Body Movements in Meditation

I've had a lot of questions about spontaneous body movements in meditation. People report shaking, the head moving, twitches and all sorts of other body movements. When these movements occur, it can be surprising and sometimes people feel concerned about them or want to know if they have any significance. Regardless of what kind of movements you have and what you are experiencing before they happen and as they are occurring, body movements that come up in meditation are the primarily the result of two things: 1) release of tension from the deep relaxation of meditation; and 2) increased flow of energy in your body's "energy field" (or "aura") which starts to move "blocks". In a sense these could be thought of as the same thing, but each explanation has a value in understanding your experience.

1. Release of tension. This is quite obvious. When the body becomes deeply relaxed in meditation, muscles start to relax. Usually this would be felt as twitches and small movements such as your thumb jumping, but it could also be a larger movement -- your head might suddenly turn.
2. Increased flow of energy in the energy field moving through blocks. This is a more esoteric explanation, but you may actually feel the movement as being associated with "energy" (see some of the comments on the Sensing Energy during Meditation post). In this case, deep meditation is opening up some energy pathways and as more energy starts to flow it can hit up against blocks. As the energy dissolves the blocks, the body may spontaneously shake or twist and turn since everything that happens in our energy field is reflected in the body. (Read about the Human Energy Field.)

The question then is, what should I do about this? There's really nothing you need to do unless the movements are too strong or disturbing you in some way. If that's the case, you can simply open your eyes. This will help you to come out of the deep state you are in and the movements will naturally subside. Take it easy and come out of meditation slowly.

If the movements don't disturb you, just let them happen without trying to manipulate them in any way. It's better to not get involved with the movements, trying to make them happen or continue. Just let them happen spontaneously on their own, not resisting them and not getting involved with them. In a sense, you can treat them like thoughts in meditation.

Note: Of course, if you have unusual movements happening outside of meditation or have any other symptoms of concern, it's always advisable to consult a health care provider to make sure there isn't a medical condition you need to tend to.

Related post: Sensing Energy during Meditation

New Online Meditation Course

Many people are happily meditating with our podcast and we hear from so many of you about the wonderful changes happening in your lives. It's amazing that the experience of meditation gets transmitted in this way on the web and we've been inspired to find more ways to bring meditation into peoples' lives.

We've created on Online Meditation Course for those who want a simple, yet effective way to learn meditation online. Not everyone can find or attend a local meditation course. Not everyone gets the hoped for results simply listening to our podcasts and reading the information on our website. Some want more structure and support. So we created a course that distills the essence of the principles of our meditations. Through a systematic sequence of meditations and written materials people can master the basics of meditation. We'll also be offering very personal support through four email consultations which are part of the course. It's exciting to see how our work evolves as we connect with people through the internet. Everything that we learned in teaching people in person is reflected in the course.

The course isn't just for beginners. It's also for anyone who is already meditating but not satisfied with their practice. Even those who are enjoying our podcasts could benefit from the course if they want to be able to meditate on their own, as could anyone who has struggled in any way with our meditations. 

We know some of you will have questions about the course. Please feel free to ask, either in the comments on this post or on our Online Meditation Course page.

Grief Guided Meditation Podcast

We've had more requests for a guided meditation for grief than anything else. It's taken me some time to come up with something, even though I've been a grief counselor and experienced a lot of grief in my life. This latest podcast episode, Guided Meditation for Grief, is what came up as I reflected on my own experiences with loss. Often the people asking for a grief meditation have lost a loved one through death, but grief is a reaction to many types of losses, large and small. Moving, losing a job or home, divorce, a change in roles -- all sorts of changes can cause us to feel grief. Sometimes we even grieve lost opportunities or what "might have been".

Losing a loved one is one of the most painful things we can ever experience. Not only is it painful, it can shake our whole world. The lyrics to Paul Simon's Graceland say it so well:

"losing love is like a window into my heart; Everybody sees you're blow apart..."

It can feel like your life is blown apart and your heart is going to break. Grief can bring up all sorts of emotions, not just profound sadness but anger, guilt and more. Depending on how the loss happened, it can make you question all sorts of things. You can feel confused. It can be hard to concentrate. As much as we would rather not have to experience all these things, however, the only way through grief is to experience these things all the way.

