For the past week or so, I have been sitting an odd block during meditation, but also an odd experience.
I have been going from equanimity (4th Jhana) to what feels like an expansion of mind, and a fading away of the body (I assume this is the 5th)… I cannot feel myself breathing which caused distress, and instinctually I take a breath. This causes me to go back to equanimity. I kept on it and hit this state a few more times with the same outcome…(basically yo-yoing back and forth, for about an hour)
I got a bit frustrated, and got up and took a lying posture. and got to a state where the body had what felt like energy running through it, and then all of a sudden there was a momentary loss of consciousness (I could not hear, and I do not think I was conscious for that moment but I was nominally “aware”.) I only realized that happened after I gained consciousness again because it was like a hole in a stream of consciousness. It was basically like a blip… like a line that had a sharp dip in it, and then continued back where it was.
Has anyone had this issue? Where the breathing was either lost, or so shallow that you think you need to control the breath to take a deeper breath? How do you get past it?
