Trying to prolong focus from retreat

This week was very good. Following last weekend there was a desire to prolong the focus of the retreat rather than return to the rut of net-surfing and procrastination.

It seemed like the retreat raised my level of honesty – both mental truth and verbal truth – and so my intuition was well tuned too, but has dulled over the week. But this dulling of intuition/honesty/inspiration seems to have been slowed by some choices for tension and continuance of the spirit of the retreat over dissipation of it. For instance despite persistent and nagging desire to go into a restaurant I made a deal to hold off until after the weekend PSI meeting and kept it. And with temptation to watch a movie when exercising there was a sense it would dissipate intensity, and a debate continued for a while before I thought to try asking “Why?” Asking why opened my mind to sit and see if a better solution could be found to the boredom of stationary bike riding, and catching up on e-mails came out as a great one.

Listening to zen podcasts and Rose lectures, several days I came home from work eager to meditate rather than have down-time and many meditations were good. Of my two problems more meditations were on the angst. I am sensing it is a leap beyond my honest toolset from, the answer is to challenge assumptions, to, the assumption to challenge is my self-definition. At the PSI meeting Saturday however, Art pointed out I am afraid to admit to myself I don’t know what I am which is true – I can’t respond to this question internally when it is posed.

But Art also came back to the point that while I’ve narrowed to two problems I see my mind work on, there’s still one primary. In my case, my mind is much more engaged with the problem of threat than the problem of angst. My thought is the former is not deep enough for multiple ulterior reasons – yet that thought keeps me stuck and I sense a focus that is possible were I to take the threat issue seriously that would blast away the problem so quickly. The 3 ways I thought of to fight threat are, confidence, facing fears and introspection, and Art pointed out these are on the level of experience – the 4th, the most obvious, is to inquire into who is threatened. Maybe. Both meditations since were bad, though.

This coming week with the temptations to go to a restaurant or watch a documentary when excercising I’d like to keep asking why? – because it’s a very good question.