Good morning! What a beautiful day. Waking up looking at my son’s face, the birds just warming up.
I had an Arising & Passing event in a dream last night. My body was filled with electricity and light, similar to the ‘reset’ I had on the 20250710 when my brain was formatted wholesale.
This one was smaller scale but I came out of it knowing what had happened and recognising it as catharsis for the unconscious mind. This is a very good thing; it shows me that the process is replicable without drugs.
As an update on my practice: I began my training plan about 10 days ago. I have been using more intensive meditations where necessary but found that my dvar levelled out pretty quickly so I have been able to do ‘real’ sitting meditation twice daily without struggle. This means I’ve been casually going deep, but it’s also been effortless, probably because of [faith] that it works.
Twice weekly I have been doing a ‘turbo’ session where I ride my bike for 40-60 minutes, solid zone 2 and meditative focus up the local mountain, and then sit and meditate for 20-30 min. This meditation is very effective since tda is cranked more by exercise than sitting alone, and it has left me with processing headaches a few hours later on more than one occasion. It feels amazing in the moment.
The evening sessions are also kicked up a gear by the humming / chanting in the bath that precedes them. Apparently Theravada buddhism precedes meditation with chanting to ‘purify the mind’, but I had no idea. For me, it’s because chanting produces a faster rise in tda so gives you a nice little on-ramp for your evening session.
Yesterday I sat down in the evening and went into a kinda-jhāna of breathing with the whole body easily, but still had a fair few thoughts jumping around after a busy day. These didn’t fully settle down but I was able to detach from them, like I detached from the sounds of the insects outside.
Around the 20 minute mark I saw an image or two flash up, and then a cascade of images too fast for me to consciously register. They were memories, but it was like someone scrolled through an entire movie in 3 seconds. I then started rocking back and forth with my ship-rock for a few minutes, and opened my eyes, and released.
The rocking was half-intuitive and half-intentional and my aim was to - yep - increased tonic dopamine just a nudge so that whatever happened was bedded in or let go of or whatever.
And I guess it worked. I felt completely reset after the meditation session and had a realisation that the family member who called me unempathetic never actually knew me; I left when they were young and there is likely some kind of personal trauma for them from that event; the absent brother. I realised that they do not know me, and I was never there for them, so their feeling this way is understandable.
And it seems that things released and integrated while I slept.
This whole talk of purification from meditation; I’m starting to see how it works. And I’m starting to see that you don’t really ‘need’ a path moment for the release to happen.
Let’s see what happens from here. The maps have their ideas of how it pans out, but not all teachers report the same. I have my own map, too.
This is really good news for neurodivergent folks who could never meditate though: all you need is an on-ramp and a proper warm-up in the form of something more stimulating, and very quickly you will be able to settle into a sitting meditation for real.
After that, you might even be at an advantage. Hyperfocus + stronger dopaminergic signalling could mean that your propensity toward being traumatised in the first place also gives you a stronger ability to re-write the brain consciously.
Cool stuff.
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