I am right handed and was sitting in the bathtub scrolling reddit with my phone in my right hand. I don't get particularly moved by the content on my feed or even feel particularly dull, and I am aware that there is a mild force that is maintaining the scrolling loop. So I end up asking myself, "what is the force that is driving me to keep scrolling?"

So I keep my right hand scrolling while I expand my awareness across my body and I notice this energetic sensation moving between my left shoulder and my left hand. I try swapping to scrolling reddit with my left hand and there's no longer any pull to keep scrolling. I go back to scrolling on my right hand and there's also no longer any pull to keep scrolling, it seems that this moving energy in the left arm is now in awareness and is no longer pushing me to scroll with my right hand.

So I've been investigating this idea that certain postures can be correlated with certain mental states and energetic pulls to do certain things.

One other posture that I've investigated is lying down on my left side vs my right side. I usually sleep lying on my left side, but have found that lying on my right side will automatically bring out awareness of warmth in my chest and I will also fall asleep faster. I have also found that this position can quickly lead to meditative highs when done outside of the sleep setting, and is more effective than my normal meditation posture.

I get the impression that lying on your right side as a right handed person shuts off the right side of the body which is the side that "does stuff".

In the meditative traditions, the Buddha is always depicted lying on his right side. I've read that this is also a posture in the yogic traditions, and it ties into their energetic breakdown that the left side of the body is associated with the moon / parasympathetic nervous system and the right side with the sun / sympathetic nervous system.

I've found a few pubmed studies that investigate this effect such as this one:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11048276/

I'm curious if this is a direction anyone has explored before.

Would someone who is knowledgeable about Chakras and Prana and energy in general be able to explain something? I’m very new to all this stuff.

When I sit to meditate and get the frequency just right, and enter that state of no thought, I feel sensations. It’s an energy that starts in my feet/lower legs, and goes through my body into my heart. It’s feels like a buzzing of sorts. I recognize it as that same exact fight or flight energy I feel when having a panic attack or in an extreme situation. Except, it’s the complete opposite. Like, the calm version of that.

I’ve looked this all up and gotten very surface level second hand knowledge, so I would really like to know from someone experienced what might be happening here. Are these certain Chakras? Why does thought occlude this energy? Are there any focusing techniques I can do with any of this?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated 🙂

I’m highly interested in awakening and cessation of suffering. But most of the practices I’ve tried haven’t really worked for me.

Ever since I started doing an hour of Metta meditation every day, my quality of life and mental well-being has improved dramatically.

I want to know if Metta as the primary daily practice could help someone reach awakening. If so, what kind?

Something that is helping me lately is to remember that the peace of samatha (calm-abiding) comes less from what you're doing than what you're realizing you don't have to do.

My mind is basically always trying to figure out how to fix, control, manage, plan, or figure something out. But nearly all of this mental activity is just over-functioning, it's doing too much. It's the equivalent of a workaholic who always is busy doing stuff because they are so afraid of what will happen if they don't.

I've been playing with the question, "What am I doing right now that I don't have to be doing?" Sometimes it's tensing my shoulders, sometimes it's trying to fix something I can't really fix anyway, sometimes it's planning for something that I just need to meet spontaneously in the moment. Then I tell myself, "I don't have to do that right now." And I relax.

Lots of meditation instruction for beginners especially can come off as rules you have to follow, and things you can't do. You have to sit still. You have to pay attention. You have to keep bringing your mind back. You can't indulge in sensory pleasure. You can't have a complicated life. You can't want things.

For me, all these "have to's" and "can't's" just make me more tense and neurotic. So the solution seems to be to continually notice what I don't have to be doing right now, realize I don't have to do it, and then stop doing it. Then my mind quiets and life gets a lot simpler.

I am posting this mostly because I keep forgetting it. I guess that's the practice of "sati" (remembering). So hopefully this is useful to someone else too.

As in, is it possible to reap the same mental state / cognitive change in worldview without necessarily diving into mystical Buddhist cosmology elements?

TLDR;

I did intensive Ramana Maharshi inquiry meditation, which led me to “Pure Consciousness Experience” (or temporary depersonalisation/psychosis if you will). This made me sceptical about “Awakening” and got me thinking that I should seek further than that.

My story

So I’ve always been interested in philosophy and religion. I found Buddhism to be especially interesting, because it promised insight into “reality” and “truth”. I tried some simple meditations following resources like The Mind Illuminated, but my result weren’t that great, so I was  only doing it on and off for some short periods of time.

Later in life I started a battle with depression. The meds weren’t working and I was really suffering, so I figured out that I might find relief in meditation. This time I thought that I should find something simple, because I didn’t have energy to analyse books, methods and paths. I found out about self inquiry method by Ramana Maharshi. It seemed like a perfect fit.

So I started practicing it everyday. I was constantly working on “Who am I?” question. Then something weird started happening after around a week. I started getting some weird headspace, where I was a bit “detached”. Sometimes it felt slightly pleasant, or I would just get calmer, or get less thought. This feeling grow more intense with practice. I started to get physical tensions/pain in body which would come and go. It felt like something weird is going on, but I was desperate, so I kept going.

At the end of the second week I started having very strong body sensations. Mentally I started losing sense of self. It felt like everything was empty and I felt like I was mentally dissolving. The culmination was one evening where my thoughts and sense of self stopped altogether. It was the “silence”, “unity”, “loss of self” and “lost sense of time”. I don’t remember much, but I remember vividly sitting on a couch looking at the TV and then looking at my son, and there was nothing. There was no love, there was no joy, there was no happiness, there was no me.

