Something strange happened yesterday after i had been practicing. Just after i opened my eyes, i started getting little shocks in the middle of my head. I have already reached a conclusion about what probably happened, but i might be wrong, and also, i have the (vain) hope that it might help others be clearer about what's happening.
Here's as full a description as i can remember:
Background and ContextI've been practicing a hybrid vipassana lately, which so far seems to be working out ok. I don't note explicitly, but try to focus the mind towards the "holes" in experienced phenomena, and try to experience the nature of these gaps. I combine this with part of what is described in
A letting go approach to Jhana at the hamilton project blog - i try to combine a light focus on whatever phenomenon im investigating with a "letting go" that lets the gaps in phenomena appear more clearly.
Anyways, yesterday i did this practice. I started by going to a light 2nd-jhanic state by concentrating on the witness (or what i think of as the witness). When i didn't need to focus hard anymore, and the pleasure got a lot subtler, i started looking at phenomena. I start out with touch-sensations, and usually stay with a specific sensation until it fades, which often happens when i begin to really see there being gaps in it. Or i change if something presents itself very vividly, like a pain somewhere suddenly being very noticeable.
Things began to go better, and i stabilized in a state where there was less annoyance and things really began to open up. All touch-sensations had some vibratory/holed quality at this point, and i began to notice the hints of the same sort of gaps in what i think of as my awareness-space (the non-place where the "witness" seems to be not-located at the centre of. physically centered between the eyes, and a bit in, but seeming to reach out further than the head, at least when i don't really con centrate on on noticing that it's not really a physical area).
With some distractions (not that i began to think, i just forgot focusing), i began to get a sense of this "awareness-space" being "gappy", and with the help of some mental bystander-noting "See how it perceives, see how it is aware" to "open up" persistently solid sensations, my inner world took on a very gappy/vibrating nature. Now, i might have phased out into some sort of momentary cessation here, there was some physical jerks, and some maybe-discontinuities when the "letting go" went really we', and the entire mind seemed to be gappy/vibratory/flowing.
Anyways, after trying to get even the very "core" of my being to vibrate like this, and seeming to come at least very close a couple of times, it stopped and opened my eyes.
Strange eventThis is when i suddenly felt a jolt in the center of my brain, a bit electricity-like. Thought was certainly interrupted, and i think i blinked every time it happened. There *might* have been a total blinking out - as the "zaps" continued, i tried to be notice whether everything blinked out or if my thoughts were just interrupted, combined with blinking and the surprise of a mild electrical shock.
The zaps seemed to hit in the middle of my brain, and began *hard*. I had the first of them a couple of seconds after i opened my eyes, and thereafter they seemed to continue with 2-10 second intervals. They seemed to come mostly when i wasn't attending to them, i had the sense that attending to the area where the sensations happened sort of blocked the 'zaps'
In the beginning, i thought "Yay! These must be fruitions. So i did actually get a path. Wow. Nice."
But after a while, i noticed that the zaps were familiar - the physical sense of them seemed very much like what i get when i forget to take my antidepressants and similar medications -
SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome . Also, i did actually forget my antidressants at least the last couple of days before, and hadn't taken my Ritalin that day (which has seemed to affect the SSRI-DI too) After a while, i noticed that the shocks actually seemed to travel up from my heart before zapping me in the center of the brain. This made them feel even more like the SSRI-DS zaps, and after 10 minutes to an hour (not sure), i began to get zaps other body parts too, though still mostly in the head.
The presentation was still very different from the other times i had SSRI-DI. They started out very suddenly, just when i stopped meditating, and instead of hitting perhaps every minute or so, they were very fast (at least once per 10 seconds, i think they started out at one every 2-3 seconds, and intensely felt). And the zaps usually seem randomly distributed in my body, instead of hitting my in the middle of the head.
So, thus far i've concluded that the vipassana "jump-started" and "focused" a case of SSRI discontinuation syndrome. There might have been fruitions in the zaps too, but i've gotten enthusiastic before, and it doesn't seem to help my practice.
I wanted to post this because it was really strange, and i wondered if anyone else had experienced something like it (and might have some other explanation). Also, to inform you guys that it seems vipassana might be able to affect the way SSRI-discontinuation syndrome presents, and might also be confused with fruitions by other people (at least, if it's not just something that happens to me.
I guess i kinda hoped they would turn out to be fruitions, as well as the ordinary brain zaps, but i haven't noticed anything else special. I think i get distracted and irritable just as i usually do, and my self doesn't seem any smaller.
Anyway, all comments greatly appreciated. And (before you ask) i will be mentioning this to my psychiatrist too, since it might be something else entirely.
And thanks to you all for being here