Not sure where this should go so it wil go in MISC. 

So, I was progressing along quite nicely for a while, (and a part of that was letting go of the need to progress), but then I hit this major roadblock and I'm quite confused.  

It was much as Daniel Ingram describes as what happens before descending into the dark night of the soul.  Concentration was getting easier and easier, I was able to go more and more deeply into absorbtion.  Then it was like there was a huge emotional upheaval and it was very difficult to concentrate at all. The center of my awareness became very muddy and it was hard to find and discern the sensations I had been using to navigate previously.  

After much trial and error, what seemed to help was using more of the periphery of the awarness instead of the center of attention, and also to really become aware of when the desire to be somewhere or something else was happening, and just sit with and feel that as well. Things were getting better and better and it felt like I was dissolving many of the intense emotions that had come up through the dark night. Restlessness, resentment, disgust, fear, heartache etc. If I could just feel the sensations and sit with them. Eventually they started to release and process. Picking up on the meta frustrations about how I felt within a meditative session really helped a lot too. Just becoming aware of and sitting with those sensations. I hadn't been able to be aware of them before and it seemed like they had been a major hindrance all along I wasn't aware of.  After a while the center of my attention came back and I was also able to find and focus on things again. It felt like I was truly processing feelings and actually getting over them and releasing them. 

But then, i had another shift where the center of my attention was even MORE muddy and emotions even more intense. Now I'm kind of at a loss.  I find it difficult to describe, but it feels like it's very difficult to use the techniques I used before.  I can feel that sensations are happening but I can't distinguish between them easily and it's hard to sit with or feel them because I can't find them. It feels like my awareness just kind of slides off whatever sensation it's looking for and can't lock onto it. It was also difficult to even discern when I'm in the present or not, which was previously getting clearer and clearer. I find that I am often going back into thoughts but not realizing it because it's so difficult to distinguish between things. Also thoughts are more racing and restless than ever. 

One thing that seems to help, is that It seems to help relying on the periphery even more, and to try to feel things more indirectly and try not to worry too much if things are locked on or not. Similar to the thoughts in the room exercise that Daniel recommends. (maintain awareness of the periphery and the environment you are in at the same time as the sensations of the emotions. And just sit with it, but I'm not exactly sure if I'm really locked on to the emotion or not... it's just there in a vague way, like catching something out of the corner of your eye).  As for emotions, I still find it very difficult to just feel them when I can't find them and they are more intense than ever. I sort of feel like there might be some trapped trauma that the body is avoiding. It feels like the body keeps running away from it in an involuntary way... like when you touch a hot stove and your hand pulls back. It feels when I try to guide the body towards feeling the feelings... things will get more muddy and confusing and restless all the sudden. And I can't make sense of what is going on.  

I'm kind of at a loss at how to proceed. Any advice would be appreciated.  

Everyone is different and I don't know the specifics of your situation so I can only suggest possibilities. They might not be that helpful to you but maybe someone else reading will find them helpful....


Sometimes emotions have a biological cause that mental techniques can't alter. This is not necessarily something you would experience all your life. It could be triggered by something that happened. Because of that possibility I would consider other possibilities such as looking outside vipassana for the cause or the solution. 

• Some people will try to tell you to just push through it. Sometimes that will work. But people are not all the same and what people think of as dark nights is not a single phenomenon. Sometimes "pushing through it" will lead to permanant brain damage and has also led to suicide:  https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2021/04/willoughby-britton.html
• Try a different type of meditation.  (I model my own practice more after the anapanasati sutta than the progress of insight. I first practice tranquility by calming the body, feelings and mind, and only then cultivate insight. I think this helps to minimize the emotional difficulties that are a natural consequence of insight.)

(After people learn to meditate it is not unusual for them to become more emotionally sensitive, and for suppressed emotions to start to come up during meditation.  And as your perspective on "self" changes your world view can get turned upside down which can also be upsetting. I would call these cognitive effects - they are due to awareness and thoughts. These types of phenomena don't necessarily mean you are incompatible with the type of meditation you are doing. But if you can tell if the effect is not cognitive ie if it is biological it can be useful to know. If the type of meditation you are doing is disrupting your brain chemistry to the extent it is producing depression or anxiety I think you should be really cautious about continuing that practice. For example some people report a jhana hangover as if producing intense bliss eventually resulted in a neurotransmitter deficit that caused depression. It is not a good idea to tinker with your brain that way.)

