Sense of Self Domain Summary
Given that the sense of self is construed in multiple ways—from fundamental embodied sensorimotor activity to more complex conceptual judgments—various changes in sense of self were differentiated according to data-driven reports and theory-driven perspectives from phenomenology and cognitive science (e.g.,(Gallagher, 2013)).
Changes in the narrative self refer to shifts in how a practitioner conceives of himself or herself over time, often in relation to the identities, worldviews, values, goals or behaviors both within and beyond their Buddhist tradition. Other changes in sense of self occurred at more fundamental levels that had a corresponding impact on cognitive, affective, somatic, or perceptual domains.
For instance, changes in sense of embodiment referred to feeling displaced from one’s ordinary location relative to one’s body schema, and detailed descriptions of this phenomena highlighted corresponding affective and perceptual changes in particular.
The most common change in sense of self reported by practitioners was a change in self-other or self-world boundaries, which took many related forms. Some practitioners reported boundaries dissolving and general permeability with the environment or with other people; others felt like their self had expanded out from their body and merged with the world; still others used the inverse language, reporting that the world had become merged with their sense of self. A range of different affective responses were associated with this change, from neutral curiosity, to bliss and joy, to fear and terror. Loss of sense of ownership was commonly reported in relation to thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. Practitioners also reported a loss of sense of agency—or the loss of a “doer” of actions—in relation to automatic actions such as crying, to habitual actions such as walking, and to typically intentional actions such as speaking. Some practitioners reported even more fundamental changes in their sense of self akin to a loss of the sense of basic self (Parnas et al., 2005) or the minimal self (Cermolacce, Naudin, & Parnas, 2007) such that they felt like they no longer existed at all or that they would disappear or be invisible to others.
Detailed study on meditation-induced changes in sense of self
Abstract:
A change in sense of self is an outcome commonly associated with Buddhist meditation. However, the sense of self is construed in multiple ways, and which changes in self-related processing are expected, intended, or possible through meditation is not well understood. In a qualitative study of meditation-related challenges, six discrete changes in sense of self were reported by Buddhist meditators: change in narrative self, loss of sense of ownership, loss of sense of agency, change in sense of embodiment, change in self-other or self-world boundaries, and loss of sense of basic self. Changes in sense of self could be transient or enduring, positive or distressing, enhancing or impairing. These changes were also given varied appraisals, ranging from insights associated with Buddhist doctrines to psychopathologies such as depersonalization. In the current study of practitioners reporting meditation-related challenges, more global changes in sense of self were associated with higher levels of impairment. These results have implications for both Buddhist meditation as well as mindfulness-based interventions.
“At that retreat and even for years afterward, I think I was dissociating from my body to a certain degree or maybe even a large degree. Even though I was paying close attention to the sensations, I think that maybe I was dissociating in order to observe without reacting. ”
“I was outside of my body, and I couldn’t get back inside. I was about eight to ten inches to the right, and I couldn’t get in. It was like being in a hell realm... What suffered for me was my emotional body. I had two young children. I couldn’t feel anything about them. I couldn’t connect with them. I went through all of the routines, you know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all of that stuff. But there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead. It was really like the living dead. It was like being in the hell realm for a year. ”
Excerpts from
Lindahl, J.L. and Britton, W.B. (2019) “I Have This Feeling of Not Really Being Here”: Buddhist Meditation and Changes in Sense of Self. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26 (7-8), 157-183.
In their own words…
Meditators describe their experiences in the sense of self domain
Change in Narrative Self
The “narrative self” is the most conceptual, autobiographical, and temporally extended dimension of selfhood (Gallagher, 2000). This category was operationalized to capture changes in how a meditation practitioner conceives of himself or herself as a person, or a change in either the content of or their perspective on their story or personal identity. This could include previously implicit aspects of the “story of me” becoming apparent, generally leading to a questioning, abandoning or change in that story. It could also include a disintegration or dissolution of the personality structures that support the “story of me.”
