Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state. This is because in order to successfully breathe into various areas of your body, you have to be mindful of that area. It is directly practicing physical awareness.
The fact that you have become aware of subtleties of flight-or-flight responses is extremely good. That’s stage 2 of what it is possible to be mindful of.
Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the same way you breathe into different parts of your body. Try creating an emotion when you breathe in, and letting it dissipate when you breathe out.
Stage 4 is thoughts. Stage 5 is intuition. Stage 6 is deep subconscious data grouping and relationships. Stage 7 and 8 are a lot more complicated. Stage 8 is what Taoists call “the Tao”.
At stage 4, you should also begin practicing what is called “dissolving” in Taoist meditation. That’s the ability to be aware of a stuck thought/feeling/whatever, and allow it to dissipate. Methods of doing this involve breathing into the very precise spot you feel is tense when you become aware of the stuck feeling, or slowly stretching and contracting that spot to get the tissues and fluids moving; and may also include image training to imagine that spot liquefying, then gassifying, then becoming a part of your breath so that you can breathe it out. The trick is to become as aware of the stuck feeling as you possibly can, and then relax it slowly. It’s necessary to realize that your thoughts and feelings are connected to your fibrous body tissues in order to accomplish this (for example: thought control is connected to nerve tissue control).
Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.
PS. “stages” overlap. “stage” is a loose term I came up with to describe it just now. The Taoists call it “the 8 bodies”. They’re just a reference so that you can know what is possible, and approximately how much effort is required in order to accomplish it. Half way through, the game changes. All of the way through, the game changes again.
Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the same way you breathe into different parts of your body. Try creating an emotion when you breathe in, and letting it dissipate when you breathe out.
CFAR actually has a class on this–well, not as specific as creating an emotion when you breathe in and letting it dissipate when you breathe out, but on purposely creating emotions in general. This is something I’ve been doing for years, because emotions are interesting to explore.
Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.
I’m not at all sure that my current goals involve going “more than halfway” along a path that’s described in such abstract terms that I have no idea how it actually maps onto my real-life experiences. I’m happy to, y’know, keep meditating and reap whatever benefits may come.
Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state.
I’m very certain that you don’t have personal experience of what spawned her mindfulness of her body.
Breathing meditation is certainly a way to develop it but it’s not the only way. Body scanning is probably partly responsible for her gains in that area.
Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.
What do you mean here? I would just avoid visualing negative images. If you visualize something positive and it doesn’t disappear there no harm done.
There are a lot of people who think widely divergent things about meditation. The people who are looking in in terms of “enlightenment”, in my experience, make it sound harder and scarier. The people who are doing studies on meditation as a nice way to relax or be less anxious. Googling just “meditation” turns up scary enlightenment blog posts; googling “meditation and anxiety” or “studies on meditation” or any variation seems to turn up the less scary variants. Also, I promise, none of the recordings in my Dropbox folder are scary.
That is strange. I’m not versed in meditation except as tried here. But I’d think that can do stages 2 to 5 and possibly 6 at least to some lesser degree guessing from your summary. But I can’t breath consciously. I always get short winded until I let go of control (which I consciously can). Maybe it is related to my asthma.
Note that breathing consciously and being conscious of your breathing are not the same thing. I think the latter is usually what people are trying to do when they meditate.
Interesting detail. It appears that I cannot observe my breathing without altering it (and altering diverges to the mentioned short-windedness). At least not in any detail. Sampling doesn’t seem to alter it. I will experiment with this distinction.
It helped when I realized I should concentrate on how breathing feels instead of how it’s done. I usually concentrate on the rims of my nostrils and the sensations that passage of air causes in them. I think it helps that the sensations are very subtle, because it forces me to concentrate more. Concentrating on how to breath doesn’t even cross my mind once I become nostrils hanging in the void ;)
This experiment and its associated reflection on how the brain does it has led me to some (possibly obvious/well known) insight I’d like to share:
What does concentration mean brainwise? Roughly speaking letting ‘activation patterns’ of a perception (or thoughts) stabilize and suppressing non-salient aspects of the perception e.g. environmental noise.
(To do this with neuronal nets implies moderation feedback from a higher network level to a lower level)
Such a concentration allows to detect and learn finer differences in the perception structure because these finer differences can be picked up better in the absence of the filtered out ‘noise’.
(for neuronal networks this seems to correspond to e.g. selective training of kernels of deep learning nets)
Concentration/meditation on body perception then allows to become aware of its inner workings (as far as that is possible in principle given the ‘body noise’ and suppression capabilities).
If there are conscious control paths leading to feedback via the perception (and in the end even most subconscious control paths should be in principle controllable to some degree) then it should in principle be possible to learn the cooccurence patterns of control to perception (the same way that thoughs feedback on thoughts are routinely learned).
And this effectively means to consciously control (to a some degree) body functions normally working subconsciously.
This answers one question I long had: How it is possible for e.g. zen monks to achieve such feats as selectively controlling body temperature.
(for neuronal networks I’m not aware of algorithms for this kind of cooccurence learning)
Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state. This is because in order to successfully breathe into various areas of your body, you have to be mindful of that area. It is directly practicing physical awareness.
