Hello, my name is João, I'm a 23 year old brazilian and I have been practicing meditation daily (though some days I get lazy) for a little over a year now, somedays I do 2 hours some days 1 hour..
I guess I always had some kind of inclination towards meditation, I remember my father telling me a story that he made up - as he always did every night when I was a child - while I was on my bed at night, about a homeless man that travelled around the world and meditated. When he said that the man meditated I thought "wow, that's cool". My mom also told me that I used to listen to self-hypnosis discs that they bought when I was a child and stayed there with my eyes closed listening to it for about an hour. But it seems that my interest in spirituality ended at my teens, I was very anxious,lonely and sort of scared all the time, it seems that meditation would have been a good thing for me, but since I was in a very atheistic/materialistic phase of my life, it would be very unlikely for me to engage in any sort of spiritual practice.
I regained my interest in spirituality around 2011, when I was 19 years old.Not coincidentally in the end of that year I had my first psychotic episode, which lasted for about a month or two, it was quite a dramatic and scary experience.
In the middle of 2013 I started to watch and read about buddhism and meditation and tried meditating a few times, it wasn't so good except one time when I was doing loving-kindness meditation and had a sort of love orgasm on my chest. That's when I was convinced that there was something really extraordinary about meditation, but strangelly enought it didn't make me engage in a daily practice, except for using the mental noting technique informally throught the day.
In the beginning of 2014 I went to a place that had cerimonies with the famous hallucinogenic brew called "Ayahuasca", since the ritual use of Ayahuasca is legal here in Brazil I went there and drank it without many difficulties. I drank it a total of 4 times, it was quite a dramatic experience that really opened my mind and showed me, like the love orgasm on the chest did, that the way "normal" people experience reality is not the only way possible. On the week that followed the 4th time I drank the brew I was on a sort of altered state 24/7 that seems very close to the description that I had of jhanas, it was probably the 1st or 2nd. But, unexpectedly, I had a second psychotic episode when the altered state ceased. It was the most terrifying hellish experience I’ve ever had, and I don't wish it even to the worst person that ever existed. After that I started meditating daily, but it was kind of difficult, specially because I would have some version of that hellish experience every week to some degree, it just stopped happening in the middle of this year.
Meditation seemed like the right way to go, because altough Ayahuasca opened my mind for the possibilities, it didn’t change my mind in a profound way, I was back to my misery after the effect ended.
So, after a year of meditation I can relate to some of the experiences Jhananda and some people here describe, such as feeling the Aura, which I can feel around my head and feet, and I also can pulsate it at a certain frequency at will. I get a sort of pleasent elation sometimes, but not consistently, I don’t know if I feel safe to call it the 1st jhana. I can’t still my mind yet so I’m definatelly not getting to the 2nd jhana. Sometimes I feel insecure that I will never be able to get to these states, but I try to let go of worry. I also had one week this year in July where I could get to a VERY nice state every day, but it faded away.
To sum it up,meditation has made my life better for sure, I’m way less angry and way more happy. It is hard some days and easier at others, but in general things are getting better.
