I have recently experienced involuntary body vibrations starting from my lower extremities during my anapanasati meditation.
I have to extend my feet from my meditative posture, which I felt disturbing my calmness of my body.
Could you advise on this?
Who can advise on this?
Maybe you understand.
Could you go into just a little bit more detail with what you mean by involuntary body vibrations?
Are you shaking, convulsing in the hips or legs?
Or is it kind of like a, what do you call it, sometimes the leg sort of jolts a little bit at the... I think she means vibrations like, you know, sometimes when you hold a posture and you've got tensions,
And my feet were shaking and vibrating.
Well, I don't know what to say.
The first thing I'd say is not to move straight away, but to acknowledge the vibrations and acknowledge whatever feeling arises, like if you're frustrated or you're worried about the vibrations, and acknowledge the vibrations, not just to move straight away.
Anybody else?
My best girlfriend was sitting here first with Boston, of course, and the teacher said, Are you feeling any kind of sensations?
She said, Yes.
What kind?
Are you having this shaking?
And she was really shaking a lot.
And the teacher said, Well, stop.
And I thought to myself, because I could hear the question and answers, oh gosh.
And she didn't trust the teacher after that.
She didn't want to talk to the teacher after that, because she felt that if she couldn't stop it, it was involuntary.
And so I would say just to relax.
and maybe say, shaking, shaking, shaking, and just know that you're not going to shake forever.
This maybe could go on for months or years even, but lifetimes, who knows?
But the shaking probably will come and go, so nothing to worry about.
It is what it is, no?
Actually, I had a question about this because I actually read I had to have had the same problem before with the vibrations from just sitting in a inconvenient posture and built up some tension and then after a while the body starts to vibrate and I was just acknowledging it and not moving and then I recently read in a book which said you should acknowledge it
for a while and then you should actually adjust your posture because it's just too distracting to meditation to just keep shaking shaking shaking so i don't know what you think about that
I think it's one of the examples of how you should never have a hard and fast rule.
Remember what we're doing here.
It's not a military exercise.
So it's not that you have to do it this way or this way or this way.
It's a learning experience.
So if you do it one way, you learn something in one way.
If you do it another way, you learn something in another way.
And where you get wrong is where you say, I will not move, I should not move.
Or where you say, I will move, I have to move right away.
So either you gain an incredible amount of stress from never moving or else you gain a great amount of aversion and you cultivate a habit of aversion by moving immediately when the problem arises.
Actually, the... So I would say, you know, don't establish a rule like that at all.
And as a meditation teacher, I wouldn't.
And I would say, well, okay.
And you can try different things with the meditators and say, you know, try to acknowledge it first.
And if it doesn't go away, then, you know, how we would explain it is, if you do move, then be mindful of it.
So we would never say, and then move, or and then don't move.
We'd say, be mindful of it as much as you can.
And then if you have to move, just say moving, moving, moving.
when you move your legs.
And allow the meditator to experience it as they will.
But the original question here is a little bit different.
First of all, because you're practicing anapanasati.
How do you say it?
Anapanasati?
Anapanasati.
Ana means the in-breath, pana means the out-breath, or vice versa.
One or the other.
And this isn't exactly what we teach.
If you call it anapanasati, you're probably practicing some form of tranquility meditation.
That's what it sounds like.
Because the question here that you have is how to keep the calm or how to cope with the loss of calm.
From a vipassana or an insight point of view, the problem isn't that moving disturbs your calm.
The problem is that you don't want the calm to be disturbed.
The problem is that there's a clinging to the calm.
In the technical jargon, we call it nikanti, which means this subtle clinging to something, to something positive.
So when you experience happiness, you'll cling to the happiness and you'll become content with the happiness.
If there's calm, you'll become content with the calm.
If there's quiet, you'll become content with the quiet.
If you see lights and colors and pictures, you'll become content with them.
Whatever good experiences arise in meditation, you'll become attached to it.
So the point is not to feel this calm and the point is not for that calm to stay.
