It's always fascinating to me how this types of videos gets buried, with almost zero views. While stupid videos gets pushed so hard into the algorithm!
Thanks for sharing your experience. Me, i do sit down meditation for 10 minutes everyday and i apply mindfulness with normal activities eg. Walk, eat, sit, shower, ect in daily life. I feel my meditation is fast progressive. Now when i walk by the canel, i have awareness when my feet touches the ground, inside myself is empty so my 5 senses can absorb surrounding 100%. I feel i am aligned with nature (source). I feel i am under god’s arms. Me and source are one.
your experiences motivate me to continue meditating for an hour and integrate it with other aspects of everyday life. like you said, it's not easy. Finding passion to do this work is an important message for me. I am often tormented by fear and anger. I know there is a path to go deep into it to understand my suffering. i have accepted it as a part of my life and even to appreciate it...
I'm happy this helps. Your future self will look back in gratitude for how far you've come... It sounds like you have the healthy and wise perspective Peter.
I am glad to find more people to discuss this with on the internet. For many years I practiced in a bubble. And I am only now beginning to discover new ways of practicing. I like this idea of meditation maps, for example. I backed off from meditation a couple years ago b/c I may have hit that dark night phase that I am only now hearing about. But now I am cautiously re-engaging with a longer practice, and am even considering mixing up what methods I use depending on what my emotional state is on a given day. Right now, I am considering starting a meditation support group in my area to see if it can help contextualize each others experience and be of benefit to anyone who is hitting difficulties in their practice. I’m not sure if I’m ready for 2 hours a day yet. I just got to the point where I decided to do 1 hour. But ultimately, I’m really just trying to get to Jhana states, reliably. If only it was a sure thing after X amount of time of practicing a certain way. I have been averse to spitting out a certain amount of time to sit. I think more about hitting a mark and letting the time be flexible, but I guess if I’m not hitting that mark then something has to change. I’m looking at time as one factor, but am also considering other factors too. Thanks for sharing 🙌🏻
Great update Ethan! Here are some of my add ons. Recently I've realized how prolonged mindfulness provides new information to our mind system, habits and self construct. I agree that certain corner cases like procrastination can still be an issue in masters like Shinzen and there can be many personality issues one may spiritually bypass as "It is all perfect". However, if you practice about 12 hours of constant mental and body awareness of emotions, intentions, body awareness and some form of self-other investigation, your dysfunctional social habits and patterns will start to dissolve as new information will be supplied to unconscious layers of your psyche. This is a pressured jelly like practice which requires elasticity and base level of mindfulness to be maintained for hours back to back. It is what Culadasa calls in TMI as "the magic of mindfulness". I definitely suggest some more care into how exactly one's formal sessions affect one's daily moments. What is insufficient is the "afterglow". That is good. But the question should be approached in 2 ways. 1- How can i maintain the afterglow? 2- How can I instantly jumpstart my practice depth with zero formal sessions, epen eyes while starting my day? This facilitates some overlooked zen bounciness. When you are walking,looking someone in the eye, speaking yourself etc. Unless the mind trains itself in motion like this, its progress will be halted. Your skills in the formal sessions dont magically penetrate every living moment. Significant attention and care must be maintained for daily practice in my opinion. I can observe that you are at that juncture where it might do you well to relax the formal sessions a bit and focus on this aspect of development.I trust that you'll encounter many unforesoon benefits by taking this very seriously. A key skill to do this is to master meditation in the visual field,looking with stable attention to an object ( computer screen,video outline, words) and immediately expanding peripheral vision panaromically and to do this each time attention moves to a new object. Define the scope and then expand the peripheral awareness until the self perception reduces. It is no different than inner attentiom and awareness dynamic. This visual practice will slowly reduce the sense of self and enable you to practice consistently in daily life. Because eventually this idea that extrospective and introspective collapses as the self and other collapses. Then you realize how crucial this skill is to develop and it is not to be taken as "a cool exercise" :)
