Superb Owl

Five Advanced Meditation Techniques (also, drugs)

A few ways to turn up the volume if you're feeling stuck

In How to Start a Meditation Practice I advised readers to “just sit”. This is still my best meditation advice: create a quiet space and patiently let your mind unfold on its own.

But I’m an impatient person. I’ve always sought out ways to accelerate the process, looking for shortcuts and embarking on get-enlightened-quick schemes. This is inadvisable for two reasons:

• One: there really is no shortcut—you have to do the work

• Two: you’re messing with your brain, and you can do damage

That said, meditators often get stuck in habit, fruitlessly body-scanning or counting their breaths.

Sometimes you need a kick.

Outline

• Fire Kasina

• Mirror Gazing

• Pain

• Shivering

• Intuitive Movement

• Drugs

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Fire Kasina

Fire kasina is a deceptively simple practice: you stare at a bright light—a candle flame, a light bulb, even your phone screen—then close your eyes and watch the after-image. When the after image fades, rinse and repeat.

Kasina practice can induce psychedelic- and dream-like visions, alter your perception of time and space, and give way to life-changing mystical experiences. In a recent small-scale study, participants practiced kasina for 6-11 hours per day for several weeks:

Mean [mystical experience] scores were…similar to prior observations of high-dose psilocybin [i.e. psychedelic mushrooms]…experiences were described as the most intense of the individual's life, while subsequent transformational effects included substantial shifts in worldview.

Daniel Ingram (coauthor on the paper above) seems to be the biggest advocate for kasina meditation. He’s created an entire website with instructions for practice—as well as some intense safety guidelines.

When I spoke to Daniel about kasina practice last year, he estimated that around 1 in 9 retreat participants has an intensely negative experience, on par with a bad psychedelic trip. One, he said, sobbed for hours. Another began seeing demons in the mirror.

I haven’t yet found a month of free time to attempt a full-blown kasina retreat, but I’ve done a handful of 30 minute sessions.1 While I haven’t had a full-blown mystical experience (or seen any demons), it does feel quite powerful.

With kasina I become fully immersed in sensory experience, and after several minutes begin seeing all sorts of strange colors and patterns. It’s led to several insights on the ephemerality of perception.

I’ve even felt the need to put kasina down for a time, for fear of getting lost. Like any advanced meditation technique, kasina needs to be treated with caution and respect.

Mirror Gazing

Close the doors of your room and put a big mirror just in front of you…Then constantly stare into your own eyes in the mirror. Do not blink.

…Your face will begin to take new shapes. You may even be scared. The face in the mirror will begin to change. Sometimes a very different face will be there which you have never known as yours.

…If you continue…the most strange thing happens: suddenly there is no face in the mirror. The mirror is vacant, you are staring into emptiness.

—Osho, cult leader of Wild Wild Country fame

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A strange thing happens when you stop blinking—your visual buffer has no chance to reset, and tiny perceptual distortions begin to self-reinforce. I’ve often played with this phenomenon, watching solid objects disappear from my vision, or seeing the three-dimensional scene before me flatten into nothing but shape and color.

But none of that comes close to the strangeness I’ve seen in a mirror.

I discovered mirror gazing mostly by accident. I was on vacation, meditating on my bed. On an impulse, I turned 90 degrees and faced the wall mirror to my left.

Within a few minutes, I saw huge ranges of emotion sweep across my (in reality expressionless) face: joy, terror, despair, excitement. I saw my self as a woman. I saw my self as an old man. I saw myself as a warrior, as an invalid, as an angel and a demon. The faces of family members and friends appeared superimposed on my own—most often my brother’s. I even caught a few glimpses of the “no face” Osho alludes to above.2

It’s such an intense experience that I only earnestly engage in it a few times per year.

There are two interdependent insights that I’ve gleaned from mirror gazing (in conjunction with other practices, like dreamwork):

• I contain within me every aspect of humanity, good and bad3

• I’m “one” with the rest of humanity—we’re all the same thing, wearing different masks

These are the sorts of insights you can dismiss as platitudes, or think you’ve understood intellectually. But they take on a new character when you look in the mirror and see your mother staring back. Your felt sense of self becomes blurry and distorted, and you realize that those statements point to an empirical fact.4

Pain

Nothing will focus your attention like pain.