The Buddha taught that the path to become free from suffering is to see impermanence, suffering and non-self.
So if I can ask you, when the calm disappears, does that mean it's permanent or impermanent?
Impermanent.
Is it satisfying or unsatisfying?
I mean, can it really satisfy you or is it unable to satisfy you?
And maybe you still think that it's satisfying.
You just have to figure out the way to make it satisfying.
But actually it's not.
Actually what you're seeing is a part of the truth that it is not satisfying and non-self, that you can't control it.
You can't keep the calm.
You can't move and still have the calm.
So you have to see that the calm is not permanent.
This is really the core of the answer to the question.
Now, in regards to vibrating, dealing with shaking, dealing with swaying and so on, and many experiences like it, the theory that we hold behind this is that it is related to rapture.
or it comes under the heading of rapture.
So if you ever see Christians, these Christian evangelical evangelists who go into this rapture and start convulsing on the floor or so on, that's the sort of phenomenon that we're dealing with.
Some people will sit and shake back and forth.
Some people, their whole body will vibrate and so on.
There are many things and it can become quite strong.
So in fact one technique is to stop, is to tell yourself to stop.
One teacher in Bangkok, he said the way you have to do it is just say to yourself, stop.
Tell yourself to stop.
And the point behind that is not that you're trying to control it, but the point is that even though you say that it's involuntary, the fact that you feel calm or so on suggests that there could be
in some situations, some kind of propulsion or impulsion, intention in the mind that is very subliminal and so subliminal that you are unable to detect that it's even there.
So there's the contentment with the feelings and that creates the shaking and the vibrating.
And then you become even caught up in the vibrating.
So when you'd say to yourself, stop, you're changing that intention.
It's like you're adjusting your volition.
There's power in words.
So when he would say, just say to yourself, stop, instead of saying feeling, feeling, or so on, just tell yourself to stop, just say to yourself, stop, and your mind will change, and your mind will wake up, and because of the harshness of it,
Your mind will adjust and then you'll be able to be mindful.
Because if you just continue to acknowledge it, because of the underlying attachment and not acknowledging that attachment, it won't really be an acknowledgement.
It will become a mantra and you will just get caught up.
more shaking.
This is actually one particular special sort of experience that has to be dealt with a little bit special sometimes because of the repetitive and the habitual nature of it.
The mind can become so caught up in it that it just gets out of control.
As you see these Christians, they just start convulsing and it's totally...
They say it was uncontrollable, but the truth is that they're controlling it, they're creating it, they're cultivating it.
And eventually they become so good at it that it seems to come by itself.
But through the whole process there's a cultivation going on.
And when you make a determination to stop it, that can help.
So there are two keys.
First of all, you may very well be cultivating
the vibrating and the shaking.
And in that case, you have to try different things.
You can try moving is fine, but just be mindful moving, moving.
And if it's really not going away, you can tell it to stop.
Tell your mind to stop, but don't expect it to work all the time.
But it can help to remove the clinging in the mind.
And sometimes you can just acknowledge it.
Sometimes if you just acknowledge it and into the point that the mind becomes bored of it, then the mind will let go of it and there will be a change occur in the mind.
And really in the end that is the key is to eventually just become bored of it.
And when the mind is truly bored of it, it will disappear.
The mind will stop cultivating and be like, enough of that.
It's not really making me happy.
It's not really doing anything for me.
So that's the first part.
The other problem you have here is the clinging to the calm and the wrong idea that calm somehow has some intrinsic benefit.
The purpose of calm is to see things clearly.
Once you're calm, then you have to apply insight to the experience, whether it be the calmness or whether it be the object of meditation.
you have to look at that and be able to see impermanence so in fact what you're seeing is a positive thing you're seeing impermanent suffering and non-self but because of the clinging and because of the defilements in the mind there's still the attachment and the thought that something's wrong it's changing something wrong it's disappeared that's the truth of life everything that arises disappears okay