What a great description, Yogani, beautifully stated, and it perfectly matches what I myself have experienced (actually, it sounds a lot like the frenum snipping instructions for kechari, which seems to be a microcosm of the whole practice!). I definitely have noticed the bore size of my nervous system expand to handle greater flow. And I've just been made to see that it's still not all that wide!
The majority of my recent posts are confessions of bone-headed things I've done, but, hey, if it helps anyone avoid my mistakes, great.
quote:
But we learn quickly after getting ahead of ourselves with practices and having a few unexpected time-delayed sunburns from the inside, yes?
Uh huh. A few factors caused my meditation time to sneak up on me over past two months.
1. My "inner clock" has been telling me my 20 mins are up at the 30 or 40 or 45 min mark
2. I'm getting a lot more silence, and it's painful to leave it
3. At 20 mins, I'm just settling in, and I feel like I'd be doing more harm by wrenching myself out at that point than in slurping over by a few mins.
So I've let it expand. And I feel like crap today. You know that weak, shuddery, whiney, unpleasant feeling of fever? That's me. And I missed a harbinger: a few days ago, I woke up at night feeling vertigo as if I was drunk. I failed to fully register it. You've got to watch for those small preliminary signs, lest you get hit with the wallop of the follow-up sign. I'm in wallop phase right now.
Interestingly, this has little in common with the burnout that comes from energy-based overdoing. I don't feel burnt, I don't feel pains at the base of my skull, I don't feel fuzzy. I feel more flu-ish (but it's not flu). Low strength. I do have headaches, but they're a different sort.
Now my task is to find a way to scale back just enough, but not to over retract and start lapsing again.
I should note that yesterday I did something I'd never before done. I started meditating in a parked car, expecting my friend to arrive in 20 mins. She arrived in 5 mins, just as I was starting to get some serious energy flows. I did a hard cut-off to the meditation. So I'm not sure how much of this effect stems from that, and how much from the overdoing in meditation. But my intuition is that it's both.