Where Next?

[TheSophie]

Hi people,

Do any of you have any tips on techniques to where to take my meditation next?

As some background, I started out meditation to get a handle on anxiety issues I was having. After a few years of slight interest and six months of serious practice I am now able to calm my mind down really well, and when anxiety attacks happen I can now get myself back to a relaxed state pretty quickly and reliably. When I am meditating without the anxiety I can get very calm and content.

All of this has left me interested in doing more self-inquiry... most days I can get pretty calm after 20 minutes or so and it would be nice to have techniques that let me dig a little deeper after that point.

I am currently using the following in order of "depth" of meditation:

Simple breath awareness
Normal mindfulness
Do nothing
Strong determination sitting
Neti-neti style negation
"Who am I" style questioning

I kind of see how I feel before I start and then do 5 mins of breath awareness, 20 mins of do nothing, then 20 mins of 'who am i' questioning.

ie. I kind of ramp things up slowly.

Could anyone suggest other techniques that have worked well for them? Or is it more a case of working with what I have for longer periods perhaps?

Or, do any of you have any nice combinations? For example, I find that 20 mins of neti neti followed by 20 mins of 'who am i' questioning  can work really well. The neti neti kind of gets my head primed for the 'who am i' in a way that really opens things up.

[123456789]

I don't recommend you use more then one technique in one sit.

[TheSophie]

Cool - worth keeping in mind, thanks.

I'm aware that I should probably do some longer stints of a single kind of meditation rather than 20 of this then 20 of that.  I guess I find it hard to jump straight into a 'who am i' style thing from dealing with the kids bedtimes etc. I need to ease in a little.

 

 

[LaucherJunge]

1 hour ago, Mr Lenny said:

I don't recommend you use more then one technique in one sit.

Why is that bad? I like to combine them usually.

[123456789]

@LaucherJunge Watch out for those labels. I never said there's anything "bad" about combining techniques. I don't recommend doing because if you use one technique at a time you can go deeper, faster.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Mr Lenny

[LaucherJunge]

18 minutes ago, Mr Lenny said:

@LaucherJunge Watch out for those labels. I never said there's anything "bad" about combining techniques. I don't recommend doing because if you use one technique at a time you can go deeper, faster.

It depends what you are aiming for. If i combine many techniques the benefits will have a larger quantity and the increase in quality due to one technique might actually fall off if you reach a very high level.
But it comes down to how long you actually meditate sure if its 30 minutes and you use 3 different techniques that would be pretty useless but if you meditate 3 hours and use 3 different techniques it is a whole other story. That is atleast my experience that the first 20-40 minutes you go deeper at a good pace but then it starts to get deeper very slowly if it does at all.