Intense experience

So yesterday I had an intense meditative experience. There's a tendency to not share such deep personal experiences except with your close friends. I was with Shams, and he supported me through it. He could see I was crying a lot if he opened his eyes, and he meditated an extra 5 minutes with me. 

I have felt an overwhelming crush of love that just erased all the quibbling. I have felt one with the wind in the tree, the three and all the elements. I consider that a kensho experience.

The language I use is deep meditative experience, I don't make claims of attainment, just deep meditative experiences. 

I've had to wait a day to find all the words about it, and I have to say I don't think there are enough words to describe it. I'm a firm believer in speaking about unformulated experience.

So to outline my practice:

I have a 12 day cycle where I do the 4 brahma viharas. One day of metta (universal lovingkindness), karuna (compassion), Mudita (sympathetic joy) and upeksha (equanimity). My second and third meditations are just sitting or pure awareness. 

Then I do anapanasati with the full 16 stages. Two stages of tuning into the breath, then breath plus body, relaxing body, listen for rapture, happiness, feelings and perceptions, relaxing feelings, mind, gladdening the mind, steadying the mind, liberating the mind, impermanence, disentangling, cessation of suffering and relinquishing samsara. If I do 64 minutes, that's 4 minutes per stage. 

Sometimes I do a free flowing and just do them till I stop somehow and then change. I focus on ones struggle with, like I'm not sure what I'm doing when I liberate myself, but I learn more and more how to somehow work towards things. At Shams' suggestion I focused on restlessness the other day. Meditating for 2 hours, it's harder for me to tell myself I have to relax and settle down now, there's plenty of time. 

I do that for 4 days, and then the last 4 days are spiritual death and rebirth. I do 2 days of 6 element meditation where I dismantle myself. I used to freak out a little bit with that one, but if I do, I just shift into building myself up as the Buddha. Two days I do Buddhanasati, which is mindfulness of the Buddha. I chant the mantra 108 times in my head, and try to visualize the Buddha. I imagine I approach him and ask permission to sit with him and join him on the path. I imagine his warmth and permission, and the influence of meditating next to him.

Yesterday I was just chanting silently in my head, Oṃ muni muni mahāmuni śākyamuni svāhā for 32 minutes, and I felt energy building up in me. Then I imagined the Buddha inviting me to meditate with him, giving me permission to join him on the path. And I just felt so much energy. I was crying a lot. Sometimes I hyperventilate when I feel trapped not moving when I have so much energy, a sort of panic attack, but it's just me feeling good.

Many times, I've felt piti just downshift into sukha. Sukha has a calm feeling to it, it's a big sky mind time often for me, not a lot of thoughts. I can't really control the downshift, but there were times when I would invite it, and it seemed to happen and there was a downshift to more calm happiness. I invited it to resolve into sukha but it didn't, and I've felt it after I settled, today.

Sometimes I suggest to go down the chakras, lower down the head and into the throat and chest. It stayed up in the head.

Sometimes when I have energy like this I radiate metta, karuna, mudita and upkesha with my infinite mind into infinite space. I wasn't sure if that was really doing it, but I looked up the other two arupa dhyanas, and they were sunyata and neither perception nor non-perception, but I wasn't sure how to radiate those things. 

When I looked at the Buddha I was ashamed for some of the negative things I'd done and I cried and cried and cried. 

Shams said he'd done mushroom a few times and that twice he's had similar experience, where there's a catharsis of sorts. 

All day I felt oddly positive and focused. I went to the circus with my daughter and a birthday party. It was pretty intense. Other parents were a little cranky, but I was oddly positive. 

I meditated again, hoping to maybe slip into that mode and learn to control it more, but I couldn't. 

Today I tried to get there too, but I couldn't. I just felt the sukha today, I felt really happy, but simple and calm. My phone died, and the usual castigating myself for not checking was further in the background. I really just want to make sure I don't make Shams meditate for more than an hour, so I got up and charged my phone. I used to get really upset when I broke meditation position, but I meditate so much now, I'm almost too lenient about breaking position. In fact that was an insight I had about my restlessness, I actually need to try harder to focus on the object or lack of object and hold myself as still as possible for the whole thing. I think a lull and breaks in practice helped me to get to this place. I may just have reached a summit like you do sometimes hiking, and then you realize there are other peaks and high points further on, there's more hiking to do. 

I almost feel like it was a manic episode but there were no drug or sexual images, if anything it was more filled with apatrapia and hri associating with the merger with the Buddha.