Maddie

Naturally when this is occurring I drink more fluids.

To a point yes, but when it interferes with being functional in life then that is too much.

It's interesting that you mention this as another thing that happens when I meditate is I have to urinate much more.

Yes I have considered that but I don't think meditation is helpful if it turns one into a crazy person.

Yes, I found that early on with breath meditation the mind would be very busy. As I continued over time it would gradually get quieter and quieter like a spinning wheel slowly losing momentum. Making the mind be quiet cannot be done with the will, as to do so is an act of the will.

Yes I feel like my recent accidental meditation and ensuring side effects were a wake-up call. I ordered a whole new set of herbs to deal with this and in the mean time have been doing Acupuncture. In TCM this is called Phlegm affecting the mind.

Something else I just remembered is now that it's been a couple days and I'm not feeling actively anxious anymore, I feel this odd brain fog and heavy headed.

The self inquiry like you said wasn't so much an active thinking thing. It would spontaneously happen sometimes during sometimes after meditation.

After the lockdown last fall since I had much more free time I began to meditate even more than usual and only at home. It got so bad that, that is when I suspected meditation was not good for me and I stopped it

This did not seem to be my experience.

I would meditate anywhere. Home, at work when it was slow, sometimes the park, the play place at McDonald's (jk). Yes I stopped doing it regularly almost a year ago now. Pondering what I am is something I actually do often.

The time and place vary as I would meditate often do many times many places. The places were usually quiet, dim lighting, indoors and the temperature moderate. The type was anapanasati. I would just focus on the breath.

That actually sounds like a pretty good idea. I remember in the past when I tried that for some reason I really hated it though.

It didn't cause me to have high blood pressure, but it did cause me to almost go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

This is the variety that I had the misfortune of falling into. I think the lack of genuine spirituality is due to the fact when you are trying to convert people all your attention is outward as opposed to inward. Ironically when I was doing my research to enable me to better convert Jewish people to Christianity I discovered that the Jewish people had valid reasons for not believing in Christianity, so much so that I left it myself lol.

The same can be said for many books that actually made it into the Bible as well as many of the sutras. It's commonly recognized that many of these were not written by the author that claims authorship. This tends to be more of a problem in the Western mind than in the Eastern mind..

It would seem so. I'm questioning a lot of things lately.

One reason I was asking is because the method of breath meditation I was taught in Buddhism said to focus on the air going in the nose. I would notice when I did this I would eventually feel qi at my third eye area and since I felt something there my attention would go there and then I would feel it more, so on and so forth. So I think I accidently fell into upper dan tien breathing meditation accidently. As I have mentioned in other posts lately I felt like meditation was making me go nuts. This is one reason I was asking.

Do the eight brocades only improve health or can they be used for cultivation? Is there a deeper aspect?

What to do when one feels like that nothing makes sense, and they know nothing? I know this is not the best place to ask, but lets see what happens. But how to know what one does not know but one needs to know?

I remember watching the 60 Minutes documentary about Mt. Athos. At one point they showed this monk in ecstasy while doing the morning chanting.

I find this very interesting and surprising. Perhaps it was due to the low level of Christianity that I left, but after I left the church and began to study teachings from the east I tended to look down on western things like Christianity as being "quaint". So to hear there are systems within this religion that are advanced is quite a revelation. I wonder what the path is and how it works?

Yes kindness and compassion are extremely important to me.

I have been wondering if this would be ok, though I guess I'm a bit hesitant due to the severe reactions I have. I'm also worried that I might accidently fall into meditation doing something similar, as this has happened to me sometimes just sitting and relaxing.

Yes, TCM can deal with trauma. In fact its the primary means that I now use to deal with past trauma in both myself and my patients. I found that due to the fact that I have had a lot of trauma in my life that meditation was much to volatile for me to do as it would dig up to much trauma. This being the case I have now primarily turned to TCM, and it has been much more successful for me than meditation ever was. There are a few TCM terms that can be used to relate to trauma but the main one I would use is "phlegm". The "phlegm" is of the "invisible" variety but make not mistake usually people that have had a lot of trauma, especially childhood trauma have lots of knots of "phlegm" that can be felt under the skin. This idea is to deal with this phlegm naturally and safely.