My Experience:

To summarize my problem, through meditation I have been flat-lined into an terribly dull and silent, completely joyless anhedonia state. My willpower is incredibly diminished and it is very hard to get basic things done. I also very often feel unreal like I am in a dream, similar to depersonalization symptoms. Though certain times, the emptiness can be peaceful when my ego is not freaking out about the future. I am 95% sure this is the result of the meditation as I was otherwise pretty healthy and other causes seem unlikely.

I am a 19 year old man that started practicing mindfulness meditation along with self inquiry techniques in early 2011. Sometime after I started practicing meditation on my own, I joined a Zen group called the Heart Circle Sangha in Ridgewood, NJ to which I go most Sundays. Sometime in July 2011, 6 months after I began practicing mindfulness meditation and introspection, I have not felt right at all; in fact I have felt almost completely emotionless.

My spiritual practice up until July 2011 was going very good actually, alot of my anxious and jealous thoughts had subsided and I felt like I was making progress. Before then I felt pleasure and pain at different times in meditation, and there was motivation to keep going. When I wasn't at the Zen center, I would do a combination of sitting and walking meditation for 2 hours a day. I was a really intense seeker.

Then I really started to get into self interrogation after watching youtube videos with adyashanti and papaji. The impression I got from them was that it is beneficial to question every thought, and question "whos thinks that?" I also used netti, netti netti.

So I analyzed my thoughts over and over again relentlessly... watching all the painful things in my mind everyday for at least 2 hours walking or sitting. Eventually certain untruthful thought patterns started to subside, but I was sort of depressed and I wanted to completely eliminate all self-hating thoughts for good.

I think I can trace it back to one or two days when my symptoms of DP/DR started to kick in. After watching a couple satsang videos about the "void", self inquiry techniques and confronting your fears one day in July, I sat down and meditated. For some reason I was overwhelmed with fear at this stage. It sounded like the fear described by certain gurus that arises when you come close to revealing some sort of truth and the ego wants to hold on, so it releases tremendous amounts of fear.

I don't remember much except I closed my eyes to meditate in a dark room at night to confront the fear. I then, for a brief moment, perhaps a 30 seconds, I had the experience of all normal perception of my body disappearing, and getting sucked into a black hole of nothingness. Part of me was excited, thinking I was close to an awakening, but there was crippling fear throughout my body and I was truly terrified. Also my heart beat so fast that it was probably comparable to a heart attack. After 30 seconds it was too disturbing and I got up off the chair screaming.

At the time I thought something good had happened because I was confronting deep fears within, so I must be getting close to the truth. A day passes and nothing happens. The next day something similar to the void happens and I experience it a bit longer.

There was an aftershock of fear from the two situations, but besides that I didn't think anything had gone wrong. Its only after looking back almost a year later, can I really pinpoint that period of about a week in my life as when I started to become mostly emotionless, severely apathetic, and experienced symptoms of depersonalization and derealization.

My Zen teacher told me I should probably have taken a slower, less intensive and more Zen path to enlightenment, but unfortunately its too late for that and I need to correct myself from the current situation.

Since then:

-I do not feel any emotions except in a superficial sense. I used to actually feel something; but I have not felt barely a drop of joy, happiness or even sadness and grief for months. Positive and negative emotions are both effectually gone. Very rarely, maybe once every 3 months I'll have a brief cry and it feels like a great release.

-All the spiritual techniques that used to work so well for me seem to have hardly any effect anymore.

-Lack of joy and positive emotions has proven to be extremely debilitating because I now release that pleasure is the motivation for everything I used to do. So I just slump along.

-Nothing looks right. Trees used to be beautiful. Paintings used to be beautiful. Even girls. Now I can only superficially appreciate beauty. And its not in a depression type way. I just don't feel it; more like a robot.

-I have lost interest in all my former hobbies and interests, if I still do any of my former hobbies its just a habit and I don't derive any pleasure from it. Even my favorite music has become rather dry and tasteless.