• Try less meditation. Particularly if you recently started meditating more each day.
• Try not meditating. This doesn't mean you have to give up meditation permanently but if you find a close correlation to doing a certain technique and strong unpleasant emotions it would be useful to know.
• Are you eating a healthy diet? Did you change your diet recently?
• Are you meditating at a different time of day, particularly with respect to meals?
• Did anything else change in your life? Sleeping patterns? Stress levels? Major life events?
• Try seeking help from a psychologist. 

One thing I'm not totally clear about your post is you use of the term, "muddy". There is a stage of insight termed "dissolution" (bhanga).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1%B9%87a#Visuddhimagga
It sounds like this might be what you are experiencing. In this stage it may seem like you are not aware of arising, only of passing so it can seem "muddy" like you can't get a grasp on things, like they keep slipping away. People that aren't aware this is a stage might feel like this is a step backward when it is a sign of progress.

Is this how you see it? 
​​​​​​​
Shinzen Young describes this stage as noticing arising and passing away at the same time - in that view it's not due to a failure to concentrate or to pay attention - it's a change in perception due to greater awareness of what is really happening.

https://youtu.be/b2ZTR9mhBWk?t=111
​​​​​​​
He says its a stage "of greater sensitivity or awareness".

If you can tell something is fading as soon as you notice it, you are perceiving impermanence with greater clarity not less clarity.

Read Daniel's book for advice again about this issue and perhaps follow it and see what happens, then report back of exactly what you did, and how it worked out.
Good Luck,
​​​​​​​~D

Sounds like funzies of Dark Night for sure.
There are ways to quickly end DN effects and avoid most unpleasant experiences but best to not expect miracles and some times, especially when all this is pretty new to you best way is to just be mindful of what happens.

Few pointers I can give are:
1. There is reason DN happens and it has to do with experiences you had during A&P. Most simple way to put it is you cling to these experiences and expect mind to work like it did during A&P and this is impossible because A&P is more like prototyping stage where mind allows itself to do things which it knows are unsustainable. The idea is that you should recognize subtle clinging to how mind worked in A&P and realize its not particularly helpful.

2. Central focus being gone is like experiencing sunburn in your eyes. Not sure if you were as stupid as to ever gaze at sun for long period of time but even quickly looking at it will disable part of eyes which experienced strong light. In this case it is similar in that parts of mind which handle focus are tired and need to rest.
This wouldn't be an issue and mind would shift which parts of brain it uses so it get less tired ones but as I mentioned in point 1 you are clinging to what you experienced in A&P and this does two things - first it keeps bothering parts of mind which were used during A&P and second it will cause any part of mind which didn't triggered the wrong ways they do not expect. In other words some spare resources brain can throw at the problem weren't exactly participating in A&P and rest of mind might expect them to behave in ways which was tried during A&P so these parts of mind can be confused (not to mention these resources are spares and might had seen little action in the assigned role in general) and this will also cause some dukkha. That last part not the major issue but contributes to DN.

Solution will then to be to recognize what you cling to from A&P and stop clinging. Also to not use central region which seems to be mostly hit and tired. Lastly is to accept however your mind performs and give it time to figure out how to do all this focus thing like it never did it - do not expect mind to know how to do it because it might very well be its first time some poor neurons do it. Also because it might be first time generally you should recognize what your focus feels like and refer to focus this way.

More advanced way to end DN is to encourage mind to assign new resources to focus.
Something called "new resource" has very specific feel to it. EQ generally works by mind getting fed with all that nonsense which is happening and doing it for you everywhere so if you have good idea about how EQ feels its possible to induce assigment of new resources to handling things in mind. Control-sensation you need to induce is not exactly the same quality which is felt during EQ (especially given there are many experience during EQ and you need to figure which quality I am refering to) but similar + some trial and error is usually what is needed to learn how to control things in mind.

