Meditation Off Limits?

[scout86]

I still think "normal" is highly over rated! :D

 

[DogwoodTree]

I still think "normal" is highly over rated! :D

Our conversations are more interesting, right?

"I got kicked out of meditation class today because I wasn't self-actualizing right. So how was your day?"

 

[Chava]

If the two experiences of meditation and dissociation are so closely related, then how is asking about the distinction between them such a strong indication of mental illness that disqualifies me from attending a meditation class where I didn't cause any sort of disturbance at all, where I asked honest and thoughtful questions afterwards about the experience, and really wanted to learn from her? So then I start questioning if maybe I came across in ways that I'm completely unaware of...which is frightening.

You did have a very good question and it purely sucks that you felt it was brushed off. If the leader has any soul they went home and pondered this because it's a very good question. Maybe she was suggesting with your therapist you uncover what dissociation looks like for you. The meditation person can't really tell you. For you, it sounds internal. Sometimes that is how it is for me, but more often my dissociation is that I have evaporated...I am just not existing. I can turn something lovely like Zen into nihilism. I'm well aware of this challenge for myself.

If you have other options for meditation groups, I'd keep checking this out. It sounds like you had a positive or okay experience and it's worth learning more about meditation and what fits for you. It's important to feel welcomed. For me that makes the biggest difference. I worked with a Buddhist priest who could not necessarily answer all of my questions, and did ask if I was seeing a therapist (because felt there were issues he could not help me sort out, which was true). But he also was nto threatened by my questions and managed to always make me feel welcomed. So within a group, I just need to feel welcomed. On my own, I can't really tolerate meditation but can do the sound meditation thing.

 

[watundah]

I don't like that, I don't like that at all! I'm sorry this happened to you. My T encourages me to do meditation, and I am a big fan of dissociation, so I've traveled on both sides. The difference is, meditation encourages you to be IN your body, focus on your breathing, free your mind, yes, but dissociation is a self-numbing, OUT of body experience as a means to escape. Big difference. I like meditation, when I really get into it it heightens my senses and feels great.

 

[Chava]

The difference is, meditation encourages you to be IN your body, focus on your breathing, free your mind, yes, but dissociation is a self-numbing

I can't focus on breathing but sometimes I can feel myself supported in the posture, how I am holding myself up...and that feels good and embodied. This is a good distinction @watundah .

Is your inner-focus related to thoughts @DogwoodTree ? Like you get disconnected from outer world and lost in there? That might fit well with meditation actually...learning to just watch the inner mind stuff come and go without getting sucked in. If you feel numb or like outside of yourself, the postures (and breathing for many people) can help keep you embodied. For me the tricky part is when I stop thoughts I easily also slip into void and non-existence. Staying focused on my posture would help (or breathing, if I could do it). But if you are going internal and thought-oriented, meditation should work directly with that.

 

[Ronin]

"I got kicked out of meditation class today because I wasn't self-actualizing right.

Forgive me, but this is hilarious. I mean, isn't self actualizing by definition right if it works for the person in question, and there not being any 'objective', one-shoe-fits-all-sizes way to go for it?

So many 'spiritual teachers' gaps in light bringing fields (like loogic) are astounding.

 

[The Albatross]

Personally I am continually confounded by the whole meditation thing. I guess it stems from the efforts I needed to ground and be present in the first place. I tend to ground more than meditate... "IF" (big if) I can go there at all it's more often a word, a phrase or an affirmation of some sort and I latch on to it.

Just not my thing.

 

[scout86]

Our conversations are more interesting, right?

Absolutely! Who wants a boring, predictable existence anyway??? :confused:

 

[barefoot]

Hmm...I'm confused by her response too...

My therapist is a huge advocate of meditation – she does it every day herself and she encouraged me to try it because she thought I'd really like it and benefit from it. And she knows that I dissociate. I think she thought that meditation would help to calm my nervous system down/stimulate the parasympathetic system to reduce my anxiety/hypervigilence etc. And I think she thought it would also help me feel more grounded and present.

From my own experience, I think a simple distinction is: meditation keeps me feeling in my body and dissociation takes me out of my body.

There is some kind of focus and purpose to meditation in a way that there isn't when I dissociate. When I dissociate, I feel like my brain is just sucked out of my head/the room I'm in. And then there's just nothingness, a numbness. Meditation may be quiet, still, calm....the volume in my head dialled right down....but it never feels like I'm just numbing out and "gone".

 

[DharmaGirl]

I do mindfulness meditation. I also have a problem with dissociation, but when I meditate, I am completely aware of my surroundings and I'm grounded and centered. Have you tried googling guided meditation? I found some pretty good ones on youtube. I don't think anyone who is just starting to meditate should sit for an hour. Maybe 5 or 10 minutes, but an hour is a long time for a beginner.

Jack Kornfield, who is a Buddhist Psychologist, said he used to fall asleep during meditation, so his teacher had him meditate on the edge of a well. He didn't fall asleep after that. That was back in the 70s in India though. I wouldn't recommend that, lol.

 

[seedling]

But...it's like that explanation went straight over her head, and she got this psychiatrist-distanced look on her face that I've seen a few times before with people. At which point I start concluding that I'm too screwed up to be around normal people...

I think the explanation did go over her head. Your following conclusion sounds like an easy cognitive distortion to fall in to as she was the teacher and seemed to be the one who should have an answer. Maybe she was challenged by being out of her depth but didn't want to admit it.

My acupuncturist told me one time that sleep served the same function as meditation. This was when I was struggling to sleep at night and then falling asleep when I tried to meditate. He didn't think that was a bad thing. I found it was a pleasant kind of way to go to sleep.

