Somatic Domain
The somatic domain included observable changes in bodily functioning or physiological processes. The study documented a large number of physiological changes, many of which were infrequently reported across subjects. Fainting (syncope), gastrointestinal distress and nausea, cardiac irregularity, breathing irregularity, extreme fatigue, headaches and sexuality-related changes were all reported by fewer than 20 participants. A more commonly reported physiological effect was changes in sleep need, amount, or quality, with practitioners tending to report loss of sleep need, decreased sleep amount, or insomnia (see also (Britton, Lindahl, Cahn, Davis, & Goldman, 2014)). Other sleep-related changes included parasomnias such as nightmares and vivid or lucid dreams. Sleep-related changes frequently co-occurred with appetitive changes, especially a decrease in appetite or food intake. Thermal changes included both feeling warmer and colder throughout the body, and more localized sensations of heat and cold.
One principal set of changes in the somatic category included reports of pressure and tension in the body, or sometimes intense pain, which would become more acute or release in the course of contemplative practice.The release of pressure or tension was sometimes associated with positive affect and surges in energy; however, it was also associated with the re-experiencing of traumatic memories and other forms of negative affect.In some cases, the release of tension was associated with reports of electricity-like “voltage” or “currents” of somatic energy [or energy-like somatic experiences] surging through the body. Somatic energy could be under practitioners’ control or beyond their control. This was the most commonly reported experience in the somatic domain and was associated with a wide range of other somatic changes as well as changes in other domains. For instance, when surges in somatic energy were particularly strong, involuntary body movements sometimes followed.
Excerpt from:
In their own words…
Meditators describe their experiences in the somatic domain
Breathing Changes
Ashley
Ashley is a forty-seven-year-old female whose main period of difficulty took place during a six-month solitary retreat in the wilderness. She had already completed multiple shorter retreats, during one of which she completed the preliminary practices. The remote location of her solitary retreat entailed practicing without contact from her teacher for long periods of time. During this retreat, Ashley reports being engaged primarily in various generation stage and completion stage practices. As the retreat progresses, she describes finding the breathing component of gtum mo increasingly difficult to execute, and after a euphoric experience, begins to feel like she is being guided and instructed by a “projected guru.” This “inner guru” becomes “my new teacher who’s replaced [teacher’s name], who’s no longer there for me because he’s inaccessible.” The inner guru gives her a new subtle body yoga practice that like her practice of gtum mo, involved a combination of breathing and visualization. She also abandons her counterbalancing “energy stabilizing practices,” which she said was “a big part of the problem” because she “let the structure [of her retreat] go.” In addition, her sleeping and food intake began to wane, and she became increasingly destabilized. At this point, Ashley describes how her “breath had gotten incredibly sticky […] it was just terrible. Just breathing became terrifying.”
Involuntary Movements
I started to find myself thrust into different yoga poses, some of them which I knew, some of them which I didn’t know. And, in one case in the very beginning—I think it was within the first day or two of this experience—the energy was thrusting my body into a pose that there was no way that my current physical condition could hold. (#30, Theravāda M)
Pain
Simon is a fifty-two-year-old male practitioner who had been practicing in a Tibetan Buddhist tradition for a little more than ten years prior to the interview. He estimated undertaking a cumulative total of approximately two years of solitary or group retreat, comprised of at least one retreat of two months or more and many shorter week-long or weekend retreats annually. During his earlier retreats, he worked on completing the Vajrayāna preliminary practices (sngon ’gro), “doing maybe 300, 400 [prostrations] a day spread out over several sessions.” This led to a range of challenging somatic experiences. Simon describes how at one point it was like someone cut a razor in my chest on both sides. Very, very, very strong and unpleasant. If you think of channels opening and purifications, it’s like that kind of stuff. The same with pains deep inside your bones, pain deep in your joints, muscles, in your organs. [Being] really really sore. Basically feeling after the afternoon and morning session that you’ve been in a boxing match for about ten rounds.
Parasomnias
I started getting these meditative states that were like seeing a curtain of light, so even in a dark room meditating at night there would be a sense of – as if there were lights on in the room, and when I opened my eyes there wouldn’t be, but…there was often a curtain, this internal curtain of light. I began to have very luminous imaginations where…if I pictured something it was as if I was actually there, so when I pulled back a memory or a fantasy of being on a beach my mind became so bright it was as if I was actually there, I could see all the details of all the trees and hear the birds calling and…it was as if I was actually standing at the beach. So this very luminous mind…was coming a lot also when I was sleeping; I was getting incredibly vivid dreams…I would be walking around my cabin, and after ten-fifteen minutes of this I realized I was still dreaming, but it was so incredibly vivid as a first-hand experience. This is all talked about in the developing of concentration.
