What is the way you were meditating? Relaxed or focused? Comfortable or cross legged? Focusing on a meaningless symbol, or letting your mind wander, or focusing on something meaningful?
I have found that I can produce a significant amount of emotion, of a chosen type, eg anxious, miserable, laughing, foucssedly happy, ect in seconds. I seem to do this just by focusing on the emotion with little conscious thinking of a concept that would cause the emotion. Is this meditation? (Introspection, highly unreliable)
Can you describe the meditation as attempting to modify your thought pattern in some way?
I’m going to partially answer your question. The full answer is that I followed the instructions of The Mind Illuminated, and that if you want to meditate regularly I suggest doing the same. And also find a teacher. I lack one and notice the lack; I’ll be seeking one out when I move to Boston soon.
I did both sitting and walking meditation. While sitting, I would pay attention to the sensations of my breath, while also trying to be aware of everything else (sight if eyes open; sounds; itches; etc.). My mind would then wander. When I noticed it had wandered, I would return focus to my breath. This would happen over and over again, something like once a minute.
I wouldn’t describe meditation as modifying my thought patterns, because the (e.g. breath) sensations I put my attention on are not thoughts. My thoughts take me away from them.
I’d usually sit cross-legged, but when that got uncomfortable I would just sit upright in a chair. You should sit in a comfortable but alert position. (Sit upright! Don’t slouch. It seems to me to have a surprising detrimental effect on focus.)
I haven’t tried amplifying emotions. I don’t know of any style of meditation that centers around that, but I hear there’s a wide variety, most of which I know nothing about. I just tried, and wasn’t able to immediately produce a strong emotion in myself (just middling ones).
The subjective effect I experience from meditation usually happens after the fact. (Or appears to; it might just be harder to notice when you’re repeatedly returning to your breath.) It’s a phase transition in my mind. Like I said, I’m rather confused about what’s going on, but I can tell you how it feels. It feels (repeatedly) like I have just woken from a dream; my inner monologue grows quieter; it no longer feels appropriate to say that “I am experiencing this”, rather there are only sensations; the present feels isolated from the past, even seconds ago; objects in sight feel more real than those not in sight. It sounds (and feels) strange, but A++ would experience again.
“waking up from a dream” is a relatively common description as are the other things you describe. As your “mindfulness” improves you will more or less permanently shift into “awake”. With practice the experience transitions from a “psychological” state to a “psychological” trait. Using Kahnemans terminology this transition can crudely be thought of as the balance of power shifting from the “remembering self” to the “experiencing self”
Are you able to sit cross-legged for more than 30 minutes, without moving your legs, without pain? Is there a trick to doing so that isn’t “sit cross-legged an hour every day for a year; by then the pain will stop”?
Personally, my leg goes to sleep and starts throbbing, and I hear this is pretty common.
It’s been a while since I regularly sat in cross-legged as I’m in a meditation tradition where we don’t meditate cross-legged. It’s comfortable enough to sit cross-legged that I sometimes do it without meditating.
I’m just writing from personal experience but my current hypothesis is that at the beginning having something on which you can lean your back is central.
I acquired the ability to sit how I sit from doing an Aikido breathing meditation I took out of a book that includes some movement and I did it back then with my back resting against a wall. In the meditation there was the goal to inhale really long and then exhale really long and move a bit forward and contract with the whole body and then give the lungs as much space as possible during the inhale.
The wall helps the body to organize in that position and then after having learned how to sit that way it isn’t needed anymore.
One thing I did back then was to have my feet directly in front of me with the wall in my back and push down the legs on both side during the exhale so that the knees go down and take the up during the inhale.
That’s what I did back then when I didn’t know much and just had book to guide me.
I still think that the basic principle of allowing your body to sync with a rhythm will having as much support as you need to sit comfortably in a cross-legged position is a good way to learn to sit.
There’s a oscillating rhythm that’s faster then the breathing rhythm that works to stabilize the body position but there seems to be little research for it and the people who taught me about it couldn’t give me any names. In it you basically move the minimum that’s possible to move forward and back in a really fast rhythm of maybe one second.
There’s a state where that rhythm happens automatically and where you aren’t moving back and forth through effort, the body gets upright and tensions relax.
I’m not sure whether my description is enough for you to work with that oscillating rhythm.
What is the way you were meditating? Relaxed or focused? Comfortable or cross legged? Focusing on a meaningless symbol, or letting your mind wander, or focusing on something meaningful?
