Incredible Pleasure Sensations Whilst Meditating

Hello all, bit of an odd post this.

I have been meditating for years, i took a small break for a whle and came back to it, i think around a year ago. Anyway i tend to meditate daily but the last 4 or 5 times i have encountered something odd, not bad just odd.

I practice three main types of meditation. The first is a mantra meditation, nothing special just the traditional "ooomm" kind. The second is an empty minded meditation where i completely clear my thoughts and the third is the "healing light" meditation where you imagine your body filled with white light.

So the last few times i practiced the empty minded meditation and mantra meditation after maybe 10 minutes of going deeper and deeper into it i experience this incredible sensation. It seems to start around my heart and spreads all over my body. It's almost a warm sensation but at the same time i get a chilll. The sensation is almost like when you have a drunken buzz but with a clear mind and far more intense. It is so intense that my heart quickens and my breath speeds up. It's so nice i try my best to hold onto it as long as possible but it often only lasts 30 seconds or so (although i am getting it to last longer and longer).

I'm not to worried but can anyone explain this, have you experienced it yourself? Thanks for any help and advice.

reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984


This is what it feels like to take MDMA. Must be nice to be able to experience the sensations naturally.....

I think I've been getting something similar to this recently.
Before I go to sleep, I do this deep relaxation thing, and just over the past few weeks, I've occasionally (About three or four times so far) had this kind of wave of pleasure which seems to come from my right hand side and across my body, but as soon as I notice it, it goes away and I can't seem to get it back.
I've tried ignoring it to see if I could make it last longer, but it feels so good, I fail every time and lose it.
And yes, it is a bit like ecstacy (Which incidentally I haven't had for well over ten years now), but sort of softer, cleaner and less physical somehow.
Are we in the same boat here?

Originally posted by skunknuts
This is what it feels like to take MDMA. Must be nice to be able to experience the sensations naturally.....

I haven't ever taken any drugs so i wouldn't know, i think it's a little silly to compare the sensations when neither of us have experienced both

Originally posted by Illegal Alien
I think I've been getting something similar to this recently.
Before I go to sleep, I do this deep relaxation thing, and just over the past few weeks, I've occasionally (About three or four times so far) had this kind of wave of pleasure which seems to come from my right hand side and across my body, but as soon as I notice it, it goes away and I can't seem to get it back.
I've tried ignoring it to see if I could make it last longer, but it feels so good, I fail every time and lose it.
And yes, it is a bit like ecstacy (Which incidentally I haven't had for well over ten years now), but sort of softer, cleaner and less physical somehow.
Are we in the same boat here?

I don't know if we are because again i have never taken any drugs. The sensation you describe sounds similar though and the fact you lose it when you try and hold on to it is very similar. I have spent the last few days trying to grab a hold of it and make it last longer. At the start i could only manage a couple of seconds, after 4 or 5 days i'm up to 30 but i don't really know whats causing it.

I mean i know the science that could possibly cause it, a wave of endorphins or oxytocin or something but i am not sure why it would suddenly start occuring during my meditative practice.

reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984


You did a good job being descriptive, so I felt I could relate to the feeling. Also, there are many people who use MDMA to help w/ meditation/transcendence, etc., so I think there is a reasonableness to comparing our experiences.

reply to post by skunknuts


Well ok fair enough i'll take your word for it Thinking about MDMA, i seem to remember reading that MDMA causes a release of oxytocin which could account in part for the feeling when on the drug and so maybe that is what is happening in my brain when i meditate, a big dose of hormone dumped into my system.

What i cannot figure out though is why now, after years of meditation is it happening. I'm hoping someone can post some similar experience and maybe if they've had it for a while if it leads to anything good or bad.

The classic reference on this sort of thing is William James' Varieties of Religious Experience,

etext.virginia.edu...

and especially his quote from Tennyson (click on the Lecture 16 link, and search for "the two voices" on that page):

[226] The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows: --

"I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance -- this for lack of a better word -- I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words -- where death was an almost laughable impossibility -- the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"

Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition: "By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473.

We also recently had a thread here about Husserl doing much the same thing. You can do a site search for that. Here is a description of Husserl's method:

www.iep.utm.edu...

Once settled in this comfort, the “inquiring back” into consciousness may begin; it is the having of the self as the only object of meditation that makes this a self-meditation. Since what we are after is a self-meditation, the focus of attention is on the self and the radicalization of this meditation consists in one relentlessly pushing back and forcing the self onto itself. This can be done by repeatedly affirming, not merely saying, “I am” to oneself while trying to experience or “catch” the “I” in the present instead of remembering it. In the attempt to experience the “I” in the present, one will be forced to feel the I-ness of it; this is why Fink says the performance of the technique encompasses the “entire man” and speaks of the “pathos of the one who is philosophizing.”

with apparently similarly mind-altering effects as those reported by Tennyson.

Apart from those who successfully court the experience, it happens spontaneously, too. The Gallup organization has asked a poll question about religious and spiritual peak experiences every few years for several decades, in both the US and the UK. You can search the details, but based on the results, a reasonable estimate of prevalence is about one quarter of the adult population having had at least one.

As to the qualia of the spontaneous variety, I like this description:

www.globalfamily.net...

(at least I like the description of the experience itself; the author's interpretations of the experience, which form the bulk of the article, are rambling which doesn't interest me - except in discussions where the topic is the variety of interpretations that people have of what are, in all likelihood, very similar experiences in any objective sense.)

I've had the spontaneous variety myself, and have from time to time recovered the experience in meditation, although it is not a consistent goal of my meditation. And yes, there is a curious openness in the chest sometimes.

Since it seems clear that having this kind of experience is possible, and that doing so is both learnable and teachable, it is unsurprising that you would have a trajectory of improving performance.

Pursuing these effects by ingesting neurotoxins seems silly to me. You need a faucet, not a firehouse, to get anything out of this. Or, another image I especially like, from Joseph Campbell, you want to swim in this ocean, not drown in it.

reply to post by eight bits


I am pretty certain i can explain the reasons for the sensation in regards to brain chemistry. I only say that because it appears the sensations i describe are similar to what others experience when using MDMA. After someone mentioned that here i went searching around the net and the similarities in description are striking. So yeah the brain chemistry seems pretty solid.

However i just can't figure out why now, after years of meditation. I have done a couple of hours at a time every now and then (very rarely) and still not experienced this. So what fascinates me is the idea that maybe after years of meditation something has changed in my brain, hopefully a positive change

I know a few years back brain scans were done on people who meditate and they found they are less likely to have violent or aggressive thoughts.

Still if anyone has experienced similar things whilst meditating i really am interested to hear from you and to hear what long term effects this can have.