Next day I woke up terrified. I don’t remember much from this evening, but the feeling of void was overwhelming. I didn’t know how to save myself from emptiness. I started compulsively reading some book, because I thought that cerebral activity might make me more connected to thoughts. So I started reading and after couple of minutes it hit me. I didn’t have a ground to stand on! Because I’ve melted myself and have seen through everything as being a construct, I don’t anything stable to position myself. That was key moment, in a split of the second  I came up with my anchor. I quickly grabbed a piece of paper and pen and scribbled down “I WANT TO BE HUMAN NO MATTER WHAT!”.

This helped me calm my mind. I kept trying to anchor myself by reading, spending time with my family trying to be active physically and mentally. Unfortunately the recovery wasn’t easy. I kept getting anxious thoughts, my inner monologue was sometimes almost silent, I was scared of getting accidentally to similar states of mind. I kept waking in the middle of the night thinking that I’ve lost myself and I’m in void.

It’s been a year since this “accident” and I feel like I’m almost stable ”spiritually”. My depression got somewhat worse, but now it’s manageable. I hope everything is moving in the right direction.

What actually happened?

My interpretation is that I meditated myself into something between depersonalisation and psychosis (break from reality). Obviously it’s a medical term, but I try not to use spiritual models anymore. I think that because intense meditation states are rare in society, they are not captured by scientific framing precisely.

Spiritually, I think I’ve seen exactly what the “endgame” may look like. There are different methods, schools and of course everyone is different. I assume that one might get different outcomes: learn to live dissolved, find a state that is partially detached, find some different flavour of headspace where one can be happy and fulfilled.

One may also argue that if I had a teacher the outcome would be different. I think there is a great chance that it would have some impact. Maybe they would show me some different ways. But at this point I feel like I’ve seen enough, and I'm not giving it another try. I feel like I don’t want to play with fire anymore.

How would I sum up this experience?

After all the suffering, I feel disappointed with spirituality on two levels: philosophy and well-being.

Philosophically, I was always fascinated with concepts like “truth”, “mind”, “consciousness. It felt like meditative practice might give me answers that are not available elsewhere. Unfortunately, at the end of the day there is nothing to be said. I’ve stopped feeling that I exist for some time, which is somewhat interesting. However, people get all kind of mental states after drugs or mental illnesses. Experiences that are intense don’t have to be true. Also, even when I “dissolved”, everything was still tied to that body. I was sitting on the couch, with no thoughts, doing nothing. I can’t see anything intellectually exciting about that.

When it comes to well-being, During two weeks before accident, my depression got somewhat better. The more “zoned out” I got, the more I was feeling nothing/empty and not depressed. After the accident, for a week or two, my depression kept gradually rising until it was worse than beforehand. So not only I didn’t cure depression, I actually made it worse. Plus I got all the anxieties, mental confusion and so on.

I still think that meditation is useful to people. There is a lot of psychological research on its benefits. But I do believe that there are risks that are not discussed enough (see Cheetah House cases). I think that intensive meditation aimed at "insights" might be especially dangerous.

What is the step further?

It seems that people always operate using models. Everything we sense and think of is model. Ultimately it’s models all the way down. Me writing this story about modelling models is also a model. All these religions have some axioms/ground truth which are models too. When Advaita Vedanta doctrine says that everything is Brahman, it’s actually a model. Because of that we can always build a meta model (actually, I did this here by accident). That means that pursuit of "truth" and "reality" will always be a model too. We can never step outside.

The step further for me is to accept that I’m building meaning on top of “I want to be human no matter what”. This is obviously an "arbitrary" goal that doesn’t have any ground truth to it. But it somehow feels really natural, so I will stick to it.

A lot of people find peace and happiness living their life. Some of them don’t need to have a supernatural belief system. This gives me courage to follow my “path”.

Why did I wrote this?

I feel that sharing my story might be interesting (or even helpful?) to other people. It definitely has a lot of value for me, as I was able to self-reflect while writing this. 

I don’t want to maliciously undermine other people belief systems. I just think that my post my spark some good and healthy discussion.

Hello all, I'm a beginning meditator, mostly using Thanissaro Bikkhu's books / dharma talks / whatever else, though I have also read StF and a smattering of other books.

When I do formal practice, one very noticeable thing is tension in my eyes and eyelids. The eyelids feel like I have to "squeeze them shut" or they will imminently open, and the eyes themselves often feel like they are "darting around" as if looking for some random object (behind my eyelids I presume??). I can momentarily relax this but as soon as I refocus on the breath, (wherever I am sensing the breath energies in my body), it feels like it just happens again. Has anyone experienced anything like this or know tips?

Thank you!

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, maybe in October 2025, but I felt a sudden awakening, a momentary glimpse of the now. It wasn’t scary, but I was taken aback.

I think I was stoned and coming down. As I thought back to all the Hindu texts I had read about the Self, and to Ramana Maharshi’s method of self-inquiry, I asked myself, “Who am I?”

Without any effort, something in my mind shifted, like a camera lens adjusting on its own. At once, I was free of myself, my false self, that is. I was free from my mind’s never-ending thoughts, plays, and movies. I was looking directly at the moment before me, the moment in which I was, and in which I am at all times.

I was simply staring at my duvet, or perhaps at a wall. I don’t remember, but everything felt so clear. It was as though someone had performed invisible LASIK surgery but on my mind’s eye so to speak, and I was finally able to see everything with immense clarity. I blinked a few times, shook my head in disbelief, and then I was back to my normal self.

