In the third stage of this meditation practice we let go of the counting and simply follow the breath as it flows in and out. This is the Mindfulness of Breathing proper, and if I were forced to introduce the Mindfulness of Breathing practice in two minutes then this is what I’d teach — simply paying attention to the sensations of the breath.
However, by saying that I don’t want to devalue the earlier two stages, which are important aids in helping us to practice effectively in this stage of the practice and important practices in their own right.
Here’s an outline of the practice so far:
Set up your posture, as described in the posture guidelines, developing awareness of the body and relaxing as best you can.
Then, becoming aware of the breath as the central experience within the body, begin counting after each out-breath, counting in cycles of ten breaths. When you notice the mind wandering, gently bringing it back to the breath. Notice the gently relaxing quality of the out-breath.
Moving into the second stage of the practice, begin counting just before each in-breath, again counting ten breaths before starting over again at one. Notice the gently stimulating quality of the in-breath.
When you feel ready, move onto the third stage.
In the third stage of the practice, drop the counting, and just follow the breathing coming in and out. Pay particular attention to the transitions from an in-breath to an out-breath, since those are the places where you’re most likely to become distracted.
See if you can notice the breathing as a continuous process — not as a series of in-breaths and out-breaths, but as a never-ending stream of sensation connected with the movements of the body, and the sensations of the air flowing into and out of the body.
You can listen to an MP3 guided meditation that will lead you through the first three stages of the practice by clicking on the player below:
If you’ve been working methodically through this practice you know the score by now. Try doing all three stages for a few days. Practice them every day, if possible, and get to know them well.
Watch out for any tendency to want to skip over one stage (maybe because you don’t like it as much as the others). Each stage has its own special function, so remember to do them in the correct order.
You might want to make your meditation a little longer now, perhaps five minutes per stage, making fifteen minutes.
Shunryu Suzuki, the famous Zen teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and who was a major influence on Western Buddhism, talked about “the gaining idea.” This rather awkward but incredibly useful phrase points to the problem that arises in our practice when we’re hungering for results. We want be enlightened right here and right now. Or we simply want to rush on to learn the whole practice so that we can check that off our list of things to do. The gaining idea is a major hindrance to developing skill in meditation.
As Suzuki Roshi said, “When a gaining idea arises in our practice, it is a sign that our practice is in trouble.” The reason for this is that we’ve actually incorporated our restless, grasping mind into our meditation practice. Our practice has been taken over by the mind that craves, yearns, and tries to appropriate results without following the path that leads to those results.
These attitudes of grasping, craving, and greedy hunger are the very things that cause us suffering in the first place. Because we suffer we want to meditate, because meditation is the antidote to craving and suffering. And then what happens? Our craving takes control of the meditation! It’s as if the antidote to the poison itself accidentally becomes contaminated with poison!
It’s useful if you learn to recognize this gaining idea, this notion that somehow your best interests will be served if you rush through the practice. That notion is false. Meditation is about letting go of grasping so that we can experience freedom. So start doing that now by deciding that you’ll pause where you are right now, and that you’ll explore the stages of the meditation practice and really get to know them before you move on to the next stage.
As part of that exploration come back to this section and read a bit more about the issues that can arise in this stage of the practice.
Perhaps this is a good time to remind you of your body. I’ve emphasized that it’s important to set up your posture at the start of a period of practice. Doing this provides you with better conditions for meditating.
It’s like making sure, when you’re building a fire, that your kindling is stacked just right and that your matches are dry, so that you’ll end up with a good blaze instead of a pile of smoldering wood and a bad temper.
But when you take your attention away from your posture in order to be more aware of your breath, you’ll often find that your posture starts to drift. You might find that some parts of your body start to sag, while others become tense. And these changes lead to mental and emotional changes.
The tension in your shoulders might be related to some anger you’ve started to experience. The sagging in your spine might be related to a feeling of despair that’s crept in. If you relax your shoulders, the anger will start to disappear again. If you straighten your spine, you’ll start to feel more confident again.
As you become more proficient at meditation, you’ll learn that you can periodically take your attention away from your breath for a split second in order to check your posture and make minor corrections. You’ll get so good at doing this that you’ll be able to effectively keep a continuous awareness of your breath.
Remember learning to drive? You probably found that at first you’d take your attention off the road to change gears and when you took your attention back to the road (several long seconds later) you’d find that you’d drifted off towards one side or that a red traffic light had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Later, you’ll have found that you were able to change gears without significantly taking your awareness from what was going on around you.