Great write up as usual man! I sincerely appreciate your analysis and articulation of these dynamics. It's amazing to have such a high level practitioner giving feedback in this little RU-vid pocket. So seriously, thank you. Yes I completely agree about the necessity of 24/7 mindfulness. The idea of more information being supplied to the subconscious mind is very fascinating! It tracks with my experience as well. The zen bounce is a critical part of the equation in my view yes. Without some sort of baseline, background mindfulness being practiced all day, results will stall out for sure. For background practice, I am a HUGE fan of Shinzen's See Hear Feel technique. Having now practiced it on 3 different retreats and building a lot of momentum with the various subtleties of the practice, it's fairly easy to practice in the background. I've also found that the deeper I go into formal practice, there is actually a passive, automatic, effortless carry over into every day life. I find myself slipping into "micro" hits of practice without even meaning to, without the need of a surface level intention arising. Even after making this video I find myself still drawn to practice for 2 hours/day, and even a little more at times. I'm just riding the wave for now. I definitely don't think background mindfulness practice and formal practice are super mutually exclusive. Since the same fundamental skills are being trained with each, both can be developed quite synergistically, simultaneously. :) Thank you again for such a wonderful comment! ❤️
You made an incredibly interesting Point when referring to the Comparison of Mystical Experiences to everyday life. How overtime the Mystical becomes Normal and the Everyday becomes Mystical. From my Point of View, this means that you’ve reached a Stage to Where you can be Naturally High off Life Within yourself. You don’t need Music, or Overly Exotic Foods, Sugar, drugs, alcohol, To feel Happy. It Simply becomes natural to feel good in the Moment. Every Moment becomes sweet, and this is Extremely important in Living a Life of Freedom & Pursuing your Desires.
just found your content. went thru almost all. love it! i wont be able to share it with the general audience because of the F** bombs, but i see where you are going with it , connecting with the atypical audience. All the best in your practice . Sadhu !
I have been meditating for a long time and have been involved in Ayahuasca and Iboga ceremonies for decades. Prolonged fasting for up to 25 days was part of that. The expression in the meditation reflected this extreme way of life. I have reduced the fullness and multiplicity within the meditative experience to something very simple. The mindfulness is a trap that leads to suffering, when there is nothing within the meditation, there is something. Just the focused attention disturbs this (nothing anything). By omitting any perspective, only pure love and joy remains.
Thank you for the reminder why I am doing this. 1 hr per day is my current New Years resolution and it's a big commitment. I know it's worthwhile though :)
Great introspection, I like this. (.....I admit, I stopped the video at minute 24, 25, and then made this long comment below. :) We draw the same conclusion, and you get to mention the Infinite too. :)) ) At about minute 23 you say that in the beginning our self is very different than the self at the end of our life. I totally get what you mean. Once consciousness and intellect kick in, it's time for chaos to begin, from the beginning till the end, really. This is the definition of life for so many of us. But I want to create a different image here: if we picture a line where the left end is at -∞ and the other end is at + ∞ , could it then be that through our Meditation, we are trying to bridge that gap as much as possible, allowing less and less chaos/intellect/judgment in between the "two sides of the infinite" (as if the infinite has limits.)? Our chaos disrupts the Continuum of the infinite... is what I am trying to say. :) And so, could it be that our initial self is actually very similar to our final self (and that we are not looking for a different self through meditation). After all, all religions say that when we finish our business here, we return back "home", we go back to our origins (of which, again, we quickly forget once we are aware of our self). :) So the self has 2 definitions: the intellect/the chaos, and the universal PS Which, if that's what we're trying to do through Meditation, it means that the self, the real self, (it just occurred to me, and had to come back for a post-scriptum) is not equal to the intellect, as it's usually defined in books,, but maybe the self is our true nature.....the one that's part of the infinite. :) That is our real self we are trying to get back to via Meditation. And when some say....we try to get beyond the self by meditation, maybe it's not that at all: we are trying to get to our true self. (Because the self is not the intellect, but bits and pieces of the infinite. How many bits and pieces?? Eight billion of them. :)) Basically we say draw the same conclusion, we just see it a bit different: either that there is another self out there that we are looking for through meditation, or that there is only one self, and that one has been given to us from the beginning of our lives till the end of our lives and we just lost it somewhere in between....usually early on, and we're trying to get back to it through meditation. :)
Meditation should make you come to a deeper understanding of life though...and then you know exactly what you need to do.......... Meditation is not a problem solving tool. It helps you understand how the inner world works.