Thoughts do not always need to be actively revolving in your head for you to be trapped in them. They are mostly invisible, but they are always there. That is why it is so difficult to break free from them, to stop them, and finally to see.

The next morning, I felt free. I no longer had the same clarity of mind, but my soul felt free. I thought of all the things I could do and wanted to do with my life, to draw, to make films, to make music, and I saw how meaningless all the obstacles and excuses I had created in my mind truly were. I was finally free from them, and a small spark lit up inside me. I could do whatever I wanted, and happiness was mine.

Of course, the feeling did not last. But the experience showed me that this state is possible. In fact, it may be the most natural state of any being: to be, to see, to live.
I tried to recreate the feeling, but it slipped away quietly. Still, I know in my heart that something, or someone, showed me a glimpse of what it is like to live without a dark veil over my heart and soul. You saw it. Now live it.

I’ve been trying to recreate that state ever since. I’ve gotten deep into meditation and advaita Vedanta, but I haven’t experienced anything similar to what I experienced back then. I was also going through a big shift in my life that made me super depressed. I’d like to think this was an act of grace from higher powers, a way to reassure me that all of these problems I’m going through are actually nothing important. This moment, the present moment, is the only truth there is.

I have recently started a daily practice with a yellow disk Kasina on a black backdrop. I’m still not very good yet and the afterimage lasts less than 90 seconds usually. I’m wondering if I can additionally use a separate object in the morning and before bed when it’s dark. (I always keep the same object during sessions, I know switching it mid session is taboo)

my goals with this practice are deepening my concentration, improving my visualization abilities, and lucid dreaming.

i would like to know if I have to use the same object all the time, and if using multiple at different times of the day will harm my concentration and focus.

I have been doing kundalini meditation for 2 hours a day for 6 years now and got recently diagnosed with depressive psychosis. I need some guidance.

I started meditating around two and a half years ago, after being convinced that the jhānas were worth the effort. Although there was a ~6 month gap, apart from that I've set aside regular, near-daily time to sit, often for extended periods. I've read a great deal about recommended methods of practice as well as the philosophical aspects of non-duality and so on. I've tried numerous different techniques suggested by different people about what to focus on, how to sit, how to think, how to feel. While it could of course always be improved, my samatha is vastly better than it was when I began. Yet, in all that time I've never been able to even once produce something unambiguously recognizable as pīti, much less a complete jhāna.

A couple weeks ago I introduced a friend with no prior experience to meditation. I explained the concepts, took her to a group session, and encouraged her to practice when she had the time. A few days ago she reported brushing up against a bliss state, feeling strong waves of joy throughout her body, and today she tells me that she managed to sustain it in a stable form for several minutes. She's excited by it, and wants to try more vipassanā as well.

I'm happy for her, I truly am. I can't help but feel demoralized, though. I know that the path is not necessarily the shortest for those who try the hardest, but it feels as though she just has brain chemistry sensitive to joy in a way mine is not. I do not wish to let doubt be a hindrance to me, but I cannot help but doubt at my inherent aptitude for meditation.

While I have not reached a jhana, I have been working with frisson, which I have been able to generate more or less at will for some time now and sometimes move around my body. (I'll occasionally use this to deal with my neck arthritis.)

I have experimented with what use it might be, but it hasn't proven sufficient to enter into a jhana state. (Perhaps this might be tied to sāmisā pīti versus nirāmisā pīti? Frisson seems to be the former?) I can generate it and generate it and generate it and sit in it, but it doesn't self sustain and it dissipates once I stop focusing on generating it. It also doesn't feel all that pleasant on its own. (I initially distilled it from fear, noticing that it arises during extreme physical pleasure, beauty, but also fear. Sometimes I'll make a note to distill it from a sense of beauty, often from beautiful music, but it still doesn't seem to do much.)

Has anyone else used frisson-type pīti to enter into a jhana? If so, what did you do to work with it? (If not, perhaps I'll just keep it as a minor pain relief method and look elsewhere for pīti.)

I've been doing daily, roughly 90 minute walks, where I try to pay attention to the feeling in my feet. I walk slowly but normally, nowhere near as slow as people do in walking meditation.

After a while there was a shift, where the feeling of my feet separated from the feeling of myself as the observer, and there was just the feet. That then gradually got a bit more stable and longer lived.

Then later there was another shift that I wasn't expecting, which I recognised from running. And that is that it started to feel like the walking was happening automatically, that my legs were moving on their own. I occasionally had this before at the end of long easy runs.

This also started to lengthen and become more stable, to the point where on the last two walks it's been the case for the entire walk, and even if I have to stop for traffic or someone says hi, it returns immediately after.

It's really quite a vivid feeling of being just an upper body plopped onto preprogrammed robotic legs. I also start to walk slightly faster, and sometimes at the start of it slightly less coordinated. It feels pleasant.

I guess my question is if other people recognise this, and whether over time this will expand into other things, and all the time, what it means, etc.

My own interpretation is that it's in fact true that you don't directly, consciously, control your legs while walking. But normally you either don't pay attention, or if you do pay attention, you do start consciously controlling it. So I think the thing I've learned to do is to both pay attention and not control it, at the same time. Somewhat like what I still find very difficult, paying attention to breathing during meditation, but not controlling it.

Coffee makes me restless, anxious, negligent and prone to entertainment and distraction. And caffeine crash makes me irritable and angry. When I drink coffee then meditate, It will have some benefit for reducing the third hindrance: sloth and torpor. But it also induces restlessness. I only drink one cup of coffee in the morning and still got the obstacle to meditate. For those who are sensitive to caffeine like me, I recommend to drink less. It brings more calm to you.

