Stopped pratices and still overloading

[innercall]

Hi everyone,

I just want to share my journey for the past months.
Since last fall, I had to stop completely every practice because of serious overloads I was experiencing.  That was and still is felt as a great loss for me.  I was unable to meditate because it would build up energy in my head, it disturbed my digestion, I would feel light headed, ungrounded, depressed, and fearful. I couldn’t afford all these symptoms while I was in the period of the final exams of my bachelor’s degree in osteopathy. Since then, I tried a couple of times to get back to practices but after only a couple of days I felt deep purification symptoms like depression and anger that last for days so I was not able to keep meditating.

One problem I have been facing is that simply treating patients in osteopathy gives me overload symptoms. The way I work in osteopathy can be quite meditative and I usually finish a session filled with energy. What usually happens is that I feel high just after the treatment, then energy builds-up in the head, I feel light headed, it gets stuck in the throat and the heart area leaving me feeling depressed. The energy is stuck on the right side of my body, slowly getting down where it gets stuck in the lower right part of my abdomen and pelvis. After some time it usually drains to my right leg with an energetic-ecstatic feeling in the right leg and feet that can sometimes be followed by a period of anger and deep tiredness.

When I was treating one patient every now and then that was fine but now that I start to treat more patients I am constantly on the edge of overload, and crossing the line more often that I would prefer. With great difficulty and despite bhakti that is eating me from the inside,  I resigned myself to self-pace to the point of not doing any practice but I can’t self-pace my job, I need to earn my living. This situation has been worrying me for the past months. I am far from working full-time in osteopathy right now but I will be in about a month or so and I fear I won’t be able to sustain it.
I tried many things for grounding but in the end I am nearly always in overload and I don’t know what else I can do. I am always changing from optimism (thinking to myself that it will all get better soon) to pessimism (thinking to myself that it is still the same situation that will always come back and I won’t be able to meditate any more in this life…). I must admit I feel quite alone in this situation and I can’t find anyone in the people around me, inside or outside the osteopathic community, who understands this sensitivity issue related to my osteopathic practice. That’s probably why I wished to share this with you guys…

There are a lot of issues related to this situation. As I write this message, I realise that the connection to the people of AYP, some of which I met during retreats, is very important to me. But now that it’s been five months that I can’t do any practice I feel as if I don’t belong to this great community, that  I am excluded from it by not being able to do the practices. I know that this is only crazy thoughts running in my mind but I still feel sad about it.

Hopefully life will find a way to solve these problems and I will laugh while remembering it in the future.

Thank’s for letting me express myself, it has already helped me.

[Swan]

Hi innercall,

I think i have been through such phase and come back to meditation later, however, the work contributing to overload is something else. Grounding practices seems to be the way to go but you said that you have many things for grounding - would you like to describe what grounding practices you have done?

Have you read the lesson 367 for oversensitive meditators? and what is your practice routine when you go for it?

[AumNaturel]

Not having been in your situation, I can't offer reassurance, but I do hear you out at least in terms of too much energy in the head (prior to ayp). Cutting back entirely sounds like a reasonable thing to do then, and getting into the habit of not worrying and not paying attention to the symptoms might help, even if it is counter to your instinct. Let the alarms continue, just try to be at ease, knowing you are addressing them by doing so. Do what you must to find balance again, and the forum's always here for you even while you're on a vacation to the land of purification

[LittleTurtle]

Well please do know that even when you take a break you still are part of the AYP community. I've taken a break a couple times myself. Perhaps you could connect with a good energy worker outside the osteopath community? Perhaps physical as well as energetic bodywork may help? Also, put yourself on the healing samyama list.

[brother neil]

How do you feel about your job?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nSAc1sKiyg&feature=g-all&context=G2a71d19FAAAAAAAACAA

[jean]

I have a similar experience, not as excessive though. I think it has something to do with the moon cycles.
Often the energy peaks before full moon. Lots of grounding to do for me till I can start again with regular practice. I have trust in the process and it will work itself out as needed.

[innercall]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delay, I had problems with my computer.

