Author: sean2.0
Forum: Daniel's Practice Hut

A couple of weeks ago my daily practice shifted a bit from an uncomfortable, intermittent twitchy/buzzy vibration state to a fast and steady vibration. The practice is almost exclusively mindfulness, noting as fast as I can at this point. Sometimes the body sensations are disparate and spread out -- pressure of the seat, visual field, skin sensation of the shirt touching the front of the left shoulder -- you get the picture. Farther into the sitting, the body awareness usually shifts to minute sensations that are usually outside of awareness -- the individual hair follicles of the left eyebrow or the mustache around the mouth. The vibration tends to be constant through these phases, though sometimes the breath seems to move with the vibration. The experience feels quite concentrated, and sometimes is accompanied by a mild euphoria and kundalini surges of energy along the spine.

At any rate, for the past several sessions (7-10), that basic experience arises, sustains for a time, and then seems to subside into a kind of quiet -- the body goes quiet, the vibration stops, the kundalini experiences subside. It's a bit like everything drops away to take a rest from the intensity of the practice. At first, the quiet period felt like "coming out" of the meditative state, and sometimes the meditation practice would end without the first experience reoccurring. Now, though, it seems that the vibratory mindfulness state alternates with the quiet period.

My question is this: though I may be mistaken, I have a sense that some part of my mind is either generating or subtly maintaining the vibratory "active" meditation state, and it feels a bit like relaxing when the state subsides. To move forward, is it a matter of maintaining, to the extent possible, the active and vibratory state, or is it simply watching the sequence of events and not getting too interested in the end of the story, or is it something else entirely?

The shift sounds to me like the transition from A&P to Dissolution, which is a tricky one. Advice varies, but I can offer the following:

1) notice every moment of quite, every moment of calm, every moment of spaciousness, peace, and the like. Note what arises quickly and precisely. However, this stage requires some subtlety that is different from what A&P territory requires. Pulses may be slower, out of phase, or hard to find at all. Advice: work with what you have got, with that is going on, as it is.
2) Note things like relaxing, wondering, wandering, spacing out, and still try to find the breath and what is going on with it. Notice that things may feel out of phase whereas before they were clearly in focus and in sync with mindfulness and attention.

Helpful?

D

Author: sean2.0

Thank you, Daniel. It hadn't occurred to me that I might be moving through A&P and onward. For some reason, I had notions of the A&P event being something dramatic and telling, but I suppose it need not be.

At any rate, I will try the approach you recommend for the next couple of weeks and report back.

s

Your description of kundalini -> tranquility is very similar to my experience in the 10 day retreat I just finished.

What happens to me is that I get flows of energy that may get "stuck" in parts of the body, usually associated with pain in a specific part or with a chakra. Then the sensation dissolves, the energy flows to the head, and eventually subsides. It all eventually quiets down and I get a feeling of tranquility.

I'm going to follow daniel's advice also. Please let me know how your sessions progress.

Author: sean2.0

Bruno,

The experience you describe does sound quite familiar.

Daniel's suggestion proved quite accurate, though it's taken me longer to process than I rather naively suggested it might with my "couple of weeks" comment.

Dreams of houses about to collapse around me, of a precious self in danger. Meditation intermittently one thing, then another, nothing stable.

In the past week's meditation, I perceived that I was clinging tightly to a self to whom all of these things happened -- a subject. As I began to release that clinging, the experience began to shift to a kind of flow-state, one that I'd only experienced once a couple of years ago. I'm still kind of jagged, if that makes any sense, but having seen the self/subject clinging and relaxed the grip on it a bit, a clearer sense of freedom seems to have arisen in all aspects of life.