What Happens In Meditation?

Question: I started meditating sun on my heart 3 months ago and having upper body and head movements. However, sometimes I become confused and have different mind states. I also had experiences of weightlessness. I am slightly scared. What should I do?

Jay: I have heard many people talk about strange feelings in the body from meditating, as well as strange or unusual states of mind. People often say they are scared or want to know what to do about it. Sometimes people are also quite excited about these states at the same time as being scared. Sometimes people are just happy to tell them to someone who will understand and not think they are crazy!

When I hear from people, I’m always interested to find out what your motivation is for meditating. What is it that moves you to sit still? What is it in your life or in yourself that moves you to do something at all? If it is not very clear what moves you, it is a great question to ask when you sit down to meditate. You can raise this question and then just simply sit and observe what it is that move you right now.

For some reason I am thinking of a person who wants to look in the mirror to see who they are. So the person draws a picture of a beautiful, warm sun on the mirror and then looks at it. The next day the person draws a picture of a mountain on the mirror and looks at it. The next day it is a picture of a saint, and so on. How can we see ourselves if we are always putting pictures onto our mirror? To know myself it is better to not add any new pictures. Just sit quietly and allow whatever pictures are happening to come and go, without adding to them. And yet wondering what am I other than these pictures.

There may be states of mind or states of body, unusual feelings or strange emotions. These all come into being and change and disappear, on their own, if we don’t try to control them. Can all of this be simply see as it goes on? Usually we don’t see this – the actual life that is going on in us – because our attention is all in trying to control what we are. So naturally after a whole day of trying to control ourselves, we feel that somehow something is missing, disconnected, separate. It is not easy to simply be in touch without trying to change things. Fears may come up, or restlessness, or boredom, or the brain may just retreat into fantasies. But if there is interest to know myself, then all of these things can be seen.