Swan,
For grounding I walk, do Tai Chi, practice some grounding exercises from the bioenergetics analysis approach that mainly try to reinforce and increase the sensations in the legs. I plan to get back to running when there will not have as much snow here. I have read lesson 367 a while ago but it was helpful to get back to it , thanks. I could not say I have had a routine for a while, but last time I meditated for a couple of days (in January), I did about 10 minutes of Deep meditation with IAM once per day but I could not sustain that routine.

AumNaturel,
I think it is a good advice for me not to fix my attention on energy and discomforts and not worrying about even though it is quite difficult while overload is present.

Thanks Little Turtle,
I know I am still part of AYP. I feel bringing back running in my routine will help. I am already on the Samyama list.

Brother neil,
I have divided feelings about my job. I feel very happy and honored while I am working with patients and I am pa. In another way I can be stressed by the pressure I put on myself to perform a good treatment, that will relieve the patient's pain. I always feel a little fear while I am faced with the unknown of what I will do in each treatment. I also put a lot of energy in thoughts about how the patient will appreciate or not the treatment. I must say that I am at the beginning of my career and that these uncertainties are probably part of the adaptation.

jean,
I should check how is the moon next time I experience overload, I might understand something. Now I have trust in the process too but I don't always feel that way.

Thanks again everyone.


 

[Holy]

Friend,

stopping the practices can sometimes be more frictonal than continuing them. There are practices that smooth out the energy flow to a great degree. Alternate nostril breathing for example. This may be a transitional practice until the flow gets easy and joyful. Then DM may be a good addition again and later on a switch from ANB to SBP.

[brother neil]

well you may put a lot of pressur on yourself about healing them and making them feel better, however you may also want to keep in mind that it is not entirely up to you.  how is their diet?  are they doing things to help themselves beyond going to you for treatment.  is it a collective karmic thing, such as deterioration in diet or their parents unoptimal health when they concieved this person who now have osteoperosis.  you can only do what you can do.  your not God, in the sense that it is not your will that will make everyone elses life better

[Swan]

Hi innercall,

sounds like you are on the right track about handling the situation.

you may find the bolw thread beneficial. that was more about headache, however, besically the recommendations are is about channelizing struck energy, from which i have been benefitted.

http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/index.php?topic=10800

aumnaturel brought up a very good point which I have also tried and found helpful. i read a quote during my worst time with overload, I do not remember exactly but it said - it's time to stop thinking about what you don't want, and focus on what you want. it guided me to the lower chakras.

Wish you all the best...

[innercall]

Thanks Holy,
I'll consider your suggestion to try a practice like alternate nostril breathing. I will see how I react to it.

Brother Neil,
I totally agree with you that I am certainly not the one who will heal my patients. They will do it themselves as it always comes from inside and their health is a complex and multi-factiorial process. I should probably remind me this fact more often. One thing I must add is that I also worry too much about how the patient will perceive me or what will be the judgement he has on me. I totally know it is unnecessary and I must learn to act the best I can without being attached to the results or worrying about how I am perceived. I guess it is one of the goal of yoga, to be able to perform actions without being attached to the fruits of actions.... So much to learn...

Swan,
I will take a look at the recommendations in the post and see how I can use them. I think it is a really good advice to think about what I want. A question I find difficult to answer precisely now but that raises a lot of bhakti. I still have to explore that...

Thanks everyone for your support, it is greatly appreciated.

[mr_anderson]

how are you getting on with this innercall?

I recommend some really hardcore physical exercise for grounding - bootcamp type stuff such as press-ups, lifting weights, etc and also eating heavier foods - red meat etc.

Your overload symptoms sound very similar to those that I sometimes experience.

I'm not sure about Tai Chai, but for me, the only thing that works is getting the body into very vigorous activity, it sort of shakes the energy around. Outlets through sex/ejaculation are also helpful. And I know the bhakti that eats you from the inside, I have this, sometimes I just forget about spiritual practice altogether, work out, eat meat, and resort to a very wordly, earthly type of life, almost a modern version of a caveman existence.

It may sound odd, but really engaging your masculine polarity, and your 'primal self', is a very powerful grounding technique. If you have very sattvic tendencies, you may be repelled but: meat-eating, sexual activity leading to ejaculation, competitive sport or games and/or very intense, hard and painful work-outs. All these things seem to pull the energy downwards.