 

[DogwoodTree]

Is your inner-focus related to thoughts @DogwoodTree ? Like you get disconnected from outer world and lost in there?

So, I'm slowly putting together pieces of what meditation, and dissociation, and mindfulness, and presence, and all of this stuff actually means (rather than the normal rhetoric people throw out there because they're just repeating what they've heard and don't actually know from their own experiences). Wish I could sit with a panel made up of my therapists, my yoga instructor, and a couple of other people, and just pick their brains all at one time. Anyway...

Here's how I best know how to describe my experience at this point. There's inner focus, and there's outer focus, but not both at the same time. I can't stay connected with inside experience and connect with outside experience at the same time.

Outer focus tends to be, for the most part, fairly thoughtless. In order to carry on a conversation with someone, I have to disconnect from my inner thought world. A really good conversation connects with an intuitive flow of ideas from the inside, but it can be very difficult to filter or sculpt those ideas at the same time as expressing them. So...a lot of "foot in the mouth" kinds of experiences. But sometimes the ideas coming out are really good, and those "in the flow" conversations, when they happen, are priceless. Most of the time, however, I feel very disconnected from myself when I'm in conversation with someone else. There are times my Ts have said I seemed to be very "present", and yet, those are often times that I've been very disconnected from the inside in order to be present to them. Is that "presence" or "dissociation"?

Inner focus varies a lot. Most of the time, my thoughts are going a thousand miles an hour. It might be about a lot of subjects, but often it's very focused on a single topic. There are also several layers of thought processes going at once, and they don't have to be on the same topic. I might have a verbal layer where I'm saying things to myself (kind of like when you're typing something out and hear the words in your head as you type them), and sometimes I'm having conversations with other people in my head (not like schizophrenic voices...more like avatars of people I respect, where I have conversations with them in order to hash out an idea or a problem, so that I can consider many different perspectives and insights). Simultaneously, I have visual and video thoughts, and kinesthetic-type thoughts (ideas of position and movement), and concept-type thoughts (not quite a clear picture, but more the seed of an idea before it becomes clearer). This past week, one of my Ts said this is actually a form of dissociation, that I have so many layers of thoughts going at once. She said that as I become more integrated, the thoughts will settle more into a single stream. But this is confusing to me. How can a person solve difficult problems if thoughts are simplified to just a single stream? (She said my thoughts would be quieter and more focused, which can still be very effective...something to think about.)

Inner focus can also be more muted, and just sitting with an idea as it slowly manifests itself. Or sometimes inner focus is very chaotic, and I can't get my thoughts pulled together, or manage my energy effectively. Those are times when the anxiety level is out the roof. And sometimes the chaos is centered on very disturbing thoughts and feelings (intrusive memories, flashbacks, deep depression). Sometimes the feelings take over, and there aren't a lot of thoughts, just darkness and despair. And there's a very distinct shifting at times between these inner "atmospheres"...I don't know what to call it. It can be difficult to remember that the other inner states exist, but I can remember things I did during times of being in different states, often in great detail. It just doesn't make sense to me in one state why I behaved a certain way while in a different state. I guess this is dissociation (i.e., fragmentation)?

For the hour yesterday in meditation class, I was attempting to bridge inner and outer focus. So...staying aware of certain aspects of the room around me (completely ignoring the people as much as possible because people are too complex, and just staring at a plain-colored rug on the floor in front of me), and kind of feeling the energy of that one spot in front of me, or of the whole space in the room as a single unit, and where I felt myself kind of "being" in the room, and remembering times I felt similar sensations of presence.

At the same time, I tried to simply be aware of what was inside. Not having active thoughts, and certainly no conversations, but just sort of resting at the thought layer where seeds of ideas exist...not so much pictures as simply the essence of concepts. If a clearer thought or an emotion or words or pictures came up, I kind of just let them float on up, like smoke drifting away from a small fire.

I can feel changes in pressure in my head for the types of thinking that I'm doing. Like...if I'm thinking really hard to figure out a difficult concept at work, I feel a lot of warmth and energy in the front of my head. If I'm thinking more creatively, the energy moves backwards a little, and up high...that kind of thing. So from the very beginning of the session, I felt a lightness and airiness in the front of my head and on top. Any time I started feeling warmth and activity in those areas are the times where I realized I was more aware of whether I was uncomfortable, or what the other people were doing (mostly they were sleeping, lol), or wondering what time it was. So I'd let go of that energy, and settle back into deep space where I don't really notice time passing (even though I usually still have a pretty good idea of how much time has passed while I'm in that space...like, I knew pretty closely when the hour was up). The idea, for me, was to try to be aware of both inside and outside at the same time, with neither one controlling my experience, but neither one detached from my experience. It's like...mindfulness. Notice, but don't hold on to any of it.

For me the tricky part is when I stop thoughts I easily also slip into void and non-existence.

Thought stoppage, for me, tends to create chaos. I do it an awful lot, because I'm afraid to have a thought that "shouldn't" be. It becomes a struggle. For me, it's easier if I let the thoughts exist kind of right in front of me instead of so much inside of me. And observe them. And let them exist separately from me as long as they need to be there. And at some point, I often notice they've just...gone.

But then...it's entirely possible that I'm so familiar with the "void and non-existence" that I don't even realize when I'm there, because there's a connection to that experience of nothingness nearly all the time on some level. It seems there are always significant parts of me that I can't access at the same time as other parts.

Okay, reading back over all of that, it sounds truly bizarre. Maybe I'm just over-thinking all of it...