Hello fellow meditators,

I just subscribed to this forum and a brief introduction about myself and my background ought be mandatory.

I'm a 31 old man from italy.

I was introduced to meditation more than 10 years ago while on a study year in Thailand, I signed up for a 10 days silent retreat at Wat Suan Mohk in Suratthani, there I learned the basics of anapanasati as of the tradition of Ajahn Buddadhasa Bikkhu.

During the 10 days retreat I actually managed to reach what later I came to know as 2nd samatha jhana.

About one month after the retreat I experienced my first psychotic-manic episode(was it A&P in disguise?) and I ended up almost being killed by some thugs, somehow I managed to survive and be hosptalized, I was then sent back to Italy.

After my return to Italy I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 1.

Ever since then I kept on practicing the meditation exercises I learned in Thailand, and experienced other cycles of manic and depression, until my first willing hospitalization for a manic episode back in november of 2020.

After that manic episode I went trough the phisyiological depressive episode that(at least in my case) always succeeds a manic phase.

After my recovery from the latter manic-depressive cycle I felt like my meditative practice was stagnating, then I began consuming more dharma literature, starting from Bhante Guratana books that pushed my samatha practice towards 4th samatha jhana(or maybe even further but I'm kinda skeptical about it).

Then I started exploring vipassana meditation by reading Insight Meditation By Joseph Goldstein, right after that I read Practical Vipassana Exercises by Mahasi Sayadaw and now I am more than halfway through MCTB2.

Daniel's book is a magnificent piece of Dharma literature, but the more I go on reading the more I question my progress of insight.

I feel like, I passed AP and the dark night and finally got to equanimity about 9 months ago.

And that all these years I had been alternating manic phases and depressive phases were some kind of mixture of a mental-illness predisposition and navigating blindly the stages of awakening.

When I finally got myself a map and compass for this kind of journey my mental health improved by a lot, It's almost 5 years I haven't had a manic episode and more than 3 that I haven't had a major depressive episode, with the last 2 years that were practically asymptomatic.
Plus I finally managed to quit smoking by applying vipassana to my nicotine cravings(It's what marked the attainment of equanimity in my opinion).

That's my story, and I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced practitioners than me on where should I be heading next with my practice(or where I am finding myself atm).

Classification and categorization in Meditation is useful, but dangerous territory.
Your attainments get clearer with the passage of time. Instead of labeling your experiences, live with Compassion on Heart and wait.

Create a Diary with everything you experience. Look at past entries once a week.

Realizations and Insights will come naturally, if you keep practicing and do not try to figure "What the hell was that?" with your Rational Mind.

You have to understand that, although Daniel's book is superb, it leans on the Phenomenological side. That is just one of the sides.
People have become Enlightened by doing and reading Zen, which is basically Poetry about Experience. The other side of the spectrum.

I am not diminishing the value of his ouvre but you used so many terms that are "Daniel's". Find your own terms.

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This is my humble suggestion, one I would give to my old self. Take it with a grain of salt.

Everything with a grain of salt, and the bigger the Ocean you try to embrace, the more salt.

Stefano, welcome to DhO.

Are you now or have you ever been under the care of a mental health professional? Have you discussed the intersection of your practice and your other symptoms with that person? That would be a wise option, in my opinion, given what you describe as manic and depressive episodes in your comment.

Chris M

Chris M,
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Since the manifestation of my bipolar disorder I've been under the care of both Psychiatrists and Psychologists at the same time.

It's been almost 5 years I follow my medical treatment rigorously, the professionals that follow my case find it interesting in how my meditative practice helped me in gaining more mastery over my emotions to the point of breaking my addiction to nicotine, overall they are really supportive about it.

They actually involved me in managing peer support groups and strongly encouraged me in getting certified to teach MBSR.
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That said, after reading the part in MTCTB2 relative to the stages of awakening the table turned on me and I am actually reconsidering not to become a mindfulness facilitator anymore, I'm concerned a student may go too much "down in the rabbit hole" and bad things would happen as a result.