Do you have a specific time of day where you find meditation easiest/most beneficial for you? Also do you have any tips for weaning off of cell phone addiction on the meditative path? Great vid as always! Love the location
Funny enough, this spot was very difficult to get to because of the water haha, but we got it. And thank you :) I find the morning immediately upon waking to be best. If I start procrastinating in the morning with putting off sitting, it's always more challenging to get through it. For phone addiction, I personally set time limits on apps, routinely will just turn my phone off. Meditation can help bring more mindfulness to the compulsion, but letting the feelings go in the moment is unfortunately the hardest and most effective approach for these types of habits, in my experience.
How can people reach you Nathan? Please make a reddit community or a discord or something! Their's alot of people me including who are dieing to talk about this journey, to learn and understand! More about meditation! It would be great to talk and express ourselves with like minded people such as yourself!
I have some questions for you if you can answer them it would be helpful. 1. Can you define meditation? Is it only to sit down and focus on your breathing or do you see meditation as brushing your teeth and doing the dishes? 2. When you talk about meditation does not act as a one solution to everything (changing habits, therapy, etc). When talking about changing habits I wonder how meditation can help us with it? What is your pov on this? 3. I have some trouble understanding acceptance and acceptingf reality and life as it is. Do you have any ideas of why this might be and the reason for why it can be hard?
Great questions, I'll address one by one. 1) I actually don't have a hard line definition of meditation. In the highest most existential sense, the entire unfolding of the universe I see as reality "meditating" moment by moment. Us experiencing life, in a sense, is expression of reality's meditation. From a grounded, pragmatic point of view, meditation could be defined as the deliberate practice of paying attention to what is. How we pay attention can vary depending on the technique we choose to use though. Hell, there is even one technique, the "do nothing" technique where the main focus is to sit down and don't deliberating focus on anything. But even this can facilitate a deep concentration of our moment by moment experience. With this definition in mind, you could theoretically practice forms of meditation while in life, living. And I completely see the validity of this. However, in my experience there is something uniquely powerful about. 2) Meditation can help us improve behavior by bringing mindfulness in the situations where we are about to either express an unwanted habituation behavioral pattern. Sometimes, merely by meditating do bad habits spontaneously drop, but this is not always the case. 3) Most likely because of the many attachments that construct your sense of self, life, and reality. This isn't a bad thing though! This is what gives life it's specific flavor as the way it is. However, when we start to examine reality without pushing or pulling at it, ie as we examine reality while bring (or allowing) equanimity to the experience, we're slowly uprooting the many attachments that create suffering. This is a very complicated question though and something I don't think I can provide in a single RU-vid reply, but what I will say is ultimately, the answer is to keep meditating and cultivating equanimity. This allows us to experience the flow of life without resistance, this allows us to love more deeply, this allows us to sit with pain more effectively, etc. I hope this helps Roger 🙏
Just found your channel yesterday and already watched a few of your videos, they are super eye opening for me. I have only just recently (the last month) committed to a 20 minute meditation practice in the morning, the effects I already feel and notice in my day to day life are enough to know this will be something which is super important to me and will be incorporated into my life just as much as eating and sleeping is. To hear your experiences when you did 1 hour and now 2 hours is just super inspiring and you articulate it so well. It makes me excited for the future and reminds me why discipline, patience and consistency will give you long term rewards. I was wondering how long did you meditate before making the commitment to do one hour everyday? I know everybody's different but I didn't know if I could potentially be setting myself up to fail by increasing to an hour after only just a month of commitment, this might push me to far and put me off. Just wondering your thoughts and how long it took you of just regularly meditation before committing for an hour? (also I know to trust my own self and I will know when to make the jump but I just want to know your journey)
