Category Archives: advice

Reboot Day 56: Five Faculties

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I’m writ­ing today’s blog entry before my med­i­ta­tion, unusu­ally. I was lis­ten­ing to Gil Fronsdal’s talk on the Five Fac­ul­ties in this week’s Audio Dharma pod­cast, and this was very use­ful as a kind of map for me, a list of things to bear in mind as I carry on with my practice.

I don’t think they have to be applied in any par­tic­u­lar order. From what I can see, they can all grow at once, sup­port­ing each other, and you prob­a­bly don’t want to develop one very far ahead of the others.

So far I appear to be doing okay on the effort/persistence front. I’m doing it; I’m mak­ing the effort to sit daily. I’m stick­ing with the prac­tice, and have been for 56 fairly solid days now.

Mind­ful­ness I’ve been strug­gling with. I have prob­lems being present, but I know I have to work on that. My fif­teen min­utes of med­i­ta­tion have seemed to be length­en­ing, stretch­ing out, and I get the impres­sion from Gil’s talk that a lack of mind­ful­ness can lead to a sit­ting feel­ing like it was over with in the blink of an eye. So per­haps my apparently-lengthening med­i­ta­tions are a sign I’m being more mind­ful. One can only hope.

I’m not too sure about con­cen­tra­tion yet. I’m not entirely sure of the dif­fer­ence between mind­ful­ness and con­cen­tra­tion, so that’s clearly some­thing to study fur­ther. Accord­ing to this Wikipedia page:

  • Mind­ful­ness refers to focus­ing on the four satipatthana.
  • Con­cen­tra­tion refers to achiev­ing the four jhanas.

So I’ve just put “Look up what sati­patthana and jhanas are” on my to-do list (along with “do the laun­dry” and “put bins out”; it’s not a specif­i­cally spir­i­tual to-do list…)

Gil described con­cen­tra­tion like this, as best as I could tran­scribe it:

“Focused calm, stay­ing focused enough to see more pre­cisely and more pen­e­trat­ingly, ‘What’s hap­pen­ing here?’… You can’t see your reflec­tion in a pond that’s rip­pled by the wind. The pond has to be still… Same with the mind.“

I’ve not really touched on dis­cern­ment at all. This seems to be the wis­dom, the under­stand­ing you need to guide you along your jour­ney, the abil­ity to make the right deci­sions. So per­haps that’s what I’m start­ing to do right now — look for direc­tion, and try to under­stand where I am and the path I want to take from this point.

Finally, there’s faith — although this comes first in the list, it seems, I don’t think I’ve thought about it much. I sup­pose start­ing med­i­ta­tion is a bit of a leap of faith — the faith that the hours I’ll spend (only about 14, so far!) will ben­e­fit me in some way, make me a bet­ter per­son, and improve my abil­ity to con­cen­trate. But I’ve not really thought about it much from there. I sup­pose faith has prob­a­bly kicked in on those occa­sions where I was sit­ting for days and didn’t seem to be improv­ing — some­times you need a bit of faith to stick with things, when you can’t dis­cern (and I use the word advis­edly) results.

This makes sense, I think, given what Gil said about faith:

“Faith is sup­posed to be bal­anced with [dis­cern­ment]… our abil­ity to be dis­cern­ing, to be wise… If peo­ple rely too much on faith, your prac­tice can go askew. If you rely too much on intel­li­gence, on think­ing about things, maybe you don’t relax enough. Our faith helps us relax.“

Any­way. That’s prob­a­bly given me far too much to think about dur­ing today’s med­i­ta­tion. We’ll see how I do. I prob­a­bly don’t have time to write the med­i­ta­tion up as well as actu­ally med­i­tate — it’s 11:14 PM — so I might have to check in on today in the morning…

Drowsiness

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I’ve done a bit of look­ing around to find advice on feel­ing sleepy when you med­i­tate, which is prob­a­bly my biggest prob­lem at the moment. Here’s some of the tips I’m plan­ning on trying:

“Deva” has this to say on IndiaDivine’s yoga forum:

It is quite com­mon to expe­ri­ence drowsi­ness dur­ing med­i­ta­tion. You become very calm and relaxed. That is exactly what is sup­posed to hap­pen. Unfor­tu­nately, we ordi­nar­ily expe­ri­ence this lovely state only when we are falling asleep, and we asso­ciate it with that process. So nat­u­rally, you begin to drift off. When you find this hap­pen­ing, apply your mind­ful­ness to the state of drossi­ness itself. Drowsi­ness has cer­tain def­i­nite char­ac­ter­is­tics. It does cer­tain things to your thought process. Find out what. It has cer­tain body feel­ings asso­ci­ated with it. Locate those.

This inquis­i­tive aware­ness is the direct oppo­site of drowsi­ness, and will evap­o­rate it.

Paramhansa Yogananda is quoted on ananda.org:

Squeeze your eyes shut sev­eral times, then open them wide and stare straight ahead. Repeat this prac­tice once or twice more. If you do this, sleepi­ness will cease to bother you.

They also say:

Keep­ing the eyes uplifted dur­ing med­i­ta­tion helps you stay more alert. It also attunes you to higher states of con­scious­ness. If you find your­self falling asleep, or drift­ing off in med­i­ta­tion, con­cen­trate very deeply — but with­out strain — at the point between the eyebrows…

…You may expe­ri­ence times where sleepi­ness is a recur­ring prob­lem. If this is the case, don’t worry about it; it’s usu­ally just a phase. Med­i­tat­ing with energy and calm inten­sity — plus a pos­i­tive atti­tude — is the key to break­ing through.

Agree­ing with my sus­pi­cions about a sleep debt, Tom R Childers has this to say:

Sleepi­ness was a big prob­lem in my prac­tice for about the first 6 years… I was work­ing a stress­ful job and had lots of out­side com­mit­ments, so I scrimped on sleep. A few years ago I did an experiement to see if get­ting a lit­tle more sleep would help, and the results were very dra­matic. A lit­tle extra sleep each night elim­i­nated most sleepi­ness from my med­i­ta­tion, and made the prac­tice much more enjoy­able. It also made me real­ize I was com­mit­ting myself to too many activ­i­ties and I had to learn how to say “No” and take care of myself.

…which res­onates a lot with me.

Some of the most detailed advice I found was in this YouTube video, where Ajahn Jayasaro says:

Most people’s minds are depen­dent on exter­nal stim­uli… This inevitably is a prob­lem when you meditate…

…and then he nails the feel­ing I’ve been get­ting very well:

…your mind shifts between two modes, that of agi­ta­tion and sleepi­ness. You finally get through all the agi­ta­tion, you finally think, “now I’m get­ting some­where”, and then you get dull, drowsy, and maybe fall asleep. Again, nor­mal, almost every­body goes through this at some time or other. Peo­ple who sit really straight and don’t seem to have any prob­lem with sleepi­ness are usu­ally the ones that are think­ing a lot!

There’s a lot of good advice in the video, about watch­ing for the warn­ing signs, about prim­ing your mind to watch for the prob­lem at the begin­ning of the ses­sion, and a spe­cific tip about using the per­cep­tion of light to counter the dull­ness and tor­por. He also sug­gests using a med­i­ta­tion tech­nique that focuses not on the breath, but uses dis­cur­sive thought, like the metta (loving-kindness) med­i­ta­tion, which makes sense. Well worth watch­ing if you have five minutes.

So, that’s a good few things to try, and I’ll give them each a fair try over the next few days, or pos­si­bly weeks, and see what hap­pens. But right now, the best thing I can do for my drowsi­ness is to go to bed, because it’s gone 11pm!