5/18/23

This is my first entry. This is separate to my other post on training perception & focuses only on meditation & meditation experiences.
I'm starting this blog so that I can share my progress & gain insights into my experiences where others are willing to share what they think & know. Thank you to those people in advance.

I was particularly motivated to write this after an experience I just had. I've been meditating a little over a month (close to 2 months) now, with some prior experience meditating for a similar period, but I don't plan on stopping this time. I want to see it through. Nonetheless, I decided not to meditate for 2 weeks after getting very ill & have just been getting back into it. Here is the motivating experience:

I'm not sure if you'd call this 'motivating' in the sense that progress begets motivation, but rather motivation to share my experiences out of curiosity of where they sit in the broad field of knowledge regarding meditation. As I sat on a hill today, it became less forceful to focus on the breath. My mind seemed to start following details about the breath simply based on what seemed interesting. Rather than forcing my mind to move away from distracting thoughts, it felt easy to simply acknowledge thoughts whilst simultaneously following the breath. Normally, I try to devote as much attention to the breath as I can with every conscious moment of effort, or else seem to fall asleep. But today, it felt that whilst I was 'partially' distracted & not many details of my breath were being noticed as I would have liked, I began to enter some sort of trance.

I completely forgot about almost all sounds & sensations outside of the breath & it felt as if my mind was in some large space & I felt still very awake. My sense of the shape of my body felt confused, and I couldn't quite sense what the shape of it would even be. But, even in this state, it felt as if there were strange shapes in this large space of my mind that were distracting me from my breath. I could only really 'feel' them & I occassionally could see a 'flash' of light (maybe my eyelids just opened slightly but I was too focused on the breath to make this realization at the time). When I tried to follow my breath, these strange shapes or 'visualisations' corresponded in an abstract way to the sensations I was trying to focus on. I wanted to focus on the breath, not on visualisations I felt were almost like secondary representations of movements & sensations. So, I began to slightly overcome this issue by trying to focus on what is 'present', and simply acknowledging these visualizations for what they were. This seemed to intensify the feeling of 'space', but I wasn't able to progress beyond the visualizations very much. I felt like I could've stayed in this state for a very long time, but I was running out of time, so I had to call it there. It felt quite difficult to bring some of my senses back to my surroundings before opening my eyes. The first thing I saw upon my eyes was just some grass, but it looked so detailed & my attention seemed quite isolated to & intense on that small patch of the grass before it, I guess, diluted into the rest of the surroundings & all notions of that 'trance' I felt I may have been in had faded away.

Some things I did that might've helped: cold air on the face, very slow breathing.

I'm hoping to understand this a bit better & maybe have similar experiences in future meditation sessions.