Thanks for the advice, 

I'll consider whether making additional entries in my Inner Work journal regarding my experience with meditation or maybe starting a separate diary...

Thanks again

I agree that you should be cautious, given your history. ​​​​​​​Have a look at this online resource:  Cheetah House

You can schedule a private or professional consultation with them.

 Bipolar VS insight stages is a complicated issue which I don't think anyone really has the definitive answer to. Where does bipolar begin and the stages of insight start and vice versa? This seems to be a perennial topic. Some people realize they never had bipolar but got wrongully diagnosed. Others, the other way around. Others still think they had both, but that meditation cured the bipolar... 

I know quite a few people who went through the stages of insight but got diagnoses bipolar because of ignorant psychiatrists. Psychiatric diagnoses (DSM clinical entities) are largely, though not entirely, shit, to the point that the US national institute of mental health decided not to fund research based on these largely invalid diagnoses, qui a few years ago in fact... The whole DSM enterprise is quite deeply problematic on several fronts.

Not saying what you went through was "only an intense version of the stages of insight", as I don't know, but it sounds to me like it might be the case. To get diagnoses with bipolar 1, you need to have been through a "manic episode" once! Granted, it must have lasted a week. But to qualify for bipolar 2, you need to have gone through one "major depresssive episode" and one "hypomanic" or "manic" episode... I would tend to think perhaps a majority of meditators actually qualify, lol.

Cheetah house are great but they definitely lean on the "if anything challenging happens to you with meditation it is not normal and there is a problem with the practice in some way" end of thing, it seems to me. 

The traditional qualifier than I'm not a medical doctor applies, but in this case I don't think mental health professionals have much of a clue, to be honest.

Edited to add: That being said, I do agree with Chris about being cautious! Caution is good. There is a saying, "trust your experience, but keep refining your view", which I keep coming back to as good advice...
 

 
Yeah, just commenting here to agree with Olivier. 

As you get into paths and stages things can get a bit bipolar. A lived experience of gentle investigation involves the revealing of deep wounds and the exploration of intense pleasure. It is functionally, conversationally useful in socially normative contexts to describe this as a sort of bipolar type thing. But, I know in my own experience, it is something that started with meditation, and even the diagnosis itself is something I grasp for when I've just stumbled through a messy revelation but I'm not convinced the diagnosis is always totally apt. The Buddha taught that there is suffering, there is a cause of suffering, there is an end to suffering and there is a path to the end of suffering. What is that suffering he is talking about? Do your approaches to meditation, teachers who guide you, factor in this most fundamental of the Buddha's teachings? If not they're scamming you. End of story. The easy metric is whether or not they regularly use the word mindfulness. There is no course or teacher training through which wisdom can be cultivated. None. It can not be bestowed, can not be bought, or sold or traded.

My basic understanding is that the path to the end of suffering can involve navigating similar neurological facets of experience to bipolar disorder but that this manifests more extremely for some people. It was often very extreme for me but as I'm really not suffering all that much anymore it was absolutely worth it to walk that path. If you have a tendency towards this kind of intensity of experience I would urge you to think long and hard about whether or not the end of suffering is what you need to do with your life. It is for me but I was only able to walk what I have walked of that path because I made HUGE personal sacrifices. Lived in some of the cheapest (most dangerous) countries on earth, worked 3 hours a day, meditated constantly, almost all my relationships were my support network, no alcohol, no drugs, no romance, I dealt with extremely intense levels of suffering, alienation, neurosis, anxiety, pain, discomfort... Not to mention the absolutely otherworldly highs, the ecstacy, the catatonic bliss and the tendency for those highs to lead into weird neuroticism and obsession (Not everybodies journey is like this, or this intense, but most seem to have some aspect of this and I know enough people out there who get hit as heavily as I get hit)

If you've got to end suffering then you know you're going to have to come face to face with the self, with who you are and what you've been upto all these years-that's often an unpleasant realization-and you're going to have to learn to relax and breathe and just be there with it. With the highs and the lows and the ins and the outs and all the dynamic activity of a life being lived. 

