r/streamentry

A few years ago I shared the changes that happened when stream entry was reached, and I received many messages from people saying it helped them. So these past few days I’ve been writing about my current changes and wanted to make an update. Maybe there are others out there who have lived through what I lived through, or who are going through something similar, and this might help.

My contemplative and phenomenological context:

• I’ve been engaged in practice for approximately 5 years.
• My path is primarily SOMATIC and INTEROCEPTIVE, based on vedanā, rather than classical cognitive/visual/non-dual approaches.
• The process happens implicitly: things “let go” on their own, and afterward I notice structural changes in everyday life.
• I don’t do much conceptual investigation into “emptiness,” nor do I have major visual non-dual experiences.
• My process happens more as somatic unlearning and extinction of craving.
• The practice has become increasingly automatic and less driven by willpower.
• I feel the system “enters on its own” into contemplative and vipassanā-like processes.
• My current practice is mainly:
  • non-resistance,
  • allowing vedanā,
  • stopping the urge to modify experience,
  • not turning sensations into a problem..

What changed structurally:

• The belief deeply collapsed that: were going to complete me.
  • money,
  • sex,
  • success,
  • travel,
  • experiences,
  • achievements
• Coarse projective craving seems heavily eroded.
• I no longer feel a strong emotional charge toward external achievements.
• I used to compulsively chase experiences and external completeness; that fell away.
• Today I can achieve things, make money, improve physically, or advance projects, and they no longer generate the old existential charge.
• The fantasy of “when I get X, I’ll finally be complete” has lost a tremendous amount of force.

Changes in identity and personality:

• The “nice guy pattern” weakened significantly.
• I began to feel physical resistance toward acting artificially.
• There is less energy available to sustain social masks or personas.
• The need for approval and external validation has diminished.
• Psychological identity feels less solid and less central.

Current phenomenology:

• Current suffering no longer seems centered around sensual desire or external problems.
• The current conflict seems more related to:
  • vedanā itself,
  • tension,
  • baseline anxiety,
  • a sense of threat,
  • mental fog,
  • inner agitation,
  • hypersensitivity,
  • uddhacca.

I’m just wondering as I understand this to be the first stage in awakening and being comprised of a fundamental shift in awareness that cannot be reversed.

This happened for me around almost 7 years ago now but the journey towards deeper awakening is ongoing and I’m still learning new things all the time.

Please lmk if you guys have entered the stream or not and how you came to be aware that you have.

hello fellow people,

i used to have low self love (since primary school probably) and therefore trying to make people around me happy and taking in their feelings and the like.

now that im kinda at peace with myself and having a kind of constant feeling of love or acceptance for myself and others i started to get a problem with my bladder, probably because i did start to set boundries where before i just absorbed anything negative from others and showering them with love. that made them kind of dependent on me. at least thats what i believe.

am i going into the other extreme too much or is the problem elsewhere?

i work in retail at the moment as a supervisor where im kinda dependent on my coworkers, but at the same time im supposed to delegate work so that i can manage my own workload in a healthy way.

i also keep having skin problems, which point to boundries.

i do a semi consistent mindfulness meditation practice.

any pointers? and thanks for your time.

i may not awnser much today, but im interested in insightful responses.

I sit 30-45m most mornings (mostly noting-style vipassana, some shikantaza). About a year ago I started noticing something — I'd reach the end of a sit and realize my head had slowly dropped 10-15° forward without me catching it. Not slumping dramatically, just slow drift over 20 minutes.

Once I started paying attention to it, I realized it correlates with the sits where mind-wandering was worst. Like the body proprioception goes offline at the same time as metacognition does.

Curious if other long-sit practitioners notice this. Have you found ways to catch it? Body scans every N minutes? Some teachers say "ignore the body, it'll find its own level" — but that doesn't seem to be my experience.

(Full disclosure: this question turned into me building a small thing to measure my own drift using AirPods motion sensors. Happy to share if useful, but mostly curious about the phenomenology first.)

