I have just returned from a two week trip, walking across the tramuntana mountains in Mallorca. During the trip, I kept my twice daily practice, in ‘holiday mode’ which for me is a slightly shorter practice of 5mins sbp, 10mins dm and 5-10mins samyama plus rest.
During the trip, I had a few nice experiences, lucid dreams , a few entity visitations and the occasional bout of ecstasy but nothing that I would call extreme. In fact I would say I experienced less symptoms of purification than my average week at home. - This is probably due to the grounding effect of walking for 5-6 hours per day.
However, during my first couple of practices in my usual meditation room, I feel like I am in some kind of pranic microwave, like the room is radiating prana/energy. I have experienced this before but not to this extent. In fact this made me overload a bit last night, I kept waking up, sizzling with uncomfortable electrical feeling energy all over my body. This is the first time I have overloaded in ages.
Has anyone else had this problem? How long does it usually take to cool off? I wonder if I have got myself used to the amount of grounding I have been doing whilst walking, and now I’m not doing it there is trouble!
I’m not exactly panicked by this, I’m sure it will be resolved somehow, I just find it an interesting challenge/ slight spanner in the works!
Hi Tom
Those mild symptoms could be a sign of progress. They usually go away, sometimes they disappear as soon as you share them. I had problems go away as soon as I pressed the reply button.
Really, I’m not kidding.
Best of luck
I don’t doubt that Alain, when we are sharing experiences, we are sort of engaging in ritual. In Carl Jungs ‘active imagination’ technique, and in many other ‘shamanistic’ type practices, the ritual ends in either journaling, writing poetry, songs or art, in order to deepen insight and release attachment an experience.
Even before reading about this I found it useful to write down an experience, then ‘close the book’ on it. I found this allowed me to let go of experiences more easily, as I was less likely to keep reliving them in thought for fear of their memory dissolving, safe in the knowledge that I had them written down. Ironically when I do revisit these experiences in writing, I find that I have largely forgotten about them.
Being as we are all ultimately one without another, I can see how the forum would act as a kind of ‘open’ journal.
Hello Tom. The symptoms could certainly be attributed to the change in environment, routine, and meditation seat. A yogi should always approach each session with an openness to whatever unfolds and adjust (in real time) one’s practices accordingly in states of high energy or discomfort. Getting outside on a daily basis is very stabilizing, it’s a yoga practice in and of itself. Once a stable yogi realizes their gentle attention can move inner energy, one may experience radiance exiting hands, feet, heart, on the breath and through all three eyes. As you mature and become confident in your body and affect of yoga practices, overloading becomes much less of an occurrence.
I had similar experiences several times after coming back home from multi-day hikes. On these hikes my sessions are often we very short (e.g. just a few min while lying in the sleeping bag if the weather is bad). Then the first few sessions at home always have felt super deep with a lot of scenery.
My theory is that the body and mind is taking the opportunity to catch up after having been “meditation deprived” for a while.
This theory I somewhat “confirmed” (only 1 data point though ), by experimenting with skipping my morning session during a normal day to see what the effect is, but I felt quite cranky the whole day and I noticed that I would slip into meditation whenever I just relaxed and closed my eyes. So I stopped my experiment and had an evening meditation that also felt unusually deep, and that quite instantly fixed my crankiness.
I probably never missed a session in the last two years, so my body and mind got used to it. For someone with a less regular practice routine, my guess is that skipping sessions or reducing practice time due to traveling might have much less of a “deprivation” effect. I also expect that further down the path, I get less dependent on my practice with more of the fly-wheel effect producing similar effects as meditation throughout the day.
Yeah it’s been a funny few weeks which has presented challenges for my self pacing skills.
Things have calmed down again at home and I am just feeling my way back into a stable routine again.
I think the grounding effect of walking every day certainly had a calming effect on my practice whilst I was away, but now I’m home I am finding it a little difficult to ground - although I work outside every day, building dry stone walls, I don’t find it has quite the same effect as walking all day, probably because I am stood in one spot all day at work.
No doubt I’ll get it together again just before I leave for the retreat in Wales in July! Then it will be similar problems again!
Interesting what u say about cutting morning practice. I’m same with not missing practice, I always get some in, it’s non-negotiable!
My evening practice is my strongest, where I use the spare room and really get into a full hour long practice including asanas et al. The morning session usually consists of sitting up in bed for 15mins whenever I wake up, usually around 4-5am, then I go back to sleep. It might be an interesting experiment to see how doing a full practice every morning changes how I feel during the day compared with my rather lazy version
Sometimes I feel like I really need to sit in meditation at the end of a long day and sometimes have really deep sessions then.
), by experimenting with skipping my morning session during a normal day to see what the effect is, but I felt quite cranky the whole day and I noticed that I would slip into meditation whenever I just relaxed and closed my eyes. So I stopped my experiment and had an evening meditation that also felt unusually deep, and that quite instantly fixed my crankiness.
