Somehow Kundalini awakened in me back in August at a meditation retreat. I had very little equanimity and it was quite destabilizing. Lost my job and spent 6 months in monk mode trying to meep myself together. I have been meditating the whole time and kept the energy awake and ready to continue. My practice has guided me back to spiritual kindergarten, so, now I am strongly determined to improve my concentration and relaxation skills.

It seems like I can become most concentrated and relaxed by simply holding attention into the space inside the skull in the area behind the eyes and relaxing back, back, back, ever backwards. When I do this, it seems like I relax back into an upward flow of energy that surrounds the whole body and perhaps the entire universe. Experience seems to draw relentlessly ever closer and closer to where I identify my "self", the looker, hearer, thinker, etc... I get insights into where and how my various personality traits, emotions and thought processes live and operate as if they are floating in physical space and as I become conscious of them, am able to let go of them and relax even more backwards. I start to feel myself as the space filling and containing the body, mind and world. I start to get a general sense of "existence" or "being" in which all of the senses and life situation, time and space merge into one experience of pure consciousness.

I feel like this is an advanced practice, though, and I really just want to learn concentration and relaxation. I want to learn equanimity so that I can handle any future dark night symptoms while staying grounded. Separating off into space and becoming the void does not feel like staying grounded. I really want to try using the breath as an object, but any attempt to pay attention to the breath feels like exerting control, which reinforces the identification with self. I struggle to pay attention to the breath, especially the sensations in a specific part of the body, without excessive selfing and stress.

Please give me advice on using Shamata to deeply relax, attain Jhanas and such, completely ground myself in the present moment in the body, etc... considering my current experiences. Also, feel free to comment on where on the path you think I might be. I honestly don't know if I have ever attain Jhana or even access concentration. I feel like I have already cycled through the Dukkha nanas and even gotten into equanimity here and there, though. In all my insight attainments there has been the sense that I was only partially in the attainment, as though I had not come into wholeness before venturing there, and so some large part of my bundle of karma has not made it into the light of attainment. Sort of the whole, head is through, body still sticking out phenomenon.