The same thing happens in meditation – we learn to deal with the seeming complexity of managing our posture and what we’re doing with the focus of our attention – elegantly and even effortlessly. A good way to start practicing this skill of monitoring your posture without disrupting your practice is to check and correct your posture in between stages.
You might want to do this every time you move from one stage to another. Later, you’ll find that you can integrate monitoring your posture into your practice in the way that I’ve described.
While stage one of this meditation practice helps to develop more calm (by emphasizing the qualities of the out breath), and stage two helps to develop more energy and awareness (by emphasizing the qualities of the in breath), the third stage emphasizes both the in breath and the out breath equally. This helps us to blend the calm relaxation of the first stage with the energized awareness of the second stage.
In our meditation practice we are ideally developing a sense of energetic calm awareness, or a calmly energized awareness. While doing stage three you can be aware of the constant oscillation between the calming out breath and the energizing in breath, and allow the qualities of the out breath and of the in breath to permeate each other.
Modifying an analogy the Buddha himself used, you can think about making dough. When you’re making dough, what you’re doing is taking two contrasting substances – a wet one and a dry one – and combining them together in a perfectly balanced blend.
If you have too much water, then you’ll have a sticky mess, while if you have too much flour, you’ll have a dry, cracked ball.
Get the proportions just right, and you’ll have dough that is perfectly pliable and workable. (The Buddha’s analogy involved a “bathman or bathman’s apprentice) blending soap powder and water — presumably the Buddha was more familiar from his earlier life with bathing in luxury spas than he was with baking).
Just as the right balance of flour and water (or soap-powder and water) produces a pliable mixture that can be used appropriately, this stage of the mindfulness of breathing meditation practice helps us to develop pliability of mind; to get our minds into a calm and energetic state where we can work to develop a much greater degree of concentration.
If the first two stages have gone really well, letting go of the numbers can allow us to develop a deeper and more balanced concentration. However, if we haven’t managed to develop enough calmness in the first two stages, then it’s easy to get lost in the third stage.
This often happens because the counting has been acting as an anchor for our awareness: it stops us from drifting too far away from the breath. So if we let go of the counting we can often float off into distraction.
One way to retain an anchor while letting go of the numbers is to use a physical sensation in the body as an anchor. I sometimes use the physical sensations in my hands in the same way as I use the numbers.
Sometimes at the end of every out-breath I take my awareness to my hands in order to keep me grounded. I use the sensations in my hands much as I’d use the numbers.
The physical anchor is a more refined anchor than the counting because it’s non-verbal — it cuts down on the amount of thinking, so that your mind can develop a deeper level of stillness.
Other times I maintain awareness of my hands throughout the cycle of each in-breath and out-breath. When I breathe in there’s a sensation of rising in the body and so I have a general sense of the gap between the hands and the breath widening. In each out-breath there’s a feeling that the body is sinking, and so I get a sense of the connection between the hands and the breath narrowing. So I notice the connection between the hands and the breath, and this helps keep the mind from wandering off.
Partly I think this works because it makes the practice more interesting. But partly I think it’s something to do with introducing a “stretch” into the practice. What I mean is that I’ve noticed that when my mind stretches to accommodate two separate sensations it seems to calm down very quickly. I can’t explain this, but I offer it as a tool that might be useful.
Other “stretches” involve being aware of the space outside my body while focusing on some inner sensation (like the breath), and being aware of sounds outside of myself while following some inner sensation.
You might want to play around with this idea of creating a stretch in your awareness and see what happens. Just notice two very different and geographically separate sensations, and pay attention to both simultaneously. And notice what the result is.
We talk about “trains of thought.” You can think of these as being like real locomotive trains that pull into a busy station and then go rattling off. Most of them don’t go anywhere that we particularly want to go (most of them are to do with worrying, getting angry, running ourselves down, etc). But our mind is like a little kid that’s very restless and curious, and keeps going through the open doors into the carriages.
Before we know it we’re miles away from where we wanted to be (in dangerous territory, often!), and it takes us forever to get home.
By learning meditation you can learn just to watch the trains pulling up and pulling away, being aware of them and choosing not to get into them.
Are there any trains we want to get into? Yes. Some thoughts can be useful, if they are thoughts that guide us toward our immediate experience. For example, we can say to ourselves things like “Staying in the moment … there’s just this moment.” Thoughts like that take us deeper into our meditation.
One difference between useful thought trains and those that take us into distractions, is that when we’re reflecting (as opposed to being distracted), we know what we’re thinking and why, and what effect those thoughts are having). By contrast distracted thoughts are like dreams — we don’t know we’re in them until we “wake up.”