Some practitioners reported changes in how they viewed the relationship between their narrative self and other aspects of their experience:
I remember brushing my teeth [and] cleaning the sink, and then having this feeling: “Oh, I’m cleaning this sink because I think that this is something that is enlightened, or is something a good Buddhist would do.” And then I fixed the rug. And then all day long I saw how all my actions were reinforcing this story that I had told myself, and it was really deflating and unsettling and just made me kind of sad. […] And this story that I was telling myself was the very thing that was preventing me from being with my experience. […] I would build these stories up about what I thought practice was or who I would be when I practiced, but my real life didn’t match that narrative that I had told myself. (#52, Zen M)
However, for some these changes resulted in confusion:
And my sense of self got confused. I questioned a lot about who I thought I was. I didn’t know what the “self” was, anyway. “I don’t even know who I am anyway, so why should I continue to pretend what I think I’m doing…” There was a lot of weird thought processes like that. When I thought about who I was, it was very unclear to me what that means.” (#64, Zen M)
In some cases, the change was described as a complete loss of personal and narrative identity. For the next practitioner, this started during a meditation retreat and persisted into daily life:
But on the inside, I was deeply wounded in the sense of my identity. I felt that I was—my identity was threatened. I would walk, and I would feel that I forgot my past. At some point on the retreat, I literally forgot my name. I was like, “Wait, what is my name again?” Yeah, I totally forgot. […] I would look at other people and interact with people, and they would say regular things like, “Oh, I like that type of ice cream” or “Oh, I like that thing.” And I remember hearing that, and I’m like: “Wait, how do you know that? How do you know what you like and dislike? How do you know who you are?” It was like I couldn’t figure out who I was, what I like, or who I am. I felt like I had no identity. (#87, Goenka F)
And for others the loss of a narrative self and personal identity had further impacts on their motivation and drive:
It basically felt like whatever personality I thought I had before just disintegrated. And it wasn’t an expansive disintegration into unity or bliss or anything like that. It was a disintegration into dust. And I really had the feeling of being in a very, very, very narrow, small, limited psychological space. […]. I didn’t believe in all the things that people do to tell themselves that “something is worth it” or “just be you”—all those positive psychological frameworks that people use to get through life just seemed really unconvincing. […] I came to this conclusion during that time period that personality is just a structure without any real substance to it. And I don’t know if that really solved anything for me or resolved anything for me. […] But I was just convinced that there wasn’t any point in working on this structure. (#71, Theravāda F)
Change in Sense of Embodiment
The sense of an embodied self is construed through various processes of body representation, and these too can be changed or lost (Giummarra et al., 2008; Blanke, 2012). Changes in sense of embodiment include reports of feelings “out-of-body” experiences or feeling “disembodied,” whether generally or at a specific distance and direction from the body. Also included are changes in locatedness within the body schema, such from behind the eyes to the middle of the head or to the heart; generally feeling dissociated from the body or body sensations; being re-located above, behind, to the side, or displaced in some way from the body; or feelings of falling through space or through the ground.
Some changes in sense of embodiment were shifts into the location of self with respect to specific areas of the body schema:
I experienced a kind of enlightenment experience, had a kind of satori experience, where I had an experience of a tremendous reduction in suffering. […] What I experienced was a sensation of my conscious awareness of my body dropping from my head into my heart, and then a sense of being continually present in my heart center. That’s a strange thing to describe; it was very experiential. It was a feeling of my self being in my heart instead of anywhere else. (#58, Tibetan M)
Others found their sense of self re-located beyond the body schema:
I couldn’t really pinpoint where my self was. I remember, at one point, I was eating and the swallowing—and it was like I was just the swallowing. My sense of “I”—that’s what I was. And then, another time, walking in the hall and hearing the heater working, and it was like and that’s where I was. It was a very different kind of experience. (#62, Tibetan F)
Some changes were initially disorienting or disconcerting, but ultimately were presented in relation to Buddhist concepts:
My body was slipping away; my very sense of self was disappearing into a black hole. I had experiences of my body virtually disappearing or dropping through the ground or through the floor—feeling like I was suddenly dropping three or four feet. It would freak me out. And I had an experience like that, went to sleep, but the experience wouldn’t stop. […] And there were other moments where it felt like I was actually, literally coming apart at the seams that night, where, instead of just moving in one direction, I was moving in all directions, as if… I can’t… It’s hard to describe, but it was like something just moving right through the center of myself, as if I was going to come apart. […] And I meditate now, and I have—and, increasingly, my meditation experiences are becoming more and more pleasant, more and more absorptive—just deeper states of no-self, deeper states of my body disappearing. (#11, Theravāda M)
Some practitioners made explicit connections between their changes in sense of embodiment, their approach to meditation practice, and clinical constructs:
At that retreat and even for years afterward, I think I was dissociating from my body to a certain degree or maybe even a large degree. Even though I was paying close attention to the sensations, I think that maybe I was dissociating in order to observe without reacting. (#71, Theravāda F)
