Hi everybody! Could someone please take a look at this and tell me if my practice is going in the right direction? I know there's a ton of resources out there, but every description of the PoI I've read sounds a lot more detailed and dramatic than what I'm actually experiencing. I also seem to have hit a bit of a plateau and wonder if I need to adjust something.
--
I've been dabbling in various meditation techniques for 2.5 years, and I'm pretty sure I crossed the A&P during this time. In late January I decided to get more serious and stick to one technique, noting, for more than a few months. I sit 90 minutes (2*45) per day. I count the breath for a while to get concentrated, then I start noting, one note every 1-2s, sometimes a bit faster, rarely much slower. I note mostly body sensations and hearing, followed by thoughts and mental images, more rarely vedana and mind states/emotions. I note mostly out loud.During the last months I've gone through somewhat distinct phases, but I'm not confident about matching these to what I've read about
Phase 1 (about a week): ear ringing and head pressure shortly after I sit down; tingling sensations on the skin; some itching; eventually lights behind the eyes; pressure eases; getting a bit spaced out and seeing more random mental images; sometimes lose track of the noting; lights behind the eyes come and go, don't notice a pattern; some pain and desire to get up towards the end.
Phase 2 (~three weeks): ear ringing, head pressure (primarily bridge of the nose and between the eyes, sometimes more general), tingling; quickly getting spaced out and seeing random, dreamlike stuff; perception of heartbeat becomes unpleasantly strong and mildly disgusting, feels like it reverberates through the whole body; lots of ear ringing; some anxiety-like sensations in the abdomen, not connected to any particular source of anxiety; sometimes feel queasy and get hot/cold flushes; sometimes mildly unpleasant "vibrations" that are a bit like the tingling I experienced earlier, but more disembodied and not on the surface; often a desire to stop and lots of thoughts about the timer; all of this sometimes interrupted by fairly happy and calm phases during which there is light behind the eyes.
Phase 3 (about a week): the unpleasant aspects of phase 2 are receding more and more; mostly left with calm and a slightly spaced out feeling; new thing that happens a few times per sit: my head suddenly slumps forward as if I'm falling asleep, followed immediately by bright lights.Phase 3.1 (~two weeks): slumping goes away; calmness and spaciness remains; only rarely notice some anxiety; something new in my initial concentration phase: after two or three rounds of breath counting I get this feeling as if my head is being pulled up by a string; feeling light and concentrated; body sensations feel somewhat attenuated; sometimes faint "vibrations" in the head and torso.
Phase 3.2 (~six weeks): another change in the initial concentration: instead of feeling like my head is getting pulled up I get a heavy, "sinking" feeling as if all the blood rushes from my head at once; sometimes there's also an abnormal coolness of the skin in the chest area; feeling a bit more detached from my body; sits feel uneventful, neither particularly pleasant nor unpleasant; after the initial ramp-up it's just noting until it's over; less spaced out, rarely lose track.
Phase 3.3 (still going): experience of sinking feeling mostly gone; instead feeling light and wide with more fuzzy boundaries between the body and everything else; more detached from the body; often can do my 90 minutes fairly comfortably in one sitting; sometimes see patterns emerging out of the murk behind my eyes; saw some heavy flickering on days I meditated more than usual; sometimes briefly feel as if time has somehow slowed down and I'm experiencing things in slow motion; otherwise very unexciting sits.I wonder about how quiet things have been for the last two months, and how things feel somehow more mundane now than they did earlier on.
Do I need to change something? Do I need to put more time in?
