[djmassk]

Thanks Goofaholix,

I will speak using the experience gotten with Zazen before shifting to Anapanasati.

A question has arise from your last post: Do you think that it is not enough to practice directly from the Anapanasati sutta?

Then there is no indication how one knows the breath, is it by feeling it? imagining it? noting it? labelling it? just figuring well I'm not dead so must be breathing? how do you calm bodily fabrication? how do you be sensitive to rapture?

Another question. If Anapanasati do not make any kind of emphasis about this, don't you think it is because it is not needed at all?

The first tetrad tell us just to be in the presence of breath, long, short, in, out, and after a while calm happens.

If you feel it do you do so at the nostrils or abdomen or the whole body? when sensitive to the entire body does that mean sensitive the the breath in the body or all bodily sensations whether or not breath realated?

How long is it supposed to take? Do you just breath once short and once long and go on to the next step? Anapanasati only tells to be there, with the breathing.

How do you deal with pain? I have not experienced pain.

how do you deal with discursive thought? Watching it, letting it go.

how long should you sit there? Time is not really relevant, but an hour is OK. It depends. Again, I think time is not relevant as it is not indicated in the Sutta.

What is relevant is the process that develops and unfolds as one sits regularly. Time depends on the unfolding, not the unfolding on time.

I don't think a total beginner reading this sutta is going to know exactly what to do As for Anapanasati I can be considered a total beginner. When obsessed with so many things around this technique, meditation was not working. When returning to the sutta as the basic guideline, results appeared again.

But maybe I am a kind of an atypical practitioner due to my circumstances