-My thoughts are almost completely blank. Originally I thought this was a symptom of spiritual progression, but I have discovered that it is more like a great hindrance to everything in my life. I cognitively can't think straight. Even if I try really hard to concentrate on something, my mind is like "eh, whatever" and drifts off into nothing.

-Chronic tiredness- whether this relates to all the other cognitive symptoms or not; I've noticed that my symptoms of physical fatigue and tiredness all started back when the mental problems started. There is literally no mentally motivation to get out of bed.

-I do not feel the endorphin rush of exercise the same way I used to, so it is very hard to exercise. Now when I exercise it seems to magnify my symptoms of depersonalization.

-I feel like I am the observer of my mind/body, and like I am helpless to get my life back on track

-Driving in a car feels really weird and it is hard to focus on the road

-I constantly feel dreamy and spaced out like I am not really here (which is partially true though, I guess)

Then I really started to get into self interrogation after watching youtube videos with adyashanti and papaji. The impression I got from them was that it is beneficial to question every thought, and question "whos thinks that?" I also used netti, netti netti.

So I analyzed my thoughts over and over again relentlessly... watching all the painful things in my mind everyday for at least 2 hours walking or sitting. Eventually certain untruthful thought patterns started to subside, but I was sort of depressed and I wanted to completely eliminate all self-hating thoughts for good.

it sounds to me like you're going through your first dark night, not a second cycle. but whatever the case, if you've been practicing, anything new and unfamiliar is usually good news, no matter how bad it might feel--you're breaking new ground, making progress. a few things about the dark night:

you absolutely cannot trust your thoughts and feelings in the dark night ñanas, no matter how logical, sane, and true they may seem. the more you hold on to your ways of reasoning, interpreting, analyzing, judging, making conclusions, thinking, making sense of anything, the tougher the resistance you'll face. the mind is simply out of tune at the moment. i don't know what it technically involves (frequencies/energy/or what) but the mind is like a musical instrument with strings getting tuned but not yet in harmony, and sometimes you might think, well it's gotta be either this thought (a bit flat) or that thought (a bit sharp), and believing either one will get you nowhere because neither one is it. only when you let go of this complicated mind, let go of the need to know anything, and let the effects work themselves out (as josh mentioned) will things start tuning up.

think about it--what's the only thing you have that's totally fail-proof? the only way to stay perfectly clear from any kind of wrong view? how can you orient your mind so that there's not a chance you're gonna screw it up and generate new tensions, complications, or hindrances? the only thing you can really really trust is how things appear to your perception at the sense doors--feel that sensation, see that, hear that, taste that, smell that, notice that thought arise. those are your only faculties for direct knowledge and your express ticket for moving in the right direction, so keep your watch at the sense doors like a top guard dog, and every thought and feeling that arises concerning practice (that's not about paying attention to the senses) is potential bullshit and not to be trusted, and a waste of precious moments of practice opportunities.

possibly the worst way that the mind messes with you in the dark night is to make you think your practice is crappy and your efforts aren't going anywhere. towards the later dark night stages, what often happens is that the worse it feels and the harder it gets, the farther along you are, closer and closer to the tipping point before equanimity ñana.

make use of every second you have in your sits and daily life to pay attention to bare sensing without adding a single interpretation or analysis about what's going on. dump all your energy into paying attention to the present sensations more and more constantly, subtly, intensely, objectively (non-judging), and equanimously as possible. you can't waste one second of possible practice, things are already bad enough. stay vigilant, stay innocent/unknowing, stay determined, and everything will fall into place.

jill

To summarize my problem, through meditation I have been flat-lined into an terribly dull and silent, completely joyless anhedonia state. (...) I do not feel any emotions except in a superficial sense. I used to actually feel something; but I have not felt barely a drop of joy, happiness or even sadness and grief for months. Positive and negative emotions are both effectually gone. Very rarely, maybe once every 3 months I'll have a brief cry and it feels like a great release.

