| | Author: pittr
Hi Craig,
Thanks for your interest.
"I know you said it's not a headache or pain but it sounds like it would be possible to induce stress headaches - which do feel different to "normal headaches" - by doing too much concentration work. Do you find yourself straining at all when meditating?"
It doesn’t seem like it. I mean, overexertion (and resulting headaches) were one of the first mistakes I made as a beginner, and since then it became clear that samatha is more about letting go, being relaxed and knowing what’s the attention doing at the moment rather than trying to force it to concentrate on the breath. So, during meditation and immediately afterwards, I generally feel great – refreshed, relaxed, light, alert, etc.
Another good description of my problem would also be that it’s sort of like nausea, but in the head. I mean, when just starting out with meditation, there appeared a similar sort of nausea in the stomach, but it disappeared after a week or two. Then a similar thing happened in the chest area, but it also disappeared after a few weeks. So now, the nausea is confined to the head, but it won’t go away for months now.
"Have you tried any other forms of meditation such as vipassana noting or dzogchen, does that cause the pressure too?"
I sometimes do objectless meditation, where the idea is to be aware of what’s going on in the mind at the moment, without concentrating on a specific object of meditation. The same problem occurs though.
Hope this clarifies the issue somewhat Pit |