I still remember the first sit where I dug into the psychodynamics of suffering. During a normal meditation session, I shifted my weight, and the seam of my jeans began poking into a pressure point on my ankle. The pain was intense, but for some reason I hesitated before reacting, and decided to just lean in and see where it took me.

The pain crescendoed into an alarm as I made up my mind to do nothing. Within a few seconds, it maxed out, and transitioned from a constant sensation to periodic rolling waves. The pressure would subside into a warm, tingling, almost pleasant glow. But the moment my attention drifted, the pain would come roaring back.

I sat with the pain for around half an hour, before becoming concerned that I might be doing lasting damage to my poor ankle (spoiler: it was fine). It was the most focused I’d been in a meditation session for a long time—no long discursive thoughts, no daydreaming, no sleeping. Just me and the sensations in my ankle.

Since then, I’ve occasionally experimented with deliberate pain—pressing a needle into my skin or sitting in some terribly uncomfortable way. But all that seems too morbid and masochistic, so these days I just seize the opportunity when pain arises on its own. I actually get a little excited when an itch on my face starts to complain, or a mosquito lands on my arm. It feels immensely empowering to refrain from moving and simply sit equanimously with the sensation.

(If you’re interested in this topic, I’ve also done a deeper dive into the effects of meditation on pain, through the lens of Shinzen Young’s teachings.)

Shivering

This is a bit of an odd one, and it’s not a technique I’ve seen described elsewhere (though it’s probably somewhat related to Tummo meditation).

As a teenager, years before I started any kind of meditation practice, I found I had a tiny degree of control over whether my body would shiver when cold—but only if I was right on the edge, maybe wearing a t-shirt on a crisp autumn evening.

In the years since, I’ve tried all sorts of ways to expand this ability—visualizing fire, humming, breathing deeply, focusing my attention—with some slight progress.

More interesting, though, is the sensation of suppressed shivering. Once my body physically stops shaking, I continue to feel an immense reverberation coursing through my torso and limbs. The vibrations occur at the same 8-10Hz frequency as physical shivering—I imagine the same signals are hitting my nerves, just not hard enough to engage the muscles.

It’s a raw, intense, tactile sensation that pervades my being. It can be hugely pleasurable, and I’ve found I can move and modulate those vibrations, even expanding them to fill my entire sense of self. I become a transparent ball of vibrating energy.

If you’re interested in working with the pīti of jhana practice, the qi of Taoism, the prana of yoga, or any of the other names various traditions have given to the tactile sensations that arise during contemplative practice, not-quite-shivering is a great place to start.

Intuitive Movement

I’m a very brain-oriented person. I make a living with my mind, and I’ve always been praised for my mental output. But I was never very athletic or coordinated, so I’ve mostly neglected my body.

When I took up a meditation practice, I had the idea that it was yet another brain-skill for me to master. I’d learn to modulate my attention, to quiet my mental chatter, to master my emotions. But things really took off once I began to pair all that mental effort with an embodied practice.

Ironically, my journey here started in a quiet, seated mettā meditation. But this was no ordinary mettā practice—it was the beginning of a dance party hosted by a wonderful human named Tasshin. We began by wishing for love and peace and acceptance for all the people sitting there with us. And (it’s easy to forget this part) feeling their well-wishes in return.

Now, normally when I’d dance—only at weddings and when mildly drunk—I’d just bob back and forth, trying as hard as I can not to look dumb, intensely aware of how I must appear from the outside. If I made eye contact with someone, I’d immediately assume they were gawking at how ridiculous I look. I’d try to move as little as possible and stare at my feet in the hope that no one noticed me.

But at Tasshin’s party, something new happened. Instead of seeing my body from the outside, through the imagined eyes of others, I became completely absorbed by the sensations inside my body. I lost track of the people around me, completely forgot that they might be looking at me and judging my movements. I even lost any sense of having a physical body! I just felt movement and flow and release.

I can’t begin to describe how freeing this was. I put my hands in the air. I spun in a little circle. I wasn’t really even in the picture—my body was doing these things all on its own, to the timing of the beat, without any premeditation or post hoc judgement.

I’ve adopted the idea here into other little rituals. I’ll wiggle about on the couch while listening to music, or move through some random yoga-ish poses on my living room floor. There’s something immensely pleasurable about just letting my body do what it wants, without any interference or planning or judgement from my brain.