Nothing looks right. Trees used to be beautiful. Paintings used to be beautiful. Even girls. Now I can only superficially appreciate beauty. And its not in a depression type way. I just don't feel it; more like a robot.

I feel like I am the observer of my mind/body, and like I am helpless to get my life back on track

I have anhedonia. There really is no sense of pleasure. And im not being dramatic about it. There just isn't. If there was something pleasant to focus on I would love to focus on it.

The only reason I was observing my negative thoughts was to dislodge them because they were becoming unbearable. That was a year ago. None of the debilitating stuff had happened yet by then.

...I don't intentionally focus on them. I just note them. Is it my fault that the only stuff that seems to come up is negative? I really really can't help it.

Now the problem is not thoughts. The problem is I can't even function right for God's sake. I don't really nearly have as many thoughts as I used to like a year ago.

The problem is first of all, having some clear confirmation that I'm in the dark night.

Second of all finding someone who has been through the type of dark night I've been going through. Not every seems to have such a debilitating experience. I'm looking for someone who has, so I can learn what to do from them.

I know cats and stuff are nice to look at it but I have been spending WAY too much time on the internet since the crappy symptoms starting appearing, since I don't have the energy or money to too much else. I want to try to spend less time on it.

Painful now, pleasant later
6a (3) There is a way of undertaking things, bhikshus, that is painful now, but ripening as pleasure
in the future?
Here, bhikshus, someone,
is by nature strongly lustful, and he constantly feels bodily and mental suffering born of lust;
is by nature strongly hateful, and he constantly feels bodily and mental suffering born of hate;
is by nature strongly delusive, and he constantly feels bodily and mental suffering born of delusion.
6b And yet, despite his pain, despite his grief, weeping with tearful face,56 he lives the holy life fully
and perfectly.57
With the body’s breaking up, after death, he is reborn in a happy state, in a heavenly world.
This, bhikshus, is a way of undertaking things that is painful now, but ripening as pleasure in the
future.58

Try this:

If you're uncertain you are in the dark night keep in mind that you can correct this situation whether you are or you are not: (Statements like "My spiritual practice up until July 2011 was going very good actually, alot of my anxious and jealous thoughts had subsided and I felt like I was making progress" seem to suggest that this is very likely dark night symptoms.)

I'm going to make a suggestion based off a sense of overall messiness with regards to the hindrances, as well as your suggestion of a lot of mental illness-type symptoms to which I am most definitely no stranger to: ( I'm the type of guy who makes posts like this: http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3373753 ).

Take a step back for a moment and forget about doing insight for a little while and cultivate samatha jhanas. Sit at access concentration and then cultivate the samatha jhanas and immerse in their bliss. Suppress all of your hindrances using the samatha jhanas. What happens when you suppress the hindrances? Do these symptoms go away, temporarily?

If you take a significant while to do/accomplish this or decide you want to live with your hindrances suppressed for a while by practicing daily samatha, you will likely backslide and then have to start over at mind and body. If you have good samatha skills (which from reading your post, it doesn't seem like you do) you can practice this for a shorter while and then continue insight without backsliding, if you wish not to backslide.

Backsliding is not necessarily a bad thing, as starting over at mind and body -> cause and effect -> three characteristics -> a&P -> dark night would give you a much clearer/cleaner indication of progress as well as a much cleaner dark night to work with. If all was not completely understood at the first pass through stages -> A&P you are likely going to automatically backslide and have to do it again anyways. If you are uncertain of whether you actually passed A&P or not, then this would seem much more likely to actually happen anyways.

-Tom.http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3373753

I hear you. You have an appetite for ice cream, though. What is driving that? You could eat some ice cream very very slowly, a tenth of a teaspoonful a minute, and attend to the pleasant sensations of that, for instance. Even if it has negative associations for you, there must be some positive sensations driving the appetite.



I know, I I know. I've been there. It's a natural misinterpretation of the teachings which I made too. It's nobody's fault, it's just the way things worked out.