Changes in which the sense of self was displaced beyond the body schema could arise as a response to emotional intensity:
Now the problem is what happened later, where we’ll get to, is I experienced these emotions very intensely in my body, and it kicked me out. And the defense mechanism now is this anhedonia, or this nothingness, or this loss of self, or this thing, whereas before it was the thoughts. […] And I read a paper on schizophrenia he [Louis Sass] wrote, and I just saw this paper and thought, “Fuck, I have schizophrenia.” It sounded so like schizophrenia. Like: hyper-reflectivity, hyper-awareness, diminished feeling from inside because all this stuff… It was like I was observing my body from outside, everything felt strange, the whole atmosphere looked different. And then there was also the loss of self that came with it. (#78, Goenka M)
For others, it resulted in difficult periods of blunted affect that endured into daily life:
I was outside of my body, and I couldn’t get back inside. I was about eight to ten inches to the right, and I couldn’t get in. It was like being in a hell realm. My mind functioned okay, not great. But, as I said, I could tell you things. My body was 100 percent fine; it functioned completely well. What suffered for me was my emotional body. I had two young children. I couldn’t feel anything about them. I couldn’t connect with them. I went through all of the routines, you know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all of that stuff. But there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead. It was really like the living dead. It was like being in the hell realm for a year. (#12, Theravāda F)
Change in Self-Other or Self-World Boundaries
One of the ways in which the sense of self is typically construed is through the body’s processes of differentiating self-related percepts from percepts originating in the environment (Christoff et al., 2011). Recent studies have also shown that the sense of boundaries can extend beyond the boundaries of the bodies and includes what is called a “peripersonal space” (Maister et al., 2014). However, the boundaries between self and others or self and world can expand, diminish, or break down entirely. In such instances, practitioners reported feeling like they had spilled out of their ordinary embodiment into the world such that there was no longer “self,” only objects. Or, conversely, others reported feeling as if their sense of self had expanded to include external objects or people.
Some practitioners described a change in sense of boundaries in terms of an expansion of self beyond the body to include objects or people in the environment:
I remember one incident in particular, I think during the first sit, where I realized that my sense of self was extended to my cushion. So sometimes if people even walked close to my cushion, it was as if they were trampling on my self. So I realized the pervasiveness of self. And I don’t know if that’s in any really deep way, but those were the kinds of things that made me feel like I was getting something out of it. (#85, Goenka M)
Other practitioners reported expanded sense of self arising during informal practice:
So, [the retreat] was in the spring and I was doing some raking leaves, and just as I was raking, this really profound feeling of “this is all me” came to me. And so the “this is all me”—what that means is that my identity is literally everything that I could see through my eyes. So, the rake that I was holding in my hands was me. The ground that I was raking was me. The feet that I could see down at the bottom of my body, that was me. The steps up to the residence, that was me. The sky was me. The trees were me. And so, everything was just “me.” And that there wasn’t really anything else. It was all just “me.” […] Those experiences that I related about what I would call kensho experiences, there was no viewer in those—it was just what was there, and there was no viewer observing it. And so I would say that that would also confirm the general theme of Eastern philosophy of no-self. (#49, Zen M)
Some practitioners described a change in sense of boundaries as a lack of separation between their body and people or objects in the environment:
The boundary between me and my environment began to break down. A bird flew in front of me, but it didn’t fly in front of me—it flew through me. I continued to walk. There were some dogs off in the distance about 200 feet, and one of them mounted the other and they were copulating, and I remember feeling a tremendous joy about this—but it was all happening within me, which is very consistent with a satori experience. Now, at the same time, I was manic, so it’s hard for me to be clear on whether the illness was distorting the experience or whether this was genuinely a satori experience, but I had never experienced anything like this in mania before. (#28, Zen M)
Practitioners who experienced a diminished sense of boundaries also reported a concurrent sensitivity to perceptual or emotional stimuli—a permeability that could be enduring and distressing:
Another thing was that I didn’t feel like I had any personal space—like, a sense of a boundary-ness. […] If you came close to me, I’d just feel you in a painful way—it’s like you’re inside of me or something. So if anybody had any feelings or emotions… Of course, I was too whacked out to be able to tell what they were, but I could feel it. So I was very permeable in that way. It was not a pleasant experience, either. (#08, Theravāda, M)
Loss of Sense of Agency
The sense of agency has been described as effectively the sense of ownership pertaining to actions, although some have also argued for a greater separation between the two aspects of sense of self on account of differences in underlying process or mechanism (Gallagher, 2000; Tsakiris et al., 2010). Practitioners in the VCE study who reported a loss of sense of agency described feeling that actions that were typically voluntary now felt involuntary and beyond their control, or reported there being no “doer” or “no one” who decides, controls, or executes actions. A loss of sense of agency also included being concerned with “who” would perform daily actions. Sometimes, a loss of agency was reported in terms of adopting unusual bodily postures involuntarily or the feeling that some other person, power, or force was performing actions through the practitioner’s body.
