-clinging. This is the key :)) Try to connect this impermanence (which induces equanimity anyways) to your self-experience right now :)) See its impermanence and to aid you in this investigation, reduce craving and allow a clearer look at where perception originates. The understanding will develop by itself. Inıtıally, do a 3 hour normal meditation. Feel free to move your shoulders, stretch BUT don't allow yourself to move your legs. (in a cross legged posture). That is where the bulk of suffering lies in the first place. This is still very beneficial. Give yourself many 'relief' moments by stretching your back and arms while maintaining the posture. Then go back to heightened awareness. When you are comfortable doing this in casual meditation, now you can do a 3 hour SDS sit. Much love, Arda

In order to do long strong determination sits, one of the essential awareness modality one needs to develop is something called 'awareness of mental states, emotions and intentions'. This is actually an awareness that forms extremely deeply on the 2nd path attainment. Basically, you understand (on the experiential insight level) that as long as ANY amount of craving is present at ANY moment, it reinforces self-clinging and suffering. The only completely satisfying state is the one where craving of all forms is extinguished. Whether the state has more unpleasant sense percepts in comparison to pleasant sensations is absolutely irrelevant. To do a 3 hour SDS sit, you DON'T have to be a 2nd path meditator. But you need to have a momentary contact with the awareness of mental states, emotions and intentions. Here is what I mean, In an SDS sit, eventually you are going to feel the resistance and an innate urge like: 'Oh my god. It's been 2 hour and 10 mins, when is this gonna be over? This agitation keeps building. Due to cross legged posture, my legs are in a ton of pain. If I was sitting on a chair, this would be so easy. I can't feel any joy or equanimity...Nothing works. FUCK I'm gonna stop and eat some pizza.' Whenever this sort of mental state, intentions and urge arise, since you've developed metacognitive introspective awareness (explained here), you are going to self-correct, reduce craving (aversion in this case) which will allow you to maintain equanimity and tranquility. That will give you a breathing room to generate a happy mind (even if you are in a lot of pain) and from that will arise another opportunity to generate pleasurable sensations in the body (even if you are in a lot of pain). - Now this part is OPTIONAL but it will be effective to develop this habit and skill t develop equanimity further. Inıtıally, the moment of attention to the pain will be greater than pleasure but since you are in a state of joy and strong metacognitive awareness, eventually the moment of attention to the pleasure will greatly outnumber pain. The pain sense percepts will de-amplify and pleasure will amplify. This process, by itself, will generate even more equanimity and tranquility. Which will then generate stronger mindfulness. All of a sudden, pain no longer bothers your and/or is absent from your conscious awareness. What remains is a reduction of craving, self-clinging and a generation of joy, happiness, pleasure, contentment, equanimity, tranquility and metacognitive awareness. Whenever the mind goes back to the old paradigm, you revert it back to the process I've outlined above to reduce craving and self-clinging. Then the bell rings which ends your 3 hour SDS sit. ---- To be honest, this sort of technique won't be deployed unless everything becomes unbearable. Usually, this would constitute the last 15 mins of the sit. Normally, due to physical and mental pliancy, pain sensations don't even register in consciousness and is almost totally absent from your awareness. Even if pain arises, you allow it to exist and do its thing in the background. That will also develop equanimity in another way. In fact, that is your default technique. You can go further technically at this point. It depends on how much physical pliancy is present. That will develop deeper as you practice more. Don't worry about it. Do the best you can now and eventually, what seems impossible will be fairly doable and easy. It is all about developing this real time awareness which prevents you to sink into depression, agony, frustraton, and lack of awareness regarding your mental states, alertness, emotions, feelings, craving and activities of the mind. You need to stay conscious of these in each moment and allow the understanding I've outlined above to develop by itself. Hope this helps, Much love,

Sit on a chair if you want to. But working with pain and unpleasant sensations is the name of the game in a SDS sit. Cross legged postures allow you to work with all types of sensations. Let me know how your practice goes :))