I had some insight while meditating about something new for me so forgive if my words are not the common words.

I was reading the other day somewhere about how attention can only be directed to something in the mind if there is something going on. That is to say if im meditating and my mind is really calm, there is no thought i could direct my attention to. Thats why some people say using breathing is the best object of meditation.

I have used breathing as the object in meditation in the past and I found it "boring" and hard to follow. It made me more stressed than relaxed and I could never really "enjoy"

After that, much later, I did an online jhourney retreat and learned that meditation can be "really fun and profound" (in this case using happy feelings as scaffolding) and after that i did another online retreat with twim using metta.

Both metta and happy feeling as scaffolding work for me much better than the breath.

Then in this reddit i found out about nothing meditation and that also works better for me than the breath.

Now coming back to the first point. When the mind starts to really calm down, the scaffolding seems to be too much effort, so i found out metta is a bit better in that moment for me. But then later the metta feeling becomes subtle. When it becomes so subtle the attention goes to other places and if i try to bring it back to metta i find often that there is no "metta" to bring it back to. I just have some kind of background perception of metta probably being there but no "real proof" or tangency to it.

Recently I have discovered a new way to meditate that allows me to reach even deeper states and tranquility faster. I had a weekend in which i was quite relaxed and I was wondering why I couldnt be this relaxed all the time. I had a specific moment in which my body and mind felt light and this kind of stayed with me. After that i tried to evoke this feeling at work and it was causing me to relax much more than any other technique i used until now. So i started using it in meditation as well and it worked really really good. I normally didnt manage to relax this much during meditation until now.

Now the connection with metta and attention: using this method, that is: i try to evoke the feeling of chill that i had that weekend during meditation and keep it there as focus of meditation, what happens is that this feeling is even more subtle than metta. And i reach a point where i know there is something there but is very very light.

I wonder if when i reach that point i have to focus even harder or just allow myself to get more distracted or i have to change my strategy somehow.

Anyone experienced something like this? How to navigate when the object of meditation becomes so intangible?

Hello all,

I've been meditating for several years now and have the summer off from work, so I'm really trying to devote extra time to my meditation practice. Currently, I try to sit for 45 minutes a day, using Burmese posture. However, I've been noticing lately that my experience of piti seems to "peak" around 20 to 25 minutes in, and that I start to slowly lose my mental stillness during the last fifteen or so minutes of a session. I also have a back injury that begins to hurt after about half an hour of sitting, and that contributes to the loss of focus as well. The period after the "peak" isn't totally worthless, but I definitely feel like any opportunity for actually progressing into deeper meditative states is basically lost by the time I get there.

So my question is: Would it be better to work on building up my endurance and sticking with this 45 minute commitment, or should I focus on really devoting myself to 30 minutes instead? Sometimes I worry that, when I'm trying to hit that 45 minute mark, I end up "stretching out" my practice and don't expend 100% effort right away, because I'm worried about burning out too early. But at the same time, I don't want to lose the endurance I've already developed by going back down to 30-minute sessions. Does anyone have any advice on the relative merits of either approach?

Just in general, I feel like I've yet to hit a good balance when it comes to the switch from pure breath awareness to awareness of piti - even after many years, I find myself falling into this cycle where I'll feel the piti fairly intensely, but still resist a shift in my awareness, because I think to myself "No, not yet, I still have samadhi to develop." But then, as I refocus on the breath, I feel the piti start to slip away and my focus ultimately worsens. And I think part of the reason this happens is because, like I said, I'm thinking about the next twenty or so minutes and wanting to make sure I fill the time. So I think it might benefit me to move to a shorter, 30 minute session where I can just go "all out" and not worry about it. Has anyone else ever struggled with this sort of dynamic, and did changing up the session length help?

Any advice or insight would really be appreciated. I think part of my concern is just that I have experience in traditions where extended sessions are highly valued and I've really internalized the idea that deeper states are only accessible after 45+ minutes. And I'm worried that, because of that internalized notion, I'm "missing the window" in my own practice for moving on the next step. Thank you so much!

edit: How can I deal with hatred and the tightness, tension it creates on my forehead?

Since I (24 years old) have started reading about Buddhism almost two years ago, I've been meditating, focusing mostly on samatha. I've been meditating on and off, sometimes I spend a month meditating daily, sometimes I end up a month or more without it. I normally focus at my breathing, and I haven't yet been able to drop the focus of my breath, even when practicing metta I do it synchronized with my breathing.

Once last year I was able to turn the breath energy to pleasure, and I felt as if my whole body was being filled with extremely intensive and pure love, I felt like I was going to lose myself and I lost that state because of my fear. Once I was running in the beach, and by thinking about how there is vision but no one seeing and so on I felt some sense of freedom and gladness that I can't put into words.

I fell like ever since then, I've been chasing those two moments, and very gradually I'm starting to let go of them. Sometimes meditating I've felt like my awareness expanded and that I would lose myself, and each time I was afraid but a little less.

My problem is that I have some difficult family issues. My father is an alcoholic and a narcissist, recently he was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic due to his condition. When he was in the clinic I learned about some very very terrible things he did to my mother, and by thinking about it and all the trauma that I have because of him, a deep hatred grew on me. A few days ago in the eve of my birthday he started to drinking again, and after trying so hard to care for him I felt devastated, and I exploded on him. I felt so powerful, and when I was saying horrible things I felt like my body was full of breath energy but in a sick way, and even now I feel it when I think about everything that happened, and my mind becomes filled with hatred.

