Vase Breathing Update

Tuesday 11:30 a.m.
Jack, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

Say there were tubes of various circumferences, one enclosed in the other. So with the vase breathing sometimes you move from one tube to another of a different circumference. You could think of it as planes, like planes on different levels. You move up and down the planes. It's a bit like that, but not like that at all.

When you are in a different zone, the memory of being there before comes back. But sometimes the zone you find yourself in is the same as the zone you remember, but different, as if something has been added. Whatever zones, you are out of your comfort zone! This is new stuff, the same as the old stuff, but different as well. Maybe it's more like spiralling where you go out and out, but sometimes hit the same part of the diagonal.

For only he was passes this way can understand it, and even he cannot describe it. St John of the Cross.

Sometimes you don't have to hold your breath for very long at all for the outbreath to blow you away. It was like that yesterday. I wasn't too clever early on due to the effects of the disease, but I was getting better later.

One of the signs that you're getting on well is that the air is moving evenly up both nostrils. This is not happening when one of your nostrils (or both!) is blocked by the fung disease. So on the first meditation of yesterday evening, I'm trying hard to clear this nostril with lots of energetic alternate nostril breathing, and that doesn't seem to be working very well. So I'm vase breathing using only one nostril and I'm sure that's not to be recommended. Anyway.

In the session from about nine o clock (The Dom Bliss is watching Wired on the computery thing and I'm sitting close by with the noise blockers on, etc.), suddenly the nostrils were both clear. Then I'm giving it laldy with the vase breathing, but noting that I don't have to hold the breath for more than a few seconds to get a very strong response. And everything is feeling a bit different, and I'm wondering if I've ever been in this zone before or not.

Then you feel your body going into a kind of spasm, and you're sort of watching it shuddering as the whatever seems to rattle up your body, or over your body, or through whatever the overcoat is you've got over your body. And you ask yourself: Am I having a fit? This lasts maybe seven seconds. It's years since I got anything like that.

The only instructions I got from the lama were not to force it and if I get too hot, to do lots of prostrations. I'm not getting too hot, but when you get something like those shudders, you think you'd better give it a wee rest.

Of course, this won't make much sense to most folk coming to this bloggy! Dearie me!

Yesterday evening was the first time I'd managed to do any decent meditations since Thursday or Friday. But it had progressed anyway. I was on trains and planes and buses and not able to give it my proper attention, but it seemed to have progressed anyway.

I woke up this morning at half five and still felt crap, so I phoned in sick again.

The tree photies were from yesterday. The buddhas on the carpet reminded the Domestic Bliss of the kiddo lining up her toys in the long ago. The Dom Bliss is at home this morning as well, so I was meditating in the living room.