My experience with Neurofeedback meditation.

I have been interested in meditation and mind research for over 20 years. Sometimes I have been practicing a “formal” meditation, and by that I mean sitting on the floor and relaxing/quieting my mind trying to get into deeper states. But for the most part I have been doing it informally, during travel, after watching a movie, laying in bed and other situations dictated by life when I didn’t sit nor “practiced”, but just contemplated the recent experience. This latter form of meditation (contemplation) was more appealing to me because it was more spontaneous and intuitive.  So although the normal “formal” meditation was fine, pleasant and beneficial, I was never able to continue it for longer than 2 weeks (on daily basis), maybe because too many times I wasn’t able to quiet my mind (for longer time) even when I “thought” it was quiet, and I didn’t really know how to relax deeply, even though I thought I was relaxed. The truth is, I never reached deeper states for longer time; at least I don’t think I did.

When I started my adventure with biofeedback the mind research and meditation was one of my goals. It wasn’t immediate and took a while but I did get some amazing experiences. For example during one of my first neurofeedback trainings with BioEra I found out that my occasional frontal headaches were not really because of hours spent by the computer (as I had thought), but because I had a habit to strain my eyes too much (which was probably a result of constant gazing at the screen, but wasn’t really necessary to do so). Once I learned that, I started to relax my eyes and that was a very good start.

The real breakthrough came when I started to train BioEra coherence with electrodes places on P1 P2 locations (before that I was always using active electrodes with no skip preparation on forehead). Already during the first session I learned a lot, for example about my low confidence in some situations (like during meditation). Then I was learning more and more. Each session was at least 2 hours or more because it felt so good (my normal “formal” meditation never took longer than half an hour). During those first days I was discovering more and more, for example about the relaxation as a prerequisite to meditation. After about a week came a true “jackpot”, I reached a state so deep that my heart felt like it had stopped beating. What was however more important, this stayed that way after I finished the meditation and it took a week until I started to hear my heart again. This one experience was the most amazing of all, because during the last 10 years, I could always hear my heart, and I never liked it, often it was causing my problems with falling asleep. In other words, suddenly in one day I reduced my anxiety to a tiny fraction of what was before. Initially there were some side effects (feeling cold, almost sick for a few days, slower reactions etc), but it came back to normal more or less, and the most important part is that my everyday life became much more pleasant and overall better. And my sleep became much better too, now I was able to sleep all night without a single wake (or not more than 2); during the last 10 years something like that could happen maybe once or twice a month, on a typical night I was awaking myself for about 5-10 times (for short times), sometimes I couldn’t sleep for all night when something in real life was too exciting (good or bad).

So today it is 2 months since the “jackpot” day. I have been doing the meditation 3-5 times a week, experimenting a lot with method and settings. On some days there seem to be not much progress (which I could feel), on others it is great to discover something new. But the important part is that my anxiety seems to be gone permanently. My heart is louder than on the “jackpot” days, but still much quieter than before. I know now much better how to relax. And I know much more how to meditate even without neurofeedback (however it is never as deep or pleasant). And I expect to find out more, because it feels like just a beginning.