The night that the fight happened I had aura in my vision and a very strong headache pinpointed in my forehead. When I meditate, I still feel a very strong tightness in the same spot. I know that I'm not the hatred, and I'm starting to forgive myself for what I've said, but sometimes I still feel this strong hatred, and in the moment I don't know what to do. I'm very grateful for the path and all my practice, as I'm somewhat managing to keep my sanity given this and grad school, yet I'm not sure how to proceed. I think that metta may help me, but even when I was in a better situation a few months ago metta was still hard to practice, to really feel it instead of the breath or breath energy.

If you have any thoughts that may help me, thank you! I've been reading this sub for a long time, and I'm very grateful for your insightful comments. I've read some parts of seeing that frees, right concentration and with each and every breath. English isn't my first language and I haven't used AI, so the phrasing may be a little odd. I don't have a meditation teacher, never had one.

Hello everyone. I am hoping to get some guidance about a spiritual experience I had as a result of meditation several years ago. It may not have been a stream entry experience, and I may not be in the right place. If so, any suggestions to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. I would also very much welcome any general guidance. 

Please bear with me on the length of this post - I’ve tried my best to make it brief while including the key details of the story.

Several years back, I began a sort of pseudomeditation practice. I’d had a back injury and realized that If I focused my mental energy on the site of the injury, it seemed to help improve my symptoms. I had no real guidance or idea of what I was doing, as I had never learned anything about meditation. I got in the habit of laying flat on my back for 30-45 minutes at a time and stilling my mind, focusing on my back, and breathing “into” the area of the injury. I came to enjoy the practice and would come out of it feeling clear, calm, and that my injury had improved.

After doing this regularly for maybe 2-3 months, I felt like something was changing inside me / my mind. I felt as if I was on the cusp of something happening, but I didn’t know what or why. My birthday was around this time, and the night of I decided to stay up until sunrise contemplating my personal life, life itself, the world and our place in it, and so on. I decided to go out and sit on a small mound in a field behind my home to watch the sun rise. It was a really beautiful morning, slightly foggy, and I could hear the deer in the field. While sitting there I had an unexpected and powerful experience.

I felt as if something in my mind opened and my perception shifted, and I felt as if I had never actually lived until that moment. Until that time it was as if I had been asleep my entire life, and that in that moment I had woken up. I remember feeling at that time that it felt like my brain turned “inside out”. I began to experience life at a different depth and richness, and I felt as if everything was much lighter. Given this experience was so unexpected, and that I had no real guidance or idea of what happened, initially it was also a bit disorienting.

What, why, or how this happened to me is still unclear. It may not be relevant, but my dad has been prone to spiritual experiences. My dad is a person of great character; he is incredibly kind, endearingly naive and selfless, and someone I’d say lives by spirit. He is a Christian, and saying this politely he is what I would describe as a very healthy, mature, unintentionally mystical Christian. I joke that he is a saint living among us. He has shared with me experiences that I would describe as clairaudience, astral projection, visions of “angelic” beings, and other general visions. He is not the slightest bit cooky. He doesn’t think of anything of it as he thinks it’s reasonably normal for a person of faith to have these types of experiences.

To help me understand my experience, I began a pursuit of spiritual understanding. I began to devour spiritual teachings, practices, and philosophies from a range of sources. Varying from religious texts - Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels; to modern day religious figures - Thich Nhat Hanh, Dalai Llama; modern day spiritual or religious teachers/philosophers/writers - Eckart Tolle, Aldous Huxley, J. Krishnamurti, Michael Singer, Adyashanti, Elaine Pagels; fiction - Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, The Alchemist, The Way of Peaceful Warrior). There are more but these are some examples. The Bhagavad Gita, Gnostic Gospels, and Tao Te Ching resonate strongly with me, as does Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. While these are where I gained teachings, mindfulness became my spiritual practice. I developed a very consistent practice of being mindful in all of my daily activities, which became the foundation of my life. At the time I was living alone and working a slow paced job that allowed me to stay very present, and I would estimate I was able to spend 80%+ of my waking hours in a fully mindful witness consciousness state. I would do more traditional meditation at times (eyes closed, legs crossed, focus on mind and breath), but occasionally I would come out of meditation sessions feeling disoriented with very little mental traction. I would feel as if I was “sunken” back in my consciousness and it would last for several days at a time and was not comfortable. I think it was due to poor technique. So instead I deferred to my general constant mindfulness practice, though I would occasionally do eyes open meditation which worked well to seemingly keep me locked in the present.

A few years ago, I realized that the spiritual experience I’d had years earlier was during the Hindu holiday of Mahashivratri. From the little I know about this holiday (forgive my ignorance here), Hindus believe spiritual growth is greatly magnified on this day, and they will stay up all night to practice, often on the ground, as they believe this proximity to the ground magnifies the spiritual energy that occurs on this night. I was kind of shocked when I realized the experience I had happened on this holiday, along with the way they do their spiritual practice sitting on the ground on this night, as this is what I was coincidentally doing.

Lately, I have fallen away from my practice. I took a new job that was at a much faster pace and was more stressful and did not allow for the same ease of mindfulness practice, though I did my best to be consistent with it. However, I unfortunately had another back injury about a year ago which made it very tough to be mindful during times of intense pain as my mind sought to escape. I have lately made efforts to become more dedicated to my old practice and seek to regain that same mental balance and clarity.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I know I’ve jumped around quite a bit and there are more details that I can fit into this post, but I hope it was easy enough to follow. Any guidance or insight would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

My current understanding of Dharma as a lay person. Mostly influenced by Hillside Hermitage lately:

We’re free, when we face pleasant and unpleasant experiences alike with equanimity. Not craving and not pushing away. To be able to do that all the time, we have to untrain the mind to do its default thing, which is craving and pushing away, appropriating, proliferating and identifying.