The fact that you have become aware of subtleties of flight-or-flight responses is extremely good. That’s stage 2 of what it is possible to be mindful of.
Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the same way you breathe into different parts of your body. Try creating an emotion when you breathe in, and letting it dissipate when you breathe out.
Stage 4 is thoughts. Stage 5 is intuition. Stage 6 is deep subconscious data grouping and relationships. Stage 7 and 8 are a lot more complicated. Stage 8 is what Taoists call “the Tao”.
At stage 4, you should also begin practicing what is called “dissolving” in Taoist meditation. That’s the ability to be aware of a stuck thought/feeling/whatever, and allow it to dissipate. Methods of doing this involve breathing into the very precise spot you feel is tense when you become aware of the stuck feeling, or slowly stretching and contracting that spot to get the tissues and fluids moving; and may also include image training to imagine that spot liquefying, then gassifying, then becoming a part of your breath so that you can breathe it out. The trick is to become as aware of the stuck feeling as you possibly can, and then relax it slowly. It’s necessary to realize that your thoughts and feelings are connected to your fibrous body tissues in order to accomplish this (for example: thought control is connected to nerve tissue control).
Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.
PS. “stages” overlap. “stage” is a loose term I came up with to describe it just now. The Taoists call it “the 8 bodies”. They’re just a reference so that you can know what is possible, and approximately how much effort is required in order to accomplish it. Half way through, the game changes. All of the way through, the game changes again.
CFAR actually has a class on this–well, not as specific as creating an emotion when you breathe in and letting it dissipate when you breathe out, but on purposely creating emotions in general. This is something I’ve been doing for years, because emotions are interesting to explore.
I’m not at all sure that my current goals involve going “more than halfway” along a path that’s described in such abstract terms that I have no idea how it actually maps onto my real-life experiences. I’m happy to, y’know, keep meditating and reap whatever benefits may come.
I’m very certain that you don’t have personal experience of what spawned her mindfulness of her body.
Breathing meditation is certainly a way to develop it but it’s not the only way. Body scanning is probably partly responsible for her gains in that area.
What do you mean here? I would just avoid visualing negative images. If you visualize something positive and it doesn’t disappear there no harm done.
After reading Swimmer’s article, I was thinking about starting to meditate; but you’re making it feel very hard, complicated and dangerous now.
There are a lot of people who think widely divergent things about meditation. The people who are looking in in terms of “enlightenment”, in my experience, make it sound harder and scarier. The people who are doing studies on meditation as a nice way to relax or be less anxious. Googling just “meditation” turns up scary enlightenment blog posts; googling “meditation and anxiety” or “studies on meditation” or any variation seems to turn up the less scary variants. Also, I promise, none of the recordings in my Dropbox folder are scary.
That is strange. I’m not versed in meditation except as tried here. But I’d think that can do stages 2 to 5 and possibly 6 at least to some lesser degree guessing from your summary. But I can’t breath consciously. I always get short winded until I let go of control (which I consciously can). Maybe it is related to my asthma.
Note that breathing consciously and being conscious of your breathing are not the same thing. I think the latter is usually what people are trying to do when they meditate.
Interesting detail. It appears that I cannot observe my breathing without altering it (and altering diverges to the mentioned short-windedness). At least not in any detail. Sampling doesn’t seem to alter it. I will experiment with this distinction.
It helped when I realized I should concentrate on how breathing feels instead of how it’s done. I usually concentrate on the rims of my nostrils and the sensations that passage of air causes in them. I think it helps that the sensations are very subtle, because it forces me to concentrate more. Concentrating on how to breath doesn’t even cross my mind once I become nostrils hanging in the void ;)
Eureka!
This experiment and its associated reflection on how the brain does it has led me to some (possibly obvious/well known) insight I’d like to share:
What does concentration mean brainwise? Roughly speaking letting ‘activation patterns’ of a perception (or thoughts) stabilize and suppressing non-salient aspects of the perception e.g. environmental noise.
(To do this with neuronal nets implies moderation feedback from a higher network level to a lower level)
Such a concentration allows to detect and learn finer differences in the perception structure because these finer differences can be picked up better in the absence of the filtered out ‘noise’.
(for neuronal networks this seems to correspond to e.g. selective training of kernels of deep learning nets)
Concentration/meditation on body perception then allows to become aware of its inner workings (as far as that is possible in principle given the ‘body noise’ and suppression capabilities).
If there are conscious control paths leading to feedback via the perception (and in the end even most subconscious control paths should be in principle controllable to some degree) then it should in principle be possible to learn the cooccurence patterns of control to perception (the same way that thoughs feedback on thoughts are routinely learned).
And this effectively means to consciously control (to a some degree) body functions normally working subconsciously.
This answers one question I long had: How it is possible for e.g. zen monks to achieve such feats as selectively controlling body temperature.
(for neuronal networks I’m not aware of algorithms for this kind of cooccurence learning)
Does this sound plausible?
PS. Focussing on nostrils did work.