[Enginerrrd]

Yeah, it came as a real shock to me at first. I had made many mistakes in my early meditation career. But I learned a lot more and suddenly started progressing. This was wonderful at first. I started to feel and experience some pretty mind-blowing things on the cushion at first and then extending well off the cushion into the rest of my life. Then... I remember random memories started to kind of pop into my awareness. I started to see a bright light shining through my eyes/head while I was on the cushion. This was accompanied by these almost divine feelings of bliss and content, which sometimes extended for hours after my sit. This was very cool at first. Then... this weird head pressure and uncomfortable feeling between my eyes started showing up. My single pointed focus was impossible to maintain because the intense feeling of pressure between my eyes or on the crown of my head would grow more and more distracting as I tried to regain the single pointed focus I had been enjoying. Then... shortly after that, the pressure turned into full tension headaches that lasted all day on bad days. Then... I was working in my office at home one day and my vision suddenly became blurry. Then, I started to feel nauseous. I went to throw up, I could feel the usual feelings of vomiting coming up from my abdomen, then up my throat, then... when it reached my mouth/face, instead of vomit this wave of intense sadness reached my face and it contorted into an expression of anguish. For the next like 30 minutes, wave after wave of this sadness, in every nuanced flavor I'd ever experienced started coming up, taking over my face, then passing. Then the rage. So much anger and rage and betrayel and hurt came and did the same thing. Wave after wave. I had NO idea WTF was happening to me, but I'd always been an absolute pinnacle of mental stability so this was very unusual. I didn't know what else to do but to let it pass.

After that, for months, the head pressure / headaches would reappear and then they'd be relieved by me crying. Feeling the intense feelings and going away.

But... I really wasn't expecting any of that. I just wanted to be able to focus better and think more clearly. I didn't sign up for THIS. So I just let it go and fade. I didn't really want to accidentally screw my brain up. So, unfortunately, I haven't started a daily practice again since. It all did feel pretty cathartic though.

I've dabbled here and there with meditating again. When I do it with any real regularity though, the head pressure tends to come back.

[frostwarrior]

Those are the kind of things that make me stay away from deeper forms of meditation and mindfulness.

Also, I'm not very fond of taking the traditional advice so literally. These sources focus solely on training new Buddhist monks, and most people doing secular practice just want some peace of mind while they continue their, productivity focused, western lifestyle.

We need to take these sources with a grain of salt and reorient our practice so that it cultivates more peace of mind without making us implode when the cultivated buddhist mindset creates a conflict with our western lifestyle

[bowsamic]

There aren’t Buddhist meditation practises that have no risk of causing this. Any meditation practise that involves mindfulness and concentration done for more than 15 or 20 mins a day carries this risk

I agree that the goals of Buddhism contradict the goals we have in western society though. That said, Steve Jobs was a devout Zen Buddhist, so he sat many thousands of hours of zazen

I do find it funny though when companies train their employees in mindfulness. It’s almost like they want workers who have less emotional connection with their work. As I said elsewhere, it’s all a matter of whether you follow the instructions. If you do, it will have adverse effects.

[frostwarrior]

> Any meditation practise that involves mindfulness and concentration done for more than 15 or 20 mins a day carries this risk.

Looks like mindfulness to 15 or 20 minutes a day is a sensible choice then.

> Steve Jobs was a devout Zen Buddhist, so he sat many thousands of hours of zazen

Steve Jobs was a powerful and a very influential man. He didn't have a boss urging him to be productive 24/7 like a field employee has. Investors expected his company to deliver working products. And it delivered all of that.

> I do find it funny though when companies train their employees in mindfulness. It’s almost like they want workers who have less emotional connection with their work. As I said elsewhere, it’s all a matter of whether you follow the instructions. If you do, it will have adverse effects.

IMHO they want their employees to become stoic productivity machines that make no demands and cope with whatever shitty working condition they set up.

[titanomachy]

Wow, thanks for sharing. I have no advice to offer but maybe an experienced teacher could help.

I've experienced intense emotional swings like you describe but not the pain or pressure. The emotional swings at least were something I was able to get through, eventually. They were strong for a while but stopped with continued practice. I'm definitely still more sensitive than I was before. I feel both positive and negative feelings more intensely, but hold onto them less.

[bowsamic]

Yep, I've heard of multiple people with these exact symptoms. It's a very familiar story

[Enginerrrd]

Yes, I'm very secular. But the fact that these things happen with such regularity and there is remarkable consistency and precision in them really lends itself toward the religious interpretations. Also, the skeptic in me says it's unreliable, but those glimpses of actual visual light (flickering at first, then steady) coupled with feelings of (for lack of a better word) divinity, are still hard for me to reconcile with a purely secular interpretation.

One big takeaway I had was realizing that outside the west, these types of things are well known. Here though, it seems almost no one who purports to be a "teacher" knows much about them or what to do with them.