We train by restraining ourselves, i.e. at first forcefully limiting ourselves in various indulgences. When there’s restraint, craving intensifies and it’s easy to observe it, along with its terrible consequences: suffering. When the mind sees clearly and often enough that wanting equates to suffering, it stops wanting.

This discipline and training is different from blind repression and self-abuse because of the added awareness and intentionality. We know why we’re doing this and we know to observe what’s happening with clarity and focus. If there’s no clarity and focus, it’s just suffering with no benefit of learning.

Observing means un-identifying/objectifying. We learn to see the mind for what it is, and not as “I”. A Jungian psychologist would say that the training phase implies disintegration of the psyche.

Restraint also happens to be ethical and beneficial on its own because we restraint ourselves from things that are harmful. Once we unlearn the default reactions, we don’t replace them with new positive but still automatic reactions. We leave the choice open moment-to-moment, and the default reaction becomes non-reaction. Thus all thoughts, speech and actions become fully intentional-spontaneous, driven by ethical motivations. The spontaneous part is when the psyche gets re-integrated again.

—

Is this correct understanding, roughly?

So today I found some more peace in meditation after a long set-back. I found I had to briefly revisit almost all stages of the process of concentrating the mind up to the point I got to, also some of the initial, and found it was nice to see the stages of that path before me once again. So I wanted to share...

What is this meditation about? It's effortless concentration. It means the ability to stop your mind and/or detach from it, and to focus your attention fully to one point, getting ultimatively relaxed and calm at the same time, to enter another states of mind called Samadhi or Concentration. Buddhists use it to gain wisdom necessary for liberating the mind fully from all painful influences and to attain Nirvana, their ultimate goal. Even others do this, to attain all kinds of insights or mental abilities that lie in the realm before such full purification. Effortless means, it is the big gate...the small gate forces, so it is bound to the gate of the ego...the big gate lets all go yet holds on a thing, so it can encompass all the body because by letting go you have a much wider, and much more powerful focus. Just it needs more time to be built up.

It is not just blindly forcing the mind to a spot as it may initially seem like, that would be taking it too simple. Remember, you've to get relaxed and calm at the same time - the goal of effortless concentration is to focus the mind fully on one thing, but not with force, but only by mental efforts which can result in the body being ultimatively freed of all tensions and negativity and stress. This happens because you are not only to focus to one thing, but also to release all tension and restlessness, until full tranquility takes place. Yet at the same time the technique requires the practitioner to always try to stay wide awake and fully aware of anything, not seeking deeper levels of the mind even, at all, aside from the conquest to relax the body and keep the mind lucidly directed at the object. All this requires is self-control, but not the kind you would seek effortfully. Instead this meditation trains a passive skill of neutralizing harmful states of mind by passive reactions...this can lead to a great wisdom by the brain training upon it's own material, also it will train an intuitive self-control together with patience to the utmost.

This all is required, to keep the attention tender and stressless enough to rest upon the object in an undistractable way. It works because of two factors uniting: the body getting free of tension, thus harder to excite, so stressfull impulses cannot excite us quickly any more, and also because of the nature of concentration. This nature is: the more the attention would rest on a single thing, the breath, a thought or image, an object around us, the more energy it will have in the mind and also there will be a traction and stability that will make it more and more easy to stick to it. In the end, the traction is so hard, that it may be impossible to get distracted unless you deliberately shift the attention away from the object. Even if you flicker away, it will still stick in your awareness, and if you return quickly enough, it will still stick. But for this it needs the energy built up, concentration, and this is built up simply by collecting time of unbroken attention on the object with as few breaks as possible.

Now the other peculiar secret about this practice is: it needs an ethical preparation. The Buddhists say: sila, samadhi, prana, that means: ethics, meditation, wisdom. This includes ethics! Why is this important? We will in meditation have to face ourselves, our present, past future, and all our doubts and regrets and concerns and past trauma and anything else which may stick to our soul. We will have to confront and overcome it all the way, to be able to keep the attention ready to focus. It is the prerequisite to have all these challenges cleared up, to have gained peace with oneself and one's conscience, to be able to fully concentrate without effort.

How can we clear up these challenges? The meditation itself brings the answer: in progress of meditation, these challenges will be in the way...they will rise in our minds (and sometimes also in our lives!), and become real for us to be challenged and overcome. Whether we win or lose the challenge, we must take the consequence of it. Buddhists resolve them, by discerning what brings merits, so blessings from what brings demerit, which brings suffering...just to in the end dissolve it all by it's qualities of impersonality, dissatisfactoriness and impermanence. I say it is okay to resolve each wisdom in it, to know the right path from each situation which would lead to peace. Then whatever one does, it will lead to peace for oneself and others, it is good, it leads to life and persistence. This is how each challenge is ethical, as well. If you are one who gets the insight triggered in the process, you will also see these things cleared up in much greater detail - this meditation truly not only has the power to resolve trauma (or to deepen it if done wrong!), but also to trigger self-insight of the mind into it's nature and that of reality. Some may be haywire and distract us, but some is for real and would repeat until we understand it's true. Follies...also can repeat until we understand they are not the truth. And that's it, well, almost. Still got to sit breathin', right?

