Headaches in practice are no fun. The purpose of this new thread is to log some experiments I've been doing to get through a very rough patch in my meditation. If anyone else is experiencing headaches in their practice, please tell us what you have done to work through them!
If you know about my practice history (or don't care) skip down to "Headaches" below.
HistoryAbout 2yrs of Goenka style body scan practice with the last 6mts or so spent largely on navigating the stages of insight through the jhana I learnt to generate with that increased perceptual threshold in regard to sensations. It seems I'm quite attuned to kinaesthetic/somatic type stuff. I can generally feel a "field" of awareness in and around the body all of the time. On the skin it is a light tingling that shifts and shimmers to varying degrees depending on what Im doing. Outside the body it's like an extension of that but felt as a field of sensations surrounding the physical "core". It varies from close to the body to maybe the size of the room (when meditating).
HeadachesMy headaches in meditation have been getting worse for a while now. They started with a pinching/creasing sensation in the forehead that I seem powerless to release. At night I have to go to sleep with one hand on my forehead to stop it from tightening up as the body-mind starts to meditate itself. It happens when I read, write, watch tv etc but not when I walk or exercise. This in itself is not a huge issue. But what really floored me on my recent retreat was the addition of a really ugly pain right inside the skull that feels kind of like the whole brain is tightening. This increases as I meditate. It feels intuitively like all the vibrations in my body are centring in my head and that my attention is "pooling" or "gravitating to" that spot. It's a real mess.
This has put the breaks on my jhana practice because it seems even concentrating on the pleasure generated in the body still eventually turns into crippling headache. Not just in the 3rd jhana where I would normally experience some degree of dark night like sensations in the head, but even in what may be 4th, or at least is 11th-nana territory -- generally in the 4th/11th kind of area the headache will get the better of equanimity and dump me back into the dark night.
It's quite possible I'm mis diagnosing and ALL of the above is the dark night. I don't think so though.
Things I've Tried- Focusing with the lightest of light touches on the jhanic pleasure -- doesn't work
- Exercising more control over jhanic states -- the teacher on retreat had me try this. I seem to have no control whatsoever. My "jhana" seems to be very much of the "concentrated nanas" variety and I experience it in a reasonably linear fashion and cannot yet jump about from jhana to jhana. I certainly can't go backwards.
- Metta practice -- sounded like a cracking idea, but it's still all about the body, and results in the same thing: crushing headache.
- Goenka body scanning -- going back to the strict technique of keeping the attention moving at all times did help a bit. Scanning only from the neck down in a downward direction as once advised by a TA on a course also helped a bit but this does not have the ring of "possible solution" about it.
- Willpower -- for a time at least I do appear to be able to force the energy/tightness to stay out of my head by brute force. Turns out to be a bit like sticking your finger in the hole the damn though. At some point it's going to blow...
- Visualising/directing energy -- another thing i was recently told to do was try to imagine the energy dissipating out of the top of my head (or my ears heh!) etc. -- Didn't work
- Physically raising my eyebrows in meditation to release the forehead tension. -- This works, but only for a few moments and only on the forehead. Once the brain pain is in full swing, no amount of eyebrow wriggling is going to help!
Current PracticeI've had a bit of a fascination with
Shinzen Young for some time now and figured I'd look more closely at his "5 Ways" I like the systematic style of noting and the way you can create combinations and variations to suit your needs. And it's hard not to like Shinzen.
So.. what Im doing right now is
Just note "Gone" but
restricted to sounds. Essentially I meditate with the window open and listen to the birdsong outside in the trees. Cars, planes, machine gun fire <--really, not joking. etc. When something ends abruptly I note it as "Gone". Mostly I do not use an actual label, but if the mind is a bit less concentrated I will. This is fantastic with birdsong as a birds noise is generally long enough for you to notice it end, but not so long as to become the background. In between noting gone I am paying (bare) attention to to the background noises.
ResultsAfter 3 days of practice (2 sits a day) this
appears to be working out great. The "brain pain" has got less and less and today it is not there at all. Forehead tension still happens during meditation but seemingly to a much lesser degree. I have hopes of that falling away too! I seem to be progressing through the nanas, though i do not trust my diagnosive ability much at present. I "think" i have been reaching EQ on the 2nd sit of the day. The DN appears to be vastly reduced. There is still a lot of "gripping" sensation in the forehead but it seems less. More a minor curiosity than a major problem.
Why this is happening is anyones guess, but here's a few thoughts:
- Im not meditating so intensely so my brain just hurts less
- I've simply moved past a particularly bad DN experience
- The continuous bare attention on sound is channeling attention away from "vibrations" which in turn is helping to stop the "pooling" effect of attention in the forehead region.
I am still getting jhana like states doing this practice but i have been mostly ignoring them. My concentration seems very good right now (by my own history only) and I do not get any discursive thought at all until i reach the DN like stages and those jhana things seem to just happen in the background. Last night and this morning I have begun to split my attention very lightly between pleasure and sound/gone and so far so good. It seems to have good effect but I need to be wary of allowing a backslide toward headache.