WOAH, holy crap. Ok, I’m doing a retreat (in my own house, by myself) and i’m only four and a half hours in, but i’m breaking retreat protocol and going on the computer because I have to tell you guys how unexpected what’s happened so far is. Woo, ok, sensations subsiding, getting feeling back in my fingers.
I’ve been meditating for about six months now, starting at 20 minutes a day and gradually moving up to an hour and a half, with no discernible effect other than my butt getting sore. When daniel posted these articles, I was getting so demoralized with my complete lack of results that I was looking into maybe kickstarting things with LSD or something.
Since he really sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and presents the information in a manner that’s refreshingly candid and sassy, I decided to at least TRY doing a retreat, however painful it was. I expected maybe kinda sorta to get palpable results if I could stick with it for a few days.
Instead, here’s what’s happened so far. I actually started last night, but immediately went to bed, and just tried to be mindful in the moments I was awake, haphazardly. Got up, sat for fifteen minutes, nothing, walked for an hour, still absolutely nothing, sat for an hour, and here something at least worth writing down happened, which is that near the end I started getting a bit twitchy.
I’m prone to the occasional twitch or spasm in my daily life, but no more than a few per day. But I was starting to get them a couple of times a minute. I noted them, and eventually time was up, and I felt a little smoother or more clearheaded as I (slowly, mindfully) went downstairs and made myself a protein shake for breakfast, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary.
Then, more walking, still nothing, more sitting, and soon the twitching came back. Then it subsided for a while. Then it came back. Then it got worse. Then it kept getting worse and worse, more and more twitching, jerking, spasming. It seemed to be related to the noting process, if I let my mind wander or concentrated on the breath without noting “in in in in in out out out out out”, the jerking subsided.
Eventually it started to get kind of painful, some of the random unpredictable jerks hurt my neck and whatnot, so experimenting I found that if I breathed faster (and consequently noted faster, “ininininin outoutoutoutout”), the twitching would come even faster, but in smaller, tighter, more controlled jerks, and in fact I was tensing up like crazy. I noticed a kind of buzzy vibration in my teeth and considered “Is that the vibrations he’s talking about? No, i think that’s just something irrelevant. That happens to people now and then”. In retrospect, I’m not sure it does. It wasn’t a REMARKABLE sensation, but I don’t really recall having my teeth buzz normally.
But, the buzzing sensation did not stop in my teeth. Soon I was feeling it in my hands as well, and then spreading from my neck to my face, and eventually all over. Meanwhile my breath had become quite labored and audible and irregular and I’m sure had anyone else been trying to meditate in the same room they would’ve been greatly irritated.
My body felt very much the way your foot does when it falls asleep, though without any accompanying loss of sensation. Also I was getting a headache. And most weirdly of all, my fingers were bending back of their own accord. I found that regardless of how hard I tried, I could not hold my hands in the proper posture, they were all screwed up. Similarly my shoulders were hunched and my face was somewhat puckered, I think.
The vibrating / tingling / asleep body part feeling was mildly unpleasant. I’ve smoked salvia once or twice (actually it’s the only drug i’ve done),and gives a certain prickly sensation all over. This somewhat resembled that as well.
When I had started out this retreat, my feeling was “if i can just get my foot in the door, i’m sure I can make it to the end”, but not really expecting to get my foot in the door. Now that I have, I can see it’s going to be just as difficult taking the next step as well. This was not an easy thing to sit with for even part of an hour, and in fact I gave up and broke my meditation a few seconds before the bell.
The world looked considerably… brighter? More detailed but in its normal textures? definitely different, in a positive way. The same way it looked after the first hour, which I dismissed, except much more so.
I’m surprised this happened so fast, and I’m surprised at how physical it was. What I’ve experienced so far did not feel in any way enlightening, but nor was it my imagination playing tricks on me. This is serious business.
Anyway, I’d better get back to my schedule. After typing all this, I’ll probably have to start all over.
I believe you are describing paraesthesiae from hyperventilation-induced respiratory alkalosis—ie you’re breathing in too much oxygen too quickly and breathing out too much CO2 too quickly, it’s turning your blood alkaline, and that’s screwing with your nervous system.
It’s not uncommon to mistake this for a spiritual result of breathing-related practices—I used to do so myself—but it isn’t, it’s not healthy, and you should try to avoid it by breathing at a more measured rate.
I believe you are describing paraesthesiae from hyperventilation-induced respiratory alkalosis—ie you’re breathing in too much oxygen too quickly and breathing out too much CO2 too quickly, it’s turning your blood alkaline, and that’s screwing with your nervous system.