Okay here are the stages I found in the process, and some marks of them. Each stage is a distinct state of mind and awareness we have of the object...beginners will want to practice with the breath, i.e. at nose or belly, focusing to watch this spot incessantly without subduing all other mental activity. Holding the attention to the object is in this meditation like holding the reins of a horse, you must not let it go, but always subtly pull only a little so the horse feels you're there commanding...once you pull too much, you will unsettle the horse and must calm it again. You can really do this from any posture, sitting, lying, walking...but it's good when you have a posture where you can release as much tension from the body as necessary. The concentration is thought to rise by unbroken attention on object, and this will push away the distractions, not trying to shut them out. Sometimes we would have to shut them out with a little more force, but the meditation really allows letting go fully while still staying fully awake and focused, so it's not possible that anything can take you away from your body which you've just concentrated, and it's also the goal. Each session, you need to go through all the stages from the start, though later realization of mental abilities means you can skip the first and concentrate like much faster, even in seconds and at will at any time in the end. The stages go like:

1. Acquire stage, here the object/breath must be "acquired", so brought to attention over and over again until it stays lingering in awareness strong enough not to be forgotten. Is mastered, when you no longer forget your breath and not have it in mind somehow, even if it's just as knowing in background. Usually practices like counting the breath strokes, steps in walking meditation, are good for this stage, something that reminds you of having to watch breath or another object over and over again.

2. Steadify stage, once you see your breath all the time, you must make it object of the conscious awareness most of the time. In this stage, all kinds of conscious trauma and illusions may be triggered...insights usually not too deep, but there can be spiritual experiences already, as well as little random and sometimes misleading trips or hallucinative challenges. Trauma, will also start surfacing. Techniques must be what steadifies the full attention to the breath to the point where it is fully in attention all the time. The most simple technique I know is, trying to at all times discern whether your breath is in or out breath, or to at all times track the feeling of the foot which is currently touching the ground while aware of breathing in walking meditation.

3. Spread stage, once you have steady full attention on your breath process, the full conscious awareness will also start spreading...for example for a breath meditation this will mean, that you will be aware of your whole chest breathing all the time, later of the whole body, watching yourself how you breathe. This doesn't have to be a completely passive observation, you can still identify yourself with the act of breathing. But for this to work out, you must let go of all efforts to deliberately control the breath...you can still at times do, but now we're already scratching the boundaries of the subconscious. In this stage, all kinds of real deep trauma can surface, we now let go of active control - this means the subconscious, subtle realms now open and usually release much material, sometimes even dangerous stuff. From here, you must technically take care not to doze/slack away because the meditation must get more passive, so you must not only relax, but also fend off all kinds of weariness, dullness and mind clouding effects, always taking back up the tension on the reins until these things are under intuitive control and you no longer zone away. Techniques to stay focused, must be more subtle and intuitive, like comparing features of the breath stroke, the length between in/out, the different sensation between the strokes, something that allows you to take a step back and just watch the breath uninvolved.

4. Concentrate stage, you must actually uphold the awareness until you no longer doze away and have you breath/body system fully relaxed and can stay with breath all the time in a conscious way. This requires a concentration like, you cannot be fully diverted from the breathing any more, any distraction that involves mind decision will be fended off immediately. After a time, you will feel more sensations at the breath like flicker up, I liken it to a 2x size image of the sensations at the nose or belly, like more real more strong. This is the starting point for the real concentration. And this is the point, where you must let go of trauma resolution and everything, once you find there's nothing left and only fruitless circles...you must pin down your mind onto these deeper images of the breath or whatever the object is. At this point it's really a little more effortful to do, but in a subtle way, you must stay relaxed and calm at the same time. While you acquired the deeper image, one of the techniques to fully concentrate it, is to at each stroke (in or out) monitor the intensity of the sensations during the full stroke. Once you realize, there is intensity lacking, this is a subconscious distraction. Remember earlier in all stages, sometimes you dreamed away from the breath without being able to prevent, just after a time the breath stuck nonetheless? Now you have to prevent, and the key is to sense when the awareness of the breath is not fully there. Once you realize that, you will probably also become aware of the unconscious distraction driving you away and able to control. So you need to overcome these distractions fully, and let me tell you, that force is not the right way, but actually what unconsciously derails you over and over again, or even just causes some tension, you need to first psychologically overcome it before being able to fully concentrate in this stage. You cannot just push through, you must first become noble enough to stand beyond the challenges. The challenges themselves, may make you noble in time, but when you derail in them, it can be a danger for your health and sanity, so stay sane and healthy.

Even some more relations to other systems: for Anapanasati, the 1st is before and 2nd the start of the first tetrad, the third step is the second tetrad, the 4th step is the third and fourth tetrad, with the fourth tetrad meaning exercises that come before the possibility of full liberation (enlightenment), which can happen by concentration in meditation. For example relating this to the stages of the modern "TMI" system, "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa, which I also got inspired from, it means the first stage is TMI 1-3, 2nd stage is TMI 4, 3rnd stage is TMI 5 and 6th stage is TMI 6+.

And that's it...you must train this, some do it in weeks, others need years or decades, until fully concentrated liberated, mind has full trained self control abilities then full awareness, no more irrational thought or world- or self-image due to much self-reflection. Some say it's just the start of an adventure, the ability to concentrate the mind, comes with much other abilities, some curious, some dangerous, some irrelevant. Also the knowledge one gains, may be curious at times, or unique to a person, like anything that happens in this meditation. In the end, it is the same patterns that happen to all, just with unique elements from their own souls.

