Korpo,
It's really a pleasure to read your thoughtful responses.
I think these pains and how we deal with them is really at the heart of the whole process. Equanimity, in my experience, is not necessarily so much a "relaxed attitude", as you describe it, gentle, like water, as an active and potent way of directly engaging an object. Honed to maturity, equanimity becomes a blow-torch that forcefully dissolves whatever it's concentrated on. A mind concentrated with equanimity becomes a dentist drill with which you can drill out all the cavities of your mind.
It's not a pleasant process, but it gives real returns. I look back over the evolution of my practice and can see the progression clearly: "tight spots", like you mention, the same burning knots of pain coming up in my back every course (ie vipassana course). As the hideous initial ones little by little got dissolved over these course of the first year or two, similar fiery little knots started cropping up more and more concentrated in the upper back. They snaked about there and consistently dissolved into the heart region for a year or so. As those got exhausted, they started coming up concentrated in the neck area, and after that the face and skull, and finally for about a year or so everything was coming up inside the brain, snaking around deep in there like little fizzling cartoon bomb fuses. As soon as that stock finally got exhausted, Kundalini went up! It was a total surprise, as I was under the impression that the meditation I was practicing had nothing to do with kundalini and everything to do just with purifying the mind of this stock of impurities. But the two things are intimately connected. Clearing this stock of burning mental defilements, "sankharas", is clearing your stock of karma. You're liberating yourself, which is a universal process. The "kundalini experience" is one step in that process.
A Yogi friend in India explains this by distinguishing between "sahaja kundalini" and "kevala kundalini". Kevala kundalini "kundalini in isolation" is the artificially aroused kundalini that is forcefully raised by working like the plumber we were discussing. Sahaja k, "natural kundalini" is the k. that rises spontaneoulsy when the mind is sufficiently purified of its stock of defilements. It's not capricious or unpredictable. There's no need to cross your fingers. You clear the stock, and it goes up automatically. - and without problems. I think my experience bears out the distinction he makes perfectly, as I was in no way working intentionally for this particular development. But in retrospect it makes perfect sense. With the systematic elimination of more and more subtle things, as soon as even the head was emptied out to a certain degree ( ), "pop" went the weasel.
So figuring how to work with these "pains" is really key to the whole process. And in my experience there's a definite right and a definite wrong way to do it. I was quick to caution you about dwelling prolongedly on such spots because I've gotten myself into trouble by doing that. Using brute force can work when your equanimity is iron strong, but it's natural to lose your equanimity by dwelling on spots of intense pain, and if you dwell on them hating them, just wanting them to go away, then you're reversing the process and compounding your misery. I spent one memorable course working like that - clamping down on the burning knot of pain i so much wanted to get rid of in the center of my back adn trying to dissolve it by brute force - and I ended up making my mind so gross, after a few days I couldn't feel subtle sensations even on my hands or feet. At that point I had to sigh, give up, and start over from the beginning, this time trying to figure out how to work properly.
The trick, as I see it, is to work to *observe* deeper, more objectively - very much like you describe in fact, trying to feel "beneath" and through the pain, down to the underlying subtle sensations.
There a good methodology to this, since things generally dissolve in a systematic manner: In any given "blockage" or "knot of pain", a little subtler than the dull, dense pain, there is an intense sense of pressure, weight, an active pulling heaviness. If you can tune into this pressure aspect of the pain, you are already tuning into a slightly subtler level of the sensation. It will begin to predominate, and the blinding "pain" aspect will start to recede. It becomes slightly more bearable. Forget pain - work observing pressure.
Again, going slightly deeper into the sensation, you will almost certainly find that along with the pressure, there is some heat. In fact this was what you were interpreting as pain - just heat, intense burning heat. If you tune into this level of the sensation completely, you will begin to feel the heat aspect exclusively and the sensations of "pain" and "pressure" will recede.
Again, slightly subtler than heat, there is invariably some pulsation. If you can catch this pulsation and tune into it, your work is already 3/4 done. It will be slow and heavy at first, since it is a very gross spot, but as you tune more fully into it, and concentrate exclusively on that, the sensation of "heat" will recede and the pulsation will become predominant - and begin to speed up.
As you stay calmly fixed on the pulsation as it begins to speed up (not hard at this point, since it is really pretty engrossing), little by little it will increase its speed until it becomes indistinguishable from the other subtle vibrations on your body - by this point, it has in fact "dissolved" right under your gaze.
In my experience, these phases are pretty constant. Pain - pressure - heat - pulsation - vibration: five rungs on the ladder back up to free flow. You've just cleared your "blockage" without force and without stress, by pure equanimous observation.
One perk: no plumber's bill
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