This is part of the reason I always use focusing on (and minimization of) breathing as part of my meditation. It perhaps distracts a little from some aspects of the meditation but the adaptations sure come in handy when conserving energy while distance running. Cheaper than using expensive equipment to provide a low oxygen environment for training or sleeping.
It also enhances the one element of meditation that I have a particular interest in. Training the stress response. Breathing somewhat slower than feels natural prompts a mild panic response. I keep the standard letting go of active thoughts, being aware of them but not following them running along in the background. Multitasking isn’t exactly in the spirit of meditation but the process is integrated and complimentary enough that it works for me.
The process of letting that go over and over again and maintaining calm focus and balance despite the temptation to succumb to distress is exactly the mental technique I am trying to train myself in. Outside of meditation I do similar training with ice baths and painfully hot but not quite damaging showers. Applying ‘extinction’ to the flight or flight response in cases where stress response does more harm that good.
Neither my personal meditation variant nor the hot and cold stress response play is certainly not something I am recommending (at least without ironing out the details and collecting and confirming the credibility of some research). It’s just my idea of fun.
In regards to buzzing/tingling, I’ve found in tai chi that it can be a prelude to reliably increased sensation that that area of my body. Not a good thing in itself and not essential, but also not a problem.
Aha, I had a nagging feeling there might be something like that going on.
Any idea what the involuntary spasms are about? I did another hour of sitting, and while I didn’t have the tingling and such this time, the spasm came back as strong as ever. In fact, I’m inclined to discontinue things until I can figure out what the deal is with them.
Even laying down, breathing calmly, I’m just twitchy as hell. It stops as soon as I stop meditating.
EDIT: Here’s something from wikipedia.
Cortical reflex myoclonus is thought to be a type of epilepsy that originates in the cerebral cortex—the outer layer, or “gray matter,” of the brain, responsible for much of the information processing that takes place in the brain. In this type of myoclonus, jerks usually involve only a few muscles in one part of the body, but jerks involving many muscles also may occur. Cortical reflex myoclonus can be intensified when patients attempt to move in a certain way or perceive a particular sensation. [italics mine]
This seems like a pretty bizarre explanation, but I have yet to uncover anything better. Wait, that’s probably intended to be read “when patients perceive”, not “when patients attempt to perceive”.
I don’t have any hard knowledge about them but my wild guess is that they’re similar to hypnic jerks, basically your brain noticing it hasn’t heard from your body lately and pinging it to make sure it’s still there. The more serious twitches that get linked to kriyas are probably something more exotic, but what you’re talking about doesn’t sound like that.
If you’re tired, sleep better and they might go away. If not, see if you can make meditation less of a relaxing brink-of-sleep-inducing experience by some of the tips David mentioned above.
The exceptionally large amount of twitching you’re having now could also be linked to the previous hyperventilation. Note the part of the Wikipedia page that says alkalosis can cause “tetany”—that’s involuntary muscle contraction. See if it goes away after a while breathing normally. Note that breathing normally during meditation is hard, at least for me.
Thanks for giving the experiment a try and reporting about your results so far. Please keep us updated.
I have some comments about your reported experience, but since you do seem to be intending this as an experiment, I would rather not say much and let you see for yourself how things turn out.
Despite that, if you feel the pressing need for some kind of feedback, feel free to send me a private message.
Yvain may or may not be right about the etiology of your buzzing sensations (people get these sensations from many causes), but clearly what you’re doing is affecting your breathing, which is the interesting part (you mention having meditated before but never had this experience until using my technique), and typical.
Twitching, inability to hold a posture, feeling like your face or body is contorting is also typical.
It occurs to you that twitching is related to the specific process of noting your breath, which is good. Also typical. Keep observing that. (Cf. my piece of advice in this post about paying attention to new things that seem strange or interesting.)
I’d say you’re in middle or late stage one.
Keep noticing your breath, the interaction between your noting and your weird experiences, and your weird body sensations. Your experience will eventually change as you continue to meditate.
Also, go back to being on retreat, away from the internet.
Ok, I’m back online. I basically flaked out partway through day two, I think I overextended myself.
However, the twitching or convulsing is still here, whenever I meditate, and after conferring with a medical professional, I’m pretty sure it’s a meditation related thing, and not due to hyperventilation or somesuch. In fact, he explicitly said “yeah, that’s from meditation. don’t even try looking for a medical explanation.”
SO, not exactly PLEASANT or ILLUMINATING results, but results nonetheless. I’m going to try going back to an hour or so of daily meditation and see how things develop for a while.
