| | Ok... about me:
my first experience with yoga nidra was a few years before starting meditating; I had to study a lot, and Ifound these relaxation exercises that were meant to get you to alpha&eventually deeper state; did them regularly, 7 minutes were enought to make me feel very refreshed; at the beginning it was a recording, after awhile I learnt to do it by myself.
When I begun meditating, observing the breath for the first times, likely because of that past conditioning, I would quiteoften end up in what nowI recognize as a very well known state during the progress in yoga nidra, where the trance was quite deep and a lot of random, mental activity was going on; in particular, I am not a visualthinker, but in those statesI would have all sorts of beautiful visions; if someone would call me I'd stand up immediatly, feeling completely refreshed and lucid, while half second before that I wasin this relatively deep kind of trance. Btw, you know when you are falling asleep and your thoughts get disconnected and quite nonsensical? If you keep awareness going, that's pretty much the place you end up into. However, at one point I talked to a monkwho told me that that state was too much torpor-oriented and not conducive to good meditation, so I stopped doing that immediatly, though I was really enjoying that. This wastwo years ago.
In these days, when I happen to do something like that, the procedure is much less structured, and it's like "Lie down, tuning into a sense of heaviness, making the breath go up&down throught the body, tuning into whatever feels like a deeper state of trance".
No still awareness, quite a lot of sensations of heaviness moving throught the body, sometimes with the breath, changing intensity, shape&so forth; no particular mental images going on in this period, and this way of experiencing the process of falling asleep is for sure hightly conditioned by a lot of time spent training in vipassana and energy practices. I have no doubt that if I would focus on thoughts, I'd end up having visions again.
I also noticed that the activity of noticing things, (knowing what's going on) is very much related to the third eye* ), while when you are falling asleep energies tend to slip into to the heart**, the third eye gets deactivated, so there is this place where you are somehow still experiencing things but not really knowing what is happening and, according to my observations, that seems to be obviously the reason you don't know when you are falling asleep just before losing awareness, because the third eye is shutting down, so the activity of knowing what is happening doesn't have energy to function. So, if you are interested in these things, a tip would probably be to put attention to the heart when you want to go deeper,and putting attention to the third eye when you are deep and you don't want to lose consciousness. Or, you can do that by being intuitively aware of the sensations that are going on throught the body (or your mind), like if you wanted to note them Mahasi-way, but you keep sistematically doing the mental act of knowing what's going on without creating the label (that si because the label activates the throath, while you are trying not to fall asleep you want to constantly knowing what is going on in order to keep a steady flow of energy to the third eye)...this for me is working very nicely when I try to keep awareness going when I'm falling asleep, wich I don't do a lot because I'm having very paniful stuff going on in this period, and if I menage to just get asleep that's basically all I want right now.
Also, there is a place where the energy body seems to be loosening his connection with the physical body, so I end up experiencing falling, rotating, and stuff like that, and this happens expecially if you go with the heaviness flowing throught the body (if yougo with the thoughts you end up having visions), and that's, according to what I red on the subject, the state where you want to be in in order to begin the process of coming out of the body, thought I never really tried that.
That's pretty much all that comes to mind... good luck!
*wich, btw, explains very nicely why the Buddha was saying all the time "the monk, having established sati in his forefront..."
**wich I think is related to why the orgasm tend to knock you out, because after that there is a massive heart activity, and possibly is also related to why the old texts say that the one who practice metta sleeps well |