Finding friends, guides and a sangha who know the territory and with whom you can be honest about your experience is key. It is one of the single most important aspects of waking up. I wouldn't recommend trying to do it without that. 

 
 

Thanks for providing me with the resource,
​​​​​​​I had a look at their website and I am seriously taking into consideration to schedule one or more consultations with the staff members.

Considering that I can't go more than 6 months without meds before either a major manic or depressive episode occurs, I'd say my diagnosis is correct.

If I'd never read MCTB2 I'd say meditation is helping me a lot in handling bipolar disorder, and maybe I'm right.

It's on that sole supposition that I pushed my efforts within the last two years of forming myself to shape my career so that I could work in the mental health field, I wouldn't back down at this moment.

​​​​​​​But yeah, maybe I could wait until I obtain a master degree in clinical psychology to have a better view about this whole thing.

Dealing with Psychological Symptons whilst navigating the States and Stages of Meditation is a topic of my upcoming book.

If you're interested, just send me a DM and I will send you the link to be part of the Early Accessors. I can also give you some nudgets of Dharma advice, if that fancies you.

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The topic is too broad and too complex to be tackled in the Forum format for me. I am a bit concerned that I might have to defend my thesis too much instead of actually helping you. 

Ah, thanks for mentioning https://www.cheetahhouse.org/ Chris, I have added it to my resources list!

 Just wanted to share a couple thoughts as some parts of your story resonated. I can't say I am further along than you but perhaps this might provide some value anyways.

For most of the latter half of my practice (roughly 12 years, never been on retreat, never had a teacher beyond internet videos), I focused largely on samatha and cultivating brahma viharas (positive mental states/emotions/feelings) and stillness type stuff. This had some very nice side affects and largely made me a better person emotionally. If you haven't explored those sorts of things (Metta, Tonglen, etc.) it might be worth looking into that. For me, it actually was the first kind of practices where I was able to cultivate enough samadhi that it started producing insight experiences as a side benefit.

The flipside of that is in the past year or two, the mind has been inclining more towards insight naturally. This has been producing new experiences and in some sense upgrades of attentional capacity/resolution. But suddenly I am experiencing some pretty persistent negative mental states that have been tricky to deal with; contrasting that with roughly 5 years of pretty blissed out practice before then. To try to echo what the others have said... insight seems to be filling out an axis that was not developed much but it sure is bringing the imperanence, impersonal, and disatisfactory sides of out of everything; including my beautiful and blissful jhana/samadhi stuff. At least that is my hunch as to why some days lately, there is awareness that this mind is sometimes full of aversion but also that the causes and conditions for this aversion don't seem to be the same as before. In laymans terms, the narrative self frequently remarks "Why am I so pissed off right now?". 

Final note, I agree with Zen Poetry's point here:
"Classification and categorization in Meditation is useful, but dangerous territory.
Your attainments get clearer with the passage of time. Instead of labeling your experiences, live with Compassion on Heart and wait."

I got super into trying to classify which jhana I was in 1-2 years ago. This was great in the sense that it gave me a lot of motivation to practice. But I kept finding that every teacher/traditions models were only somewhat related to my direct experience, and they tended to contradict each other. Something about trying to obsess over and reify these things seemed to be blocking some insight into them (namely the impersonal, impermanent, and disatisfactory qualities of such states) that I didn't really get over until I stopped trying to quantify it at all; instead just noticing the experiences and states as they are. There is a sense that if I keep practicing I will develop my own internal models of these things, but that will happen naturally and is not super important at this stage of my practice.

Anyways, that's all. I wish you luck with your path.