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It is commonly called “noting”, and has its origins in Sutta 111 of the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (or Majjhima Nikaya [MN], very worthwhile reading), usually referred to as MN 111, called “One by One as They Occurred”, and in MN 10, Satipatthana Sutta (variously translated as “Four Foundations of Mindfulness”, or “Frames of Reference”, etc.), as well as Sutta 22, Mahasatipatthana Sutta (“Greater Discourse on Mindfulness”) of the Long Discourses of the Buddha (or Digha Nikaya [DN]), usually referred to as DN 22. Noting is used primarily in the Mahasi Sayadaw insight tradition from Burma, though related exercises can be found in various Zen traditions, notably Soto Zen and Korean Chan, such as repeatedly asking, “What is this?”
Noting is the exercise that gained for me the most breaks and insights in my early practice, particularly when done on retreats, and because of that my enthusiasm for it is extreme. I still consider it the core foundation of my early to middle practice, the technique that I fell back on when things turned difficult or when I really wanted to push deep into new insight territory.
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The practice is this: make a quiet, mental one-word note of whatever you experience in each moment. Try to stay with the sensations of breathing, which may occur in many places, noting these quickly as “rising” (as many times as the sensations of the breath rising are experienced) and then “falling” in the same way. These are the fundamental insight practice instructions. When the mind wanders, notes might include “thinking”, “feeling”, “pressure”, “tension”, “wandering”, “anticipating”, “seeing”, “hearing”, “cold”, “hot”, “pain”, “pleasure”, etc.
Note these sensations one by one as they occur and then return to the sensations of breathing. When walking, note the feet moving as “lifting” and “placing”, or as “lifting”, “moving”, and “placing” as you perceive each of the many sensations of all those processes, noticing other sensations as they arise and returning simply to the sensations of the feet walking.
The details of this practice can be found in such books as Practical Insight Meditation, by Mahasi Sayadaw, which I highly recommend, available free online in various places and in book form. This is my all-time favorite dharma book. It is short and to the point. Its instructions work and the promised effects are reproducible. The first forty-two pages are total gold. There is no need for me to repeat much of the useful information found there, as it is pithy and now readily available online.
I just did this for a whole bike ride, noting everything that caught my attention. It’s far from “focused” but I remained aware the entire during, while losing track of time and thus impatience. Usually I get lost in thought when I try to be mindful, but I was able to simply label a thought or perception and move on. There are a lot of sensations if you pay attention so it will be challenging but that’s what keeps the mind engaged. You don’t need to be aware of everything at once, just wherever your attention is at a given moment. As well as other benefits, I feel like being aware of how everything is constantly changing helps one perceive life as more novel and thus less boring and miserable.
I’m sure it’s great if you’re not ADHD as well, as that’s the case with the author.
Excellent post
Meditation, in the west, has this very stereotyped view of it being something that you do when you sit cross legged in a place with some candles burning and half-shut eyes with chanting playing in the background and all of that stuff.
Speaking as an ex-Buddhist who white-knuckled their undiagnosed ADHD ass through all sorts of meditation, I’d say that it’s particularly hard for ADHDers to do the “traditional” sitting meditation, but active meditation has always been much, much more tolerable to my extra-monkey monkey mind.
I remember one time, long after I no longer considered myself Buddhist, for some reason I found myself at a Mahayana Buddhist temple of a fairly different school to what I was used to, although it was familiar enough. We all sat down to eat in the hall and out of respect as I ate I tried to do an active meditation while eating, I guess we’d probably call it mindful eating in the west. What was very apparent to me in this process was that I had such a strong urge to rush and, of course, when I noticed my mind rushing forward and carrying my body forward in this rush, I would bring myself back to being very centred on the present and eating slowly while observing—of noting—as described in the post above. But of course I could feel my frustration with myself rising as I kept failing to meet my own expectations, like an angry parent who was just over it with their unruly child lol. So, of course, you note that and re-centre yourself and on you go with it.
What’s funny is I was sitting across the table from a guy who was big into Buddhism and heavily involved at this temple who I also worked with in the same organisation at the time. Next time I bumped into him at work he remarked to me that he noticed me doing this mindful eating practice at the temple, which inspired him to do it too and he thought I did really well at it. Meanwhile internally at the table an inner war was raging inside of me the whole time as I struggled to achieve any sort of detente with myself that would last for more than a few seconds lol. So I noted that too.
Anyway all of this is to say that if you have ADHD or you find it difficult to settle or focus and to be still physically, don’t sleep on active meditation and maybe seek out a walking meditation group if this resonates with you and you want to try it. Meditation doesn’t have to be a religious practice and once you grasp the basics of how to meditate and how to do active meditation, you can do it almost anywhere.
I think I’ll try this on my morning walks. I’ve found making a physical note of my thoughts and ideas while walking has been great for my creativity, and is helping to guide my projects. It has helped calm and focus my mind because those thoughts go onto paper to be revisited or forgotten.