Some practitioners reported changes of loss of agency over simple, ordinary actions:
I was on this automatic pilot of just being able to go to the bathroom and feed myself—because those things were on this sort of automatic pilot that I was able to keep doing them. But there wasn’t a “me” doing them. (#19, Tibetan F)
As above with the loss of sense of ownership, some practitioners reported a loss of sense of agency that they appraised as an anticipated result of Buddhist meditation practice:
There are experiences that I had in meditation, where I was doing walking meditation and suddenly knew that nobody was walking. That, once the intention arises—however intention arises in the mind for walking to happen—it initiates the walk, one foot initiates the other foot and the next and the next…but there is no one. The body is walking, but no one who owns who is taking a walk. The first time that I realized that, it was not so mind blowing. I thought, “Wow, there’s no one there.” […] I’ve had the realization, and the next moment after that you say, “Hey, I did it! I had the awareness of not-self!” And right back is the sense of self, who is feeling proud of themselves, that they just had that. (#06, Theravāda F)
For some practitioners, these were ongoing changes that endured beyond the practice session:
And for most of the time it now seemed that this “Robert” was kind of doing its own thing with a little sense of control somewhere. So that did some serious damage to the sense of center-point and subject and controller and doer and agent. Not that it wasn’t there, and sometimes it was more strongly there, but it changed my walking around experience into this totally different thing where it really seemed like: “Wow, okay, now I’m starting to really get what no-self is talking about, both in terms of control and in terms of perception.” So, that was very different. (#34, Theravāda M)
Another practitioner found such changes distressing, and recruited neuroscientific language to explain her experience in terms of brain disfunction:
So, cognitively, I could not focus and I could not gain control over my will. That was something that was severely damaging to me because it felt like my mind couldn’t control my body or my will, if that makes sense. […] I remember that vividly. I was climbing up the stairs once, and I just stood there, and I was like: “Why am I climbing up the stairs? Who did that? What sort of motor system triggered this action that was climbing up the stairs?” It felt like there was a huge disconnect between my motor actions and my prefrontal cortex, which was not working. (#87, Goenka F)
When a loss of agency was enduring and associated with unfamiliar movements or behaviors, some practitioners attributed a force, energy, or being as the agent of their actions:
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)
Loss of Sense of Ownership
The narrative self is often contrasted more basic, embodied processes such as the sense of ownership (Gallagher, 2000). Typically, we have (or do not notice not having[1]) the sense that our thoughts, body sensations, emotions, and memories are “ours” or “belong to us.” Practitioners experiencing a loss of sense of ownership described feeling that their body or body parts or thoughts or emotions no longer belong to them. Thoughts, emotions, and body sensations can also be lost to the extent that they are experienced as impersonal, as belonging to no one.