Wow really happy to hear this Heather. That's incredible that you've only recently begun to practice and are already feeling such a resonance. I would suggest this is a huge sign to enthusiastically continue this exploration, especially because meditation takes us to the heart of what we really are, our true nature and the nature of true happiness. For me I was meditating inconsistently for about 3 months, 10 - 20 minutes per day, usually morning or afternoon. I could also tell it was something that would be very important to me although at the time I had no idea just how important it would become. After those first 3 months, I listened to a podcast where the guest claimed to be enlightened. He communicated the possibility of enlightenment so well and in such a grounded way, it immediately resonated as a true possibility for myself. He framed enlightenment as "knowing the way things really are." Very simple, pragmatic, but also deceptively deep. The guest went on to say that if someone was interested in seriously knowing how meditation affects them, they should meditate for an hour a day for 6 months and then they'd know whether meditation was worth pursuing. The logic made sense, the immediate resonance with enlightenment had me excited, so I committed myself for those 6 months. At the end of those 6 months, I was sent to the emergency room and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, a very challenging chronic health condition I still struggle with daily. However, in the hospital I could feel my body and mind processing the trauma from the diagnosis in real time, in a way I'd never experienced before. I could feel myself already beginning the healing/integration process of this lifelong illness because of my meditation practice. In that moment, all doubt about the power of the practice was eradicated and I've been slowly increasing the intensity I practice since, to the point now where I am living in a monastic training environment practicing around 4 hours per day when we aren't on retreats. Anyways, as far as your path, I would recommend slowly increasing your time to 1 hour rather than immediately jumping into the deep end. Too much too quickly can be difficult for the mind. However, if you're feeling called, TRUST that call to pursue this work vigorously, but just be strategic about it. Once you feel comfortable with an hour, I would recommend for those first 6 months of practice using the 1 hour meditation technique which I believe I've done a video on but it's basically this: Minutes 0 -10 : Focus on breath sensations at nostrils, counting/mantra optional Minutes 10 - 20: Open awareness, be as aware as possible of everything while not becoming lost in though. Minutes 20 - 30: Gratitude, metta, or emotional processing Anytime you're lost in thought, you'll eventually recognize you were distracted. Then *gently* return attention to the focus space. Then repeat this cycle one more time for an additional 30 minutes, or do this cycle in the evening. You will get a small but significant enough advantage to using this technique for an entire 60 minutes rather than splitting it into 2 sits, however, daily consistency and overall minutes practiced is the most important variable for progress. I would also recommend at least doing 5 minutes per day as a daily minimum at this point. There are other videos discussing the advantages to learning multiple techniques and exploring what makes you curious, but the above technique outline is a good place to start. It was my main practice for about a year. Don't rush and have fun :) With metta, ~ Ethan
@@ethanschaltegger Thanks so much for your reply Ethan it is greatly appreciated and I will definitely take your advice...I think this could be something big which I am yet to discover the power of. Your story of the diabetes and the ability to truly accept and process this suffering because of all the work of your meditation practice is truly powerful. I feel like I will definitely take note of the techniques and apply when ready at the time. Thank you , you are an inspiration and great role model to us all.
Thanks for sharing your experience. that is heavy and well articulated. Just curious, have you experienced status of Dyhan(Sanskri word, not sure who to translate it.) in 2 hours meditation. Thanks.
I found your channel today and can't stop watching your videos. I started with 2 minutes meditation and then gradually increased the time to 30 minutes.. and then suddenly jumped to "one hour daily" in the morning. Do you think that sitting position is very important. I mean, does sitting crossed legs is more beneficial than sitting on a chair?
That's awesome progress! Being able to knock at an hour at once is a huge milestone on the path :) As far as your question, I don't think sitting cross legged is inherently "better" than using a chair. Sitting with whatever is most comfortable is generally what I recommend. If that means a chair, great. That being said, you can gradually train the body to sit cross legged. I personally prefer sitting in half lotus to a chair if I'm able, but when I first began practice is was chair only.
@@ethanschaltegger do you use a backrest when you sit half-lotus? I just don't have the hip-flexibility to sit half-lotus unless I use a pillow behind my lower back against a wall, and doing this is.. okay. Does feels like it impedes my meditations though, quite a bit, because my upper back gets pain.