I have found that I can produce a significant amount of emotion, of a chosen type, eg anxious, miserable, laughing, foucssedly happy, ect in seconds. I seem to do this just by focusing on the emotion with little conscious thinking of a concept that would cause the emotion. Is this meditation? (Introspection, highly unreliable)
Can you describe the meditation as attempting to modify your thought pattern in some way?
I’m going to partially answer your question. The full answer is that I followed the instructions of The Mind Illuminated, and that if you want to meditate regularly I suggest doing the same. And also find a teacher. I lack one and notice the lack; I’ll be seeking one out when I move to Boston soon.
I did both sitting and walking meditation. While sitting, I would pay attention to the sensations of my breath, while also trying to be aware of everything else (sight if eyes open; sounds; itches; etc.). My mind would then wander. When I noticed it had wandered, I would return focus to my breath. This would happen over and over again, something like once a minute.
I wouldn’t describe meditation as modifying my thought patterns, because the (e.g. breath) sensations I put my attention on are not thoughts. My thoughts take me away from them.
I’d usually sit cross-legged, but when that got uncomfortable I would just sit upright in a chair. You should sit in a comfortable but alert position. (Sit upright! Don’t slouch. It seems to me to have a surprising detrimental effect on focus.)
I haven’t tried amplifying emotions. I don’t know of any style of meditation that centers around that, but I hear there’s a wide variety, most of which I know nothing about. I just tried, and wasn’t able to immediately produce a strong emotion in myself (just middling ones).
The subjective effect I experience from meditation usually happens after the fact. (Or appears to; it might just be harder to notice when you’re repeatedly returning to your breath.) It’s a phase transition in my mind. Like I said, I’m rather confused about what’s going on, but I can tell you how it feels. It feels (repeatedly) like I have just woken from a dream; my inner monologue grows quieter; it no longer feels appropriate to say that “I am experiencing this”, rather there are only sensations; the present feels isolated from the past, even seconds ago; objects in sight feel more real than those not in sight. It sounds (and feels) strange, but A++ would experience again.
There has been (some) research on the hoped-for effects of meditation. http://nonsymbolic.org/publications
“waking up from a dream” is a relatively common description as are the other things you describe. As your “mindfulness” improves you will more or less permanently shift into “awake”. With practice the experience transitions from a “psychological” state to a “psychological” trait. Using Kahnemans terminology this transition can crudely be thought of as the balance of power shifting from the “remembering self” to the “experiencing self”
https://lindagraham-mft.net/the-experiencing-self-vs-the-remembering-self/
There’s nothing inherently uncomfortable about sitting cross legged. It’s just a matter of adapting yourself to the position.
Are you able to sit cross-legged for more than 30 minutes, without moving your legs, without pain? Is there a trick to doing so that isn’t “sit cross-legged an hour every day for a year; by then the pain will stop”?
Personally, my leg goes to sleep and starts throbbing, and I hear this is pretty common.
It’s been a while since I regularly sat in cross-legged as I’m in a meditation tradition where we don’t meditate cross-legged. It’s comfortable enough to sit cross-legged that I sometimes do it without meditating.
I’m just writing from personal experience but my current hypothesis is that at the beginning having something on which you can lean your back is central.
I acquired the ability to sit how I sit from doing an Aikido breathing meditation I took out of a book that includes some movement and I did it back then with my back resting against a wall. In the meditation there was the goal to inhale really long and then exhale really long and move a bit forward and contract with the whole body and then give the lungs as much space as possible during the inhale.
The wall helps the body to organize in that position and then after having learned how to sit that way it isn’t needed anymore.
One thing I did back then was to have my feet directly in front of me with the wall in my back and push down the legs on both side during the exhale so that the knees go down and take the up during the inhale.
That’s what I did back then when I didn’t know much and just had book to guide me.
I still think that the basic principle of allowing your body to sync with a rhythm will having as much support as you need to sit comfortably in a cross-legged position is a good way to learn to sit.
There’s a oscillating rhythm that’s faster then the breathing rhythm that works to stabilize the body position but there seems to be little research for it and the people who taught me about it couldn’t give me any names. In it you basically move the minimum that’s possible to move forward and back in a really fast rhythm of maybe one second.
There’s a state where that rhythm happens automatically and where you aren’t moving back and forth through effort, the body gets upright and tensions relax.
I’m not sure whether my description is enough for you to work with that oscillating rhythm.
For me, being able to lean my back against something fixes the thing about legs going to sleep.
Should take about a week of stretching. Not a year of sitting.