Week 4, just made interesting progress in taming my mind. I had already noticed how visualisations/verbalisations easily come with stray thoughts, so I abandoned these, which increased my 'empty time' to 5-10 minutes. Yesterday, for the first time I discovered how breathing in typically goes without random thoughts, breathing out is often disturbed, while the period in between is most vulnerable. Trivial as this observation may seem, it added that little extra bit of awareness to my breathing exercise, so today my mind remained empty for 21 minutes. This starts to look good!

Energy work proceeds slow, but there is progress. I usually experience glowing hand palms and foot soles throughout the day, which I interpret as a steady flow of energy building. My sub-navel storage is glowing, too. When raising energy, in addition to sensitive areas like arm pits, lips, nostrils, ears, I feel my temples glowing too. Stimulating my primary centers feels a little weak for now, with a somewhat buzzing base, and a feeling of energy in navel, solar plexus and heart. In addition, in my heart I felt the very slow pounding sensation that I felt before when meditating. I took this earlier as my heart beat slowing down dramatically, but I now understand this probably was a slowly pulsing heart centre. This is a bit of a recurring theme in energy work: many of the sensations I feel, like the buzzing base, were experienced before, but never paid attention to.