My yoga practice has been broken for around 1 year but during that time and before I have had difficulty managing my practices and in developing good self pacing skills. Looking back my attempts to maintain a stable yoga practice were affected by symptoms of overload as well as external factors that often seemed to arise in conjunction with my overloads, but not always, sometimes I just found it hard to honor my practice because or unrelated things.
An example would be feeling pain sensations in my heart that would lead to the feeling of being saturated in a strong emotion, such as insecurity, fear or sometimes feeling really in love with people I see and heartbroken at the same time, even strangers. Even though these would be recognized as symptoms of practices and not acted on I often felt they were affecting my external environment especially the way others interacted with me, backing off practices would remedy my interpersonal relationships again.
Another aspect of dealing with overload is my tendency to experience fear , anxiety and fright when new overload sensations arise especially sensations in the head. This has lead into panic attack style symptoms that can be very uncomfortable. The sensations arent painful or anything either its just a tendancy my mind has when there is alot going on sensation/ energy wise. Mostly these have only resulted when I really am careless about how much I practice whilst the heart felt symptoms mentioned earlier seem to begin arising without much practice.
Overall though I am sensitive to all practices especially spinal breathing & mulabandha and I'm also not skilled at self pacing and getting a stable routine.
I am just kind of getting this off my chest because I have been thinking of taking up less aggressive practices but I would love any contributions from others.
Currently I have no practice. I am not sure in myself if I should drop the mantra for another practice I have done and go through the clunky stage again. The other practice is the hong sau breath mantra, it's less effective but I haven't had any problems with it.
Previously I was just doing 20 minutes I am. Sometimes I would do a few minutes spinal breathing if I felt really restless. It would usually take around 3 weeks before I started scaling back on that.
This has come up though because after several months of not meditating I went to a breath meditation retreat and had a big overload. It reinforced in me the importance of having a more manageable spiritual practice.
I am also a sensitive meditator and had to self pace on couple of occassions. I have found the losson 367 in the below link very helpful. You may go through this if you have not done already.
Self pacing ability, panic attacks and sensitivity
Posted - Apr 02 2012 : 09:16:20 AM