One thing I've been doing lately when I've been particularly stuck in finding something pleasant is resting for a second or two at each peak or trough of breathing, until the natural urge to keep breathing appears. When the breath starts again, there is a sense of pleasure associated with this. If you try this, don't hold your breath, though.

Another recommendation from my teacher which I have found helpful is to help other people or animals. If I see an earthworm struggling on the sidewalk, I move it somewhere safe. If someone asks me for money, I ask them what they want it for and I go with them to buy it for them. I provide dharma advice to people on the internet. :-)



No, the problem is not thoughts, the problem is conditioning of attention. You've actually made really good progress in your meditation which will stand you in good stead when you're able to move forward again. But right now you're in a cul-de-sac, because your natural tendency to negativity led to an emphasis on negative phenomena. The way out of that cul-de-sac is to recondition your attention to note the positive phenomena too.



Yes, you are totally in the dark night. This is insight disease. You can get out of it, though.



I've been there. Try my advice. After a decade of driving my practice with insight and power, someone finally got through to me earlier this year and persuaded me to use metta and compassion instead. It's paying off handsomely. It was also my first step to managing symptoms very similar to yours, and to stream entry, which happened a couple of weeks ago.

Our culture reveres insight and power, and we are drawn to spiritual practices which promise this. We want to manipulate and dominate our environments, including our internal experience. What could be more seductive to a modernist than a meditation manual which lays out step-by-step instructions and diagnostics of progress so you can figure out whether it's working for you? And the seduction isn't based on false advertising; these are very powerful approaches. The trouble is, they inevitably get subverted by our natural desire to manipulate and dominate ourselves. So we attend to the bad things we want to fix, seeking to understand and destroy them, never realizing the power we are granting them in the process, never realizing that the problem is with the direction of attention itself.

I'm not saying you were wrong to attend to these things, just that you moved too quickly. One result of meditation is attention to all sensations of the present moment, mental and physical. That means the pleasant and boring sensations as well as the unpleasant. And the pleasant sensations can be important, because they provide the confidence and stability to go deeper into the unpleasant ones. But that is the path of loving-kindness, not power or insight, so it's less appealing to us.

Given your belief that you have anhedonia, this might make your situation seem hopeless. But the fact that the anhedonia arrived after your insight practice supports the idea that this is actually conditioning of your attention, in which case you will still have room to move, no matter how powerful the conditioning so far has been. In that case, you basically have a bad habit you want to kick, not a disease.



I am happy to mail you pictures of cute animals if you like. Let me know. :-)

Oh, and also, I am by default a ruthless, mildly sadomasochistic person who sees doom in every portent and to whom this sappy stuff doesn't come easily. I am recommending it because it works.

You can go too far in the other direction, of course. Then you end up like this person, addicted to bliss. Buddhism is called the Middle Way because the broadening of attention enables you to keep both extremes in mind (positive and negative) so you don't fall prey to either one.

But joy is not in my experience right now and any attempt to try to manufacture it just seems dumb. I don't want a smooth pleasant dark night. I want to get OUT of the dark night, completely.

Bhikkhus, what is the pleasant means and quick realization?

Here, bhikkhus, a certain one secluded from sensual thoughts, angry thoughts, hurting thoughts and evil thoughts ... re ... and abides in the first higher state of mind. Overcoming thoughts and thought processes ... re ... abides in the second higher state of mind. Developing equanimity to joy and detachment ... re ... experiences pleasantness with the body too and abides in the third higher state of mind. To this the noble ones say abiding in pleasantness with equanimity. Dispelling pleasantness and unpleasantness and earlier having dispelled pleasure and displeasure, purifying mindfulness so that unpleasantness or pleasantness does not enter the mind, he abides in the fourth higher state of mind. He abides relying on these five powers of a trainer- Such as the powers of faith, shame remorse, effort and wisdom. The five faculties of faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom are sharp in him as a result he realizes the destruction of desires quickly with successive leading. Bhikkhus, to this is said the pleasant means and quick realization.

