Fuzziness following Kasina / Tratak practice

Lowk, modified 7 Years ago at 12/15/16 8:10 AM
Created 7 Years ago at 12/15/16 8:10 AM

Fuzziness following Kasina / Tratak practice

Posts: 6 Join Date: 9/22/16 Recent Posts
Tratak is pretty similar to Kasina from what I understand, with the one modification that you don't blink while you gaze at your object of concetration. For me, this often takes the form of a black dot on a white background because it's very easy to acquire. The not blinking aspect of it necessarily limits the duration of practice as you need to close your eyes after they start to water, and then possibly splash some cold water on them once you're done with the after image concentration.

This practice, for me, is an excellent way of getting immediate feedback on whether I'm concentrating and allows for me to get very deeply concentrated for brief periods of time. The issue I have is that following this practice, my mind gets incredibly fuzzy, absent minded unless I put a lot of effort on concentrating continuously on every task. The closest feeling is being very sleepy, like in the few minutes after hearing your alarm clock in the morning. If I do this during the day, I become frazzled and absent minded. If I do it at night, I have trouble sleeping.

Since a lot of people here seem to practice Kasina, I'm hoping to get some advice from people who may have had similar experiences. What did you do, or what could I be doing wrong which is causing this? Or is this an unavoidable side effect of this practice, which essentially has meant for me that I can't really do it regularly.
Lowk, modified 7 Years ago at 12/18/16 12:14 PM
Created 7 Years ago at 12/18/16 12:14 PM

RE: Fuzziness following Kasina / Tratak practice

Posts: 6 Join Date: 9/22/16 Recent Posts
Bumping for visibility. But also, a little more information possibly to help with the "diagnosis". When I concentrate during my normal meditations, I don't feel the same, even if my attention wandered very little for the ~1hr period. So, it feels like something else is going on here. I couldn't possibly have exhausted my "concentration stores" in less than 5 minutes, is how I feel.

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