Anapana

I've signed up for another Vipassana course in June.  In the application process it became apparent that if I was going to continue with Goenka, I was going to have to make the decision to embrace this technique fully.

I haven't. Especially at the level of anapana, noticing the breath at the nostrils.  I'm a belly breather, and shifting to anapana hasn't been easy.  It's like I feel this massive electrical rod going straight down from my nose to my belly every time I try it.  I'm starting to realize that I'm afraid to make the permanent shift to such shallow breathing. Or even to experiment.

This weekend I devoted most of my practice to it, and tonight in group Vipassana, I had a revelation.  The the awareness I need for Vipassana, and for anapana to feel more intuitive,  is not in the sensation, it's in the equanimity that looks at the sensation. 

I've been experimenting with non-duality, but trying to root my awareness in the sensation, because I didn't want to see the sensation as an object.  This new approach roots my awareness the equanimity with which I view sensation.  It's a subtle distinction, but an important one since equanimity is more stable than any sensation, which by definition is impermanent.

Walking home from meditation, everything felt right in the world for at least a few blocks. Once home, I still struggled with some of the work anxiety I've been feeling lately, but I started to feel a burgeoning confidence that whatever might happen, I had the emotional intelligence to deal with whatever comes up.

Is joy made or given?

I've been feeling more joy in my practices this week.

Not entirely sure why there's been a shift, but it seems to be easier to access and easier to sustain. What may make it a little easier is the shift I've made from seeing emotions, sensations, thoughts, and anything that arises as objects, to simply being in the awareness of whatever comes up.  I am moving towards a more intuitive feeling of non-duality.

In doing this joy becomes less of an object to be grasped, and more of a type of awareness to be experienced. It is a particular colour and feeling that wisdom takes on.

I see my sensations these days as a kind of x,y grid.  Calm and alert on the vertical y grid.  Pleasant and unpleasant running along the x grid.  Joy kind of runs along the pleasant side of x.  But not too pleasant that I have to worry about getting addicted to it. 

Buddhism believes that this joy is in everyone.  But what if it isn't.  What if it is just a construct like any other emotion.

Would it matter?

What matters I guess is whether there is a cost to spending too much time in joy.  Real joy, not manic over excitement or overly heightened expectation.  Is there a cost to resting in quiet the confidence that there is enough for myself and for everybody, that happiness is not only possible, but sustainable, and that joy can be the thread that binds us.   Is there an advantage to living in the sustained fantasy of deprivation and alienation, self hatred that we believe is natural?

Put this way it's so obvious, and yet we are pulled towards the bad dream again and again.