I had a weird experience yesterday.

It started a couple of weeks ago, I listened to one of the audio talks by my favorite speaker, Gil Fronsdal. The talk was about purification and how meditation and mindfulness practice is often a way to clean out the psyche. Gil pointed out that people who meditate often get annoyed when all of a sudden their mind is full of memories and they aren’t having their normal “peaceful” meditative experience. He says this is a misunderstanding.

Gil explained using the metaphor of washing your clothes. Your body is like the water, it gets dirty (full of memories, physical pain etc.) when the meditation is “agitating” the clothes (your psyche). However, we don’t get mad at the water because it get’s dirty, we’re happy that our clothes are clean. This is how we need to think about the mind. The Buddhist concept of purity is related to this important step needed to clean your mind of the day to day clutter that collects in it. Purifying the mind in this way is often translated as purging your mind. However, the literal translation of the word is not “purge” but vomit.

He explained that sometimes people get nauseous and, on rare occasions, vomit from meditating when they begin to dislodge all the old clutter and stuff of the psyche. I listened, quite interested in this podcast, but dismissed all the talk about vomiting right out of hand.

So yesterday I was meditating…I’ve been doing this five week course (but I’ve been doing it for months) and it’s on concentrating (not on mindfulness). I am not really sure about the difference other than that concentrating calms the mind so that you can then do mindfulness practice. In week four, Gil talked about how your mind will do all sorts of crazy stuff to you when you’re getting concentrated. That’s exactly what had been happening to me; I would start to get really hot and sweat, even though I was just sitting in the house. My hands would feel really heavy. Yesterday was the first time that I began to feel every tiny piece of hair that was touching my face. My face felt extraordinarily itchy and tickly, but I just continued to concentrate and not let it bother me. Gil had also said this feeling of itchiness was common.

But then, right when the meditation was nearing the end, I started to have the most amazing and powerful feelings of nausea wash over me. I began to heave, but tried to remain calm. By the third wave, I was so sure I was going to throw up that I stood up and ran to the bathroom. I heaved again, but I didn’t throw up because the feeling receded when I got up. It was crazy. Afterwards I had a strong feeling of elation that lasted for about an hour but then I felt really depressed, bored, and antsy. This lasted for several hours but then I felt better towards the end of the day.

I’m not really sure the point I want to make with this story, other than to show that the mind is powerful and intense. For those of you who are interested in some exercises you can do to dislodge cluttered psyches, we wanted to direct you to the exercises portion of our website that’s been recently updated.

Good luck to all and keep up the good work.