I was nearing the end of a practice, sitting. I experience subtle flavors of sitting, but for me they are like dreams, hard to hold on to later.
One of the prominent indicators is a feeling of being welcome in sitting. This time was like that.
Another prominent indicator is an apparent interest to stay in my body. It can be placed on the physicality of the posture, my butt cheecks on the blocks or my spine or lengthened neck. It an be on my breath. It can be on the nuclear-reactor-like-rumbling sound I hear inside.
But almost always there is fluctuation. My mind will wander off somewhere to something bothersome (that I can later try to close off and get off my mind) or something engaging (something I’ve been thinking about recently). Sometimes I am mostly aware of the fluctuation itself … the movement back and forth between body-presence and mind-wandering. Sometimes, I get to taste a flavor a stable presence in body. Sometimes I get “lost” in the distraction.
This “lost in distraction” happened a few weeks ago … but it took on an interesting flavor. I was so immersed in wherever it is my mind had gone, that when I landed back in my body I was surprised. It is only when I got back that I realized I was away. THAT interested me.
I feel in me a(n unfounded) assumption that a stability of mind should appear in the practice itself – that stability should manifest in the bhavana (focal point) of my sitting. But what I expereinced in this particular practice is stability in (what I was framing as) the “distraction”. Can it be that the seed of meditation (a,stable and continuous directed mind) appears first in distraction?