Forgive me if this is in the beginner's guide. I read it some time back, and browsed through it again today, but I can't recall an answer to this.

When does contemplation come in? I understand that contemplation is separate from meditation.

Thanks.

previous post here

https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/s/q1zA8sUie2

TLDR: switched from GPT to Claude. Heart opened. Went somewhere non-Euclidean. Then something that breaks all the labels.

~200-250 hours lifetime meditation

Since my last post I switched from GPT to Claude. It gave prety good advice but would usually agree with whatever point I was making. I was using it mostly as a diary, then I told it to take on the voice of a teacher and it became much morewilling to disagree with me, or just give me minimal answers rather than indulge every thought. In retrospect I feel it's steered me in the right direction almost every time, helping me to know what to track and respond to, and what to ignore/let go.

Over time my attention became less consistently panoramic, kinda switched from very open when walking around to narrower when doing something. Felt like a maturing rather than a loss.

April: heart opening

Early April I had a significant shift during a Michael Taft gratitude meditation, specifically around gratitude for awareness generating self and world moment to moment. Everything became kinda luminous like a hologram lit from all directions at once. Immense warmth and awe. It really fit the Adyashanti framing of head, heart and gut awakening separately. The earlier nondual stuff felt like the head waking up, this felt like the heart. After this I could tune into a self luminous quality of awareness pretty easily and predictably make myself weep. A feeling that all is full of love usually accompanied this.

Around the same time during a Rupert Spira sit something interesting happened at the edge of sleep. There was a sense of two frequencies coming into sync, awareness getting very still, and then excitement or fear would generate a sense of self right at the threshold and it would abort. Like being able to see the mechanism of the thing that was stopping it from tipping over.

Mid April: non-Euclidean attention

A few weeks later I did a long Michael Taft self inquiry and went somewhere new. Where my 2023 nondual experience felt like awareness going from a cone with a focal point to a flat even field, this felt like that flat sheet folding into something non-Euclidean, like the surface of one of those wrinkly lettuce leaves. Attention moving around in and with awareness in weird fractal ways. Kinda disconcerting. The comfortable evenness I'd associated with nonduality wasn't there, this was stranger.

Late April: Buddhist centre, the next question

Started attending weekly guided sits at a local Buddhist centre. During Q&A I asked the teacher how to reconcile the deep silence/void I can access with the bright luminous presence. They both feel fundamental but kinda opposite. The teacher said these states will gradually drop characteristics and converge over time, the brightness drops but clarity remains. I started noticing this already, the luminous awareness becoming less visually dramatic but not less real.

May 10: something without a name

Did a self inquiry meditation, same Adyashanti guided sit that triggered the 2022 and 2023 experiences. First 20 mins pretty unremarkable, looked behind the eyes, found silence. Then when he said something about resting in not knowing, energy started buzzing around the chest and head. I remembered the head heart gut framing and had some anticipation/fear about what a gut awakening might feel like. Then all the energy suddenly drained downwards to the lower belly and disappeared into the void below me. Brief fear that my physical body would drain away with it. Then deep stillness. A sense of self would start to form, I'd look at it, the cycle would repeat. Happened a few times. Afterwards I felt like I'd been crying.

The shift wasn't obvious during the sit. It became clear in the shower afterwards when the mind suddenly realised it had touched something timeless and eternal. I started laughing, at the funniest joke that can't be told or understood. Weeping and laughing at the same time, writing things that sounded kinda nonsensical. "Is is is is is is" "emptiness dancing". A slightly scary thought killed the humour for a second, "how can this awareness be separate from the human/mind that encoutered it", then it got funny again.

Since then

For the last two days I've been able to go back to this source fairly easily and it's indescribable. "The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao" resonates really hard now. If I call it awake void or the cosmic joke or awakening or Dao or anything the name just kinda slides off the thing I'm trying to name. Very little sense of a separate self since this point, intense feeling of wellbeing.