Bhikkhus, what is the difficult means and quick realization?

Here, bhikkhus, a certain one abides reflecting loathsomeness in the body, loathsomeness in food, detachment from all the world, seeing impermanence in all determinations and the perception of death is thoroughly established in him. He abides relying on these five powers of a trainer- Such as the powers of faith, shame remorse, effort and wisdom. The five faculties of faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom are sharp in him as a result he realizes the destruction of desires quickly with successive leading. Bhikkhus, to this is said the difficult means and quick realization.

I hope your shitting me about backslidding. It just sounds awful. Not sure what you mean but starting all over again sounds cruel?

Here's why I feel I passed the AP
-I felt super concentrated
-I was had a certain feeling that I was making tiny little insights like each milisecond, sometimes when I got concentrated
-At certain points I felt tons and tons of bliss that made me feel high. Nothing like I had experienced in my life before that.
-At a certain point the bliss stop happening so often but I was not really concerned at all. This seems to sound very similar to the "Dissolution" phase Daniel talks about.
-A couple months after that I started getting really into conspiracy theories and scaring the crap out of myself with them. I had frequent nightmares with aliens or government agents that wanted to kill me. And that sounds very much like the Fear stage.

Well mostly I do walking meditation in my basement because I've just been too restless for sitting meditation without any drive to keep going. But whats weird is that even though I'm restless I still don't have alot of energy at all.

So while im doing the walking meditation I switch from paying attention to how my feet and legs move to noting thoughts and sensations as they arise.

I tend to do informal sitting meditation on a chair with my eyes opened for periods of 5-10 minutes doing kenneth folk dharma style noting. I cannot handle 30 minute periods of sitting meditation with my eyes closed at the moment. I can only do that if I am at my sangha and there is external motivation to keep going because everyone else is doing it.

For the meta when any aversive thought arises about a person, I wish that person well, or if its just an uncomfortable thought, I wish the thought well, or if self hatred arises, I wish compassion on myself, or if the desire to quit practice arises, I forgive myself for that, ect.

How does my practice sound?

-Driving in a car feels really weird and it is hard to focus on the road

Hi Simon,

No I don't really feel much tension in those places. I just feel very fuzzy and disoriented most of the time.

Yes there is a disturbing lack of focus. Like one second im paying attention to the road... the next I just feel fuzzy and forget where I am. Sometimes I realize O SHIT im driving holy shit! I gotta pay way more attention to the road.

Yes the lack of eye focus and focus in general is part of the blankness/dreaminess.

I mean in my city there are a few Buddhist meditation groups sparsely populated by aging hippies and new-agey folk (who are nice and mean well), but the number of people my age who are going through the same thing over a number of years and are using the same terminology to describe it is...well just me so far, hahahaha.

Update: The Dark Night is no joke and has the potential to make you incredibly disoriented and feel like shit. It also has the potential to make totally non functional and gives you short but random bursts of anger that makes you a crappy person to live with.

Also, nobody will give's a dead moose's last shit that you are going through this made up thing called the "dark night" and will just think you are an annoying, depressed, negative asshole and have some sort of faint hope that you will get run over by a car. Don't expect people will magically give you tons of sympathy and love while you are going through this, unless you are the incredibly sweet social type, or a female.

Seriously I have no idea why this is not written in red in the front of every serious dharma book. At least the shittiness is starting to be done some justice on this forum.

Btw I don't mean to be sexist or anything about saying don't expect any sympathy unless you are female, its just the nature of society that men are just supposed to shut up and man through it while it is more accepted that sometime in a woman's life she will be feeling down and deserves support.

Btw I don't mean to be sexist or anything about saying don't expect any sympathy unless you are female, its just the nature of society that men are just supposed to shut up and man through it while it is more accepted that sometime in a woman's life she will be feeling down and deserves support.