You sit down to meditate and in a matter of 5-15 mins, a sense of sluggishness, drowsiness and sleepiness sets in. The energy levels of the mind drops significantly. Let alone focusing on the breath, you're sinking deeper into this somewhat pleasant dull sensation, slowly lay down on the couch and take a nap. 'Meditation inducing sleep' is a very important roadblock you need to circumvent to do ANY sort of investigation towards the truth. This happens due to improper attentional/awareness balance with low conscious power. What needs to happen is that you experience MORE alertness after meditation. Not less. You need to feel more aware and conscious of everything. If your practice is pulling you further into sleepiness, then I recommend the following approach to increase conscious power. --- Let's say your meditation object is the breath at the tip of the nose. 1- When you feel the slightest dullness or sleepiness arising, reduce your attentional intensity to the breath and while maintaining contact with the breath; spread the awareness to the entire body. 2- If you lose attentional contact with the breath, then squeeze in the awareness a little bit to tighten attention to the breath. 3- If you lose the full body awareness, then loosen the attention focus slightly to regain the spread. This process will train and increase conscious power and energy. 4- Once an optimum interaction and energy is developed, dullness and sleepiness will disappear slowly. 5- When the interaction gets even deeper so that even when you are INTENSELY focused on the breath sensations, very strong body and mental awareness continues. 6- This is the point where after meditation, your state of consciousness will get more pristine and clear. Its energy levels WILL increase significantly but it won't induce agitation or anxiety. ----- Unless you arrive at this stage in practice, your desire to do any sort of spiritual practice will slowly wane until you backslide again. Make sure you don't use meditation to feel less conscious. It is how we all begin but the sooner you drop this habit, the sooner your life will feel richer and your meditation practice will be easier to integrate into your daily life. Much love, Arda

Okay. Now, I get it. You meant A&P as a stage in Daniel's system of training. I thought you meant the integration of the insight into impermanence. All piti sensations, energy movements etc. are A&P in broad strokes. You would be correct. But it is not all that important. When piti is develop more deeply, it will enable you to practice jhanas. Only then will it have some deeper significance and effect in purifying the psyche with 5 hindrances and craving etc. Anyways, let me know how your practice goes Much love,

Metacognitive Awareness is the primary awareness component you develop in adept stages of meditation to practice and succeed in insight techniques like Self enquiry, God realization etc. Metacognitive Introspective awareness is composed of 2 different aspects to it. Everythng I'm going to write below is NOT analytical or complex to experience. They all happen instantaneously in each moment without any rational thought or planning. 1- Activities of the Mind Attention - Knowing where attention is - Vividness and clarity of attention - Movements of Attention Awareness - Knowing what Peripheral Awareness constitutes in any given moment. Especially when attention is stabilized on a particular object. - Knowing the changing objects within awareness - Knowing the contextual relatonship between objects 2- State of the Mind Clarity: Knowing the current dullness and alertness levels of the mind. Monitor of the mind's conscious power. Predominant Emotion: Joy, Sadness, Frustration, Boredom etc.. Hedonic Feelings: Knowing the overwhelming hedonic quality of each moment: Pleasant - Neutral - Painful Intentional quality behind the activities of the mind: Desire, Aversion or Equanimity --- Practice meditation with these sub-skills in mind. These are the exact qualities you are developing to become a skilled meditator. This will allow you to rest in thoughtlessness. Or to stay with the breath even when there are distractions in the background. This will prevent sinking into further unconsciousness when dullness is present. Don't mistake meditation as 'watching my breath' and that's it. Maybe some revelation will instantly hit me after more breath observation. Yeah, that can happen. But this is not why we focus on the breath. It is to develop these faculties I've laid out above so that you can investigate reality with as full conscious awareness as possible. Not at all different than how psychedelics allow you to investigate reality at greater and more accurate depths compared to a sober state of consciousness. Much love, Arda

@Tristan12 It is great to hear Ethan's advice worked well for you :)) Try the process I've outlined in the post if that strategy doesn't work. Basically, do whatever works. Only as a last resort, give into the sensation of sleepiness and take a nap. Until then, do your very best integrating these antidotes and eventually, your mind will 'click' and say 'Okay. Finally, I have a clear understanding of how sleepiness arises and I know exactly how to practice to remain ever alert and bright' When that point comes, your practice will take off and potentially be a watershed moment since it will enable you to develop deeper awareness and meditation skills. Getting to that moment is absolutely crucial.