Making a simple mental note (lift, move place, thought, etc.) might be a nice different type of walk to have
Mindful eating is weird with ADHD. The cringey (in my contrarian opinion) basic mcmindfulness approach makes it sound like you’re savoring everything perfectly and super satisfied and interested. I do try to avoid eating mindlessly, but even when I’m paying attention I usually eat super fast and instead of noticing all the sensory “realness” I tend more towards the insight of “shit this sucks, it’s constantly changing and not real and doing nothing for my understimulation and yet my executive dysfunction will keep making me do it fruitlessly.”
Comrade, have I got stories to tell.
So I wasn’t like a dilettante Buddhist who picked up a couple of Dalai Lama books in an airport one day and decided to call myself a Buddhist or anything. I was definitely part of the Sangha and active in it for some time. So of course you get a lot of instruction on meditation and you do those day+ long things and all of that along the way.
Then later I’m struggling to process all the trauma I had accumulated over my childhood and grappling with my mental health so I start accessing services. This was when Acceptance-Committment Therapy had just come into vogue and it was all the rage. The sheer amount of hamfisted mcmindfulness I had to endure, I swear. (It’s also kinda wild to cast my mind back to this point because I genuinely didn’t know shit about mental health and all the related stuff.)
There was one time when a counsellor tried their hand at it with me and attempted to do a sky/clouds metaphor, which I have never liked tbh because I think we have too many associations with clear, sunny skies as being joyful or happy which I think creates a presumption that it is possible to achieve constant happiness or that this is what should be strived for, which kinda pathologises what has no right being pathologised. Anyway he fumbles the metaphor somehow and doesn’t manage to stick the landing. I am wholly unimpressed. So I use a teacup metaphor, and I’m sure you can already know where it’s going, but I gave him both the “no matter how dark the tea is brewed” and the “when you pour milk into it, the tea becomes very tumultuous” takes. He was very impressed by what I had said and I’m just sitting there trying not to gesture and say something like “Can we just take a minute to connect the dots here? Maybe your presumption that I needed your edification on, essentially, the Buddhist understanding of mind is might have been a false one.”
I loathe it lol
For me, genuine meditation has always felt more like a sweatlodge than a sauna but goddamn have people loved to tell me that I should try meditation to help myself feel better. Bruh, I don’t need you to wrap up your preference for how to do relaxation in this weird psuedo-religious, pseudo-secular happiness industry shit and try to push it on me non-consensually. Imagine if you mentioned you were hungry and someone decided then and there to give you instructions on how to eat because they have decided that you needed it. It’s like “I am currently engaging in meditative practises while you condescend to me about how I should try meditation, and you proceed to give me some butchered version of meditation instruction, just so that I don’t say something rashly which I will regret later”. But you cannot say such things out loud because people will get offended. If I wanted help, I’d ask and f I wanted instruction on meditation, I’d ask someone else lol.
I’m not particularly sectarian and still investigating various schools and such, but screw non-judgment, I hate seeing mainstream and new age bullshit where people just want to be happy all the time. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t a communist or a monk when it comes to this stuff (well, actually not a fan of religious institutions either for the most part). Whenever I hear some self help - if “science based” thing talking about certain benefits of meditation I cringe. Fuck blissing out or making illusions more comfy, I’m in this for insight into the true nature of reality. Even advice to lean into the good feelings of meditation by more trusted sources I contradict. I perpetually suffer, and suffering makes a better object of meditation than whatever bs.
That experience sucks. I’m glad I came at this from a philosophically informed place while learning about AuDHD.
Edit: also gotta hate pseudo eastern bs that tries to embolden the self. Like I get people have self esteem issues and people need help with that, but it’s silly to aim to think highly of “yourself” when the goal of these source traditions is to reduce suffering by realizing the illusory nature of that idea. Relatedly “mindfulness” and “mantras” as excuses to be selfish and ignore interconnection. No the Buddha was not trying to enhance fucking hedonism. No you shouldn’t ignore your “judgement” about the immorality of something. We should be striving to be bodhisattvas feeling the suffering of the world. The utter perversion of ruling class dominant ideology cooptation.
Yeah new age shit gives me the ick and it’s weird seeing how institutionalised it has become. I was actually reading a book titled The Happiness Industry by William Davies while later working in the mental health sector and I had to put it down because I was like “This is right and all very accurate but I need to keep my job and I’m going to lose my frickin mind if I keep reading this critique of the industry that I’m part of”, because it felt a lot like working in a bureaucracy while reading Kafka for leisure or something - I’m not a masochist. But anyway I feel like you might find that book interesting given what you’ve said here. One other book recommendation that you might find interesting is The Places that Scare You by Pema Chodron. I’m a very critical of her particular school of Buddhism and the book itself has some fawning worship of figures which I’d encourage you to skip over without a moment’s hesitation but the actual book itself its a very practical angle on the Buddhist approach to compassion in quite simple and contemporary terms. I don’t really talk about it often because I’m pretty ex-Buddhist but if you’ve seen me posting on this comm about the peer support drop-in spaces that I’ve been running recently, that book is definitely something that I draw upon as an influence for how I do that work.
