Meditation often has a reputation for being peaceful bliss, but it can also bring up some unusual experiences as the body and mind are finally able to digest and process things that have been buried. Among these experiences can be:
* Memory flooding
* Exaggerated emotions that don’t have an obvious explanation
* Compulsive sleepiness that doesn’t have an obvious explanation
* Racing energy, fidgetiness, restless agitation, a feeling like one is going to burst, “nothing actually hurts but I can’t stand this one second longer”
* Strange physical experiences like vibrations and tingles or flashes of hot or cold
* Dream-like visions that seem deep and compelling
* “Seeing” swirls of colors
* Involuntary shaking and twitches
* “Proprioceptive hallucinations” – that is to say, feeling like our body is one inch tall or our neck is three feet long, like our torso is turned around or our hands are upside down from what they actually are, like we are floating in air, etc.
Although they can sometimes be disconcerting, most of the time, such “symptoms” are normal, harmless, and fine. In fact, they can be seen as a positive sign of progress; one can take on the interpretation that they are caused by “impurities burning off”. For example, if at some point in our life we had a difficult emotion that we didn’t fully feel and work through and instead tightened up our body to resist feeling, then as our body relaxes and opens years later, we can have a strange experience as that emotion finally was a chance to work its way through and resolve itself. The strange experiences listed above can happen as a sign that other ancient unfinished tension in the body and mind is finally being released.
So, the meditation instruction for such experiences almost always is to just simply relax and ride it though. One of my teachers used to say that our job as meditators is to “tolerate the intolerability of being human”, and I would add to that, that we are aiming to get comfortable with some of the weirder sides of being human. It is all part of the process of how meditation helps us to be freer, more integrated, and happier people.
People who meditate for years often find that they had more strange experiences like these during the first thousand hours of their meditation career than they had after that. And people sometimes have similar unusual experiences when opening their bodies, emotions, minds, and souls using other forms of growth, like yoga and stretching, psychotherapy and other psychological growth work, and even when fasting and dieting.
(If however you feel physical pain or emotional destabilization that sticks with you more than say an hour after your meditation ends, then that can be a sign of concern. In such situations, it can be helpful to talk to a meditation teacher or yoga teacher about your meditation posture, or a meditation teacher and/or psychotherapist about meditation and your mental health.)