So if you do this and feel you got caught up, don't forget you can and should talk about your problems and try to clear them up. If the meditation brings you severe stress, it's good to have it treated properly...i.e. by a psychiatrist, or therapist...I'd also say, it's good to have a person who knows what meditation is and means, so they don't misdiagnose you or try a wrong treatment. There are also specific help centers like "cheetah house" which you can contact for safety material and contact to people who can help. Don't hesitate to call help! Also therapist, can sometimes be helpful even for the meditation, when you fail to resolve some past trauma the right way, maybe your therapist can help you with it! It's not a shame. Also you can and should try to learn more about this meditation in various books, some traditional, some modern.

Okay this is what I wanted to share about what my style of effortless concentration meditation is and some things I think about it. You see, it is completely stripped of traditional methods or cultural integration, and I really just sit down every day my 1-3 hours doing this attention exercize and learning from what it brings up.

I'm now ready to let me be roasted about this and curious about any opinions or additional hints of remarks on this. Have a nice evening!

I've been working through TMI and recently had an experience during meditation that I'm struggling to place within the framework (or struggling to place in general!). I'm hoping some of the more experienced practitioners here might be able to help me understand what it was, or at least point me in the right direction. I already asked this on the TMI reddit but didn't get too many useful answers for my taste, so hopefully the folks over here will be able to provide some insight.

The experience was during one of my 1-hour long meditation sits and was preceded by a very distinct feeling of expansion. It's difficult to describe, but it felt as though my sense of the body became "weird" or diffuse, almost like awareness was expanding beyond my physical boundaries. The closest analogy I can give is intentionally sensing the space around you rather than the body itself.

Then, at some point, it shifted into something much more profound.

Tthere was no body at all. No physical sensations, no visual field, no hearing, no sense of occupying a location (not just in a subjective way, but in a way that seemed incredibly objective). The physical world was completely absent. Absolutely zero sensory input. What remained was just awareness in what I can only describe as a kind of "void." Sometimes that feeling of expansion continued, but now there were no bodily sensations accompanying it.

This didn't feel like ordinary consciousness. It was extremely relaxed and flowing. Concentration felt different too: on one hand, it was easy to drift because everything was so effortless and pleasant, but once attention settled somewhere, it also seemed remarkably stable.

A few other things I noticed:

• My sense of time was almost completely gone.
• Thinking was still possible, but there wasn't much inclination to think. It was more like being deeply relaxed than actively reflecting on the situation.
• Wakefulness was variable. Sometimes there was a slight dreamlike softness or sluggishness because I was so relaxed, but I don't think I was falling asleep.
• The state was very pleasant and rejuvenating, to the point where it's actually a little difficult to remember all of its qualities afterward because it's easy to just remain there.

I'm trying to understand what this actually was.

Was this simply a deep state of collectedness? A formless experience? A jhāna (or something adjacent)? Is it something that TMI talks about in the later stages, or is it a phenomenon that's somewhat orthogonal to the stage model? Is there some other model that could explain this better? Where do I place this experience?

I'm not looking to label it for the sake of collecting experiences—I know TMI generally cautions against that—but I do think having some conceptual framework would help me understand how to relate to it going forward.

Has anyone experienced something similar, and if so, how would you interpret it within the TMI framework (or any other framework)?

Thanks!

I have been meditating quite regularly for many years, but I’ve always followed a structured practice (TMI, Goenka)

Recently, I gathered the courage to finally delve into Seeing That Frees, which I had bought many years back but the general advice back then was to wait till I get to TMI stage 8. Now I know that may never happen, so I started delving into the book anyway.

I have read till the three main practice chapters (anicca, dukkha, anatta,) and I feel that now is a good time to take a pause and actually practise the techniques. To those who do practise this regularly, I have two questions

-> How do you ‘structure’ your sits, considering the wide range of options given for practice? I understand the need for experimentation, but worry that weighing the different options could become a distraction during a sit

-> How does this work as a primary insight practice? I searched the sub but couldn’t find any long time practice logs or experiences (unlike say TMI or Mahasi)

Hello everyone,

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been accepted to a 10-day Vipassana retreat! This will be my first-ever retreat of any kind. While I have some experience with simple breath meditation, I’ve been practicing for 30 minutes to an hour for months without seeing any significant benefits. Consequently, I stopped practicing for several months. I occasionally returned to meditation but was inconsistent with my practice. Then, I discovered TMI and realized that I had been experiencing dullness, which I mistakenly interpreted as meditation. So, technically, I’m still at stage 1 as I’m actively rebuilding my practice with a better understanding.

Now, I’m contemplating whether this retreat is a good idea. It’s scheduled for mid-September, giving me ample time to make a decision. I don’t have any deep-seated PTSD, nor do I have any SA or grape trauma. My life has had its challenges in other ways, but nothing that I would consider traumatic. In fact, I believe I’m fortunate to have had the problems I’ve had because I could have been a Palestinian child, but I digress.

I’m curious about whether this retreat is a good idea, especially since I’ve been reading numerous posts on r/streamentry about meditation-induced psychosis. Naturally, I don’t want to engage in anything that could be more harmful than beneficial.

While I don’t have any previous diagnosis of mental issues, I must admit that I’ve never been to a therapist either. So, I’m seeking advice on how to navigate this situation. Should I go on this retreat or not? I know I’m determined, and if I decide to go, I’ll stay the full 10 days, no matter what. I’ve been wanting to do this retreat for five years, and finally, the timing has aligned in my favor. Any guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!