7:02 - "the mystical starts to become mundane and the mundane starts to become mystical" - this seems relevant to my alcohol addiction. I don't fully understand it tho. Can you explain? I am battling an alcohol addiction and i really want to quit.
it is the DESIRE to consume alcohol that we want to quit, not the alcohol. we dont want to be pulled and told what to do, by desire, alcohol is not our problem my friend. it is an indication of a problem, a symptom, not the root of the issue. if we quit alcohol then the root issue will only manifest different symptoms. we will think non stop about alcohol if we quit alcohol. this is not freedom, this is not what we want my dear friend. we want freedom from the desire to drink. certainly we will need to refrain from drinking for a long enough period of time for our body to find proper health. and we need to become aware of the root issue(s) that are causing much suffering in our life. please know dear friend, that the root is inside you. we can realize this before we have to realize it, you need not suffer an extended Water Only Fast is an excellent tool for resetting our bodies health, bringing balance and equilibrium to our hormones (specifically serotonin and dopamine). you will come to realize experientially that the nature of addiction functions like a wave, it comes on, peaks... and if you wait long enough, it will pass. as time passes the waves will becomes less frequent and less intense. this is how our hunger works, we get hungry as our body releases a hormone called Ghrelin (which releases more based on our normal eating habits and not because we physically require food at that time). it is released around the same times through the day when we typically eat. if we skip two meals that we are used to eating, our Ghrelin hormones will hit us in large waves of desire to eat because your body is so conditioned to eating. these waves come, peak, then leave. the waves of Ghrelin released into your bloodstream will increase if you continue to fast, only until the second day, after that the waves begin to decrease, in size and frequency until about the 5th or 6th day you no longer get hungry. you no longer get hungry because your body stops producing so much Ghrelin. this is the nature of desire, it has a chemical makeup in our body and that chemical makeup is driven by our habits. there are alot of other wonderful things your body does to "clean itself" during an extended water only fast via a process recently explained scientifically called Autophagy. your body will even produce stem cells. i was hopelessly there, and i found freedom, you are not alone and you are not at fault to answer your question about "the mundane becoming mystical", based on my own experiences, we can realize that the outer world is not so objective, but subjective. we can experience great ecstasy doing the dishes without the use of drugs. all of our experience happens inside our body, not outside our body as it may seem. our senses relay information to our brain so that we can physically survive. our senses are a tool for our physical survival. our mind, with an emphasis on survival of the physical body, has constructed our reality from these sensory inputs. keyword constructed. our senses do not tell us the true nature of reality, because in reality there is much more that is actually there. we do not smell all chemicals, only a handful. we do not see light in the infrared spectrum, only in a narrow band of the electromagnetic radiation we call visible light. other dimensions and such. our senses know very little, and this is how our mind constructed our reality, to survive in the physical body. the issue is that our likes and dislikes, judgements and opinions skew how we see reality, in a foggy way. the likes and dislikes is a matter of survival because our reality was formed unconsciously during childhood. if we expand our awareness, we can rewrite our reality consciously and with intension. so that, the outside has little influence over how we feel. we can damn feel high as shit watching water fill up a glass. when we abandon our likes and dislikes, judgement, and desire, the only thing left is bliss. bliss that is always available to us despite our external circumstances. true freedom
Hey Ethan I don’t know if its like this for anyone else but this video isn’t showing up in my subscriptions feed. I only saw it in my recommended. Just wanted to let you know
Thank you for letting me know. It's most likely the RU-vid algorithm preferring to push larger channels over smaller channels. It's actually a pretty big problem in the community. Or perhaps it's just a glitch, I'm honestly not sure. One thing that may help is turning on notifications for this channel. Thank you for the heads up though, I'll look more deeply into it.
@@ethanschaltegger There is a way to do it manually. Have you ever heard about Australian metaphysic and writer Robert Bruce? if you can meditate by hours after 5 6 hours of sleep, you can raise your Kundalini manually or it can happen naturally but you have to do it in a very deep altered state of mind in the theta level. find in internet Robert Bruce's energy work book. He also developed a program how to awaken and raise Kundalini. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NTMaMDAJEMQ.html
Speaking of distances and levels of consciousness an ant cant identify the sun it only feels it. If you dont know who you are being in 3D or who you really are outside of it, if you dont know youre a divine eternal being you dont understand what the perfection is youre feeling in meditation or how it relates to what youre being in 3D focus. Everything is not perfect and everything is not equal. What is perfect is eternal life, Divinity and the love and light within it, and what is constant about our real and true divine Identity beyond time and space. There is nothing wrong with us in reference to our real identity which is always real at all times beyond time and space the 3D experience. What is wrong is what is out of alignment, the lack of connection to our divinity and Source found in our heart light and core. There is nothing perfect about cruelty and suffering and you cant equalize that which is not equal. Which globalists are trying to do.
