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Sounds useful - do you still practice samatha meditation? If not then what made you stop?
by vosper 2y ago
Sounds useful - do you still practice samatha meditation? If not then what made you stop?
- swayvil 2y agoI do not practice samatha meditation anymore. I practice a different kind of meditation now. We basically have 2 kinds of meditation. 1) Concentrate on a thing for a while. 2) Watch sensations come and go while refraining from moving your attention in reaction to what you're watching. I did the first for a few years. Then I did both for a few years. Now I only do the second. Both deliver the calm but they do it differently. They also do some other stuff. The second is trickier than the first.
- wslh 2y agoIs the second akin to zazen?
- swayvil 2y agoYa.
- vosper 2y ago> Watch sensations come and go while refraining from moving your attention in reaction to what you're watching. This sounds like standard "mindfulness" meditation, to me.
- lewispollard 2y agoIt is. Samatha is often contrasted with vipassana in the Buddhist traditions. Samatha being calm concentration, vipassana being analytic insight meditation. "Standard mindfulness", i.e. the distillation of Theravada Buddhist insight techniques into the western mainstream, is rooted in vipassana. However, when you learn vipassana from a religious lineage, the various teachers and monasteries have slightly different techniques and progressions of the practice from what we'd consider "standard mindfulness".
- swayvil 2y agoI like to call it "turning into a big fluffy cloud".