Inflating awareness

Opened "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep" by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche from a random page. It was the "Sleep yoga" chapter which I had not read before but found familiar. Recognized the emptiness and calmness as well as the spontaneous moments of clarity during the sleep. An Aha moment when suddenly yoga started making a lot more sense.

Before bed, I practised focus on everything constant. There is this certain emptiness and calmness in each and every piece of furniture as well as all the wind, trees, grass blades and water outside. Focused on that, trying to grasp it.

Every now and then focus wandered and thoughts appeared. Observed what could be seen from between the thoughts. Even if there are a lot of thoughts obstructing the view directly, there are always gaps between the thoughts, during which one can see what is beyond. Thus it is still possible for the mind to put the picture together by keeping the focus on what shines through from these gaps and then just do it long enough so that all the pieces are gathered.

Approached it in two more ways. Occasionally I focused on my breathing, but in such a way that I would sense and hear it from a distance - to force myself to observe the body breathing, not me doing the breathing. For a few times I deliberately thought of or visualized a feeling or an object, after which I sharply cut the visualization to focus on the moment of emptiness that would be there shortly after the thought or visualization.

It did not take long before I could keep focus on the emptiness and all encompassing love (which shines through the emptiness on its own) for seconds. When I eventually stretched it into about 10 seconds, something cool happened.

I could hear the body breathe in the distance. Consciousness was moving farther from the body,  while at the same time, it was growing larger .. as if being inflated. After having become 2 or 3 times larger, it 'popped' into shape. A good old familiar feeling of presence, which I had forgotten. Due to some sort of insecurities, I had somehow been drawn inside and compressed into a smaller form.

After about 2 hours of this practice, I felt fully energized. Well, since it was about 1 AM, I turned around and fell asleep.

Very familiar floaty feeling since last night. Some mild geisting (lights flickering, about 20 meters from me, a plastic bottle fell on its own).