Meditation Tingles: Bodily Sensations in Breath

I've been meditating for 20 minutes every day since April of 2022. When I say 'meditating,' what I mean is sitting comfortably, closing my eyes, and focusing on my breath. I essentially command my brain to focusing on "breathe in, breath out," while actively listening to the AC unit, fan, or heat system depending on the time of year. As soon as I become aware of my mind drifting away with a thought, I remind myself: "back to the fan, back to the breath."

I was introduced to meditation when I was a freshman in High School. I was 'submitted' to an outpatient program in a mental health clinic, where one day we laid on our backs and closed our eyes. I remember the instructor instructing our breath, and I remember them telling us to imagine a ballon above our lips. As a new thought arrives, imagine you are exhaling it into this balloon. At the end of this practice, the balloon lifted up, up, and away. I think this was the same year I was introduced to hot Yoga.

I remember that first meditation so clearly, still. It plucked a string within me that I'm not sure I knew I had. It felt like ease, like a sigh of relief, like nothing really mattered. Though I practiced Ujjayi breath during my Yoga practice, and meditated a handful with a close friend in college, it wasn't until my later years of college that I began to explore meditation on a personal level.

My therapist then was very soulful, and I her website wrote the words: body, mind, and spirit. Amongst a multitude of insights and practices, one day she recommended I "go up into the mountains and sit with yourself for 3-6 hours, and let your soul speak to you." I remember feeling like, and even telling her that it sounded like she wanted me to take psychedelics. As I remember, her instructions were: Do it sober. Sit quietly. Listen. And write down whatever comes up.

I wrote at the top of a fresh page in my journal: Soul Speak. I sat and listened. I wrote what I sensed and heard. And I saw something. I saw the desert, cacti, and miles and miles of dust. After I graduated with my BA in poetry and enjoyed one last Colorado summer, I packed up my car and moved to Arizona.

"Soul Speak" became a meditative practice I brought with me to trickling creeks and mountain peaks of Colorado, to the mesas and totems of Arizona. Sitting in my nothingness, I would write what came up. This was different from my usual Mrs. Dalloway-style of journaling I'd done for years and years. This was more intentional, more of an active listening than a rapid releasing. And I stuck with the essence of "going up into the mountains." I sat aside reservoirs and lakes, in dry grass at parks, and amongst poky plants on the side of beautiful scenic drives.

I took a couple classes on meditation during my Yoga teacher training... We even had a mala-making workshop where we strung 108 beads onto a string, meant to be somewhat of a 'timer' for your meditation. You hold a single bead with each full round of breath, cycling through all 108 beads until the practice is complete. Even then, in the midst of what I think of as my 'spiritual awakening,' one of my feet was firmly grounded in what Christianity taught me was "reality." Despite years of Yoga, I still had a lot of internalized fear of meditation and spiritual practices of other religions.

There were months of strings of days in 2020 and 2021 that I would sit quietly in the morning to "Soul Speak," at what I now know was my altar-- adorned with rough fluorite, raw amethyst clusters, crushed egg shells, ribbons, and photos of me as a child. I would sit quietly and write when thoughts that felt inspiring flowed through and past me. One day, I saw something: trees. Continuously, these trees with lively green leaves popped into my mind, until one day I recognized them as the trees lining roads in Northern Michigan. So I packed up my car yet again, and back to Michigan I went.

Fast forward to April of 2022, I began to meditate every morning on a daily basis. This meditation I wrote about in the beginning-- of breathing while listening to a steady sound-- was taken from Abraham Hicks's clarification of meditation in "The Law of Attraction" book. I knew I had dabbled in meditation for years, despite sometimes calling it by different names. I also recognized that my meditation practice only happened when it felt like a good idea, rather than a disciplined practice.

Similar things continue to pop up. I receive inspired thoughts-- to rearrange my dining room furniture, to text a certain someone, or to venture out to a new park, creek, or trail. I gain a sense of clarity about a lingering hurt on a subject or past relationship. And so deeply appreciatively, I've begun to see a new visualization, of a new scenery, somewhere I've never been, and somewhere I'm not sure I can identify just yet.

I've felt that mental sigh of relief, ease, and a spiritual connectedness on many occasions during my meditation practice. Though more recently, in the last 3 or 4 months, I've begun to feel things physically. Sometimes this has been extreme pleasure, like someone giving me a deep-pressure massage. But more consistently, it's a tingling feeling, or perhaps lack of feeling, of my feet and fingertips-- sometimes my entire hands.

I remember during my Yoga teacher training, we talked a lot about energy. The teacher had us rapidly rub our hands together and consciously feel the heat. Then, the teacher would have us pull our hands just a few inches apart, and sense the energetic pull between palms and fingertips. Almost comparable to standing up too quickly and feeling the rush of blood to your head that makes you dizzy. This was a conscious effort, and instead of flinging the body around, it was opening that internal, energetic fuse.

Last year, maybe a bit before I began daily meditation, I read Breath, by James Nestor. He traveled the world and wrote about his studies of different breathing methods and practices, as well as the various results. I remember at the beginning of the book, what sparked his curiosity was his own experience. He attended a breathing class and despite the room at 68 degrees, he opened his eyes at the end of the session to find himself drenched in sweat.

More recently, someone I know attended a breathing circle where the attendees all held hands. Towards the end of the session, she felt a "vibrational spark" through the circle. "Like it was energy, I can't even explain it," she told me.

I'd felt physical sensations that sound similar to the above experiences, but it's always been at the end of Yoga. I've felt my body and skin tingling, almost like I am balancing atop a bundle of trees, swaying with them in the wind. I've always understood it as adrenaline still releasing from my body after balancing and strength in a 99 degree room with added humidity. Even then, it's always been a light tingling, just an overall feeling of pleasure along my skin-- the same feeling I think runner's are so obsessed with, why they're always trying to get the rest of us to run.

But this new tingling is simply that: new. My entire foot, and both feet. The tips of my fingertips and sometimes whole hands. Somewhere between the tingling feeling of a body part falling asleep, and an utter lack of feeling anything at all. When I feel these sensations, I don't want to move. I just want to continue feeling it. And when I begin to question them, they pass. Even when I just sit in this meditation tingling, unfortunately and fortunately, they always pass.

What is this? In Yoga, I can understand the surface-level tingles. It makes intellectual sense to me. In meditation, after just 20 minutes of deep breathing and listening to the white noise of a fan or AC unit, it makes no sense at all. In reading James Nestor's Breath, the sense-making lies somewhere in the middle.

Just this past week, I've felt the whole-foot and whole-hand tingling numbness at the end of Yoga. And it's not every Yoga class, it's just been at one teacher's class. Even in teaching Power Vinyasa--classes that usually feel more forceful to me-- her instructions feel patient, more aligned with the pace of (at least my) steady and deep breathing. When I told her that I'd begun feeling this tingling and almost a feeling of nothing at all, she said to me something like "Ooh, you are going to different places."

What is this? James Nestor traveled the world to explore the ancient practice of breathing, and I felt at the end of the book, that he still didn't quite come to a conclusion. Headspace, a meditation company, says various bodily sensations are completely normal, but don't necessarily provide a clear explanation (as if anyone really could).

Could we, as physical beings, ever come up with a logical explanation of the halt of bodily sensations in response to breath? Not even thinking? Where do I go when this occurs? Where are these different places to which my Yoga teacher is referring? Is it tied to my newer visualization of a new scenery to where I've never been?

Oh, the curiosities of living Spiritually. Most things we will never truly know.