But it can take a while to recognize which thoughts are useful and at first it’s not a bad idea simply to treat all thoughts as distractions and to let them all depart from the station of the mind while you “just sit” on the platform.
There’s another way that the third stage of the mindfulness of breathing meditation, in which we drop the counting of the first two stages and simply follow the breath flowing in and out, is a progression from those two stages.
The progression consists in sensing the continuity of the breathing process, through having an unbroken awareness of the breathing rather than in having an awareness of individual breaths.
When we’re counting out-breaths (as in the first stage of the meditation practice) or counting in-breaths (as in the second stage) there’s an inevitable tendency to experience the process of the breathing as being chopped into bits. There’s an in-breath. Then an out-breath. Then another in-breath. Then another out-breath. We may acknowledge pauses between the in and out phases, so that we mentally chop the breathing into four parts: in / pause / out / pause.
Now actually the breathing process isn’t quite like that. It’s not really divided into discrete parts. When you watch the breathing closely in meditation you’ll see that the in-breath shades into a feeling of fullness, which then shades into the release of the out-breath. Then the increasing sense of emptiness at the end of the exhalation shades into the beginning of the next in-breath. There are no distinct beginnings or ends. There’s just one continuous process that changes its character over time. It’s much like looking at a rainbow. There are different colors, but when you look at where one color shades into another you’ll see there are no distinct transitions.
We’re practicing mindfulness of breathing, not mindfulness of breaths.
When we experience the breath as chopped up then there’s a tendency for our awareness itself to become discontinuous. We actively experience the in-breath, then the mind goes a bit floppy for a moment, then we pay attention to the out-breath, then the mind goes a bit squidgy again. Somewhere during the times when the mind is taking a little vacation from vividly noticing the breath it decides instead to get absorbed in some thought or fantasy, and we don’t have the mental sharpness to stop it from going on a little (or perhaps a long) wander.
When we get to the end of the second stage and stop counting we have the opportunity to experience the wholeness of the breathing rather than the chopped-up-ness of in-out-in-out. And so our awareness itself becomes more continuous. We’re less likely to get distracted. The mind becomes more attuned to the subtler sensations where the breath is changing from an inhalation to an exhalation, and vice versa. And we develop a very pleasant sense that we have a continuous thread of awareness running through our experience.
So practically, what this means is that we follow the sensations of the breath as it flows in, noticing the sensations of movement becoming subtler as the sensations of fullness are becoming stronger, noticing the “cresting” of the inhaling as it releases from fullness into the emptying of exhaling, noticing the sensations of exhaling becoming stronger as the body moves faster and as the exhaling happens more slowly, bottoming out into an increasing sense of emptiness, until the emptiness gives way to a sense of filling. And so on, and so on. It’s actually hard to put this in writing because for the sake of clarity in writing I have to use commas and periods, which suggests a succession of discrete experiences rather than an ever-evolving transition within one single experience, which is the process of breathing.
Another approach would be, next time you’re following the breathing (and maybe that’s right now) seeing if you can notice any absolute boundaries and discontinuities within the process of the breathing. I think you’ll find there are none, and that as your sense of the breathing becomes more continuous, so too does your sense of the continuity of your mindfulness.
The great hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, told a story about how one day, when he was a boy, a riderless horse wandered into the farmyard outside his home. Milton had never seen this horse before, and had no idea where it lived, but very soon he had the horse back where it belonged. How did he do this?
Well, he sat on the horse’s back, got it to start walking, and then every time they came to a turn in the road, he paid attention to the almost imperceptible movements of the horse’s body that told him where it wanted to go. And once young Milton had sensed in which direction the horse wanted to head in, he encouraged it to do so. It turned out that the horse knew its own way home, and all Milton had to do was give it a little gentle guidance — or encouragement to trust its own instincts.
It’s similar with our breathing. I’ve said that in the mindfulness of breathing practice we’re not controlling our breath. On the other hand I’ve also suggested that you can use deep breathing, or breathing into the belly, or breathing into the upper chest, etc., as ways of altering your state of mind. This might sound contradictory, but it’s not really. When we change the pattern of our breathing, we don’t have to exert any control. We can gently guide the breath without controlling it, as Milton did.
Had Milton tried to tell the horse where to go, he’d never have got it home. Horses, after all, are trained to follow orders. Instead he used a more subtle technique of being aware of where the horse wanted to go, and then reinforced that desire with some gentle guidance. The horse soon got the idea.
