Blank-Mind
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ok, is it normal after asana/meditation to have a blank-mind? Blank meaning dull. Quite alot in my meditation after i do my best to calm my mind and push away all thoughts it just goes blank lol, although only my normal senses remain. After a few minutes or mainly right after pushing away the thoughts boredom sets in with the blank mind. I guess a good way to explain it would be a state of stale stagnent.
This has been happening recently as i try to push impressions(or excitement of the mind) along with everything else out. Here is my morning habits; i wake, smoke a couple ciggarettes then i head to the bedroom to meditate, as im practicing several minutes of blank mind or no mind, then drawing an influx of light into myself. Could it be that i am too passive? even with the struggle of clearing my mind as a practice for over the past year, mentally it has put me in a state of blank thoughts most of the time; i do not experience emotions normaly as say 5 years ago whe i can say i was 'normal', everything is more mental, as is my experiences are more of a mental checklist like a firewall of which packets and what not to let in or out.
So now after typing this i have come to think that mabye the result of a dull air head is not the best thing and something should be done to correct it.
any ideas?
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@Blythe A. Blanche said
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@Vlad said
"Maybe you should take a little break from meditation."I agree with this. If your emotions are becoming dull, do something to spark them to the fullest extent. Do something random (but safe, of course) that will get you out of your rut.
Obviously the goal of meditation is to settle the mind, but I think it's more important to be able to settle your mind on command, not commit yourself permanently to apathy or a blank mind. The important thing, though, is not to let the excitement overwhelm your ability to meditate either. Honestly, I've been living quite carelessly lately for the thrill of it, and it's been so distracting that until recently I couldn't even push myself to do Resh, which I used to do precisely on time, every time.
But if you can follow this advice carefully, I think you'll find the change you're looking for."
you are exactly right, and i have come to think it has to do with a few repressed emotional situations of mine that I havent been able to get a grip of for a while. All in all I developed anxiety from it. A good metaphor would be i have a buckle full of $h^! on my shoulders and all the while i dont know how to get it off my back and cannot figure out formyself what to do with it while in the mean time the bucket gets heaver as time goes by.
But these kind of things happen when i try to stick with consistent meditation a couple times or once a day.
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I think I know what you're going through - a long period of nearly continual panic/anxiety attacks has left me detached from my emotions and now my mind too, and I'm struggling to get back someplace enjoyable.
I value everything I learned in my quest to the farthest reaches of my mind I could reach given my age and familiarity with myself, but now I'm trying to find a stable ground.
From time to time I attempt to "reverse meditate" and become absolutely aware of everything going on in and around me, to fully insert myself in the situation. I know that's still technically "meditation" but the end result feels like nearly a polar opposite to what I normally think of when I say "I meditated." Maybe something like this would help you?
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Although, sometimes that detachment is just another step along the way. I think discerning between the causes can be done by assessing how well one has done at coming to grips with earlier trauma.
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A blank mind may be good for someone in complete balance, or someone who has gone through some terrible experience, or someone who is going through alot of pressure. I don't think this situation fits my criteria. For me it seems meditation for which there is no readiness.
True, sometimes we're detached, but that comes naturally
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@Alias55A said
"ok, is it normal after asana/meditation to have a blank-mind? Blank meaning dull. Quite alot in my meditation after i do my best to calm my mind and push away all thoughts it just goes blank lol, although only my normal senses remain. After a few minutes or mainly right after pushing away the thoughts boredom sets in with the blank mind. I guess a good way to explain it would be a state of stale stagnent.
This has been happening recently as i try to push impressions(or excitement of the mind) along with everything else out. Here is my morning habits; i wake, smoke a couple ciggarettes then i head to the bedroom to meditate, as im practicing several minutes of blank mind or no mind, then drawing an influx of light into myself. Could it be that i am too passive? even with the struggle of clearing my mind as a practice for over the past year, mentally it has put me in a state of blank thoughts most of the time; i do not experience emotions normaly as say 5 years ago whe i can say i was 'normal', everything is more mental, as is my experiences are more of a mental checklist like a firewall of which packets and what not to let in or out.
So now after typing this i have come to think that mabye the result of a dull air head is not the best thing and something should be done to correct it.
any ideas?"
maybe it would be helpful to assert your exact goal - what is that which you want to accomplish doing this practice.
the term 'meditation' is often misused... someone thinks of only asana when using it, someone of pratjahara, someone considers it to be dyana, etc. I recommend reading from various sources (eg Patanjali, Vivekananda, Ramakrishnan) about those different stages of raja yoga; it helps you develop your own subtle labeling of inner experience and also helps defining/comunicating it to others.
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"maybe it would be helpful to assert your exact goal - what is that which you want to accomplish doing this practice."
good question, and actually my intentions were to use the blank mind meditation to clear my mind of thoughts, and to establish contol over them, to be able to actively choose the visual images that appear in my mind, rather than accepting and dwelling on whatever arises itself from external or unconscious sources.
As for drawing in an influx of light, sometimes i couple it with the middle pillar, to try and get my body light strengthened and its a bumby road
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"good question, and actually my intentions were to use the blank mind meditation to clear my mind of thoughts, and to establish contol over them, to be able to actively choose the visual images that appear in my mind, rather than accepting and dwelling on whatever arises itself from external or unconscious sources. "
well - and this is just a suggestion - after establishing well in asana, do the pratjahara 'exercise'.
when dealing with thoughts and assotiations and other mind-samskaras (vrtti), it's good to at first just watch them, without trying to ''push them away''; and the attitude during this observation is of utter importance: it is useful to observe them as they are - a play of impressions, moving and circulating all the time; to just watch them, without attaching to any of them. (in time, you'll see that they all disappear and that ''there is that which remains''
- which is not a thought or a sequence of thoughts, or an emotion, or thought-emotion complex, etc; that's the part of our conscious that yogis call budhi.)the effect of doing this regularly and continuously should be concentration (dharana). when you can concentrate properly and deeply at will, you can create and reformulate/manipulate with any image in you mind, as long and precise as you wish.
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@danica said
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when dealing with thoughts and assotiations and other mind-samskaras (vrtti), it's good to at first just watch them, without trying to ''push them away''; and the attitude during this observation is of utter importance: it is useful to observe them as they are - a play of impressions, moving and circulating all the time; to just watch them, without attaching to any of them. (in time, you'll see that they all disappear and that ''there is that which remains''
"This sounds nearly word-for-word what I wrote in a guide I typed recently to help my friend who is beginning to delve into meditation.
(The guide was more of a "here's broadly how to do it, and here's things you might see along the way, and here are some issues you may have and my advice on how to tackle them" than anything else.)Edit: "word-for-word" is misleading, what I meant was "it was along a nearly identical train of thought and end conclusion."