As we sit to meditate we become acutely aware of this experience of sensing. How we relate to this present experience of sensing is the arena for creating new wholesome action by body/speech and mind or how we recreate from our past experience. What tends to happen is that we may get a little space around the arising experience and get a sense or belief that we know it yet it is still influencing how and who we are. This is not an experience to feel ashamed about, it is an ongoing process of becoming familiar with our arising experience and allowing the needed resources to come to to the foreground to aid in the process of not interfering.
Having this body, the self-story that has been created other the years of relating to and as the body, are old kamma. This is a stimulation system so it is in constant contact through the senses, depending on our context and the health and state of this body/mind we will find different effects arising.
So here we are sitting, what do we do?
Do we follow an instruction?
As I have grown in my practice other the years I find it helpful to just take the intention to me.ditate as my meditation. Having done so, I sit gently with interest in my experience, giving permission for whatever is arising to arise, whatever is staying to stay and for whatever is passing to pass. This I find is like opening Pandora's box by allowing my thoughts, letting them unfold, becoming aware of how I interact with them. I begin to become familiar with my thought world, this leads me to become familiar with the emotional current running through these thought patterns. The familiarity that arises in relation to the emotional current brings me to become familiar with my bodily experience. This I find eventually becomes a 3D experience leading to understanding Dhamma. Insight into impermanence, stress and no self.
Here I would like to suggest that there are similar features between becoming familiar and Samadhi (composure of body/mind). As awareness develops in relation to experience as it arises instead of turning the mind towards a chosen technique we begin to know the hindrances to the arising of a composed mind more intimately. Becoming familiar with them instead of resisting and pushing away. I find it is possible to become familiar with sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor restlessness and remorse and doubt. To know them, allow them to reveal themselves like making a good friend. In doing so I have found I become wiser in relation to them and they do not have the same hold on me and my experience. This gives rise to the potential for composure and absorption to arise in gentle integrated ways. As we are not intending to seek the experience it comes to the foreground when the conditions are right, and the process of investigating/ becoming familiar means that if the desire to chase the experience down to get it again, can be understood and so the addiction to absorption becomes weakened leaving the mind to focus on being with the past/present/future as they arise conditionally in this moment.
There is something very relaxing to understanding that this present moment addiction that I had developed is an addiction to one aspect of the chain of time, it is not freedom. The past is arising now, meeting the present, the present moment in itself is just a moment in time. Yet it can reveal how we are relating to our past experience and generating our sense of the future. Giving space to feel the past helps to reveal how we have become this, the thoughts about the future reveal what I am wanting, needing and reacting to the pain, neutral and pleasure of the past and present. They can help to understand what we may need in our lives to feel more nourished, whole and alive.
I notice that with this sense of familiarity that has developed by being with my experiences as it arises, that when the mind does drift to the breath it does so with ease and drifts into a deeper sense of calm in a shorter period of time rather than intentionally returning to the breath. This I sense is due to the knowledge of the so-called hindrances.
This is all very interesting and I have found that as I release from the bounds of identifying with this experience the more human I become. As shame dies away, conditioned by the social interactions this body/mind has encountered in its journey. There is a sense of raw aliveness, an awareness of the levels of frustration that we buried in this body/mind again through identification with its desires/urges and needs and the repression that happened unintentionally and intentionally in relation to our contexts/ plus the reality that we can not fulfill every sensory stimulated desire.How these lead to noncongruent behavior so that we can get what we want/need. This awareness is entering the stream of being human not doing human. We become more fully human the more awake we become to this conditioned process, and find are self-being real about who we are.