The twitching is typical, like I said. Not in the sense that every time you meditate, from now till forever, you’re going to have it. But it’s common enough in stage 1. There are also related things that can happen in stage 2, but they’re not quite the same. So I’d say that they might be gone by stage 2 and probably will be by stage 3. Your body will get over it eventually. Think of it as your body trying to adapt to doing this new thing; it takes some time to iron the kinks out.
Good luck with your practice! Let us know if anything interesting happens.
I get mindstate-related twitching sometimes, though not to the degree you’re describing, and I’m not entirely confident that it’s the same phenomenon.
In my case, the mindstate-part that correlates with twitching is very subtle. I wouldn’t expect someone who’s unfamiliar with closely observing their own mind to be able to notice it at all.
It does seem to correlate with stress, for me, so if you’ve been pushing yourself a lot in general recently you may want to back off on that for a couple days and try again. You may also want to try emergen-c vitamin supplement or a generic version thereof; a friend of mine suggested that to me when I was dealing with a particularly bad round of stress-related twitchyness, and it helped rather a lot, though that could obviously be psychosomatic.
You may also want to try emergen-c vitamin supplement
Be warned: this supplement can produce nausea. Purely by reading the label! What a load of drivel! The body does not care someone has played around with the ascorbic acid to hook it up with various metal ions. As long as you get them. “32 mineral complexes”? That barely means anything.
That said I would recommend it for the same reason I would recommend taking a multivitamin in general. It seems to have the basics so it’ll do just fine. Supplements trying to emphasise the vitamin C think usually taste good too.
The ‘don’t have a vitamin supplement, just have a balanced diet’ is bunkum. Get into something like this!
I get mindstate-related twitching sometimes, though not to the degree you’re describing, and I’m not entirely confident that it’s the same phenomenon.
In my case, the mindstate-part that correlates with twitching is very subtle. I wouldn’t expect someone who’s unfamiliar with closely observing their own mind to be able to notice it at all.
If anyone wanted to replicate this experience they could do so by withdrawing from Effexor (or, I have heard, Paxil). It is, shall we say, novel.
In my post I described mode one perception as having “various cognitive and emotional content but nothing very extreme aside from physical unpleasantness.” Why do you expect some kind of overt mental alteration?
I already said that twitching is typical.
Edit: Lots of respect for doing a weeklong retreat.
WOAH, holy crap. Ok, I’m doing a retreat (in my own house, by myself) and i’m only four and a half hours in, but i’m breaking retreat protocol and going on the computer because I have to tell you guys how unexpected what’s happened so far is. Woo, ok, sensations subsiding, getting feeling back in my fingers.
I’ve been meditating for about six months now, starting at 20 minutes a day and gradually moving up to an hour and a half, with no discernible effect other than my butt getting sore. When daniel posted these articles, I was getting so demoralized with my complete lack of results that I was looking into maybe kickstarting things with LSD or something.
Since he really sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and presents the information in a manner that’s refreshingly candid and sassy, I decided to at least TRY doing a retreat, however painful it was. I expected maybe kinda sorta to get palpable results if I could stick with it for a few days.
Instead, here’s what’s happened so far. I actually started last night, but immediately went to bed, and just tried to be mindful in the moments I was awake, haphazardly. Got up, sat for fifteen minutes, nothing, walked for an hour, still absolutely nothing, sat for an hour, and here something at least worth writing down happened, which is that near the end I started getting a bit twitchy.
I’m prone to the occasional twitch or spasm in my daily life, but no more than a few per day. But I was starting to get them a couple of times a minute. I noted them, and eventually time was up, and I felt a little smoother or more clearheaded as I (slowly, mindfully) went downstairs and made myself a protein shake for breakfast, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary.
Then, more walking, still nothing, more sitting, and soon the twitching came back. Then it subsided for a while. Then it came back. Then it got worse. Then it kept getting worse and worse, more and more twitching, jerking, spasming. It seemed to be related to the noting process, if I let my mind wander or concentrated on the breath without noting “in in in in in out out out out out”, the jerking subsided.
Eventually it started to get kind of painful, some of the random unpredictable jerks hurt my neck and whatnot, so experimenting I found that if I breathed faster (and consequently noted faster, “ininininin outoutoutoutout”), the twitching would come even faster, but in smaller, tighter, more controlled jerks, and in fact I was tensing up like crazy. I noticed a kind of buzzy vibration in my teeth and considered “Is that the vibrations he’s talking about? No, i think that’s just something irrelevant. That happens to people now and then”. In retrospect, I’m not sure it does. It wasn’t a REMARKABLE sensation, but I don’t really recall having my teeth buzz normally.
