Renegade Yogi

Noting Vipassana

I have been experimenting with Shinzen Young‘s model of vipassana meditation. Vipassana is also known as mindfulness. In Shinzen’s version of the practice, you focus on the inhale and exhale, and as you do, you note what sensory modalities are active when you get distracted. The three modalities that he considers important are Vision, Hearing, and Feeling. Feeling is the physical component of an emotion. If you were imagining a book and saying to yourself “I have to read that” you would quietly note “vision and sound”.

I did this practice this morning. At a gross level, I did pretty well. I could note my thoughts and even had a few minor insights into how some of my patterns work. But I did start to notice that there were very subtle distractions that I wasn’t discovering. Sometimes I wasn’t focusing on the breath, but nothing was active. Is this possible? Can the mind wander to nothing? Or did I just not notice?

Near the end, I was entirely swept away in my own thoughts. I’ve been thinking about this magnum opus website that I want to do. Way bigger than a blog post. A whole site. I’ve been thinking about it for a week now, so when I started thinking about it while sitting, I was entirely overwhelmed by the carefully constructed ideas.

I can’t wait to do it again. It’s very fulfilling. I’m glad I have the time to spend on this, because it’s always been on my mind.