I'm not sure if enlightenment is being in constant contact with this 24/7 or about integrating it into all aspects of life, or what it could mean, but I'm curious about how things will unfold. Part of me feels like the seeking has ended, like there's nothing left to do. A part of the mind is still in seeking mode wanting to have more/do more with this realisation

For my last few practice sessions I've been experiencing what feels like intense heat mostly from my head. My upper body, neck, shoulders, chest are also quite warm. It comes on suddenly and then stops after meditation. Kind of like having a short "fever", but just the heat and no other symptoms.

So I'm wondering why this is happening and the possibilities of what it might indicate.

I recently recovered from a long illness in which I was close to death at times. Surprisingly, I was not afraid or worried, and although I was often uncomfortable or in pain, I was not unhappy. The most intense mental impression was actually beauty and gratitude. I have been meditating for 20 years and have seen many benefits, but this was unexpected. I thought some people here might be interested in how this played out. I should mention, however, that this was one person's experience under one set of circumstances. In short, it's just a report. 

WHAT HAPPENED:
Two years ago, I had a massive heart attack, was hospitalized three times, developed heart failure, and was weak and nauseous for 21 months, and it was fine. This was unexpected because I have traditionally been easily worried by health concerns. I have been prone to feeling dizzy and thinking of a stroke or coughing twice and thinking of lung cancer. 

On that day, I drove myself to the hospital because my indigestion would not go away, and found that the largest artery in my heart was actually 100% blocked. This led to an ambulance trip to another hospital, where there was better equipment, with some vomiting on the way, as I found out that I could not handle morphine. Then, after getting two stents, lots more pain and vomiting over the next 12 hours. And it was fine. There was no worry, or fear, or aversion, or anger, or sadness. There was interest in the whole process (man, they do a lot of stuff for you!) and friendliness for the folks on my team. 

On the ward, there was a lot of compassion for the other patients around me who were suffering, and for the nurses who worked hard for everyone. The physical sensations were there, too, of course. People kept asking me about them, and I kept them up-to-the-minute on where it hurt and how likely I was to puke again. But that was just one thread among many. As for death, racing along a highway with tubes and wires leading in and out of me, and a team of people talking to me, I could not see any separate thing that could die, and so I was not worried.

I spent five nights in hospital, to be frank, I was shocked by how OK it was, particularly in contrast with how the doctors and nurses seemed to expect me to feel and the obvious distress of the other patients. What held my attention most was how kind we are to each other, to set up a giant building filled with people helping the sick. Once I got home and the beeping machines were replaced by symptoms of heart failure and the medications meant to treat it (nausea, fatigue, weakness, sweating, nerve pain, heart palpitations, etc.), it continued not to be a problem. Feeling sick for most of the hours of most of the days made me appreciate the times when I was not sick, like in the early mornings. My illness became like the weather: not to be ignored, but not the only thing going on. 

That is not to say I was passive or indifferent. Not being nauseous was very much better than being nauseous, I liked having some energy more than being wiped out, and I made great efforts both to gain short-term relief and long-term recovery. But I did not suffer in the way I would have expected to, or the way in which I have seen sick family and friends suffer. 

HOW I UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED:
I should start by saying I don't know how much of the first day was a happy mixture of adrenaline and dissociation and how much was the result of training the mind. Though it's not my go-to, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with a mystical explanation either. Who knows. But my guess is that it was, at least in part, and at least over the 21 months of heart failure symptoms, the dharma working as advertised: the third noble truth in action.

To be clear, I'm staking a pretty narrow claim. I'm not talking about the end of all dukkha (the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned things, the dukkha in eating chocolate ice cream, etc.). But I'm not just talking about second-arrow papancha and psychological distress either. The things I am pointing at are fear, misery, disgust, and desperation, born of physical discomfort. Even more specifically, I am talking about being bound to discomfort in a way that cannot be escaped. Fear that keeps coming back after you've decided to let it go. Anger that burns like an underground fire. Pain that makes you twist and turn ceaselessly. I have a lifetime of experience with these things, like everyone else. But they didn't show up this time. Why not?