Last advice is to not overdo all this control stuff. It is missed learning opportuinity if you just let things pass or just continue typical practices but trying to control things or figure how to end DN too much can lead to its own issues and some times its just best to let mind figure things out. As with everything ballance needs to be found. Of course being really mindful will lead to having ideas later on and just assuming you are mindful won't - then to know what to be midful of it usually require to try few things and review results. Only mentioning all this because when I said there are specific things to end DN on the spot reaction people gave indicated they weren't really mindful and just  always waited things though. It is not how right mindfulness works.

ps. BTW. since suffering is unexperienced pleasure its possible to find pleasure parts of your mind are experiencing during DN and solve dukkha issue that way - this is universal solution to any dukkha, though finding it is often pretty hard (if it wasn't we wouldn't call DN as dukkha nanas but sukha nanas) and requires changing focus in unnatural ways - and its this finding which makes all the necessary changes for this method to work. Personally I almost always use it as its seems to be most skillful way actually. There are even more methods which do work to various degree and some with various side-effects so DN is pretty much your best friend to figure what dukkha is and how to deal with it

I do think there are a few things biologically that make it worse, I currently have a lot of sleep apnea issues, as well as life issues... currently re structuring the whole direction of my life which is stressful. Also facing a lot of fears and making big changes.  A lack of sleep will tank my mood and make restlessness go through the roof.  But even when I'm having a good time and sleeping well I can still go into these states. They are certainly easier to deal with when things are going well, but they still seem to occur either way.  

I also don't actually practice that much insight. My 3 main practices are

1) just going into the present as much as possible throughout the day. 
2) qigong - I've tapered this way down to not doing it very often lately as it seems to make the emotions that come up much more intense
3) muscle relaxation / dissolving tension practices. Where I body scan the body and rest my attn on stuff that is tense and try to sit with it until it dissolves a bit.  I also use the same technique on negative emotions.  
4) noticing beliefs and and thoughts and reframing them. 

In the past I would back off practices until everything would settle down. But then I seemed to be stuck in a state where I would have to wait several weeks for things to die down, I'd try again then the same states would happen again. Then I'd wait, rinse repeat. Didn't seem like I would get anywhere for months.  What threw me for a loop was that learning to use the periphery and being able to be more aware of frustrations and desires to be something else and sit with them to dissolve seemed to "fix" things and move things forward and the issues went away for a long time. This lead me to believe that it was my practice that just wasn't quite right and that was the issue.  But when things went crazy again, that really threw me for a loop. 

I have noticed a pattern where some of the things coming up are sensitive things I have struggled to deal with. For instance, caring way too much about th eperfect outcome. Lately it seemed like moving my life forward in general I was getting really stuck, because I wanted the perfect step forward but wasn't finding it. The solution seemed to be just picking any step forward and not being too attached to the outcome, and that creates a flow that haphazardly starts getting more in alignment. Doing that in a few areas has brought some big relief in general.  

What I mean by muddy is summed up really well by Ni Nurta below...



​​​​​​​It feels very much like that. Like if you just saw something really bright in the center of your vision now you can't quite use it.  Things are blurry and you see spots / dark spots. Except it's with your internal awareness.  The main place I had heard a description of it was in a Daniel Ingram interview where he's talking about the fire kasina and travelling through "the murk".  I don't practice fire kasina but the description of the murk phase there seemed very close in a lot of ways.  

This could perhaps be due to being more "accurate" or having a greater sensitivity? I'm not sure. I suppose I'd need more time with it to be sure. 

Hmm I'll try giving that a go. Not clinging in general seems to be a major life theme lately.  



Ah this is a really good description!  Thanks for that. Glad somebody gets what I'm talking about here. I've struggled describing this to most. 

Many features of your description are typical for Patisankha-ñana, the knowledge of reobservation: the feeling that your meditation got worse (in terms of clarity, concentration, etc); resignation; messy feelings (even ones which you cannot verbalize), old memories and traumas, body reactions (needle pain, pressure on the chest and difficult breathing, tight and painful neck), restlessness, being at loss, personality instability (like becoming a spoiled child for a while, or rebelling adolescent), exhaustion. The mind is trying to "solve" stuff (motivated by the desire for deliverance, remember? which is an energizer), thinking it has a way out, endlessly looking for solutions; and keeps failing, because it was a carrot on a stick all way long. You thought meditation will give you control over what is happening in the mind, you've invested so much time and effort, you developed techniques and strategies, learnt to see the periphery clear and whatnot. And now as all that is collapsing, the mind needs to learn to drop its agenda; so it has to exhaust itself and resign — and viscerally learn something about anatta, uncontrollability. Kenneth Folk says somewhere "hitting the wall of Patisankha". It comes from behind, it pulls the rug under your feet when you don't look.

