Dear Bruce,

Since November last year I have been meditating intensively (I was at home following a lower back injury for several months not working, with no other commitments). It’s has been almost 6 months now and I have not succeeded with experiencing out of body experience. I have experienced vibrations, various sensations that feel like pressure changes etc. My life has become richer and I can observe number of synchronicities unfolding every day however no lack with the actual separation. I will try to be as honest as I can and describe in details what I do. I recognise that I am achieving a stage that feels like a rushing type of movement, when every thing feels like it’s contracting towards one point however that occurs without any noise or sounds like what some people describe. My issue is that when I get to that stage (that sometimes takes 2 hrs to get to) the rushing feeling it’s a bit like a turbulence and two feelings are accompanying it: one, my eyes start to move very fast like a rapid eye movement that unfortunately causes me to open my eyes and blows the whole thing out, the other felling that occurs is… not a heart palpitation per se but like a heart arrhythmia - I can feel several singular heart beats that feel very laud and echoing through my chest. Initially, that would scare me and I could feel adrenaline rush that would cause my hands to sweat cold, and I think this was also stopping me from progressing. These two symptoms, the eye movement and the arrhythmia are 100% given, they occur every time when I achieve that rushing / contracting stage.

Yesterday, I thought to get creative. I was home alone, I had time, I switched off all the air-conditioning units in the house and fans (I live in a tropical Queensland), I switched off WI-FI, I moved my recliner chair so my head was facing perfect North, and I thought in order to avoid the eye opening problem I will use the ping pong balls the Ganzfeld’s experiment style. I also put a lamp with red light over me. I did that to maintain the feeling of no stimulation even when my eyes open. I have tried using eye covering in the past but I would still open my eyes under it and the material would rub my eye making it quite painful and distracting. Once I set it all up, I first meditated to Between Worlds from Monroe that puts me into a deep trance state when I can feel my body getting very heavy and the vibrations become obvious. Following that, I set up my playlist to play the Hemi Sync Meditation track that I understand is predominantly pink noise and the delta /theta beats. An hour and a bit into it, I was half way through the hemi sync recoding I experienced the heart arrhythmia, but I kept breathing evenly and then I experienced the eye movement sensation, I could tell my eyes opened for a bit but it did not destroy the experience luckily and I kept going on. I got to feel the rushing / contracting feeling (as if I was rushing through a tunnel without seeing the tunnel – I really don’t know how to accurately describe it) and then it stopped, and I felt lightweight. Saying that, I did not see anything, I could still feel my heavy body pressed into the fabric of the recliner chair at the same time as I was feeling the lightweight. I could also hear the sounds in the room (like the geckos making noises) and the Hemi Sync recording but the sounds were changed as if they were further away from me. I did hear like a very subtle thin new noise that was a bit electric, outside of the pink noise. The new noise was like something you get to hear when walking into a room where there is a lot of electrostatic energy, very subtle. For few minutes I was just ‘hovering’ like that unable to move or see anything. Eventually, I gave up and decided to wake up. I felt really refreshed like after a good afternoon nap.

I would really appreciate if you could suggest anything, I don’t even know what was that exactly and what to do next. It has been so many months I am religiously meditating that I am getting to the stage of giving up all together and calling it all BS. I should add I am not very imaginative person. I am much better with sounds and smells, which is why most of the methods out there completely don’t work for me. For instance when I meet people I do not recall their faces or what they were wearing but I will remember how they felt and entire sentences they said to me even a long time later. At school I never needed to make any notes. Any info, I will be grateful for.

Sincerely,

Maria