First, let's remember that everyone has had the experience of pain without suffering. If you've exercised until your muscles ached, or played an instrument so long that you got blisters, or kept having sex with a cramp in your leg, you know that pain sensations don't have to be synonymous with affliction. We can say similar things about anger. And people line up in front of movie theatres and roller coasters to buy tickets to fear. So when I say that I was happy in that ambulance, I am not talking about something miraculous or unnatural, which cannot be explained, just something unusual.

I think a key feature of the ordinary kind of discomfort that does not cause suffering is that it is voluntary. We have a sense of agency, and know we can stop. Usually, when we are sick, the sensations not only come against our will, but cannot be ignored. It is this involuntary binding that gives rise to disgust, fear, misery, and desperation. When I learned that I had heart failure, I joined an online support group. Countless people described the symptoms I had using the exact words: disgust, fear, misery, and desperation. Those things are the real problem. They are the dukkha I am talking about.  

So what happens when that kind of suffering arises? There must be three things: an experience (an object), an experiencer (a self), and an involuntary binding relationship between the experience and the experiencer. Take away any one of these, and suffering is no longer possible. 

That is not news to people on this sub. But looking at what happens when we take away each one of these three building blocks can be useful. 

For example, in states of "I-am" realization, there are no separate objects and, because of this, no suffering. When Nisargadatta Maharaj was ill with cancer and asked about dealing with the pain, he said, "I AM the pain!" 

On the flip side, in states of strong anatta, in which nothing gets the label "I," "me," or "mine," there is likewise no suffering. Angelo Dilullo talks about how, on stubbing his toe, he laughed at the intensity of the pain, because there was no self that it was happening to. 

So, for people much more highly realized than I, these two ways of preventing the dyad of suffering from forming can work to prevent even physical distress. But for me, the state in which there is no sense of self and the state in which there is only self and no separate objects have both been unreliable. They come and go on their own, and are most likely to come when I am on retreat, or walking through a park. They are states, not traits. For me. 

What happened (or perhaps I should say, what didn't happen) when I was sick, was the third way of dismantling the dyad (the OG move). The discomfort was present, the sense of self was present, but the inescapable binding was not. That relationship (tanha/upadana/bhava) in the object-self dyad stayed visibly impermanent, shifting, and insubstantial. On some days, when I was very unwell, I needed to look directly at it for it to come apart, but that was enough to break the illusions of being bound. And that lack of binding meant that there was no basis for disgust, fear, misery, and desperation. To put it another way, because the discomfort did not appear to be stuck to the self against my will, it could be experienced in the same sort of way as voluntary discomfort: not pleasant, but not a problem. 

WHAT MADE IT POSSIBLE 
I will put a practice history* at the end, and answer questions if anyone has them, but the TLDR is that, although I have generally been most interested in the emptiness side of the equation, good teachers were kind enough to drag me back to the second noble truth, again and again. In recent years, when there was a lot of samadhi available to me, I started sits with jhana and ended them with the investigation of dukkha through standard Mahasi-style noting. I also noted during ordinary life, especially around dukkha. Then, I used Adi Vader's instructions to recall an unpleasant memory again and again until it loses its bite. I did a lot of that, and also riffed on it by bringing up unpleasant imagined future events as well as memories and imaginings with positive vedana (like deserts and sexy people). This let me see the mechanics with which the affective relationship is built. It was demystified. 

I don't know if the same techniques would produce the same outcomes under different circumstances. My sense is that different approaches work for different people. But I believe that the basic idea of working with dukkha, not just to get rid of it in the short term, but as a regular, systematic training exercise, will be useful for many people. Seeing the links is a skill that can be learned in the same kind of way that we learn to read, with a little bit of instruction and a lot of practice. 