I am not claiming that you "are" in Patisankha — it just sounds much like that. Not everybody is like that, but I personally find self-diagnosting during meditation tricky (or counterproductive), and have preference for guidance by someone who can follow longer parts of the process.

That is very interesting. I'm not super familiar with the details of these insight stages, except for more at a high level.  I can see some similarities there.  It did occur to me that the mind might be freaking out. It did feel like there was more fear associated with bringing my awareness onto things other than thoughts and ego / self importance. And I did have some periods where it felt like I had really childish petty anger out of no where. I also had a period where thoughts and self importance really started to butt into things very strongly when they hadn't really before. I had a period after where I started to feel more confident in general being more connected to my intuition and then it was like my ego suddenly butted in, and its gravity became very strong. I felt almost desperate for feeling important and needing to take the credit for everything, seemingly out of nowhere. Whereas before I didn't feel as if I cared as much.  

Do you have any recommendations for teachers who are familiar with going through these stages? 

 
Imho mind can totally realize the kind of mind which mind invented during A&P but it needs first to realize that just experiencing it seemingly working doesn't mean it is anywhere near as finished as it seemed to be at the time of A&P because that was an illusion with mocked interfaces showing what we wanted to see and much more effort and time is needed to realize such mind.

Clinging to idea of having working mind state when its nowhere ready is bad but whatever was nice in such A&P experiences can be picked up and developed in to something useful, the mind which can be used.

Mocking is creating interfaces with simplistic implementation just enough to make rest of the system operational and to test it. Mind generally trims mocked interfaces after some time because they surprise surprise only appear to work. Such interfaces can interface to existing interfaces and with it be somewhat (or even mostly) functional but if when during real run without special qualities of A&P (which cause suppression of errors and cause creation of mocked interfaces) causes exceptions (literally errors in mind) such interfaces which return errors they will be tuned down and stop responding. Since most of them is in central focus it will be unresponsive until function of central focus can be replaced with something which doesn't cause errors and doesn't be suppressed.

This explanation is not really incompatible with just assuming 'mind is tired'. Errors are tiring.

Releasing control where its noticed will allow mind to reconfigure itself naturally to use parts which do not cause errors and allow parts which do to undergo maintenance hence its such powerful 'method' for DN and other issues.

Like I mentioned before there are many ways to do it. Heck, one can even mellow out DN with metta if one knows it and how to issue recursive instructions and fill whole mind with metta. Do it for long enough and in the meantime mind will sort itself out. Not without strong clinging though because anything mind does to repair itself and sort itself out can be undone with clinging. Until clinging is seen as what it is and mind becomes dispassionate to it then any method to mitigate DN (or other such issues) will be relatively short lived. In typical DN the same dukkha returning in what on one hand seems subtler and individually less of an issue but multiplied spread over more and more mind causing even worse dukkha overall.

Realizing clinging exists and might have something to do with dukkha won't however immediately solve dukkha and what parts of experience seems broken will still be that way until they heal. This is why mind spontaneously doesn't drop clinging. Understanding issue, its causes and relations to actions (clinging is a kind of action which mind does as is decision it makes to not cling anymore) and what effects will be without immediately experiencing full extent of these effects will help mind do to take right action - in this case to do anything to stop clinging. Pure dispassion.

Then and only then, after mind is dispassionate enough to not cause the same issue happen over and over again applying more nuanced healing actions or even inaction/uncontrol to let mind sort itself out will really work. Practicing these method with still clinging would be exercise in futility but... skill is skill. It is frustrating when nothing which works really resolves issue long term and why one should remove arrow as soon as possible clinging being the arrow and then proceed with bandages and good sleep.


Some themes need to exhaust itself ;)
 

I learnt almost everything about them in retreats in Ajahn Tong lineage (Thai-Mahasi, main center in Chom Tong near Chiang Mai) and affiliated centers in Europe. The structure of retreats is much around familiarity with the stages (resolutions, regular reports, ...). I can give you some contacts for sure, having been in those circles for some time — please drop me a private message if that is something you would find helpful.

You were aware of the states happening (such as fear, childish petty anger, self-importance, ...), that is in itself an excellent mind quality.

From the other posts, I understand you do this practice in daily life. If you have a chance for a retreat with guidance, that is — at least for myself — the best to get through. If you don't have that chance, never mind

Good luck.