[AliMember]

With regards to the specifics of what I am doing with my meditation practise this leads to a question I was going to post separately but I will post it here as I think it is relevant…

Yes, I have got a little piti in my practise before but since starting the TMI this is not the direction I have been taking, nor can I get it consistently (I am still at stage 2-3ish). For a long time I was simply following my breath at the nostrils, trying to make it clear as possible, however I then discovered I could really work on calming the body and sweetening the experience (if that make sense) by a range of techniques such as whole body awareness, listening to sounds to calm my thoughts, incorporating some metta or loving-awareness then once the good feelings got going I could focus on them. This was my primary practise for a while and I felt was really useful for my anxiety as these good feelings would remain for a while once I got up from my sit. I could also occasionally tap into them in my daily life. The downside of this practise was I would sometimes get a little bit confused about where to place my attention, especially if there was restlessness around (which is a recurrent problem or me) which would then lead to a little monkey mindedness and doubt. Also, sometimes I would also end up in a slight fuzzy pleasant haze without too much clarity.

TMI appealed to me as it is quite structured and made me realise how much I needed to work on stable attention. It also appealed to me that Culadasa really emphasises joy in practise. Working through the stages I am however finding it a little difficult to follow the TMI method without it getting a little dry.

Basically, I can get a little joy going in the first 2 steps of the 4 step transition by using the aforementioned techniques, but I find as soon transition to the nostrils I get a lot more clarity to the experience but this joy diminishes. That is not to say that it is unpleasant to follow the breath at the nostrils, especially if I work on keeping my awareness wide, but it certainly isn’t calming like my previous practise.

I wonder if I should spend more time on the 4 point transition to make sure my body and mind is really calm before moving to the nostrils and then try and maintain these feelings in my peripheral awareness? or should i simply see it as a separate practise. I hope this all makes sense! Thanks

[AliMember]

Thank you both for your replies. Yes, perhaps some more detail might be useful. This might be a little long so bear with me..

So I’ve been practising for about 5 years. Maybe 2 years in, often after sitting I would notice a slight shift in my perception where everything seemed slightly hyper-real and a little unrecognizable, nothing too crazy, more of an annoyance. These experiences would come and go and occasionally pop up in my daily life too. I wasn’t sitting for particularly long, (20-30 minutes max) nor getting that concentrated (maybe stage 2-4 in the TMI model). I wondered if it was anything meditation related so I asked a few dharma teachers on retreats but no one recognized it as such. I also had a few experience taking psychedelics the previous summer and wondered if it might be related to haven taken LSD..

Around that time I started to read a lot by Daniel Ingram and found lots of references to similar experiences in relation to dark nights and the path. I spoke to one teacher in that tradition who suggested it might be in fact a dark night. Given how little information I gave him and the fact that my practise had never been that deep I was quite sceptical. Nevertheless, it instilled a little fear in me around the path and where it could take me.

After a few years of a cautious and slightly lazy meditation practise where these experiences would come and go, I decided to sit for a little longer, around 45 minutes, twice a day. I found the experiences suddenly got considerably more intense and consequently I got quite panicked. I immediately stopped practising but the fear and experiences continued for quite sometime. I went to see a doctor to check about the anxiety and these altered states and he immediately recognised my description as derealisation and basically told me that it is highly correlated with anxiety and depression but for some people it becomes more of a persistent issue.

Since then I have been working a lot with the fear and trying to accept it as I am very aware that fear of fear is the one thing that keeps it going. I also found a few people online posting similar experiences of increased derealisation through practise and they said that once they accepted it seemed to go. This seems to somewhat correlate with my experience. However there is a still some doubt about whether it could be something dharma related and still a lot of holding back in my practise as a result.

With regards to what I am fearing when I get up from my sits, sometimes it is from these slight changes in my perception, but more often it is just a general sense of anxiety in my body and mind. It feels like I am over-sensitized and there is a rawness to my experience. I wonder if it could come up due to previous fears of practise or simply that I have had a lot of anxiety in my life that I have not really engaged with and now I am settling down it is coming back up.

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