Hi,
I ended up super stuck in kundalini a few months ago. Spiritual awakening was going amazing, so much love and equanimity and truth. But some parts of my shadow I was refusing to face arose in March and since then, love and equanimity steadily declined until now I feel I have almost zero. I pinch myself and the pain lingers, you know? Another problem is that I tried to meditate my way out of it, by going deeepp into my crown chakra, and dissolved my ego structure- so its like I'm on mushrooms all the time, sense of time is gone, sense of self is gone, formation of language and concepts is hard. It was fun at first when I held more love- I felt like Christ. But now it's just mostly fear and messiness.
anyway my therapist has urged me to be an observer of my mind for months now. But I refuse: because I observe a) more dissociation from myself and my body b) more misery b) less equanimity and love and d) more social withdrawal etc, e) more into duality, f) more craving and aversion, steadily. So I always bug her about how I can just be mindful of my thoughts when I watch this all happen.
what I want is freedom, I want freedom. I'm suffering a ton, this is serious shit and I'm medicated, but I'm curious if I can maintain one pointedness of mind can I be free from all this bullshit. maybe I had this coming- throughout my awakening I shed a ton of ego but was still extremely attached to being more and more popular and liked as I grew to love myself more. And now it's blown up in my face- and I have a mind that I cannot be with and that is desperate to be liked and hates itself- again the lesson here is to not be so concerned with what people think.
every step I take I am in misery- I want out. I was trying hard for the past months to open my heart- stupidly- to no avail, cuz I wanted my old self back. Now I do see how ridiculous this is. 
the reason I'm bringing this up is because I read an osho article on meditation, and how the path of love is very difficult and most have to go thru meditation, and that love comes as a result of meditation. I cannot stand myself right now so clearly love is not the way at the moment. Can awareness bring freedom even though so far in the last theee months I have been moving away from freedom?
what gives me some hope is that my therapist insists I don't have the characteristics of someone with schizophrenia (which I guess to me implies being stuck in this forever) maybe because my self awareness is pretty good. I don't want this continued dissociation and withdrawal to happen, and I spent most days the last few months brooding of how I'm doomed to be trapped in this forever, but after reading osho I  am filled with a bit of hope that I can be free from these chains 

I will let others who are more qualified respond, but this sounds to me like classic moving from  "Arising and Passing" to "Dissolution". 

Every time I here folks talk about kundalini experiences on DhO it seems to correspond with the A&P event. Everything is all powerful, explosions, rocket rides etc, then boom. Everything sucks. https://tinyurl.com/yb633ucv (Entrance to the Dark Night)

Personally, I am currently cycling between Re-Observation and Equanimity. But I've done the A&P to Equanimity trip many, many times.

het es,

awareness is not enough, in general, as a naked hot dog is not enough. you also need a bun, and condiments. Sauerkraut, for some. (It's the Fourth of July in the US, go wild.) A napkin helps, especially in public.Possibly a ball game. A beer. It's one thing after another, once you accept how deeply fucked you are, in the hell of helpless impotent awareness, as a mortal.

love, tim

Hey Es,

I relate to much of what you say here and I'm sorry to hear you're struggling.

Have you been doing loving kindness for yourself? One technique I really really love is Cradle of Loving Kindness by Trungpa Rinpoche. 

Another that helped for me a lot was holding my inner child. My therapist had me print out pictures of myself as a baby/toddler/child to help connect to the image of myself at that age. Hold your inner child and hold space for whatever comes up. Cry, let it out, let it all go. You are safe. You are loved.  When your inner child feels calm again, play with him/her/them. Take them on walks.

Internal Family Systems therapy has also helped me when I was feeling like this. (Of course, I do not know your history and experiences)

There is a great seminar by Richard Schwarz, the founder of IFS, on youtube with a couple very safe and gentle guided meditations. I found that working with my "parts" was really effective when I was feeling like this.   

You can find it here    ---   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDyj0EWscqk


Keep reminding yourself that this will pass. And let yourself feel whatever you're feeling. Honor it. Hold space for it.

