Experiencing Problems after Meditations

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I’ve been practicing for around 5 or 6 years with out a teacher.
I have been experiencing some post meditation turbulence beginning a few hours after sitting.
Physical and mental tiredness
Distracted
Feverish
Agitation / irritability
Feeling that my skin has been sunburned
hot breath

This has been happening after deep meditations for over a year and caused me to really tone down the depth of my meditations.

Any thoughts?

[Anonymous]

hi transformer
do you have a qigong practice,or a martial arts practice, or some regular exercise routine? I have found that a regular physical exercise of some sort can help to stabilize the body from the swings that may accompany intense meditation.
the mind, energy, emotions and body are very connected, and it’s good to have a good foundation (body getting good food, exercise, rest; energy is smooth and balanced; calm and balanced emotions) to support your meditation practice. in the EA system, you learn qigong first to build a foundation, and in fact a lot of the beginning meditation practices(not all of them!) involve getting your body together while sitting.

Bruce’s breathing cd’s and the standing dissolving Cd’s are a great resource to build in some stability and balance into your practice.
also, have you read bruce’s first 2 books on meditation? lots of things in there that can help.

there is a lot to be said for finding a good teacher to study anything esoteric, bruce and EA have trained many teachers out there who have a lot of skill and knowledge to help you out, and there may be a good teacher nearby who could help, a qigong teacher, a tai chi or internal arts teacher, or a meditation teacher. id look for someone who seems very balanced and relaxed.

hope this helps, good luck on your journey
richard

[Anonymous]

Hi Transformer,

Could you tell us more about your practice? What type of meditation do you practice? Do you practice the Inner Dissolving method that Bruce teaches?

How much do you practice each day? Do you have a regular daily practice? Or do you have spikes and valleys, where you might practice many hours on one day but not practice much for a while?

Do you have any health problems? What’s your background in subjects like tai chi or chi gung?

I have had some very similiar experiances to you, but I wanted to learn more your practice first

Janak

[Anonymous]

Hi guys thanks for your replies…

My pre meditation usually involves a long shower
I standardly practice for an hour and very occasionally a little more.
After meditation I will often counter balance internal energy with some form of meditative movement.
I also have a regular practice of running for an hour 3 or 4 times a week.

Although I am not a student of Bruce’s techniques, I see some very apparent parallels between his methods and my own.

My own method has been cultivated over the years through self investigation rather than following a specific teaching.

Beginning with examining tensions within the body and applying a “letting go” approach has lead me to an awareness of subtle sensations underlying the physical.

The years examining these sensations has lead me to an awareness of the characters of varying energies at work within my anatomy, the dwelling places, and I have found various methods of manipulating these forces.

The post meditation problems which I have complained of above, have in the past caused me to reluctantly put down my practice for a few months.

[Anonymous]

Hey Transformer,

I agree, your self-research does seem to have taken you on a path that has similiarties with Bruce’s method. It’s impressive that you’ve managed to figure out so much just based on your own explorations!

I’d recommend that you try to find a teacher in a formal system. Meditation systems that have been around for a long time tend to develop a deep body of knowledge surrounding the various problems that students in their system might encounter. They will have developed precautions and adjustments to their practices that can help a particular student progress safely. If you can get in touch with any of Bruce’s instructors in your area, or even other students, I think you’ll find that helpful.

One of the main safety precautions built into Bruce’s system is the 70% rule. The basic idea is that you don’t want to push yourself to your limits in your practice. If you do, you’re likely to encounter all sorts of problems. The safest thing to do (particularly if you don’t have access to a teacher) is to take it easy. Do 70% percent of what you are capable of and let your system slowly open up and become stronger.

Right now, it seems like your practice is alternating between start stop start stop. You may want to try back off on your practice and see if that is sustainable. Maybe instead of practising 1 hour a day, try 20 minutes a day. And see if that works better.

Feeling Irritable. When you go deeply into the energy of the body, you will find many different types of energy in there. One of the types of energy you can find is emotional energy. Let’s say that someone once punched you in the face during a fight. The emotional energy of that event may still be in your system somewhere. During your meditation, you may contact that energy with your mind and stir it up. And suddenly you’ll be angry and irritated. If you stop meditating at that point, you’ll get up and you’ll be feeling pretty annoyed until those energies inside you have time to settle down again.

One of the things that makes Bruce’s meditation methods so powerful, is that they give you ways to resolve those emotional energies. So that you can resolve them and remove them from your system. In your self-research, you may have figured out a way to contact these energies but might not be able to remove them from your system.

Feverish, Feeling that my skin has been sunburned, hot breath. These three all sound like symptoms of generating heat in your system. I’ve encountered all three in my own practice and I still get them when I practice too much. What follows is my current understanding of this based on my teacher’s explanations. I’d be very interested to hear other people’s experiances with dealing with heat that results from meditation.

Heat is a property of energy. There are many kinds of energy in the body, and any of those energies can be hot or cold. Heat is basically an agitation of the energy. It’s like a disturbed buzzing quality of the energy. This heat can be generated when a great deal of energy is pumped through tissues and channels that haven’t been opened up. Imagine water flowing out a garden hose. This water will flow calmly and smoothly. Now put your finger over the end of the hose. The same amount of water is forced through a much smaller opening. There is now all sorts of turbulence and agitation in the water.

This concept of opening up the physical tissues of the body to permit smooth energy flow is important in Bruce’s system. It is why, traditionally a student would do lots of tai chi and chi gung before they would learn meditation. The idea was to open up, balance and strengthen the body in order to prepare it was the energies that would be encountered in meditation.

Another principle that is helpful in dealing with heat is to develop the downward flow of energy in your system. The downward current is the cooling current of energy. This is another safety principle that is built into Bruce’s system. In the beginning, we spend a lot of time developing this current of energy. It can help avoid a lot of problems.

Please take all of the above with a grain of salt. These are all simplified explanations. There are many different types of heat, and many different reasons it might arise in your system. There are all sorts of different issues that can arise in deep meditation. This is why it’s so helpful to work with someone that has a lot of experiance teaching this material. They can help you figure out what is going on in your particular case. But in case you don’t have access to a teacher, I wanted to give you some ideas to play with!

Hope this helps,
Janak

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