1 hour Strong Determination Sit: The Pleasure Experiment

[ardacigin]

Hi everyone! I've started to ponder how an accomplished 70-year-old zen master can do a 10 hour SDS sit in perfect posture. Without suffering. With a smile on the face.

What exact ingredients wouid he concoct in his mind body system where this torturous sounding practice could be liberating with a smile on the face.

Of course, these people being massively awake with lots of integrated insight do help a lot. But as a beginner on the path, can I get a sense of how he might generate these sensations which he spends 10 hours in?

After all, once you get the insight that pain is mentally generated, you realize that it is the same with pleasure. 

In the previous SDS sit where everything was dominated by pain, I had the interesting insight afterwards:

'Why did I experience so much pain?...Oh right. Because that is exactly what I intended to investigate and generated my attitude coming off the practice'

There was this 'I need to see how I react to pain' mentality prior to the sit. And that is exactly what my mind provided me with.

As a samatha practitioner, my mind is extremely susceptible to suggestions and intentions it generates. It is not an exact fool proof science but as long as it is within my conditioning, through mindfulness, it is more likely that the results will be in favour of these intentions.

So, it is only natural that I try the same SDS sit with pleasure. Why wouldn't an SDS be filled with amplified pleasure? Why do we assume that it will be full of pain?

Of course, I'm not going to assume absolute bliss to arise just because I've formed strong intentions for it to arise. But I can observe to what degree I can do this with my existing understanding and skills.

The most pain arose in my legs the earlier sit. 

With that in mind, this was going to be my overall strategy.

1- Generate any sensation of pleasure in my body with my mind.

2- Ampilify it enough with attention and then spread it to my legs prior to any pain settling in. I can also spread it everwhere else but the legs are a priority.

3- If any pain already set in, attempt to transmute it to pleasurable sensations as best the mind can. 

4- Hold a whole body metacognitive awareness of other body parts of pleasure even when pain arises at any location.

5- Whenever an opportunity is found, experience the entire mind body system from no-self perception as the generation of pleasure ensues.

6- Observe the tranquility and equanimity this provides and reinforce this perception as much as possible.

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As a rule, I also couldn't generate any perceptible pleasure before I start the sit. Everything would be done starting from the cross-legged posture from a neutral emotional state.

And in a 1 hour SDS sit, I BARELY experienced any pain. Especially not the 'leg pain' I perceived as so ingrained and had to do with pressure between nerves.

None of that registered any overt pain sensations in my mind. I downregulated most of the pain receptors in my brain with a strong intention.

In fact, there was this perceptible pleasure in my legs and head area momentarily with each inhale and exhale the entire sit once the momentum set in. There was no pleasure in my torso area with very little tint of pleasantness in my arms and hands.

I'll definitely work on spreading it deeply to my torso in the future. I assume there is some unconscious tension and blockage there.

I did feel some agitation and sweating at some points but due to the attitude of my mind, it transmuted into excitement and energy somewhat coagulated into perceptible pleasure in my legs and head area. Which made those sensations pleasurable to experience.

I only felt this neutral feel to my entire back and torso as a whole. I feel like there are some physical and mental knots there. But there was no significant pain at all. 

I'd regard all 60 min of this sit to be 99% pleasant and pain free. Not orgasmically pleasant but pleasant nonetheless. And it was all because I did go through that 6 step process outlined above with a strong intention to do it.

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After I got this, I assume that this is second nature to a 70 year old zen master doing 10 hour SDS sits with ease. Not only do they have the insights, but they have trained their minds to generate either pleasure or pain depending on what they want to investigate. This is all mental work I've done with this sit. It wasn't 'physical pain' and paraesthesia spreading my legs. I had a completely different experience sinking into pleasure.

 The zen master don't suffer as a self anyways but this idea that the entire sit is working through pain sensations is not accurate in my opinion. Just as one can train to maintain perfect equanimity in a lot of pain, the same can be done with pleasure. Both are liberating in different taste palates.

A zen master must definitely has complete access to all 3 flavours of experience and can see through them with equal clarity and skill: neutral, painful and pleasurable sensations.

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Hope this helps. It was an eye-opening sit in regards to the forming of intentions of my mind and how they shape up my experience so directly at this phase of my practice.

Let me know your thoughts.

Much love,

 

 

 

Edited September 24, 2021 by ardacigin

[gettoefl]

pain is penance failure is feedback ... just add five mins a week to your sits, don't try a marathon on day 1 ... in one year you will be zen master / 4

i do this