I also found Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg guided loving-kindness meditations to be very helpful and grounding.  I found walks in nature to be very helpful as well as buying more plants. Really trying to live in a beautiful space even though I felt like shit all the time.

I heard Lama Rod Owens say the other day, "To love is to allow."  I love this message and it goes super deep.

Try being sooooooooo gentle to what is coming up (even the frustration you may feel with trying to be gentle) 

It will soften. 

I hope some of this resonates with you. 

You are loved. 

Hi, thanks for the message
 I tried loving kindness a couple of times. At the moment my heart feels painful and empty....and nothing seems to help it.
crying gives me a temporarily feeling of relief, when it does happen.
but most of the time I feel like an emotionless robot waiting for this to end.
I just don't know what to DO. Yes love is allowing, but that means I am allowing repeated dissociation and moving AWAY from love. Hence trying to stop it.

What do you mean by "moving AWAY from love."   If love is allowing, then "trying to stop it" is choosing to not allow it to be. To not hold space. To try to destroy it. 

I mean this in the most literal way possible. 

Again, I do not know your history or your experiences, and please take all my advice with a grain of salt, as I am not a mental health professional nor am I a dharma teacher, just someone who relates to some of what you said in your last post and someone who found gentleness and radical acceptance to be the only way to move on. 

Is your therapist a meditator? 

I also recommend reaching out to Willoughby Britton at Cheetah House. She does consultations via Skype and she has much much much more familiarity and knowledge than I do. She may be able to help you contextualize and reframe some of what you are feeling. 

https://www.cheetahhouse.org/


Hang in there. 

Moving away from love, well subjectively feeling less love for myself and others gradually . Moving more into duality and dissociation. Life is flat now. Although that could be an illusion too. Yes my therapist is a meditator 

allowance is the only way I believe you are right....I just don't want to allow further fragmentation of my being 

es, good luck with not allowing further fragmentation of "your   "being." That's two dead concepts walking, at this point.

read Shargrol, Of Course, randomly, as necessary to keep from killing yourself. Otherwise, read nothing. It will just piss you off, at this point, or make you despair. Nobody can live up to all the advice you'll get right now. Ignore it all, incuding this.

https://shargrolpostscompilation.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html#transitiontoeq



love (meaninglessly and really quite uselessly), tim

Great so what am I and what is the point of life if not love ? Man during the last dark night I wanted enlightenment so bad. But then my heart opened. And through out my awakening, what you saw as a cute quick fix to the dark night , I saw that spirituality is useless and life is love, the path is life itself. But now I crave spirituality again , enlightenment, freedom, emptiness. I am in fullness at the moment, but in a very clinging and imbalanced way. Extreme craving and aversion. I don't see a way out of this hell, except a magical and mystical experience of no-mind, but right now I am VERY-mind. My ego is working every millisecond to judge how happy I am etc. I have almost LOST my mind. I want out of this and love didn't work and isn't working and so now I'm back to wanting annihilation of the self.
i saw this quote once, that love without freedom is attachment (what I experienced the last couple years clearly) and freedom without love is escape. Right now I crave freedom but have neither. I am simply stuck. This sucks and I don't know how it can end. I guess at the very least I can stop clinging to these concepts you claim are "dead" as they are not working for me. Love, dissociation, fragmentation, all these labels of mental illness etc. I need out of this.i

i am most worried about the fact that my sense of self is gone. This seems like a permanent irreversible thing. Like i took mushrooms but it never ended. My sense of self is therefore fighting even harder to protect me from fear. So how am I supposed to let go of my sense of self if it's only strengthening. I guess step one stop clinging. I think the motive behind all this is to preserve my treasured identity, the girl I was so attached to just a few months ago. Now I don't even know who I am, just someone who doesn't really want to exist at the moment, not without love.
again Osho talked about this mystical experience where after practicing enough, you see your thoughts are not you, and you're then filled with joy. I had that before when I wasn't looking but now I crave it again. So far not happening. Only more clinging
it made me though more willing to forget about love, concepts, just be pure awareness (easier said than done) and try to live as much of a life as possible right now I guess

A random something:

I've always had trouble understanding what people mean when they say love, and I had trouble understanding what Rumi means when he says love, because clearly he means something else. But I see another expression, that I think easier for me to relate to (probably because of delusion!). Whatever. When reading your posts on this thread, the thing that comes to my mind, is the lines below that I painted bold.