-- Jared Lindahl, Chris Kaplan, Evan Winget, and Willoughby Britton. 2014. A Phenomenology of Meditation-Induced Light Experiences: Traditional Buddhist and Neurobiological Perspectives. Frontiers in Psychology: Consciousness Research Vol. 4:973: What Can Neuroscience Learn from Contemplative Practices?Religions 8(8), 153
Pressure, Tension / Release of Pressure, Tension
Brandon
Brandon is a thirty-three-year-old male who has completed multiple three-year retreats. Like Ashley, he also engaged in gtum mo and ’phrul ’khor practices during the course of one of his three-year retreats, which he described as “extremely destabilizing for my heart area.” He said that this was “the physical experience of trying to incorporate more energy than you can accommodate comfortably.” He acknowledged that a similar experience started when he was engaged in the sngon ’gro, especially associated with mandala practice, where “the visualization is generally coming from your head and your heart. That’s when I started to realize, or tune into this experience more, it was a pain or tension, constriction. And then guru yoga was the same story.” Adopting different postures or lying down and trying to “simply breathe with my heart” would mitigate the pains and pressure, but he admits that “after that, it was always there.”
Brandon went on to connect his experiences with Tantric theories of the subtle body and its system of channels.
Before I even learned about that, I had a very distinct feeling of a line of pain that would go from my neck on my right side all the way down into my pelvis and then sometimes into my leg. Once we actually learned to generate those [channels] intentionally, it intensified. And that was [during] deity practice, an intensive practice of visualizing mantra garlands moving through the channels of the body in order to purify them. And [during] that practice in particular—again a lot of heart pain—but that channel in particular flaring up and being extremely sensitive.
He further interpreted experiences of pain, tension, heat, or cold as “constrictions or obscurations” where “the flows of rlung, or wind, through the subtle body have been constricted.” Practices like ’phrul ’khor or the mantra garland visualization intentionally circulate wind through the channels, but when a channel is obscured “it squeaks, and that squeak is an emotion or a conception in the mind.” In retrospect, Brandon believes that his practice approach “should be more gentle, more allowing things to release rather than pumping energy through it.”
Christopher
The last report in this section comes from Christopher, a fifty-six-year-old male, who has also completed a three-year retreat. He also describes the process of purifying the subtle body through practices like ’phrul ’khor and gtum mo, which he calls “the X-rated practices where you are working very directly with the thermonuclear energy of the body, and these practices are designed to go in there and quite physically and quite forcefully break loose these knots.” For Christopher, the “subconscious mind [is] actually embedded and embodied in your subtle body,” and the “knots” in the subtle body arethe places where we say “no” to experience; they’re the places where we reject experience. When we reject experience, it gets lodged into our body-mind matrix, and meditation and these practices are designed to de-repress those—they’re designed to break those things loose. You know, you get the shit blessed out of you. So these knots come loose… It’s almost as if you’re given a second chance to purify this experience by relating to it with equanimity, which is the fundamental curative agent.
Energy-Like Somatic Experiences
Ashley
When Ashley’s teacher finally returns to her retreat environment and meets with her, he “got me doing some basic physical practices to balance my energy, got me eating. He said the traditional Tibetan remedies were to drink beer, have sex and eat meat. I don’t think I had access to any of those.” This suggests her teacher identified her difficulties as symptoms of rlung imbalance as these dietary and behavioral remedies are often prescribed by practitioners of Tibetan medicine. Within a few days, though, Ashley started “to feel energy running out of my body.” She describes how she and others could feel a “downward rush or energy” by placing a hand on her belly or between her legs. She said, “it just felt like I was bleeding to death.” To halt the otherwise ceaseless draining of energy, she would have to twist her body from side to side while walking or sitting, and she would also have to “sleep twisted at night.” Her teacher decides to pull her from the retreat, and after re-stabilizing her sleep and diet and a few sessions of acupuncture and energy healing, Ashley’s “draining” subsided and never resumed.
Simon
Simon goes on to describe how he also had some “initially very disconcerting physical sensations of tingling, flows of energy or heat, vibrations. […] It really feels like if you put your hand in front of the exhaust when the car engine is running, it’s a bit like that sometimes.” Since 2003, he describes how he now has “tensions and movements of energy, heat, and pressure in different places, particularly in my neck. It wakes me up at night quite a lot.” Simon compares his experiences to what “in Tibetan they call rlung,” and this is the main framework he draws upon in interpreting these experiences. He comments on how initially “disconcerting” it was not understanding these changes because “you start feeling things in your body that you haven’t experienced before and you’re wondering what the hell is it, and is this supposed to be healthy or is this a problem?” Although the pressure, heat, and energy are now “a daily reality” in which “those kinds of things are going on the whole time,” Simon manages his rlung symptoms by doing “certain exercises the whole day to keep it flowing and keep it balanced.”
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