Hi!

I'm feeling for a longtime now a lot of things outside my body; for example, if i have a book in my hands, I feel flowing sensations of pressure in it; this stands for almost every object I touch.
Also, when I boil rice and I turn it in the pot,I can feel clearly how many grains of rice my fork is touching, wich is completely impossible according to my psychiatrist.

Also, sometimes I feel what looks like energies coming from other people;theese energies manifest themselves as sensations in my body that are related with the moviments of other people's bodies; sometimes theese sensations are person-related, in the sense that a particoular person makes me feel a particoular, recognizable feeling. I know that they are from other people because when I focus on energies (energies:flowing stuff) inside me the feeling arising is conditioned by me paying attention to it, while for other's people energies it feels more like being touched, Ihave no particoular control over it.

My psychiatrist, during a routine check, prescribed me atipsychotics in a mild dose, since she is worried about theese things.

Now, I'd like toknow if theese things are normal, if they are supposed to happen as a consequence of working with breath energies and moviment related energies, wich I'm doing a lot.

Bye!

Hi!

So...
-no,no other syntoms
-I'm basically focusing on the flowing sensations in the whole body associated with the breath and the moviments of my body, because I've seen that when theese things flow smoothly I feel better.

If you are interested, here there isThanissaro bikkhu talking about theese things...

PS: I've also noticed that theese energies are very easy to manipulate, so I can also make them flow outside my body, for example.

Bye!

Hi Mario. I have a lot of this stuff going on, though not to the degree where I can sense the impermenance in solid (seeming) objects!

I'll go ahead and state the obvious: Seek out a really experienced teacher. AND, think twice about taking those meds.

Clearly I'm NOT a really experienced teacher, but here's a suggestion you might try which surely wont' have any ill effect: Can you pull those energies inward during formal practice? Rather than giving them space and cultivating the expansion of these energies, see if you can bring them back into the physical body and ground them there. You may be able to do this off the cushion also.

I hope it helps.

Hi Mario,

After practicing qigong and neigong for about a year I began noticing what felt like other peoples energies. I would feel like there was an energy field around me that would get pulled on or pushed when I came into proximity of other people or trees etc. It surpised me at first.

Never worried about it though as I thought it just comes with the practice

cheers

Jeff

I have a slightly different approach. If it was me I'd try to get some sort of objective assessment. This way you will know whether you are hallucinating or not, and therefore, whether you need meds.

For example, you could set up an experiment where one of 5 random people you know is introduced into a room with you blindfolded. According to what you say, you recognize someone's signature energy. So if that's the case, you will be able to tell with a high accuracy who has entered the room, on repeated trials.

If your friends are not into this stuff, set it up as a magic trick and have fun with it.

If you fail the experiment, perhaps you are in need of the meds. It's an easy thing to set up, and it will give you a definite answer.

Over to you Mario.

it is worth adding, this by someone who is not a trained psychiatrist, that the DSM makes some exceptions for things that fall within the bounds of spiritual tradition's paradigms, such that, for example, they don't give psych meds to pentacostals who speak in tongues...

complex energetic and extended perceptual stuff, on its own, is well within the boundaries of the advanced meditative arts, though if you had other stuff more suggestive of, say schizophrenia, then perhaps they were right to do something, very hard to tell as I am not there talking to you, so take all this with a grain of salt, not as a professional opinion

Are you trying to control/manipulate these energies? Meditating is simply observing. How do you meditate?

tom to what extent do you think you can cure the other symptoms? and what methods are you using? and what symptoms are you focusing on?

pure curiosity

Tom, a fellow pather with psychosis, awesome, we need to start a club or something. That's cool you have found success with Niacin, my doc told me about it. I tried some high doses and it did have a positive effect with the psychosis but it didn't get the meat of it. No shame in taking anti-pyschotics Mario, they work like magic.

Hey Mario,
do these things bother you or are they rather "curiosities"? i am fundamentally against pharmacology unless there is a real need and a proven medicine with limited side effects.

in some cases they are not to be avoided but in most (IMO) cases there are better options than the brainchem hammer. most of the chemicals have some very bad side effects which aren't immediately obvious.

most docs are not trained to deal with a lot of the stuff we uncover in our "self-surgery" of meditation and jump to their standard pharma solutions. their bag of tricks is often limited to what the standard journals or the salespeople for the pharma industry tell them.

bon chance

tom

Vipassana is simply observing and it is definitely a method of controlling and manipulating energy. Choiceless awareness and non-manipulation are forms of manipulation and do cause perceivable and reproducible mental and energetic effects. People wouldn't do it if it didn't cause some sort of change.

Every meditative technique I've learned involves deliberately controlling attention. Most of those meditative systems also involve deliberately manipulating energy. Every vajrayana or qigong technique does this. Every technique I can think of that involves focusing attention like samatha indirectly affects energy in profound ways. If nothing else, the stillness from these techniques causes energy accumulation and circulation.

I echo the caveat that I am not a trained psychiatrist.

Your symptoms in and of themselves don't seem so harmful-- why not just let them be? By letting them be, very slowly and gradually out of the soil of patience, gentleness, and peace, the appropriate response to them can unfold.

I have a friend who experiences the world in an intensely synaesthetic way. She sees shapes and colors when listening to music, associates color auras with different people, feels personalities in inanimate objects and can smell colors! This is simply her way of thinking and perceiving. We're all a little bit different. No matter how we are, it's important to cultivate what suzuki roshi called "beginner's mind."

Perhaps don't give so much importance to these perceptions. Look at other areas of your life where there may be suffering, and begin the work of applying the practice. Just develop your practice, and keep studying and adjusting your meditation on breathing to be calming and a relaxed yet clear attention.

Be well.

The simple response is this. If you take the meds and the things you feel change or go away it is obviously psychosis, if they are not touched the slightest bit then probably not. (maybe a higher dose would effect it)

I am really curious as to your comment about "musty shoe odor." How did you come to associate the illness with such a smell?

I have done DMT in the past and can definitely identify with its smell. I am not really inclined to visiony things though so I don't get the smell (or taste) of it very often (for me it is associated with feelings of tension or heaviness at the top of the head, something which I don't usually experience as most of my tension usually manifests in lower regions of the body).

Very interesting Tom, that idea of having an odor. I know dogs can smell and alert their owners to impending epileptic fits. I wonder what that smells like, and if we can smell it or only dogs. Diabetics also give off a fruity odor through their skin and breath when their blood sugars are high.

Hello Mario,
Thanks for sharing your story. I was curious if you would give an update.
Billy

Disclaimer: Not a doctor but do have experience with what you're talking about, antipsychotics in the past (unrelated, not for schizo), and some formal neuroscience

The brain has many heuristics running to give us best guess intuition. We rely particularly strongly on intuition for spatial processing and social interaction. I'd guess that you're experiencing some of these heuristics explicitly as extra sensations rather than implicitly like most people. 

So, what you're feeling is "real" but not supernatural. Don't put any more faith in it than you would your own intuition (because that's what it is), and you should be fine. Just because it's happening in your brain doesn't mean you can control it easily. Just because it feels like its coming from "the out side" doesn't mean it is, but it also doesn't mean it's fake.

Don't take the antipsychotics (unless this is causing serious disruption of your life - but even then there's probably better first resorts). At best, you'll dull everything. At worst, you could do long-term emotional/neurological damage

Used to have that too, I think a lot of people do. I never felt it was an illness, simply heightened sensitivity.

If you claim to know exactly how many grains of rice your fork is touching, then design an experiment to test it. If you succeed at counting multiple times, then it's nothing to worry about. If you fail, then it's a delusion that should disolve after the (failed) experiment.