But it’s not just hedonistic pleasure—there’s some kind of emotional processing happening as I move. Sometimes I can sense stress or sadness as though they’re physical objects, which I can touch and manipulate just by twisting my body or moving my arms the right way. From the outside it probably looks like I’m practicing an esoteric version of Tai Chi. From the inside, it feels like I’m Tom Cruise in Minority Report, except the computer is my soul.

Science seems to be slowly catching up to the idea that our minds extend into our bodies. Several meta-analyses have shown the effectiveness of Tai Chi in treating psychological illness; The Body Keeps the Score seems to have turned some heads; there’s increasing evidence for the existence of mechanisms that would allow the body to store memories. But our knowledge is still in its infancy here, and self-experimentation is cheap—the best way to learn more is to dive in.

Tasshin’s mettā dance party was a peak mystical experience for me. It feels almost silly to say that now, because it’s become a common feeling—I now attend weekly ecstatic dances. It still takes some effort to fully click into a flow state, and some days I never really get there. But it’s the most fruitful part of my meditation practice today—specifically because I’m so naturally brain-biased.

Drugs

It’d feel dishonest to leave chemical aids out of this essay, given how much they’ve affected my practice—for better and for worse.

When I first began meditating, cannabis was a great incentive to get my butt on the mat. At the time I was smoking daily (not a good habit!), and made up my mind that I’d only get high if I then meditated.5

Cannabis gave me an incredible endurance for meditation. I’d struggle to sit for more than 30 minutes while sober, but could happily sit for two or three hours if I was high.

Cannabis also turns up the volume on my internal sensations: the tingling in my hands, the colors and shapes behind my closed eyelids, the intensity of ambient noise—the sort of stuff experienced meditators will dismiss as “fireworks”. But these sensations made it easier to become absorbed in my immediate perception rather than abstract thoughts, and incentivized me to keep sitting.

And psychedelics! A wild LSD experience is what first convinced me to take up meditation. That trip did some indescribable6 things to my ego, which I felt compelled to investigate further. Subsequent trips (there have been few, all low-dose) have reacquainted me with those strange, beautiful states of mind. I’ve found ketamine particularly useful lately, especially in combination with cannabis.

My peak drug experiences serve as a sort of waypoint for my meditation practice. I’ll experience something new and profound—a shifted sense of time, an inner stillness, a loss of my body map—then work towards that feeling while sober. The meditation experiences can lag behind the drug experiences by months or years, and it takes work to distill the essence of the experience from the more esoteric effects of the drug. But this feels a lot better than just placing my faith in the words of some monk or ancient text. I at least have a vague sense of what I’m looking for. I know, without a doubt, that there’s a there there.

But the vast majority of drug-oriented practitioners I talk to are far too dependent on chemical aids in their exploration. Drugs make it easy to feel like you’re making progress, when really you’re just wandering in circles. Every time I try nitrous oxide, I’m absolutely convinced that the next huff will bring enlightenment.

I like to say that drugs are like skydiving, and meditation is like growing a pair of wings. The latter is much more powerful and sustainable.

Eventually I realized cannabis was becoming a crutch (in both life and in meditation) and took a long break. I still use it at least weekly, often during meditation—but I try to have more sober sits than not. And I remain persistently skeptical of my own drug use.7

I want to reiterate that there are no shortcuts when it comes to meditation. You simply need to spend a lot of time sitting quietly and studying your mind.

But there are more and less skillful ways to make progress. Too many people get stuck in one form of practice, thinking they just need to tough it out. Method X worked for their friend / guru / guy on twitter, so they dogmatically cling to it.

Experimentation is crucial. Every brain is different. Even the same brain is different on different days, or from year to year. Little changes can help: picking a new chair, or switching from eyes-open to eyes-closed, can be enough to reinvigorate my practice. But sometimes you need more.

The methods above will mostly add fuel to an existing practice. You can experiment with different levels of intensity, or with mixing them together,8 but be careful. Meditation is not without risk, and adding fuel to that fire can cause harm. Worse, diving right into something like kasina or psychedelics, without any grounding in vanilla meditation, can send you over the edge of psychosis.

So take it slow. But if you’ve got a stable practice and you’re feeling stuck, experiment! And do be sure to report back.

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