Where did your practice take you?
Non attachment to phenomena during practice can be difficult. Especially when it had a huge impact on your heart and you ask yourself what it meant. What I want to share:
1) I have a blessed portrait of Wang Chongyang in my living room. One day I felt a surge of something coming toward me from it. I felt weird and looked outside the window. There was a bird on a tree. I looked at the tree and couldn't feel/perceive/conceptualize a difference between the tree and myself. In the next moment I looked at the bird. Same thing. Then I couldn't make out a difference between me, the tree and the bird. This lasted 20 seconds and it shook me to my core. I can't really describe it any better. I had my eyes open and couldn't differentiate anything, I had no sense of "I". Afterwards I locked myself in the bathroom in the darkness to calm down, I cried a bit and felt anxiety. I left. A similiar feeling overcame me when I walked past the portrait, but with much less intensity.
2) After a seminar, I sat on my couch and "thought to myself" (interesting formulation...): "I let go of my pride, my name, my love and many other things... what else can I let go? My body of course." I laid down on my back and let go. A darkness slowly crept around me, closing in. I began to feel cold. Everything got darker and darker. It was quiet and got quieter. I stopped thinking. My body slowly began contracting into the fetal position as I laid on my back. It was not relaxed, it wasn't pretty. I cried and shivered. I was afraid. When I was almost completely curled up, my jaw started clenching down. Hard. Then came utter stillness and I stopped breathing. The inhalation that followed felt really, really good. Like the first one I ever had. But in total, I felt like shit afterwards. This was 15 minutes maybe for the whole experience.
3) I experimented with laying both hands on the middle of my chest, between my nipples. One over the other. I focused on creating a soft, dissolving, washing feeling into my heart. The first few times I felt really nice and mellow. But it changed. I don't know how long it took. I had a vivid experience. I saw people dying in many different ways. Burning, drowning, by different kinds of violence and stuff I can't remember. The suffering was intense. I was the observer. I cried and beat my matress lying down. A few minutes of silence, but somehow I knew it wasn't over so I went back in. This time, it was me who caused the suffering. I did terrible, terrible things to the people I saw in my mind. The worst one was raping a child. It all felt very, very real... I could see, hear and feel most of it clearly, smell a little bit too. The whole thing took 45 minutes maybe.
These, among others, are things I will never forget.
Why am I sharing this?
I want to warn. You can seriously scar yourself. I had and have a teacher as well as my Sifu in my life. I didn't use their help as much as I should have when I tried to integrate the above in my normal personality. I didn't use my community to my favor - my brothers and sisters in training, but also my regular friends and family.
I continued my practice, but I began abusing drugs. Mostly weed and alcohol over the last 3 years. Luckily, I didn't screw myself up any further and even made progress. I fear I could have wrecked something with the weed, but I described my withdrawal to my former friends and none of them shared the same symptoms. So I think I'm ok because I keep progressing.
Even if my own idiocy in the past ends up limiting my ultimate potential, I'm ok with it. There are so many guys and girls around the world doing truly great stuff that actually helps humanity. I'm glad and thankful that I can support them.
The worst thing I feel wasn't the drug abuse but the garbage that followed because no one precisely explained what happened to me or what I did to myself. Somehow it was an unspoken agreement between my teacher and I that I keep telling him what I experience and he guides me along the way, letting me figuring out stuff by myself. He was there for me so I didn't drift too far away from the way. But even then, I didn't take his advice seriously and thought I knew better.
Some of my rambling got cut off because I got logged off automatically.
Anyway, I hope you guys gained something from this open diary entry and that I didn't bore you .
Don't let doubt and uncertainity poison your heart - be brave.