Hi, I've just seen your post. Hope you are doing well. This is a fairly classic description of 'incomplete piti'. Arising and passing away is a different insight that will surely come as you go deeper into your spiritual training. The sense of control is very real but the one who is 'exercising' this control by forming intentions is an illusion you'll drop as you go further. Just keep that in mind as you practice. You need to provide me with how you use attention and awareness and what level of tranquility, equanimity, joy and mindfulness arises because of this process. Only then, I can tell you which stage you are in TMI. Energy sensations, head shakes, etc can arise at any stage but to answer your question, since you have deemed your meditation skills as mediocre, it is safe to assume it is somewhere between stages 2-5. That is great. That excitement will motivate you to practice more often and deeper. Maintain that and try to curb it with equanimity if it produces agitation or impatience. You need to develop such strong levels of awareness that regardless of what object of meditation you put your attention on (breath, pleasure, energy blockage, part of the body etc), you have strong peripheral awareness of everything else and stability of attention to that particular object. Alongside this, piti (joy) and happiness will arise giving you the feedback that things are going in the right direction. Then arises tranquility and equanimity where metacognitive awareness tends to develop deeply which is the primary awareness I've outlined in this post :)) Let me know if you have questions, Much love,

@BipolarGrowth That is great, Brandon :)) Let me know how your practice is going with TMI.

Shinzen's positive feel technique is extremely valuable. It is the most approachable and effective jhana alternative. It is great that it increased alertness and clarity along with (hopefully) baseline happiness and joy. Make sure not to get seduced by the pleasant sensations of dullness if it arises. Make sure to maintain consciousness as pristine and aware as possible.

If you use it to go to sleep, then it might be a good idea but you don't want to develop the habit. Your practice needs to come to a point where when you feel really foggy and sleepy, you intentionally choose to meditate to increase alertness and clarity. Usually, people sink deeper into sleepiness after meditation. This is precisely the dysfunctional habit we need to work on with this technique I've outlined above. Of course, opening your eyes, clenching your muscles etc are immediate antidotes to dullness. Since they are so basic, I didn't explain them here. Try this out and be more aware of dullness in meditation next time. See how much power you might have in this process by playing around with attention and awareness. Much love,

Hi Ethan! I'd definitely agree with that. Dullness or sleepiness, by itself, no longer poses an insurmountable problem AFTER a certain degree of skill and mindfulness is attained. You can pierce into dullness and allow it to be there. But let me say a few things about this. I'd like to point to the similarity of such an approach with 'increasing energy levels' sort of style. In Shinzen's system, you turn towards dullness and expand mindfulness and clarity. The meditation object is the drowsiness itself. With high levels of acceptance and spreading of awareness, you increase conscious power. That is still a technique done to maintain mindfulness clearly and to prevent going to sleep. In Culadasa's technique, you focus on a different object (the breath) without pushing sleepiness away while maintaining strong peripheral awareness of the mind and body. You focus outwards (in Shinzen's terms). Drowsiness is relegated to awareness for monitoring the overall energy levels of the mind. Energy levels change as you play around with attention and awareness. So, there are no manipulations either way. Both are inwards and outwards versions of the same process. That 'manipulation' is merely a more helpful adjustment you 'choose' to do with more introspective wisdom. If you don't 'manipulate' at all, you'll lay down to take a nap. Here is why understanding this is extremely crucial. Recently, I've realized experientially that we ALL live our entire lives (almost all the time) in a state of stable subtle dullness. Occasional exceptions are sports and getting into zone with any hobby etc. Other than that, dullness pervades our lives and reduces our conscious potential dramatically. Of course, it is important to improve mindfulness WHILE sleepiness progresses. In fact, that is what you do in TMI in stages 5-8 to improve mindfulness :)) But after realizing how pervasive of an effect dullness has on one's consciousness, everyone is better off taking it very seriously and improving the mind's capabilities to 1- Increase conscious power (this should be a priority imo) 2- deal with sleepiness by turning inwards and deconstructing Hope this gives some more clarity regarding my thoughts on it. I've realized I've underestimated how much dullness and sleepiness effects my entire life and reinforce a negative mental habit for the purposes of living a rich spiritual life. Especially for beginner meditators, sleepiness should be addressed as soon as possible to not get stuck. I value this aspect of practice much more than I did any other time in my life. Much love, Arda

@catcat69123 You are welcome