But, the buzzing sensation did not stop in my teeth. Soon I was feeling it in my hands as well, and then spreading from my neck to my face, and eventually all over. Meanwhile my breath had become quite labored and audible and irregular and I’m sure had anyone else been trying to meditate in the same room they would’ve been greatly irritated.
My body felt very much the way your foot does when it falls asleep, though without any accompanying loss of sensation. Also I was getting a headache. And most weirdly of all, my fingers were bending back of their own accord. I found that regardless of how hard I tried, I could not hold my hands in the proper posture, they were all screwed up. Similarly my shoulders were hunched and my face was somewhat puckered, I think.
The vibrating / tingling / asleep body part feeling was mildly unpleasant. I’ve smoked salvia once or twice (actually it’s the only drug i’ve done),and gives a certain prickly sensation all over. This somewhat resembled that as well.
When I had started out this retreat, my feeling was “if i can just get my foot in the door, i’m sure I can make it to the end”, but not really expecting to get my foot in the door. Now that I have, I can see it’s going to be just as difficult taking the next step as well. This was not an easy thing to sit with for even part of an hour, and in fact I gave up and broke my meditation a few seconds before the bell.
The world looked considerably… brighter? More detailed but in its normal textures? definitely different, in a positive way. The same way it looked after the first hour, which I dismissed, except much more so.
I’m surprised this happened so fast, and I’m surprised at how physical it was. What I’ve experienced so far did not feel in any way enlightening, but nor was it my imagination playing tricks on me. This is serious business.
Anyway, I’d better get back to my schedule. After typing all this, I’ll probably have to start all over.
I believe you are describing paraesthesiae from hyperventilation-induced respiratory alkalosis—ie you’re breathing in too much oxygen too quickly and breathing out too much CO2 too quickly, it’s turning your blood alkaline, and that’s screwing with your nervous system.
It’s not uncommon to mistake this for a spiritual result of breathing-related practices—I used to do so myself—but it isn’t, it’s not healthy, and you should try to avoid it by breathing at a more measured rate.
This is part of the reason I always use focusing on (and minimization of) breathing as part of my meditation. It perhaps distracts a little from some aspects of the meditation but the adaptations sure come in handy when conserving energy while distance running. Cheaper than using expensive equipment to provide a low oxygen environment for training or sleeping.
It also enhances the one element of meditation that I have a particular interest in. Training the stress response. Breathing somewhat slower than feels natural prompts a mild panic response. I keep the standard letting go of active thoughts, being aware of them but not following them running along in the background. Multitasking isn’t exactly in the spirit of meditation but the process is integrated and complimentary enough that it works for me.
The process of letting that go over and over again and maintaining calm focus and balance despite the temptation to succumb to distress is exactly the mental technique I am trying to train myself in. Outside of meditation I do similar training with ice baths and painfully hot but not quite damaging showers. Applying ‘extinction’ to the flight or flight response in cases where stress response does more harm that good.
Neither my personal meditation variant nor the hot and cold stress response play is certainly not something I am recommending (at least without ironing out the details and collecting and confirming the credibility of some research). It’s just my idea of fun.
In regards to buzzing/tingling, I’ve found in tai chi that it can be a prelude to reliably increased sensation that that area of my body. Not a good thing in itself and not essential, but also not a problem.
Aha, I had a nagging feeling there might be something like that going on.
Any idea what the involuntary spasms are about? I did another hour of sitting, and while I didn’t have the tingling and such this time, the spasm came back as strong as ever. In fact, I’m inclined to discontinue things until I can figure out what the deal is with them.
Even laying down, breathing calmly, I’m just twitchy as hell. It stops as soon as I stop meditating.
EDIT: Here’s something from wikipedia.
Cortical reflex myoclonus is thought to be a type of epilepsy that originates in the cerebral cortex—the outer layer, or “gray matter,” of the brain, responsible for much of the information processing that takes place in the brain. In this type of myoclonus, jerks usually involve only a few muscles in one part of the body, but jerks involving many muscles also may occur. Cortical reflex myoclonus can be intensified when patients attempt to move in a certain way or perceive a particular sensation. [italics mine]
This seems like a pretty bizarre explanation, but I have yet to uncover anything better. Wait, that’s probably intended to be read “when patients perceive”, not “when patients attempt to perceive”.
You’re unlikely to have epilepsy. That’s serious stuff.
Meditators commonly report twitches (here is an annoying New Age page about them, because it was the first one I could find).
I don’t have any hard knowledge about them but my wild guess is that they’re similar to hypnic jerks, basically your brain noticing it hasn’t heard from your body lately and pinging it to make sure it’s still there. The more serious twitches that get linked to kriyas are probably something more exotic, but what you’re talking about doesn’t sound like that.
