KunaliniLinguini:


You should try learning how to purposely bring piti into meditation.  "Gladden" the mind, before, during and after meditation by visualizing nice things in relation to your meditation object, i.e. 'breathing in joy, breathing out relaxation.'  Likewise, talk to yourself in nice ways, coaching yourself to recieve positive feedback when you do something right (i.e. staying with the object of meditation), and forgiving yourself when you have poor concentration.  Eventually, sati and piti will become automatic and intertwined habits that occur whenever you turn the mind towards its object of concentration.  When the mind and body are sufficiently soaked in piti, sukkha will begin to arise.  This might help further open the knots in your skull.

howdy,
this is common.  you stated that 'bringing the energy down just doesn't work'.  i would add , "yet".
some tips i found helpful were:
to introduce and give emphasis to the notion and feeling of 'calm' as vimilaramsi teaches out of the satipathana sutta.  a practical tip to effect this came from the forum member teague which was, 'to take whatever energetic concentration object you have, find its perimeter and spread and widen your focus just outside of that perimeter'.  i'm paraphrasing heavily but that helped me.

yoga can help bring a more balanced energy as can doing cyclic breathing which is really just acknowleging different locations of the 'breath body' or 'process' of breathing.  one follows the breath up the back from the root chakra to the crown on the in-breath and down from the crown, face, throat, heart, belly etc. on the out-breath. a god description can be found on the aypsite.org.

also these sensations tend to be prevalant during equanimity so be equanimous.  ;-)

Get in a seated or standing posture, preferably seated, so as you would not lose your balance.  Get your back straight.  Now, lean your head back, and with your eyes closed look straight up into the sky, you should really feel a good stretch in your front neck and chest muscle groups.  But, do not overstretch and hurt yourself, use common sense.

Sorry this took so long to reply, the answer only arose during a deep meditation, it must have been way back in the mind.  Most yogis focus on the back, and the spinal column, forgetting to let the energy flow back down the front side.  This simple technique should open up the front side and let the energy flow more freely.

If this does not help, there should be no harm done.

The only other way, that I know of,  is to let the energy out through the fontenelle spot on the top of the skull.

Besides all that, there are grounding techniques, eating root vegetables and such, lots of physical excercise.

Also, the Moola Bhanda may be of benefit, as it stretches the nerve sheaths, so they say, and brings intention and focus to the lower areas, which should also bring energy back into balance.  But this will take quite a while to learn this technique if you are starting from scratch, as for some it is hard to get control of some muscle groups, especially the vestigial ones....  i.e. wiggling ears, moving cranial muscles, coccyx area muscles, perineal area muscles etc.

Psi

tell if it was as bad as your situation --certainly not--, but I had
serious headache, strong diziness (to the point I was sometimes about to
faint) and a constant feeling of stupor with this energy being so
strong it would take all my attention.

After trying a lot of things, what helped me was :

• concentration: at first concentration got me energy in the head, so I was avoiding any type of concentration by fear it would worsen my situation. But I found that actually going deeper and through the energy "knots" was actually helping me to dilute and assimilate it
• noting or at least noticing : noticing the enery moving, pulsing, etc. time frame by time frame, helped me to get rid of the sense of a continuous phenomenon. This new perspective allowed me to drop it once and for good
• also taking some time every day to direct the energy through the front channel (along the spine but on the front side of your body), feeling the energy going down and diffusing in the body.

So now I still have energy in the head, and it sometimes still quite strong when I'm tired, but I can manage it and it's not a bother anymore. Whatever strategy you might adopt, be patient and give it a few weeks or months before it works.

For headache/pressure, what works for me is looking at my thought processes and how they are pressuring me.  If I'm in a mode where I want certain things to happen, certain progress to be made, certain things to happen in certain order, doing a plot of planning and organizing, etc, if I am too clingy/intense with those thoughts, they can result in pressure in the head.  How to get out of it, change/relax thought processes.  The body is representative of the mind.  From what you have said, when you are in certain situations, you do not have head pressure so you can explore how your mind is different at those times compared to the pressure times.  It's entirely possible to let go of all that pressure you are putting on yourself and your head, but you have to be willing and interested and ready to explore first.  And you may need to put some experimentation and patience into it too.  It was only when I learned to operate and think in not pressurizing modes that I was able to finally get rid of many years of intermittent forehead chakra headaches and pressure feelings.

