Renegade Yogi

Concentration powers becoming useful?

As those who have been following my meditation practice know, I have switched to doing all mindfulness meditation. I was doing concentration for a couple of weeks. It was not my intention, when I started mindfulness, to stop working on concentration. However, it appears to have happened. Mindfulness is all I do now.

And, of course, it’s a mindfulness practice that I don’t know much about. The instructions seem simple. But of course, each mind is different and has its own way of interpreting and implementing the instructions. And so it seems, as the mind attempts to follow the instructions, the mind creates more clutter and confusion.

And that’s how my practice started. A very cluttered mind, even though I did a half hour of pranayama beforehand. That clutter was tagged diligently by me. I sifted through it and noted whether it was sight, sound, or feeling. I had asked several questions to myself as I experimented with my mind. And those questions seemed like holes in the instructions.

But tonight I went back to basics. I relaxed everything and focused on my breath. Not just the feeling of the breath entering my nostrils, which is my normal focus. No, I focused on the process of breathing. Feeling myself expand, feeling the expansion trail off, then the subsequent and unforced collapse back down to size. And repeat.

This, of course, is the same lesson I already learned weeks ago from concentration practice. My inconsistency has set me back! It’s a little shameful to have to relearn lessons, especially in such a public forum as my blog. Oh, well.

What I began to notice was all of the crap that had built up around the instructions of the exercise. The point of the exercise is not to find things to note. The point is to focus on something, like in concentration, but to notice if you become distracted. To notice what types of thoughts enter into your mind.

I noticed that I was producing so much of the noise in my head just to have something to note. So what did I do with all of that noise? I noted it. Like they were just passing thoughts.

I can’t help but think of how important it is to practice daily (which, I do not do). Daily practice let’s you build incrementally on these little discoveries. If I were to wait a week, I would have built up yet more complications about how and why it works and how to recreate the experience. Oh, do I ever do that!

Well, I had better get to bed now. Tomorrow’s the retreat! I have to get up early! I hope this post was at least readable. I am in such an altered state right now. See you tomorrow.