If you’re tired, sleep better and they might go away. If not, see if you can make meditation less of a relaxing brink-of-sleep-inducing experience by some of the tips David mentioned above.
The exceptionally large amount of twitching you’re having now could also be linked to the previous hyperventilation. Note the part of the Wikipedia page that says alkalosis can cause “tetany”—that’s involuntary muscle contraction. See if it goes away after a while breathing normally. Note that breathing normally during meditation is hard, at least for me.
Thanks for giving the experiment a try and reporting about your results so far. Please keep us updated.
I have some comments about your reported experience, but since you do seem to be intending this as an experiment, I would rather not say much and let you see for yourself how things turn out.
Despite that, if you feel the pressing need for some kind of feedback, feel free to send me a private message.
By the way, my name is David, not Daniel!
You’re a lesswrong commenter. If you aren’t Vladimir then there is a good chance you’re a David!
No, go ahead and say what you think, I’m a bit flummoxed at this point. Too much twitching.
Some very general comments.
Yvain may or may not be right about the etiology of your buzzing sensations (people get these sensations from many causes), but clearly what you’re doing is affecting your breathing, which is the interesting part (you mention having meditated before but never had this experience until using my technique), and typical.
Twitching, inability to hold a posture, feeling like your face or body is contorting is also typical.
It occurs to you that twitching is related to the specific process of noting your breath, which is good. Also typical. Keep observing that. (Cf. my piece of advice in this post about paying attention to new things that seem strange or interesting.)
I’d say you’re in middle or late stage one.
Keep noticing your breath, the interaction between your noting and your weird experiences, and your weird body sensations. Your experience will eventually change as you continue to meditate.
Also, go back to being on retreat, away from the internet.
It seems like an awful LOT of twitching, though. Like, so much so that I ended up hyperventilating to compensate for it. Is this really typical?
I should note that my concentration still isn’t that great, and I haven’t really experienced anything unusual on a mental level.
Please let us know how meditation is going for you once your retreat is over.
Ok, I’m back online. I basically flaked out partway through day two, I think I overextended myself.
However, the twitching or convulsing is still here, whenever I meditate, and after conferring with a medical professional, I’m pretty sure it’s a meditation related thing, and not due to hyperventilation or somesuch. In fact, he explicitly said “yeah, that’s from meditation. don’t even try looking for a medical explanation.”
SO, not exactly PLEASANT or ILLUMINATING results, but results nonetheless. I’m going to try going back to an hour or so of daily meditation and see how things develop for a while.
The twitching is typical, like I said. Not in the sense that every time you meditate, from now till forever, you’re going to have it. But it’s common enough in stage 1. There are also related things that can happen in stage 2, but they’re not quite the same. So I’d say that they might be gone by stage 2 and probably will be by stage 3. Your body will get over it eventually. Think of it as your body trying to adapt to doing this new thing; it takes some time to iron the kinks out.
Good luck with your practice! Let us know if anything interesting happens.
I get mindstate-related twitching sometimes, though not to the degree you’re describing, and I’m not entirely confident that it’s the same phenomenon.
In my case, the mindstate-part that correlates with twitching is very subtle. I wouldn’t expect someone who’s unfamiliar with closely observing their own mind to be able to notice it at all.
It does seem to correlate with stress, for me, so if you’ve been pushing yourself a lot in general recently you may want to back off on that for a couple days and try again. You may also want to try emergen-c vitamin supplement or a generic version thereof; a friend of mine suggested that to me when I was dealing with a particularly bad round of stress-related twitchyness, and it helped rather a lot, though that could obviously be psychosomatic.
Be warned: this supplement can produce nausea. Purely by reading the label! What a load of drivel! The body does not care someone has played around with the ascorbic acid to hook it up with various metal ions. As long as you get them. “32 mineral complexes”? That barely means anything.
That said I would recommend it for the same reason I would recommend taking a multivitamin in general. It seems to have the basics so it’ll do just fine. Supplements trying to emphasise the vitamin C think usually taste good too.
The ‘don’t have a vitamin supplement, just have a balanced diet’ is bunkum. Get into something like this!
If anyone wanted to replicate this experience they could do so by withdrawing from Effexor (or, I have heard, Paxil). It is, shall we say, novel.
In my post I described mode one perception as having “various cognitive and emotional content but nothing very extreme aside from physical unpleasantness.” Why do you expect some kind of overt mental alteration?
I already said that twitching is typical.
Edit: Lots of respect for doing a weeklong retreat.