Improving Your Zazen 

There's always some smart alec out there.

What is it like to be a table?

But can a table be aware that it has no thoughts, not the same

Funny. Here's the universe commenting about the universe commenting about the universe sending the universe another video about how to see the universe.

And heres a person saying that you two made me laugh

Weirdos

I guess so.

Seitan: Wheat gluten

Changes can be qualitative/quantitative, fast/slow, deep/superficial, ...; seems also to apply to zazen-practice as kind of wéi wúwéi/为无为/doing non-doing.

I definitely get the pins and needles and numbness in my legs, I also find that my center back area gets fussy. I accept it as much as I can, but sometimes I just have to wiggle around a bit.

I guess it's "live the kind of life and be the kind of person that makes them go 'hey, zazen actually isn't bullshit.'"

@Ed Gepixel I suppose so. I sometimes wonder why people stick with it. I was pretty much forced to aka i had no other choice basically.

Maybe some background informations could be helpful: Long before the "invention" of Zazen/Zuòbì/... by the Chán-movement, human beings were now and then "just sitting" (--> general cultural anthropology). Only the Lotus-position seems a bit special (and is even, strictly speaking, not generally obligatory, as far as I know). Same applies for the "framing" (i.e., contextualizing, structuring, etc.) in the Zen-style, which, e.g., David L. Preston (1988) characterized as a form of "ritualised meditation", especially strongly marked inside the "arena" of organized Zen-settings, whereby the core phase of Zazen shows, among other things, some characteristics of "liminality" (--> Preston thereby references to the "patterns of passage" as formulated by the cultural-anthropologist van Gennep).

Perhaps chairs fucked it all up. I find the more i sit zazen the harder it is to explain stuff lol. In a way its annoying cos my rational mind wants to just say exactly what something is.

one big problem with shikantaza is that there are no clear insturctions on how to do it, which is why i stopped and switched to rinzai meditation techniques and i must say it has been very beneficial. "sit and think not thinking" or "sit an do nothing" are really not clear explanations

My experience has been like yours, but I have been at it for at least 10 years. At some point I stopped worrying about all that and learned to appreciate my experience for whatever it was. Your experience will be your own. Even if you had one of those experiences, it wouldn't be like anyone else's or even like what you expect anyway. You just keep going because it matters. To me it is the most important thing, yet I could not even tell you how or why. Just keep going and appreciate your experience of it for whatever it is.

@@lancecole7191 I don't worry about it much. I just don't know how far along the path I am. Like a map I can say ok I am here and want to be here so I need to do X. Like Brad says in the video, my experience has been like when I first sat down to meditate only slightly different now.

@@enterthevoidIi How are Rinzai techniques different than Soto?

Your "not knowing technique" sounds good to me - IMO kensho type experiences correlate strongly to "great doubt" and say at least 2 hours regular daily zazen.