Tracking meditation on Beeminder and practicing shi-nè

The last year and a half of my meditation goal on @bmndr. The slope used to be steeper but in Jan'18 I made it really shallow because I wanted to just use it for tracking. In June I went to the @MonasticAcademy for a week, and... yeah.

Aug 3, 2019

If it had been a meditation-focused retreat, and not a BioEmotive+WeSpace retreat, then I would have done more meditation in that one week (4620h) than in the entire rest of my life so far. (this is based on someone saying those retreats have 11 hours/day of meditation)

The type of meditation that I did at MAPLE and that I'm doing afterwards is mostly shi-nè, from the Aro Buddhism meditation email course: aromeditation.org I quite like it! If you're trying it too (as I believe @QiaochuYuan and @gmws82 are) I'd love to talk about exps.

When I cannot for the life of me count my outbreaths, I shift to Adyashanti's True Meditation, which has one instruction: "No manipulation."

jonathan @jonathandubin · Jul 11, 2019

@Malcolm_Ocean I thought you'd appreciate this. It's an excerpt from Adyashanti's book True Meditation, where he describes a meditation practice (called True Meditation) that sounds awfully like an "abiding in the right hemisphere" practice

This is a delightfully perplexing little koan. I am sitting. My face is itchy. Do I scratch it? If I scratch, am I manipulating my sensations? If I inhibit my urge to scratch, am I manipulating my behavior?

Note that I imagine for many people this inquiry would mostly be a frustrating exercise, but I've been working with similar right-hemisphere practice in other domains for a long time (conversation, dance, & life in general) so it cuts right to the core for me.