Some Stuff That Happened While Meditating
I’ve been reading Mindfulness in Plain English this last week, and I’ve found it has improved my efforts to get meditating. The book teaches about a style of meditation in which you sit with eyes closed and focus your attention on your breath. In the last few sessions, I’ve noticed some interesting things:
1) Sounds seem clearly louder or quieter depending on my awareness. I play some white noise when I meditate, and the volume seems completely different depending on how focused I am. In fact, many times in a session the sound will seem to start fading out but then come back the instant I notice the phantom fade out.
2) I feel a kind of head rush when my attention shifts significantly. I don’t feel lightheaded, but I do feel something happening like a head rush without the alarming bits. This occurs when I’ve been distracted or faded out for a while and then manage to regain focus on my breath. I think I breathe shallowly when I’m distracted.
3) 10 or more minutes of meditation calms even a caffeine rush. Before my last session I had clearly drunk too much coffee. After I meditated, I felt none of that caffeine jumpiness. Oddly enough, I wasn’t aware of the calmness until I finished.
Tags: anxiety, meditation, mindfulness, relaxation
When I meditate, I feel like when I was 16 and in love.
So many amazing feelings, I wish everyone knew how good it is.
I am an Economist, MBA from UCLA, currently MPP Harvard -mid career- have been a Profesor of Economics and a sort of “horse whisperer” (I can get them to do anything).
I had been trying to meditate for years with little success. Then I came to Harvard and I don’t know why I started to meditate in silence and I started feeling the rush and the same feelings you describe.
Have you ever tried to meditate with earphones and certain very special sounds? I like the Didgeridoo and Tibetan Singing Bowl. With the Didgeridoo you achieve a certain base level of “rushness”, with the waves of the singing bowl those rushes deepen and contract.
I’m most interested in your thoughts and experiences; your reflections on why the tibetans come from the conclusion of that rush to the idea that we are one with the universe. I have meditated about living things and I feel a much stronger bond with live organisms, but not with anything dead or not alive. The love rush is a “left-brain-thing”; something like controlling with your mind the levels of Oxytocin that your brain
produces and learning to impose your will on those levels little by little. When you master them, you no longer care about the world and its mortals.Ha…
Good wishes, Javier.
Hi Javier,
It sounds like you’ve done a lot of research and thought on the rush feeling. Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!