From my experience, sometimes I suspect that kundalini trains via carrot and stick, do it wrong and it hurts and it will continue to hurt until you learn and then do it right.  Then it feels good.   ;-P
-Eva 

There is also the approach quoted below, I have used it for so long that I have almost forgot that I am doing it, it becomes that much of a natural process, with enough practice, that is.  Bhante Vimalaramsi describes the how to's on his web site , articles, talks and books.  The link to his site is at the bottom of the article. Eva jogged my memory with her post.  Anyway,  the method works for me...

http://www.dhammatalks.net/Books/Ven_Vimalaramsi_Anapanasati_Q_and_A.htm

I have a question: I had a deep awakening about 20 months ago, and ever since I've been extremely fatigued/depressed/sick-ish. Doctors have diagnosed it as chronic lyme disease, yet I cannot shake the deep knowing that nothing is wrong,and that nothing needs to be treated nor could be. It's neither fatigue nor depression nor sickness, yet it feels like all three. I am completely in the present moment at all times, with no "self" in the head, yet it feels like a heavy kind of suffocation... Constant for the past 20 months. I've read that awakening starts the process of dissolving ego/pain structures, which causes this. And "ascension" processes and "light-body integration" "incubation period" are terms thrown around a lot, which weirds me out a little. I know many enlightened people have gone through years of depression, but this id different. There is no unhappy story or even thought. Just this extreme fatigue/depressed-feeling. Any thoughts?
Also, I'd love to know what you think about these few articles on the physical "awakening/ascension" process: http://www.truedivinenature.com/EnergyUpdateJuly2015.htm
https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/…/chronic-fatigue-lightwo…/
http://www.ascension360.net/resources-2/ascension-symptoms/
http://goldenageofgaia.com/…/ascension-symptoms-or-what-is…/

 

The letting go is a release of the mind-contracting nature of the self-illusion. Knowledge of equanimity regarding formations will not deepen if said equanimity is displaced by desire for enlightenment. Meditation fueled by desire for enlightenment will get you from pre-meditation all the way to the Reobservation Crisis. Letting go will get you from there, to the path moment. Part of that process is penetrating the illusion that "you" are "deciding" to let go -- rather, the spreading field of awareness eventually encompasses not only the "external" sensations that are outside the bubble of numbness, but also the "illusory self zone" inside the bubble, and the "boundary" of the bubble itself. 

You're clearly familiar with the equanimity territory. Especially low equanimity (vipassana jhana 4.1) where awareness has arisen that there's pain with the way the false sense of self that tries to push some sensations away and pull others closer -- which is impossible, because sensations just show up where they are, and can't be moved around to other places. They don't even exist for longer than a single mind moment, so how could they move? Not that anyone consciously tries to move sensations around, of course; that's just a way of referring to aversion which tries to make things go away, and craving which tries to make them stay and grow and come closer to the "self". All of which has, at its core, the intuition that there's a cluster of sensations in the middle of the head that "controls" other sensations and makes some arise, and others not. 

Some of the things that still need to be noticed as sensations rather than as truths are the perceptions that the bubble is numb. What sensations tell you so? Are there physical feelings there that are called "numbness"? Are there inferences like "no sensations seem to be arising, so there must be a numbness zone"? What's really going on there?

A low-to-mid equanimity thing to do is to really investigate the heck out of that zone in the middle of the head that seems to be the self. A slightly further-along-the-path thing to do is looking at the numbness bubble itself: all the sensations that seem to be "in between" the self, and the non-self field of sensations that "you are perceiving".

Actually all of these sensations -- the external senses, the illusory-self-zone, and the numbness zones that divide the two, are all just sensations that are arising. Intellectually realizing that fact is nice, in that it points out what needs to be directly seen. That said, the book learning itself won't directly trigger the realignment of perceptions with the reality of how they actually are arising. Whatever you want to call the process of having attention grow wider and more inclusive, that's the thing that will open up this knot. Energy practices are optional -- clear comprehension is not. 

EDIT: I feel pretty silly for quoting a starting post that was ten months old! I saw this thread under recent discussions and thought the whole thing was recent. 

Hi! If you check out Kim Katami and open heart bhumi model, this might help you. They identify six knots in the head as bhumis/energy centers, and have amazingly effective ways to "open" these. As I have been doing it for a couple of months now I am happy to give my most sincere recommandations to these methods . For every "pop" awaress and selflessness increase dramatically, and the change will be permanent, as will probably the tension/knots in the head be less and less powerfull with practise. So take time to think about if this is something for you or not