I have a huge tendency to get energy blocked in the head, depressed by my intense bhakti, sattvic diet etc etc

Engaging the primal self and masculine polarity has been the only thing that kept me grounded and saved me from overload.

[k123]

Hello innercall,

I read your post with interest and am wondering how the osteopathy is going.  I had almost the same problem that you describe.  In the '90s I trained for three years as an acupuncturist and when I started my practice, was dismayed to find I got similar symptoms to those you describe.

I did a lot of asking around, talking to other practitioners etc.  I never did find anyone who had experienced the same problems.  I tried lots of things from grounding exercises to salt baths, but the only thing that partially worked was Tai Chi.  I didn't want to be doing that before and after every patient.  It got to the stage where I was dreading treating people and in the end I stopped.  I work in IT now, partially as a result of a long and winding path from my forced decision to give up acupuncture. It was a difficult process as I had just invested lots of time, money and emotion into the training and really did not want to face up to not being able to practice. I really tried every avenue I could before giving up.

However, these days I am really glad it happened like it did. Anyway, maybe for you it will be different. For me it was a long time ago and I did not have the ability to really know what was going on, only that I used to feel really bad after treating people.
I hope it is different for you and that you manage to work with the overload and the osteopathy.

[innercall]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for all your advices. Heavy exercise definitely helps a lot and I agree I need to engage in my masculine polarity.

k123, thanks for sharing your experience. You are the first person that seems to know what I have been through.

My situation changed a little since the last time I posted on this message and things got better. Around a month ago, I have been through an assisted self-inquiry on Liberation Unleashed and as a result of this I could see that there isn't an actual self that I used to call me. That has been some kind of a release and since then, the intense feverish-like backti cooled down. The intense desire to be able to meditate to get to something really dropped. I could even get back to meditate even though the desire for it wasn't as strong. In fact, the one thing that I feared I would lose thru that self-inquiry process was that spiritual desire that I thought was making me progress and made me DO things for that enlightenment goal. Seeing that there isn’t any actual self to what I thought was me made me drop this desire, this will. To the opposite of what I feared, that was such a relief. Since then, I can meditate nearly each day . There are still sometimes some physical discomforts, some overloading, but there is less suffering about it because I no longer see it as an obstacle to a goal.

As for treating patients, I still have the same kind of symptoms but I don’t get depressed by it as much.  Treating patients is still getting me in an “ungrounded” state but I don’t suffer as much from it and I get back more quickly to a grounded state and I really appreciate treating people while I am doing it. I have observed that treating patient is putting pressure in the heart area like it is forcing to open and I think it is contributing to the discomfort.

One other thing about it is that there was always a story about me not being at my place in osteopathy because it was so far from what I used to do before (I worked as an engineer). I am much less identified with this story and this helps.

I still need to work a lot on grounding because it seems there are physical and emotional obstructions that are causing friction when I treat people.  I hope it will slowly continue to get better and that it will enable me to have a stable practice of osteopathy.

[axelschlotzhauer]

I am rather new on this forum and still in the phase of orientation. So the phenomenon of overload in the head and elsewhere when giving up a practice is new to me though I naturally know such symptoms also. It seems the energy process continues after stopping the practice but lacks sufficient fuel by the practice till inability to meditate.

In my framework it is a question of ascending and descending and transpeircing vayus or winds and meridians and channels.

So if you have stress or anger the stomach as a very emotional organ reacts but more unconsciously as you suppress it by producing stiff muscles and a hard belly in this area taking smply pills when you get pain there.

This way it does not get remarked that the vayu energy rises in the head causing headaches and overload also.

So the solar enhancement earthens perhaps this problem by a better energy flow in this region. A simple way is to rub from the knee disc downwards with the fourth finger in the depression below on tsu san li or st 36 also good against depression and better and longer walking.

by this rubbing you may get a prickling and tingling at and between the big and second toe. This means the stomach meridian opens even at the eye brow and reverses the energy rising from the stomach as I said and may remove the problem as a known healing and yang channel.

Axel