The unfortunate reality is that there isn't a lot of interpersonal support out there. The best thing to do is to take out periods of time to be alone and examine reality in a completely objectified/scientific way as stated above. A strange irony is that past a certain point you realize that the previous natural tendency of sharing your struggles/pain with others isn't actually all that helpful for making progress, nor for keeping negativity/suffering out of others' lives. So you learn to do your suffering in private, and then go around not talking about it. It's quite hard at first and feels awkward and uncomfortable in early stages of adjustment, and takes some getting used to, but after a while it works out much better than the previous sympathy-seeking mode of functioning.

Been there for sure. You aren't alone in your experience. One very important and vital thing you could gather from it is motivation. Use it to truly get on top of what stress and suffering is, how its arises and shows its cessation. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd noble truth. Now what is the origin of such an arising of stress? How does its cessation come about? Experiment with different ways of attending and viewing the phenomena that make up a 'dark night'. Experiment to see what leads to the cessation of stress. There are many ways of approaching it. Experiment as a scientist would.

Experiment with how one can change the mental overlays/reactions/views towards the phenomena that support the arising of a 'dark night'. A 'dark night' arises only born of a belief in how phenomena and experience of aspects of the entire field of experience should be held in relationship to a belief in self. Beliefs and views conditioning how experience is to be experienced. A 'self' is the one going through a dark night. And what is the dark night made up of? What is a 'self' made up of? Pull it all apart like it was a matter of life and death. Not until I gained a clear idea of what I was putting this mind/body organism through out of ignorance did I pull my finger out and practice in a way that broke all the compounding up. Such phenomena was ignorantly overlaid with the evaluation of 'dark night' and thus a 'self' suffering it. When this was being seen clearer and with consistency and momentum in practice, it started to lead to move in a direction that where such misery started to dissipate and break apart.

Experiment. Oh, shitty sensations in my belly, solar plexus, throat, head, oh what sort of mental overlay is being extablished right now out of ignorance? Oh, woe is 'me', malaise, depression, sadness, agitation, anger, pissed off, mad, confused, woe is 'me' is the overlay. What if I changed that mental overlay by mental exertion? What if I simply broke up the compounded experience of a 'dark night' into its constituant 'parts'? Sensations, tone of sensations, thought, belief (locked in thought loop about whatever), mental holding, view (locked in thought loop holding some aspect of experience ina certain way thus conditioning other 'arisings'), mental image, thought (of self), thought (of woe is 'me'), mental image (of 'me'), sensations (in chest), sensations (unpleasant), sensations (neutral), sensations (unpleasant), image, sensations, thought, sensations, image, thought, sensations, image, thought, and so on and on. What if the mental overlay was hacked and shifted to one that was more conducive for clear seeing discernment, cultivation of dispassion, peace, calm, and happy progress?

If the mind is not able to do so, make it able to do so. Kasina worked for me. Contemplating all the above worked for me. The mind is capable of many things if the intent is there to exert the appropriate energy in the right direction. It may just simply take the saem amount of exertion that one exerts when crossing the road while look out for oncoming traffic or it may entail a mental exertion born a a great desire to not suffer anymore. Either way, intend to break it all apart and see it differently in a way that leads not to more stress but to its very cessation. Like a frickn scientist who experiemnts with all the possible ways of viewing and experiencing experience.

When i eventually pulled my finger out of my arse after dwelling and manifesting as 'the dark night' for many years on and off, i did this and successfully began a journey out of fabricating a 'dark night'.

2 cents,

Nick

Edited x 4 for flow, weird sounding sentences and other stuff added.

Edit: and if you can afford it, go get some shiatsu done on you to free up any blocks and imbalances that could be contributing to sensations arising in particular points triggering unpleasantness in the mind. Also consider some lifestyle changes like diet and exercise. A good practitioner should be able to give you good advice. Also if you try out these 6 makka-ho stretches that get the ki flowing in the body and help free up any blockages. Do them all briefly for 10 or so minutes before you sit and see if there is a difference. Try doing the stretches everyday in the morning and before you go to bed. Make them a vital part n your ongoing practice. I guarantee you will start to see a difference.