Some changes in ownership were positive and were appraised in relation to key Buddhist doctrinal concepts, such as this example of loss of ownership over thoughts:
Things would arise and there was so much clarity about there being no self, about not being a fixed and abiding self—things would just arise as a part of the experiencing. […] All the way throughout retreat, everything was so amazingly clear that, “Wow! Everything is happening, arising, experiencing, the grounds of experiencing.” […] Whatever thoughts came up or ideas about me or the world, it was just so clear that they weren’t real. They were just thoughts arising in this space; they were conditioned arising, if you like. […] I forget it much more often and I have to bring myself back into connection with it, because the personality views have been so gripping over the last year or two. I would say what was amazing was how ordinary it was, but in quite an extraordinary way. Freeing—that’s the word. I felt so free. And, when I come back to that place, the word I would use is an immense freedom—not bliss, just freedom—freedom from suffering. (#46, Theravāda F)
Other practitioners experienced loss of ownership over their body, and in the following case the experience was explicitly differentiated from Buddhist insights:
Yeah, well I didn’t have a sense of my body belonging to a “me.” There wasn’t a sense of “me” there. I could feel my hand— There was a feeling of a hand, but it didn’t feel like my hand. Yeah, [it] didn’t feel like my hand, my chest, my head. […] There are so many ways to have insight into selflessness where there’s a kind of clarity. This was not that at all. There was no awareness—no meta-awareness—of the process. (#08, Theravada M)
In some reports of loss of ownership, such as this change with respect to emotions, psychopathological appraisals were entertained:
In some ways I felt like I was—what’s that…is it called depersonalization? Yeah, the state in which one’s thoughts and feelings seem unreal or not to belong to oneself. So I felt like I wasn’t connected to what I was feeling. […]. For the previous waves of emotions, when that was happening, I felt I was very aware of the emotion, but I didn’t feel like it was mine, exactly, because it was so strange how it just came about sort of all of its own accord, and it didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t have a story behind it, like, “Oh, I’m angry because blah, blah, blah.” It just felt like anger. And so, in a way, it didn’t feel like mine. (#84, Goenka M)
Loss of Sense of Basic Self
Some have argued that more fundamental to all of the senses of self described above, there is a basic sense of “ipseity,” “feeling of being,” or “for-me-ness” underlying ordinary experience (Sass and Parnas, 2003; Zahavi, 2005; Ratcliffe, 2008). This too can be changed, distorted, or to some extent lost. Changes at this basic level can be very difficult to describe, and can include references to “not being there,” “disappearing,” or ‘not existing.” In contrast to other changes in sense of self, experiences at this level signaled a fundamental change regarding existence or being and were not captured by any of the preceding changes in sense of self.
Some changes at this level emerged from meditating specifically on “no self,” but then continued on into daily life, developing into an agoraphobia that for lasted nine years:
[On that retreat,] all we did was talk about “no self,” and I was quite aware of the fact I was not centered. I kept thinking, “I am not centered.” And I had had some good experiences before and had depth in meditation before that, but it just threw me for a complete loop. I just had no center. I felt like I was not grounded to the actual ground itself. Nothing happened to me on the retreat, but I just felt light-headed, like my head was going someplace else and I wasn’t attached to the ground. I went home—someone dropped me off from school. I had a two-block walk home. Like a blink of an eye, that was the end of the walking—I couldn’t make it home. I just became frozen, paralyzed. I could not take a step, I was so terrified. In that moment I felt like I was not connected to the ground at all. I couldn’t move. Then I became very small in my own being. […] I was gone, I was lost—there was nothing there. I didn’t believe I even had a shadow. I didn’t believe anyone could even really see me. It was terrible. […] The agoraphobia came around as a result of that no self. […] There is something called Zen psychosis, and I would assume that’s what happened to me. But I didn’t know that until after it was over, and I didn’t care. I was too busy trying to get through day-to-day existence. (#14, Theravāda F)
Others had such changes emerge in relation to other practices that were not specifically on the theme of anattā:
And there was still this feeling like I wasn’t there. I kept asking [the teachers], “Tell me what I look I like. Tell me what it’s like to be here with me. Because I don’t even feel like I’m here.” […] And it was difficult for me to talk to them, and I was trying to describe to them, “You know I have this feeling of not really being here. How do I work that into the meditation?” And they kept saying just focus on the sensation. […] I’m kind of wondering which sensation is it that tells me that I don’t really feel like I’m here? I can’t really identify that, right? Maybe, it’s somewhere… When you feel angry, right, there’s a sensation of anger. But there’s no real sensation of not-being-here. […] I was trying to tell them like, “You know, I don’t feel like I’m here. How do I work with that?” And they seemed to say, “Oh, that’s just another impurity.” (#63, Theravāda M
Another practitioner described feeling disoriented on account of a loss in the unity of her experience:
So it’s like my self-other system got really confused. […] I didn’t even know what an individual discrete consciousness was, or a person, but I lost contact with the essence, so it wasn’t like a realization experience—it was just complete delusion. […] So one thing I’ve experienced is where I feel like my consciousness became a kaleidoscope. So I remember when I first came out of retreat, someone would say something, and then it’s like I would experience a million different ripples. It’s almost like you’re looking at a lake and someone’s throwing in lots of pebbles, and it was like I wouldn’t know which thread to follow. So it was like I could become aware of all the different conceptual dimensions, emotional dimensions, spiritual dimensions, energetic dimensions, interpersonal dimensions, and I wouldn’t know where to land. […] We can become aware of those different layers, but there’s usually a unifying principle or like a magnetizing principle or a midline so that we can find our way through. (#76, Tibetan F)