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DavidM comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong
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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.