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

By Thich Nhat Hanh.

hey es,

Siavash's post is so beautiful i sort of wanted to leave it as the bottom line, but i hear you too clearly right now to leave it. Even though all i can say is that love comes out of the nothing yu are on your way into. it is the only thing that moves, in the void, when you and yours have vanished. it is impossible to anticipate; if we could anticipate it, we would fuck it up. This thing happening to you now is taking away the possibility of "you" fucking it up, along with "you" and "yours". But John of the Cross is right: and not I, loving, but the Beloved in me, and Love Itself. Absurd terms on a Theravadan forum, but this is me and my 2 cents, and shargrol can check in any time he likes and i'd simply thank God for him, and for you.

let the words dissolve into dissonant music, and let that dissonance die out like the note of a struck gong. don't hit that fucking gong anymore, and if something else hits it, let that something do its own fucking thing too. The reverberation dies away into quiet, and the quiet dies away into nothing, and the nothing dies away. let it. no accomplishment to be had, no direction toward anything. let it. there is only that faith that can't be quashed, call it what you will in any fucking tradition, that human life is better than nothing. why? because of . . .; this. This, amid this horror.

love, tim

Ok tim ... thank you.
on one hand I have to move into this nothingness . I have to drop all concepts.
on the level of my self though, I do feel like I am moving away from nothingness even more....but it's ironic, that I am doing so by CLINGING to the idea that my ego is strengthening, that my thoughts are getting faster and more dualistic etc etc.
soo...what would happen if I stoped clinging to this? Yet to find out 

But, Tim, it makes me feel better that you hear me, that you relate and that maybe I'm not the only one in this universe with this struggle, and that there is a way out....

no out so much as accepting nowhere, and then . . . something. which is sort of amazing, considering that nothing held up.

Okk will do
-antidepressants , lol

Also....accepting seems not an option when my mind has become so un-equanimous..accepting the sensations anyway . Resisted them for months now
does that matter? Can I still be free haha

thatv has been part of my path ---- https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001RS8KV0/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3

well, shit, es,

it's beyond your power, man. this fire is going to burn you and all your capacities to the ground. if there's nothing at the end but ashes, and nothing but ashes, welcome to the truth. that has not been my experience. but maybe i just have a final fatal round of burning to go too, and you'll be telling me tomorrow, just let it burn, mtherfucker. hasta la vista. you're dust and ash, the end.

love, tim

I just finished this book. I recommend it.

Oh shit you wrote a book! thanks for the recommendation 
I umm I just don't know how I can do this. I was super into being aware of my thoughts all day until I read something by Osho- that you need a strong sense of self to be able to dissolve the ego. That might explain why my ego is only strengthening/ because I accidentally dissolved the ego structure in my crown ..... I don't know if entering into nothingness can work.... I have been aware of my thoughts for 3 months and only seen my ego strengthening. But I want this I want liberation 
even though I know it's not a goal it's a journey .. but each moment I can't help but feel trapped
if I surrender, I watch myself suffer, if I struggle, I suffer, if I try to feel love, I suffer
its also reached the point where I pray I wake up with my sense of self and love back, so far 0/4

Reading your comments, it seems like you are not much interested in whatever people are suggesting? And you repeat what you have said before?
If that is the case, how about to take people's suggestions a little more serious? It won't hurt.

BTW, Shinzen Young has a way of working with thoughts that is not much conceptual, and instead focuses on the mental space and the components that make up thoughts. It you want to explore, he has a day long retreat recording, that explains this in detail and gives instructions and etc.


