valuable meditation tip: My best strategy for sloth and torpor🥱 : shake and bake 🏃👨‍🍳🥧 and stay out of no man's land

 

no man's land: land or area that is unowned, uninhabited, or undesirable.

Stay out of no man’s land

There’s a reason that AN 3.16  where the Buddha gives his daily schedule for monks, the periods of meditation, he lists walking meditation first then sitting meditation.

Ajahn Mun describing his typical daily schedule, when he woke up at 3am, the first thing he would do is walking meditation for 1 to 2 hours.

Here’s an important detail that the sutta doesn’t say about walking meditation, that I found out the hard way, but I did figure it out eventually.

Hopefully you can learn it early and avoid the pain that it causes.

Walking meditation, when done to ward off drowsiness, needs to be done at a sufficiently brisk pace to raise the heart rate and energy level, for a sufficiently long period of time.

If you do Mahasi slow motion walking meditation for example, you’re going to feel almost as drowsy and miserable as when you were sitting very drowsy and wishing to lie down.

So in the 3 years I lived at a monastery, I spent many months where I would spend a couple hours every day miserable in this drowsy state, until finally one day I thought, why not walk at a brisk pace, raise the heart rate, breathe more deeply, and see if that works better.

Guess what? It worked.

Everyone’s health, age, etc., are different, so you have to use trial and error to figure out the exact details that are fine tuned for you.

But for me, currently, if I do brisk walking for 20 minutes (I usually do shake and bake 🏃👨‍🍳🥧 which is better), then I can probably sit down for at least 20minutes afterwards of high quality non drowsy sitting.

But the best part is, it only takes about 2 minutes while doing the brisk exercise to get rid of that horrible drowsy feeling where you have strong desire to lie down. That’s the no mans land that you don’t want to be in. Whenever you get in that drowsy state, figure out a plan and move into action. Either set an alarm and take a power nap (10-20min. Usually will do the trick), or get moving with brisk exercise.

At the monastery, we also had several mandatory Dhamma talks we had to attend in the evenings every week in the evening. I was almost always drowsy and miserable because of that, unless the talk was especially interesting to arouse piti or pamojja. In hindsight, I could have avoided or at least greatly reduced all that drowsiness either with 15min. Power nap or 15 min. of exercise before each dhamma talk.

 I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life in this miserable drowsy state when there was a common sense quick fix to get rid of it in 2 minutes. May all meditators learn from that mistake and avoid it!

Important prerequisite

I get plenty of sleep everyday, more than I actually need to make sure I err on the side of not being sleep deprived. If you have chronic sleep deprivation, or you know you're drowsy because that day the monastery had everyone doing lots of hard manual labor, then the advice above doesn't apply. 

This situation I'm talking about, is going to be a common problem for meditators who are already sufficiently advanced that they can go into noble silence easily (2nd jhana or better), but their body isn't healthy enough yet with all the energy channels opened up, vegan and vegetarian diets don't help in this regard either. It's a very common problem for this class of meditators to have difficulty with long sits without getting drowsy.  

Avoid the extreme of walking too briskly and triggering adrenaline

It takes practice and lots of trial and error to tune your exercise just right so you regain energy to sit in jhana for a long time, rather than work yourself up, trigger adrenaline and have too much energy with a very undesirable side effect of having trouble getting back into a regular sustainable healthy sleeping schedule. I've made this mistake several times too, walking fast (or equivalent strenuous exercise) and doing {{++maranassati}} at the same time, and then trigger adrenaline almost to the point of fight or flight intensity. It's great that you know how to turn on a switch to get a huge surge of energy and you can stay up all night and meditate, but what good is that if it takes you 2-3 days afterwards of super low energy and poor meditation before you feel normal again? And when you're that worked up, sitting all night meditating in that state is hard to get into good quality sustained jhana. 

 

Caffeine, coffee, tea, nicotine, etc.

Yeah, I know about caffeine, but I've yet to hear favorable endorsements from jhana meditators that it works sustainably over the long term. Similar problems with adrenaline and mararanassati. You get instant energy boost, the highs are higher, but the lows are way lower and lowers your long term practice efficiency. 

Post your success stories if you think I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong, it'd be great to have another tool in the arsenal.