"headyness"/"heady-ness"/"headiness":
[This section refers to main practice p2, which is discussed in detail at a later time. One can still get a lot out of this section before encountering a full description of p2.]
There’s a particularly notable imbalance that may arise from modernity, which can be lengthy and counterintuitive to correct. And that imbalance is something like "being too in the head," "acting from the head," "living, thinking, being, etc. ‘from the shoulders up’ or even ‘the jaw up’."
Correcting this isn’t as simple as paying more attention to the body or trying to be in the body. Doing body things "out of order" or "monolithically" can even tangle things up more: "Right thing, right time, right place, right order, at a finer and finer grain."
The protocol as written (well, including this section or not), especially inclusive of the meta protocol, is intended to work as a proper antidote to headiness, implicitly, inclusively, as part of the practice progression as a whole, nothing more to say or add.
But, for some people, saying a little more may be very helpful. The protocol document, as a written/typed document, is, of course, verbal and even hyperanalytical, even if it’s very often pointing at something very undifferentiated, experiential, and sensual. So!—Even more words are written, here, as a corrective to that. :-)
For example, there’s a way that p2 can be initially be done "too much in the head," too conceptually, "too-conceptually-tangly." Note that p2 DOES account for this; p2, the other main practices, and the meta protocol do account for this. p2, itself, can and does undo its own potential headiness, all things being equal. But, again, some people might be greatly accelerated or have reduced (physical, or otherwise) sequelae by taking this section into account.
Some people will naturally do/interleave p2 "whole body" (whole everything) and some people, at first, won’t be able to do p2 except for in the head.
Meditation is ever, always, already with the whole body, of course (and mind, and everything)—all of experience, the entire phenomenological field and "envelope."
Some traditions particularly emphasize this, on the front-end; they explicitly say, "meditate with the body, not with the mind." This goes beyond even attending to the body or "body scanning," and is more things like these: "active sitting," "active ‘just’ sitting," "just sitting," meditation through posture, meditation exclusively through continuous postural adjustment, meditation through breathing and continuous effort and non-effort with respect to breathing, and so on.
I would consider these pith instructions incomplete (and the above is a straw and is not intended to refer to any particular tradition). But, in any case, instructions with this sort of flavor can be an overlooked dimension of much contemporary practice. Do explore them; they should probably get added to the preliminary/auxiliary practices (a bunch of them already are).
Again, p2 is "all-inclusive," pre-conceptual, post-conceptual, trans-conceptual: body, mind, bodymind, head, heart, concept, quality, etc.
And, don’t be TOO concerned about headiness—every meditator in modern culture will rightly spend PLENTY of time in the head, or flickeringly returning to the head, half-second by half-second, one-hundred-milliseconds by one-hundred-milliseconds, maybe interleaved with other things, while using these practices—e.g. as part of "do-to-undo" or "redo-to-undo." That is, the head ("mind, muscles, and more") is needed for untangling the head! Trying to do it just with the body will long-run cause more tangling.
So, one shouldn’t avoid the head or be afraid to spend time in the head, as it were. These are just words, the meta protocol and one’s intuition should be a bottom-up guide. And the "lists and more" section breaks down the "landscape" or "playing field" in many different ways, including a great deal of body phenomenology. There are, of course, many relevant preliminary/auxiliary practices, too.
In any case, use words to go beyond words. Use the head to go beyond the head. Don’t let words limit you, or cautions and corrections using yet more words, and so on. And also don’t be afraid of words, and so on. Traverse and/or allow everything, right time, right order, right grain, which is to say, what ever happens, or is happening, is part of the practice.
***
Below are notes from a call with a collaborator (jd), with further maybe-helpful corrections to the potentially "felt verbal/intellectual vibe" of parts of the document, for some people:
-
possibly useful things for people, from retrospective experience:
-
possible danger of too much willing too soon [Mark: I actually [now] use willing very [sparingly] and I had to clean up a lot of incorrect willing.]
-
possible danger of neurotically heady good/bad in use of p2 ("p2" carried out in the head, what a trap, hard to detect from the inside)[...] [Mark note: [...] Mark "broke out" of headiness eventually by seeing how the headiness eventually failed and failed, sort of came to a point and then "moved along the wall" until—" nowhere to go but "body," sort of. Or body cracked open eventually and inevitably.]
-
over-ontologization of experience--classifying experience in terms of doings, willings, good, bad, can lead to a kludgy thing - headiness—can carve out experience in a weird way
-
maybe good to emphasize lots of surrender, don’t even call it meditation. a lot less doing. [Mark note: I personally eventually got stuck doing [ONLY] surrender and non-doing.]
-
[...] [Mark: p2 eventually becomes, "minimally-ontological" and whole-body or whole-body-available[...]]
-
time in nature, return to immediate and physical, "skipped level [1]," went back to fundamentals and being. unplugging—more space, time, less urgency to do things with mind. naturally drawn back into own experience. concern though about running away or shoving problems where harder to see or is this a maneuver that let look at problems that actually ready to solve. [Mark note: people like shinzen think that unplugged situations might naturally draw people into meditative states, sun on the water, wind in the trees, alone in a cabin, etc. maybe indigenous people are [more] natural meditators, [sometimes] cadence it creates, the example it sets. [Mark: higher quality data [in nature], or data that’s less weird and edge-case-y; modernity is a very weird data set. in nature: better stream of data about how reality and mind actually work.]
-
try to do everything as physical as possible; very healing. if were having a crisis, but the trees are just chilling, not having a crisis, and that’s important data. or hanging out with community; it’s happy; there’s food and water.
-
civilization is a lot and facebook is a lot and dealing with 2000 people is a lot. and if didn’t master the earlier version of the thing, the more immediate, animal, physical, primal thing then it’s hard. paraphrase: maybe sometimes need to (partially) go back and relearn primal thing maybe for first time[Mark: maybe this is why monasteries exist though monasteries aren’t nature. maybe a lot of people have to sort of rebuild the basics.] small community in nature
-
arriving at all this was confusing because didn’t seem like what mark was doing. [Mark: makes sense. all seems right to me and I’ve done a ton of just wandering around, maybe not in remote nature, but away from people, in parks or where I knew that I knew nobody even if there were people around 20-50 feet away, and i knew it was completely safe so I could just space out[, be in reverie or landscape-absorbed] for hours.]
See also: