Tips for Solo Practice

This framework is designed to be used in sessions with one person guiding the other through the process, so this guide assumes that type of setup. But it's possible to go through this process solo or with a partner (in fact, I discovered the core techniques and process in my own solo exploration). From my perspective, the important bits are:

• Take your time between shifts to allow for full stabilization and integration. When people try to go too quickly they tend to spin their wheels and slide back to the last place they were stable at.
• Write down the changes in qualities and aspects of the experience you notice, or try to articulate them to someone else. This helps to stabilize the experience by bringing it into your conscious, mental, and social awareness.
• The process will lower and remove resistances in your nervous system bit by bit, which can sometimes lead to very unpleasant experiences coming to the surface. This is totally fine, but people often interpret it as them doing something wrong, even though it's actually a sign that you're making good progress. The best thing to do here is to just ride it out, and focus on sinking in, gratitude, and active deconditioning until you can easily get stable in your experience of fundamental wellbeing again.
• There's not a clear, linear progression of greater and greater wellbeing throughout this process; in fact, many changes seem completely arbitrary, that they have nothing to do with equanimity or wellbeing at all. This gets to a point where people consistently don't think anything is actually happening with the process, and they often stop around halfway through. Be aware that this is a consistent thing that happens, but if you continue pushing through (even though it subjectively seems pointless), you'll eventually "pop out" into an experience of complete equanimity, where fundamental wellbeing is always in the foreground.