Part One

Part Two

Part Three

I feel like I have tried everything read everything etc. I tried loving kindness this morning. It is definitely hard for me to generate the feelings but I can do it a little bit. 
I repeat the same stuff just because my concern feels that real.

How about to not do it for yourself, and do it for others?
I mean imagine if your loved ones or loved one need you to do something diligently for a certain period of time?
No matter what method or practice, just choose one, as if that is the most important thing that your loved one needs and you are doing it for that person, and do it without expecting any result for yourself? (Actually that is not much imaginal thing, because I guess your loved one/s want to see you happy, they need that.)

hey es,

the book is shittier than you can imagine, lol. Just a more presentable (my editor cut a lot of profanity, lol) version of what i've been saying here, mostly, with some good jokes. But the main point, after the one about medication and the dark night not being exclusive, contrary to what you often here from purists in both camps, is that at some point you are just reduced to rubble, and find yourself helpless, dessicated, and pretty much a goner, and that the turn comes out of that condition being, somehow, accepted as your actual condition without remedy. As you've noted yourself, the paradox of trying to not try is a gnarly one. You come close enough to despair that i tend to doubt people who say that they never had a moment's doubt or that their faith never wavered, or some such prettied-up autobiographical shit. It's ugly, at best, in my experience--- humiliating in the extreme, as the ego and/or self fights that knowledge of its own nothingness and incapacity to generate enduring goodness and meaning with everything it thinks it has, until all the tricks and wiles and strengths are used up through repeated failure, and you realize that everything you're doing is just making it worse. Then one day, at the utter bottom, resigned to a nothingness beyond meaning and juice, you notice very quietly . . ;. damn, that's a pretty cloud, damn, that flower's lovely. Have I ever seen a bee fly? Is the sky always this kind of blue? Is a child's smile somehow enough after all? I wonder if this is what my grandfather was getting at, with that gentle smile he had toward the end?

love, tim

p.s. thanks for the plug, Chris, lol. Your cut is in the mail.

Ok. Well said My ego is only fighting harder and harder. And ya I guess me saying this over and over is only feeding it. But I don't know what to feed insteAd.
have you heard of Jeff Foster ? He said he was obsessed for years with spirituality and enlightenment and dissolving his ego until one day he was just exhausted and awoke. I'm obsessed with teaching this exhaustion. Haha
im already pretty tired. i am literally just waiting to realize

K there's also another piece to this puzzle...well when I had the mental break some really dark thoughts came pouring in pertaining to fallen angels etc and got manipulated into believing I am an energy vampire. I have thoughts in my head that I am a "dark worker" or fallen angel aka a light worker who was supposed to spread love and light but instead is spreading fear. I feel self conscious of this wherever I go. I feel responsible for others and I notice how people react different around me now vs 5 months ago. Wonder if anyone has heard of this....hmm maybe not on a Theravada forum

well, Jesus is all over this shit. The Gospels are a primer for dealing with demons and possessed people. I know Linda (Polly Ester) has experience with someone who thought this way, and she learned and earned her hard knowledge. I have taken a guy pursued by demons across Washington, D.C. in the wee hours of the morning, home to his tent under an underpass, without incident. And I ain't afraid of no fucking devil or demon or vampire, with God behind me. I buy their drinks at the bar, actually, when they come in: first round is on me. I noticed that the Dalai Lama recently took the cursing of demons out of some ritual form, because earlier in the form even demons were blessed and given potential salvation with all sentient beings. The Dalai Lama explained that he thought it was kind of perverse to say that in one place and yank away salvation a few verses later, lol. Made sense to me.

love, tim

Haha Damn. Well I wouldn't say I'm possessed only because a dharma teacher I trust told me I wasn't . But I believe I've been psychically manipulated

Well shit, i was getting herd of pigs together, because i figured your demons were probably Legion. I was gonna get them demons into them pigs and let them pigs stampede off a cliff into the sea. I was also going to pre-sell the herd to a Chicago pork dealer, salvage the drowned demon pig meat, and double my investment. Non-kosher breakfasts are big bucks here in the south.

love, tim