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Then you can sit for very long sessions with no numbness whatsoever.

People experience all manner of varied phenomena in meditation.

Others feel tingling, deep relaxation, a feeling of lightness, or a floating sensation.

You may feel yourself growing or shrinking or rising up in the air.

Beginners often get quite excited over such sensations.

Dont worry, you are not likely to levitate any time soon.

As relaxation sets in, the nervous system simply begins to pass sensory signals more efficiently.

Large amounts of previously blocked sensory data can pour through, giving rise to all kinds of unique sensations.

It does not signify anything in particular.

Watch it come up and watch it pass away.

It is quite common to experience drowsiness during meditation.

You become very calm and relaxed.

That is exactly what is supposed to happen.

Unfortunately, we ordinarily experience this lovely state only when we are falling asleep, and we associate it with that process.

So naturally, you begin to drift off.

When you find this happening, apply your mindfulness to the state of drowsiness itself.

It does certain things to your thought process.

It has certain bodily feelings associated with it.

This inquisitive awareness is the direct opposite of drowsiness, and will evaporate it.

If it does not, then you should suspect a physical cause of your sleepiness.

If you have just eaten a large meal, that could be the cause.

It is best to eat lightly if you are about to meditate.

If you have been out hauling bricks all day, you are naturally going to be tired.

The same is true if you only got a few hours of sleep the night before.

You will not gain any new insight from sleep but only from meditation.

If you are very sleepy, then take a deep breath and hold it as long as you can.

Take another deep breath again, hold it as long as you can, and breathe out slowly.

Repeat this exercise until your body warms up and sleepiness fades away.

An overactive, jumping attention is something that everybody experiences from time to time.

It is generally handled by the techniques presented in the chapter on distractions.

You should also be informed, however, that there are certain external factors that contribute to this phenomenon.

And these are best handled by simple adjustments in your schedule.

They can remain in the mind for long periods.

All of the storytelling arts are direct manipulation of such material, and if the writer has done his job well, the characters and images presented will have a powerful and lingering effect on the mind.

If you have been to the best movie of the year, the meditation that follows is going to be full of those images.

If you are halfway through the scariest horror novel you ever read, your meditation is going to be full of monsters.

If there is some real conflict in your life, that agitation will carry over into meditation.

Try to resolve your immediate daily conflicts before meditation when you can.

Your life will run more smoothly, and you wont be pondering uselessly in your practice.

Sometimes you cant resolve every issue before you sit.

Use your meditation to let go of all the egocentric attitudes that keep you trapped within your own limited viewpoint.

Your problems will resolve much more easily thereafter.

And then there are those days when it seems that the mind will never rest, but you cant locate any apparent cause.

Remember the cyclic alternation we spoke of earlier.

You have good days and you have bad days.

Emptying the mind is not as important as being mindful of what the mind is doing.

If you are frantic and you cant do a thing to stop it, just observe.

It is difficult to imagine anything more inherently boring than sitting still for an hour with nothing to do but feel the air going in and out of your nose.

You are going to run into boredom repeatedly in your meditation.

Boredom is a mental state and should be treated as such.

few simple strategies will help you to cope.

Tactic Reestablish true mindfulness If the breath seems an exceedingly dull thing to observe over and over, you may rest assured of one thing you have ceased to observe the process with true mindfulness.

Dont assume that you know what breath is.

Dont take it for granted that you have already seen everything there is to see.

If you do, you are conceptualizing the process.

You are not observing its living reality.

When you are clearly mindful of the breath or of anything else, it is never boring.

Mindfulness looks at everything with the eyes of a child, with a sense of wonder.

Mindfulness sees every moment as if it were the first and the only moment in the universe.

Tactic Observe your mental state Look at your state of boredom mindfully.

What does it feel like What are its mental components Does it have any physical feeling What does it do to your thought process Take a fresh look at boredom, as if you have never experienced that state before.

States of fear sometimes arise during meditation for no discernible reason.

You may be experiencing the effect of something repressed long ago.

Remember, thoughts arise first in the unconscious.

The emotional contents of a thought complex often leak through into your conscious awareness long before the thought itself surfaces.

If you sit through the fear, the memory itself may bubble up to a point where you can endure it.

Or you may be dealing directly with the fear that we all fear fear of the unknown.

At some point in your meditation career you will be struck with the seriousness of what you are actually doing.

You are tearing down the wall of illusion you have always used to explain life to yourself and to shield yourself from the intense flame of reality.

You are about to meet ultimate truth face to face.

But it has to be dealt with eventually.

third possibility the fear that you are feeling may be self-generated.

It may be arising out of unskillful concentration.

You may have set an unconscious program to examine what comes up.

Thus, when a frightening fantasy arises, concentration locks onto it, and the fantasy feeds on the energy of your attention and grows.

If mindfulness was strongly developed, it would notice this switch of attention as soon as it occurred and handle the situation in the usual manner.

Observe the fear exactly as it is.

Just watch it rising and growing.

See how it makes you feel and how it affects your body.

When you find yourself in the grip of horror fantasies, simply observe those mindfully.

Observe the emotional reactions that come along and know them for what they are.

Treat the whole dynamic as if you were a curious bystander.

Just step out of the way and let the whole mess bubble up and flow past.

When you let fear run its course in the arena of conscious attention, it wont sink back into the unconscious.

It wont come back to haunt you later.

It will be gone for good.

Restlessness is often a cover-up for some deeper experience taking place in the unconscious.

We humans are great at repressing things.

Rather than confronting some unpleasant thought we experience, we try to bury it so we wont have to deal with the issue.

Unfortunately, we usually dont succeed, at least not fully.

We hide the thought, but the mental energy we use to cover it up sits there and boils.

The result is that sense of unease that we call agitation or restlessness.

There is nothing you can put your finger on.

But you dont feel at ease.

When this uncomfortable state arises in meditation, just observe it.

And dont struggle with it and try to make it go away.

Just let it be there and watch it closely.

Then the repressed material will eventually surface, and you will find out what you have been worrying about.

The unpleasant experience that you have been trying to avoid could be almost anything guilt, greed, or other problems.

It could be low-grade pain or subtle sickness or approaching illness.