what to do when nothing's happening/​working:

[stub]

Sometimes, especially somewhere near the very beginning, or eventually, it seems like nothing's happening, or nothing's working, or nothing's changing, or things are just as bad, or things are changing but nothing's actually getting better, or absolutely nothing is happening at all.

In these times, maybe counterintuitively, it can be helpful to incline towards doing ever-less, not more. Trying and experimenting and "thrashing" can be loud. They can make it harder to detect subtle and new (to you; or old) [SUBTLE] CONTEXTUAL POSITIVE LEAD INDICATORS.

(cf. [subtle] contextual negative lead indicators; contextual means "the same thing" [not to iappropriately reify 'same' and 'thing'] might be [i.e. locally] positive in one concrete instance and [i.e. locally] negative in another concrete instance, e.g. a month or 300 milliseconds later, and it might change back and forth)

These [subtle contextual positive lead indicators] might be things like subtle, distant puffs of relief, subtle, over-the-shoulder, was-already-there-at-least-in-the-moment-before memories or insights, subtle changes in muscle tension, and so on. And, it can also be very counterintuitive things or things that maybe feel bad but are actually in the right direction, slight changes in the "pattern of pixels" (not to inappropirately reify any of that), maybe a little patch in a region of bigger "pixels." Or voxels, or definitely don't inappropriately reify anything like pixels, voxels, space, time, etc., anything.

More: right-there-over-your-shoulder-there-all-along-at-least-for-a-little-bit creeping sense of something, a faint dreamy, dreamlike dawning around the edges, little phenomenological glimmers in strange inner spaces, little bits of somatic/muscle refactoring, faint, distant puffs of "relief," somatic tingles...

So, it's important to explore how to "take the foot off the gas," sometimes, in times like these, to make it easier to detect and discern and find SUBTLE POSITIVE LEAD INDICATORS (which won't necessarily feel good, but "feels good" is an excellent heuristic).

You might in particular explore the "do less" preliminary/auxiliary practice. It's not a panacea and, in my opinion, it generally won't take people "all the way," as per this whole document, but it's a good thing to explore while being careful of tangling or counterproductiveness, perhaps via the meta protocol.

Over time, one can use patterns and meta-patterns to approximately predict aspects of the future.

>>>
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1301623971323015168

[...] over time, one learns patterns of subtle lead indicators allowing navigation across larger & larger nonmonotonicities, to months of hardness where you're barely 51% sure, if that, that you're doing the right thing. it's fallible but practically doable, cf. buddha nature, etc. [...]
<<<

An example of the the above is knowing that even though things actually feel worse, you're 51% confident that something better is on the other side.

Another example is, suddenly, you seemingly know less about something than you did before, but you stably rest in this, you don't claw back to knowing, you rest in this new unknowing (because you're confident that it's ok to do it, safe to do it, and you can do it), for seconds, minutes, many minutes, or a day or two, and you come out the other side, better off, knowing more or knowing differently.