Hello Anthem,
I'm glad I checked 'recent posts' because I missed this somehow on my regular sweep of the new posts with pink folders....
Anthem said:
Irritability for me instead of prana-burn suggests overloading the meditation end of things.
The situation is similar with me. I've never gotten prana burn actually....
For me, irritability and, strangely perhaps, what I might call a 'greedy mood' in which I want everything to be 'just so', and get unhappy (and even depressed) if it is not, is, I have discovered after years, a symptom of overdoing it on the meditation side.
This certainly can happen with me even with the regular 20 minutes twice per day. I've always been blessed with 'deep' meditations, and it seems that this can be too much at times. And it can certainly creep up without any change in your practice. I think it is just a reflection of 'going deeper' and its happening too fast without its being 'integrated' in time. It's probably quite rare though for 20 minutes to be too much, or else it would probably be better known.
I had trouble with this for years. I may have actually over-meditated for many years. I never really got any info from the TM people that this happens even within the 20-minute twice per day regime, but they probably simply did not know.... The information may just not have been 'out there', which is why this public-forum self-pacing system is so promising, because it brings up new information.
What works for me is cutting down the meditation time considerably, and bringing the 'coming-out-of-meditation' time up.
Does your breath slow considerably from the meditation? If it does, you might consider letting the coming-out time be long enough so that your breath certainly returns to normal, and even becomes 'eager'.
So, for example, 10 minutes 'in' (meditating) followed by a full five minutes 'out' ( sitting in silence without attending the mantra) might be appropriate if your situation is similar to mine. Watch your breath at the end of that five minutes. If it is normal, that is a good sign. If your breath shows signs of being unusually slow/shallow at getting-up time, that is a sign that you need more coming-out time.
In my more extreme cases I have changed for some time to five minutes in, five minutes out.
If you have any comments or results on this, I'd be happy to hear them because I'd like to know if this is 'just me' or it is a thing in general to watch out for.
Regards,
-D