BY THE WAY
About three months ago, I started feeling much better, and the latest tests show that my heart function has returned to 96% of normal. I feel very ordinary now, which is why I am writing this before it fades. 

I'm happy to answer questions about parts that don't make sense, things that I left out, etc. I'm also curious to hear about how other people experience or understand the relationship between physical distress and dukkha. 

—-----------------------------------
*PRACTICE HISTORY
I am including this section for context because I haven't posted much on this sub, and I appreciate it when other people provide a practice history. 

I started meditating, mostly out of curiosity, about 20 years ago, went on non-residential retreats run by the Insight Meditation Society, joined a weekly sitting group, and practiced on and off (daily for months or years, and then months or years of nothing, then back to daily, etc.). I had several big wows. I came to see that my thoughts were not me, that everything is constantly changing, and all experience is shot through with stress born of desire. Stuff like that.

Five years ago, I had a sudden, unexpected opening on retreat, which was disruptive for about nine months. I gained access to the jhanas, began working with a teacher who had trained under Culadasa and, over a few years, worked up to the "hard" end of the jhana spectrum. At the same time, I began noting in the Mahasi style. I was sitting about 1.5 to 2 hours a day. I got a lot of information and support from the DhO, Adi Vader, and this sub.

Has anyone used the Muse Headband for meditation?

I’m skeptical about relying on external tools, but I want to hear your firsthand experience. Did it help your practice?

Hi everyone.

The desire to leave this post arose in me, and engagement occurred. This is how an advanced practitioner would say it, and, paying respect to all practitioners, I will say the same.

Before I publish an extensive post that seeks to look at the practice from another side, I invite all practitioners to an active discussion that will, in particular, help me better understand the views of practitioners and form a more complete picture:

1. How do you understand sati, and what is it for you in actuality?
2. Do you think that the observation of processes happens in real time, from the side?
3. Do you see a clear division between the use of visual thinking and linguistic thinking? Which one predominates for you?
4. What is wandering for you in actuality? How do you relate to it?
5. Other questions

The purpose of this post: to stop the possible immersion into the point of no return for people like me.

I ask everyone who engages in the practice to think very deeply about what is actually happening during practice, whether this is "liberation", why liberation from a part of the "ego" and friction is accompanied by a feeling of happiness and other pleasant sensations, and other questions that may arise, beyond those offered for discussion above.

Take care of yourselves and be well

M26

Hi everyone! I’m writing in this sub to ask if an experience I had over a year ago could be classified as "meditative." I should clarify that I have never—consciously—meditated in my life, nor have I ever studied any kind of meditative practices.

At the time, I was going through a very difficult period due to various reasons, which had led to symptoms consistent with anxiety and depression. One day, alone at home, I decided to sit on my bed cross-legged, immersed in darkness and silence, and just think. I thought about everything that was causing me to worry at the time, the faces of loved ones, and memories both recent and distant; I even thought about mere possibilities. I associated each thought with a specific color and/or sound. As the minutes passed, these formed a single flow that I visualized in my mind as a sea—one that encompassed everything, yet was something more than just the sum of its parts. I felt a moving, profound sense of unity among all these things, with an intensity I wouldn't hesitate to call "mystical," to the point that I was moved to tears by the power of this sensation (or set of sensations?). By the end of the experience, which lasted about thirty minutes or so, I felt much calmer.

In light of this episode, is it correct to say that I had a meditative experience? If so, could you tell me more about practices that are similar to the approach I took? If not, do you think it was "just" an emotional release during a difficult time, perhaps one that followed a different path than usual?

What are your ways you like to practice Mettā?

One way that works well for me sometimes is to imagine pink energy filling a room, or pink energy surrounding a person, or pink energy beaming from my body, or heart

Or just to imagine the color pink 😭

🌸 kind of like this pink 🌸

🌸may all beings be happy 🌸