I wanted to further attempt to describe the types of energy shifts I have experienced during meditation. This was an experience I had over a year after the first experience I described. The description I wrote on that date is below.
5/17/21
“Had an interesting experience meditating yesterday. I decided to meditate around 6:41 pm because I had exhausted everything else I wanted to do and couldn’t take a nap. So I was focusing on my breath, but I eventually started to notice the pain in my body, mostly from my girlfriend not texting me back and not knowing if I was going to get to see her, but also from not being able to get Linux to work, not being able to go to the event I wanted to go to, not being able to get a job, and all the other embarrassing, painful things that were plaguing my mind. I was noticing how the pain was coiling into my face and arms and stomach. I thought vaguely about accepting the pain, but that didn’t seem right, so I just tried to look more deeply into it. Just into what it felt like, without getting deep into what was causing it. It was like a lot of pressure and pain grinding into my body. Then I eventually came to the thought ‘sit with the pain.’ Once I thought that the energy seemed to shift and the pain I was seeing, or at least a lot of the pressure and staticy energy, seemed to dissolve itself. It was like the staticy dense energy before a thunderstorm suddenly being lifted.”
As mentioned in the first meditation article, most of these experiences come from an awareness of the type of regard I have toward my own thought processes. It’s often not a conscious thought, but the unconscious attitudes or feelings I have towards myself that I become aware of when I feel a noticeable energy shift. It does have the feeling of being like some type of electricity. The only thing I could compare it to before meditating would be like when you get the chills when listening to music. But this is a feeling happening on a more subtle level and not just felt at the skin surface. It feels more internal.
I do remember one spontaneous experience when I was in high school when I felt as though the energy field of my body suddenly turned negative. It was during a period when I was stressed about all of the things I was learning about the world and I was experiencing a break up with my first girlfriend. It was a feeling I had never had before that was subtle but definitely noticeable. It was like the ionized air before a thunderstorm, but all the ions were connected somehow to the emotions stored in my body and they all created some type of barrier at once by becoming negatively charged. I remember thinking after having the reiki experience, when I felt the release of energy in my hands, that it felt like the opposite of that experience I had in high school.
A related energetic experience I had happened a few months before the journal entry I wrote above. I was driving in my car one day listening to the song ‘Manateen’ by Horse the Band. While I was listening to the first chorus I felt a sudden discharge and release of energy. It felt similar to the feeling of the pressurized, ionized air before a thunderstorm suddenly being released and transformed in and all around my body. At a physical, spiritual, and mental level. I’ll include some of the lyrics below.
“I feel like I’m becoming
A butterfly
Or a golden bee
My smile is like razorblades
When I smile
It cuts bloody deep
My body is on the magazines
My face on the TV
My voice on the radio
That’s me in my dreams
But when I open my eyes
I see I’m a piece of SHIT
A WORTHLESS COWARD
A VAPID WHORE
A MORAL-LESS REFUGEE
COVERED IN SORES
A BLITHERING SEA COW
LOST IN ITS DREAMS
NOBODY LIKES ME, YEAH
NOBODY WANTS ME AT ALL
NOBODY LIKES ME, YEAH”
In the moment my feelings connected very deeply with the feeling of the lyrics and I think allowed me to open up to what I was feeling on a deeper level. The shame and loneliness and isolation I felt were being recognized somehow by the lyrics and my emotions felt able to release all that energy in the catharsis of the music. The pain of not being liked or accepted by others, even if it was only my perception of how they felt, was a constant script being run in the back of my mind and was part and parcel of the energetic configuration within my body that was associated with all the feelings of sadness and anxiety connected to that. It felt like my honest recognition of how I really felt about myself energetically reversed the polarity of that configuration and released me from the confining influence of those thoughts and feelings.
I think one important thing these experiences point towards is acceptance. I think meditating regularly has taught me is that the mind and personality have many ways of trying to hide things or conceal things from our awareness. I think I was just trying so hard to be perfect and see myself in a certain way that it was corrupting and blocking my experience of my own emotions. There is no way to fake or coerce your way into fixing your emotional problems or attaining some level of peace of mind. For me it is a very slow, ongoing process of just watching all the ways I have been actively inhibiting the process and waiting until my mind is able to let go of them.
Another interesting thing from this specific journal entry is the way pain, thoughts, and emotions are intertwined. I know from studying psychology that the brain interprets physical pain and emotional pain with mostly the same circuitry. Even though most of my pain was emotional, it was still as painful as being physically injured. It also reminds me of the Buddhist story of the two arrows. In it the Buddha states that when we experience pain it is like being shot with an arrow, and when we dwell on that pain it is like shooting ourselves with a second arrow. He compares our suffering with this tendency to dwell on the pain of our experience and distinguishes suffering from the pain itself. Our suffering is our natural human tendency to recreate the pain by dwelling on it. The image of someone shooting themselves with a second arrow is helpful to recognize the harm and irrationality of this natural tendency.
From the journal entry and my memories of this experience, the pain I was feeling was from the emotional problems I was experiencing, the pain of rejection from my girlfriend not responding, the pain of rejection from not having a job, the feelings of inadequacy about not being able to make things work the way I wanted them to. These feelings of pain were all coming from the types of thoughts I was having about the events, and the thoughts I was then having were being fueled by continuing feelings of pain. It was an ongoing process with no clear beginning or end. It was only through disengaging from thought and turning my attention inward toward the breath that I was able to eventually notice the sensations of pain without getting caught up in the story and allow them to be just as they were. I couldn’t just tell myself to accept it, my mind was stubborn and did not want to willfully do that. But by remembering the advice of just ‘sit with the pain’ I was able to just look into it without being attached to what the results were or what my feelings toward it was. This detachment I think allowed the energy shift to happen. It allowed the judgmental ego-self to stop forming opinions on the process and open myself up to acceptance of the pain as it was.