Sometimes people feel alone in their grief making it even more difficult. Some cultures and traditions support the process of mourning better than others. Often here in the US, people are expected to "move on" way before they're ready. People are unsure of what to do and say around a grieving person and may even withdraw. And yet although no one can grieve for us, it can really help to feel others supporting us as we grieve. When my mother died, I went to a hospice support group and it made a world of difference for me.

This podcast episode is designed to help you feel supported in your loss. We hope it helps!

(You can read about grief on our companion website, Heart of Healing.)

Don't Believe Anything You Think (in Meditation)

When I first read the book title "Don't Believe Everything You Think", I found myself laughing. It created a delightful, meditative moment. I was driving and saw it on a bumper sticker. Probably I was caught up in some story about this or that going on in my mind, and seeing the bumper sticker brought a sudden, refreshing perspective. Given the shift those words created, I wondered how they applied to meditation. With a change in just one word, I realized they apply perfectly to meditation, at least the style of meditation you'll hear on our podcast. When it comes what we think in meditation, don't believe anything! The way I've always put it is "let thoughts be a meaningless activity in the mind". "Don't believe anything you think" works just as well!

Meditation gives the mind the opportunity to disengage, like shifting gears into neutral. Meaning keeps the mind engaged. Believing what we are thinking and that it is important keeps us involved in thoughts. Of course that's going to happen in meditation. It's the habit of the mind. But in meditation we have the opportunity to let that go. Learning to let go of thoughts -- to not resist them and to not purposefully follow them -- is the art of meditation.

Years ago I did the Course in Miracles (the year of daily exercises in the Workbook). Although it doesn't say it's a course in meditation, doing the workbook exercises is a way to learn to meditate. What's interesting is that the very first lesson has to do with letting go of meaning. "Nothing I see means anything" is the title of Lesson One. At the time I did the lesson, it made absolutely no sense to me. I couldn't imagine what the exercise would achieve. Only recently did it occur to me that it related to the ability to allow the mind to disengage from its usual habits and surface appearances. And only now as I am writing this do I see how it was the first step in what amounted to a course in meditation.

So if you find yourself struggling with thoughts in meditation, just remember -- don't believe anything you think!

On Meditation and Philosophy

Discovering that today is World Philosophy Day inspired me to reflect on the relationship of meditation and philosophy. It all started when Richard showed me this BBC article by David Bain -- Four Philosophical Questions to Make Your Brain Hurt. I'm not particularly fond of having my brain hurt, but I am fond of philosophy. This fondness isn't about reading philosophy, as that can make my brain hurt. It is more about a natural tendency I have to question things. It's about having a mind that's always exploring the meaning and nature of things. When I was in college, I took a vocational aptitude test. The idea was to help discover what I would be good at as a profession. When I met with my advisor to learn the results of the test, he scratched his head and looked perplexed. Poring over the results, he said that it appeared that my abilities would make me well suited to be an "armchair philosopher". Since this didn't offer a path to earning income, he scrambled around for another option -- sales. Well, selling things has never been my forte, and I certainly haven't earned a living through philosophizing.

What's interesting to me is that my income is currently related to lifelong involvement with meditation. Thinking about it today, I see that meditation and philosophy go hand in hand for me. Both involve investigating the nature of things, the nature of oneself. With philosophy the exploration is intellectual, and with meditation it is experiential. And yet, there is a point where intellectual and experiential exploration meet and can't really be separated out.

Perhaps this is most clearly seen in the case of inquiry as a path of spiritual realization. The great sage Ramana Maharishi indicated that asking oneself the question "who I am" could ultimately result in realization of the truth of ones existence. Although the question can be answered intellectually with descriptions such as "I am a woman", "I am a doctor" and so on, taken to its final conclusion this question reveals ones nature as it exists beyond such descriptive terms. 

Meditation involves a shift of attention that takes the mind out of its usual ways of perceiving and experiencing. It seems that asking philosophical questions has the potential to do the same thing.

I can't speak as a professional philosopher, but as an armchair philosopher I can say that asking questions about things we don't usually question has been part of my path with meditation. It jogs the mind from its usual assumptions and opens the perception to seeing things differently. At times, it's a great recreation for my mind. It loosens the grip of tightly held assumptions and in that sense is mind-expanding in much the same way that meditation is.

In working on this post on and off throughout the day, I ended up Googling "value of philosophy" and found the following from Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. It was fascinating to find in the last sentences a description which could just as easily have been about meditation (in bold type):

"Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good."