“I don’t care if your third eye is open if you don’t care about other people.” I may one day check those out. Probably preferable to the boring stuff about neurons and meditation I’m reading.
I love the ideas so it’s sad to me when people don’t like Buddhism, but considering how much class society has corrupted it in practice I understand. Books are nice but I don’t think I could trust any real life religious leaders at this point. I don’t really trust any neurotypical with handling the dharma responsibly as long as we don’t live in socialism. There’s this Tibetan monk I watch on YouTube and it’s fascinating the obvious (to my autistic Marxist brain) critiques he makes of normie spiritual seekers. It seems like they just immediately put their trust in anyone with fancy robes. And of course this critical thinking guy is still saying there is no way to practice nearly as good as with a teacher. Meanwhile his tradition is riddled with contradictions. Sure there’s badass ascetics, but they also had a society of 98% slaves not too long ago. He’s all about lineage holders and maybe there are cool ones, but even he acknowledges that there’s a bunch of rich lamas who take a ton of money to mispractice.
Edit: probably not going to retain the details, but reading your past Buddhism effort posts are pretty interesting
GOOD POST
Extremely good stuff. Wonder if this would work when doing things one has a hard time pushing themselves through due to under stimulation as well, like daily chores
With meditation, the worst thing you can do is try*
*With the exception that if you are experiencing delusions or overwhelming paranoid thoughts or you are hearing very hostile thoughts then it’s not the right time to learn meditation and sitting with experiences like these in meditation can risk aggravating them.
There’s a story about a monk named Cudapanthaka who achieved enlightenment through meditating while doing his chores. I think it’s in the Madhyamaka tradition. So, if that story is to be believed, then it meditation during chores would certainly work.
Maybe. It’s hard to be consistent with it but my mind loves to do things in the background and while it’s recently been pondering pointlessly at times I have had it frequently coming back to the present moment: proprioception, observing sensations, insight into non-self, impermanence, and unsatisfactoriness. It has been pleasant at times. Lately, I’ve been listening to Buddhist audiobooks to help with initiating mindless tasks. I’ve also found that the insight practice of asking where the self is can help with anxiety and pain.
interesting! i do have adhd and have had a lot of trouble with traditional meditation methods. This sounds like something i could try to incorporate into everyday life
this is more or less the form of mindfulness I learned in DBT that made me change my mind about mindfulness being full of shit.
In my search for good meditation tools I’ve come across alot of bunk, and a handful of really useful ones. ‘Noting’ is absolutely fundamental, but I just want to drop 2 other simple thoughts that my practice center around. Also, i have ADHD, so I can tell from experience the days I meditate are very different from the days I don’t.
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Yoga. If you can’t ‘get out of your head’, it’s because you’re ‘stuck in your body’. Yoga as USians call it is just the exercise portion of meditation training… yoga as a tradition literally means union. Some people legit CANNNOT get out of their heads, until they get some kind of somatic relaxing goin on.
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This one is deceptively simple, but i swear by it. Any meditation follows 2 rules (the 2nd of which is pm ‘noting’ like op is about)
- Pick something repetitive (whether it’s a mantra, just your breath, or anything else; it doesn’t really matter)
- When your mind pulls away see rule #1. ‘Noting’ is a more elegant tradition of communicating just this, but that’s it.
I think a lot of people try their hand at meditating without being told that first rule, including myself for a long time. I used to just sit there while my mind wandered, which simply isn’t meditating correctly. The proper state is cultivated by ‘noting’ (a la OP) all the thoughts that interfere with your ‘rule #1’ repetitive task. Eventually after enough practice, the mind becomes fully focused on the chosen #1, and you find yourself in a pecuilar state of identifying yourself in new and sometimes powerful ways (choose your own metaphysics)… and if your ego doesn’t start reshaping automatically you’re either already perfect, a narcissist, or meditating wrong, imho.
- Yoga. If you can’t ‘get out of your head’, it’s because you’re ‘stuck in your body’. Yoga as USians call it is just the exercise portion of meditation training… yoga as a tradition literally means union. Some people legit CANNNOT get out of their heads, until they get some kind of somatic relaxing goin on.
This! My absolute favourite time to meditate is immediately following a yoga practice. I’ve been practicing seriously for about 5 years now and I’ve got very good at maintaining my focus throughout the entire practice. This focus on, well, being focused along with the physical challenge is all in preparation to be able to sit or lay with yourself, in silence, and without thought. Does my mind still wander? Of course! But I find it easier to focus on one thing, usually my breath, and recognize when I’ve become distracted.
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