Painbody, Energy, Vipassana meditation, psychosis?, God?

[Coraline]

Hello, I would love some advice and sharing of experiences!

A week ago, I was participating in my third Vipassana meditation retreat (as taught by Goenka). Somehow things became very weird and very different for me. I was really ambitious, because I did not want to fall into destructive thinking, so I even kept meditating (focusing on my breathing) in between meditation times. I remember my first "moment", when I started seeing patterns like psychedelic visuals on the walls and felt super happy and exited like a child.

My meditations during the day and the days in general were super fine (despite mood swings: happy->excited->depressed->confused->anxious). An hour of meditation felt like 10 minutes. I saw lights and patterns (and did not react to them) and just enjoyed doing the body scan.

However, at night times things became weird. For some reason I could not not meditate when I closed my eyes. I started feeling the energy in my body and often I felt some kind of force leading my attention, releasing energy from my body. I tried to resist, because I did not want to meditate so intense at night times and thought the order that force chose to go through my body was not right in terms of the Vipassana tradition. Like this, I always became really alert at night with a very strong heartbeat. If I did fall asleep, I experienced nightmares or dreams and hallucinations (I also hallucinated during the days from time to time). The most scary moment at night was, when I felt my body and realised that it was just pain, only pain in my whole body. (I thought "Wow, I never felt so much pain before" and started doing the Vipassana thing: feeling and not reacting). At some point however, I realised that I was not feeling my own real physical body, because when I pressed my fingers together, the feeling was different than this painful energy body. So I felt another body, a second body? this made me nervous and confused.

Talking to the teacher, she fed into my worry and panic. When I told her that I was feeling a lot of stuff inside my body (the surface of the body is usually the object of meditation), she said that I should not do this as this is dangerous, because I could be confronted with things I could not handle. (New thought: I awoke things I cannot handle). Also, she said I should make sure to become calm and restful at night, because stress is very unhealthy (New thought: I should not have a strong heartbeat at night and need to try to get rest). I also talked about my pain body experience. Her reaction was that there are different ways to deal with it, but she cannot tell me about it, because "I was not there yet". Also, she advised my to go receive therapy after the course. Her words made me feel really insecure... I did not leave the course early, because I thought there was nowhere to go. Even if I stopped, the pain body was with me and I had neither the strength nor the technique to deal with it. I did talk to the management though about thinking that I should go to a mental hospital. They said it will be different after the course, I should not listen to my thoughts. 

I had one very extreme meditation during the day. Again, I had this force going through my body, wanting to go a different direction than I wanted (from head to feet, part by part). In the end, I gave in, stopped resisting and kind of just observed what was happening. I think the force went through my forehead and suddenly everything became light, then I saw a lot of nothing. I was nothing, there was nothing, at least no physical bodies. However, there were some red spots in this nothingnesss. I realised those red spots were part of my body. The force ignored a bunch of these red spots and went to one, that I identified as my heart. It was beating fast. Than it went to my lungs and made them contract and release two times. I felt incredibly good. I was just crying and feeling this ecstatic bliss. I interpreted afterwards that this experience wanted to show me that I should not fear my heart beating. Nevertheless at night, I was anxious about it again.

When the retreat ended, I felt and was a different person. I felt like a child again. I had urges like hunger and thirst, I could barely resist or control. I could not listen to people when I did not care about what they said. I was extremely moody. I felt a lot of emotions coming up in my body as heat and pain, as if say had been stuck there. Because my world was so different, I wrote my identity on a paper to not loose myself. I tried to maintain equanimous. I felt like I needed to learn things new and some memories were lost like my pin code for my banking card. Those things came back slowly but gradually the days after the course.

A lot of the things I experienced reminded my of the psychotic states of my friend who has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

I feel fine and "normal" again. I stopped meditating as the teacher advised me to do. Only the memories are stuck in my head as thoughts that go in circles. I still experience difficulty sleeping, because of my fear of physical pain (or the pain body) causing me to feel pain at night (it is all in my head, I guess?).

I feel that I would love some help and guidance, as I do not think family or friends or a GP will understand me so well ...  

Thank you for reading! I am happy to read your thoughts <3

[Salvijus]

Wow, amazing report.

 

[Howard]

I would suggest you to explore more active/movement types of practices.

 

The main purpose of "Vipassana" is to help you see all your experiences (internal and external phenomena) as anicca/dukkha/anatta. So whatever you experienced, no matter how abnormal, is anicca/dukkha/anatta. Not sure if this is best thing to do.

 

But if vipassana is your path,

Maybe look into whether the fear of physical pain is anicca/dukkha/anatta, and the experience of physical pain itself is anicca/dukkha/anatta?

Edited August 1, 2019 by Howard

[Coraline]

On 01/08/2019 at 9:17 AM, Howard said:

I would suggest you to explore more active/movement types of practices.

 

The main purpose of "Vipassana" is to help you see all your experiences (internal and external phenomena) as anicca/dukkha/anatta. So whatever you experienced, no matter how abnormal, is anicca/dukkha/anatta. Not sure if this is best thing to do.

 

But if vipassana is your path,

Maybe look into whether the fear of physical pain is anicca/dukkha/anatta, and the experience of physical pain itself is anicca/dukkha/anatta?

Active like Yoga? I did some Systema last summer. Do you have other suggestions?

Thanks for your suggestions. I try to keep the wisdom of anicca with me and it does help me.

[Aakash]

Great read! always love to read people who have taken the spiritual path and believe they are in a mental illness state, and then trust god! which over powers the thought conditioning. 

Thanks really loved that