We all are riders of horses, in a way. Our breathing is generally under the control of subconscious processes, and it has to be said that our subconscious, by and large, does a pretty good job of keeping breathing. The subconscious rarely fails to carry out its tasks, which is more than can be said for our conscious minds (how often do we go upstairs to get something and then forget by the time we get there what it was we wanted?). So let your subconscious do what it’s good at.
When you want to change your breathing, say by breathing into your belly more deeply, then all you really have to do is to take your awareness into your belly to give your subconscious a gentle hint, and then let it do the work. In this way, we gently guide our breath rather than control it.
The fourth stage of this meditation practice helps us to have greater focused attention. You can learn about that here.
You can also learn more about this meditation practice in my book, Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation.
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Thank you ~ Bodhipaksa
Hi
I'm hoping you might be able to help me on this one....
I've been meditating for just over 2 years now and in that time had experienced the highs and lows that often go with genuine commited practice.
Some time ago...I was, or I thought I was making real progress and on a couple of occasions reached a state on a profound peace and intense clarity and presence with the essence of the moment. These experiences have to no significant degree changed my life not to put to small a point on it...all for the good....which is great.
However. a few months ago, I found my practice suddenly much harder than it had been for many many months -almost like going back to the begining-and I struggled to let go of the thoughts that only a few weeks earlier I would have had no problem with letting pass from recognition to evaporation.
I am still struggling with this change and and trying to act constructively with it...but tbh am finding it really difficult.
Also maybe of relevance is that I feel a sense of tension ...bodily tension in my practice and demonstrated in feeling that I need to take a sigh of relief more often and more awkwardly than experienced before....
Any advice you might be able to give me would be very...very much appreciated Bodhipaksa
genuine appreciation for your time and consideration :-)
simon
Hi, Simon.
What you're experiencing is quite common. Think of the famous story of the Buddha being assaulted by the forces of Mara as he sat under the Bodhi tree. He was much more advanced than you or I, and his "distractions" weren't, as you might expect (and let's take this story as symbolic of a real episode of spiritual doubt), less vivid or powerful. In fact the opposite was the case. [By the way, despite everything you've probably heard about this encounter, the Pali canon has this episode happening seven years after the Buddha's awakening, rather than on its eve.]
It may be that you need to take your current experience as a call to go deeper. Perhaps you need to find a complete acceptance of the fact that things don't feel good. It's OK not to feel good. If you completely accept not feeling good, then something amazing happens.
The way I look at meditation, both samatha and vipassana, is that it's all about "unselfing." "Selfing" is my rendering of the Buddha's term, "ahamkara," which means "I-making." All craving and aversion is "I-making," or "selfing." Now in samatha practice we're letting go of the hindrances, which themselves are manifestations of selfing, and so we're unselfing. We may experience jhana, which is a flow state where our selfing is almost absent.
Vipassana is just another approach to unselfing. We notice the impermanence of our experiences in order to remind ourselves that there's no basis for a self to "self" (taking self as a verb. We remind ourselves that our experiences are "not me, not mine, (that) I am not this" (Taṃ netaṃ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā). And this reduces clinging, and thus helps along the unselfing process. And we can recognize that no experience is worth grasping after because they are all dukkha (incapable of giving us happiness) -- but neither are they worth having aversion toward, because they are also not the "source" of our unhappiness. In fact the source of our unhappiness is a subtle level of craving or aversion.
So all practice is "unselfing."
You're probably needing to make a more conscious shift from samatha unselfing to vipassana unselfing. It's not enough to have deep and enjoyable meditations. We need to conduct the three kinds of vipassana investigations of our experience that I mentioned above -- each one corresponding to a different "mark."
Now I may have missed the target by a mile, because you haven't really said anything about what you do in your practice, but I had a need to write the above, and I suspect that it may be applicable to you -- especially the lakkhana of dukkha, where you need to learn to rest deeply in your experience even when it's unpleasant and chaotic.
Let me know what you think, and how you get on.
For a while now, I have been getting random flashbacks of very distant memories from early childhood or certain dreams that I have had years ago. I can usually remember quite vividly the moment that I had this experience and that it was years and years ago. Usually I find that the actual experiences I am remembering were not in the least bit significant at the time, but they come back so vividly, even though they are just fractions of distant memories, like moments that are stored in my brain somewhere. Is this a sign of progress? I know meditation is supposed to help memory but I am a little surprised at the frequency with which these flashbacks are occuring and am especially surprised because I have not even been practicing meditation consistently for more than 6 months.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
One of the things that happens naturally through meditation is that the mind becomes less "noisy." And when the mind is less noisy, then we can hear "whispers" more easily. So there are connections between your current experience and past experiences present all the time, but in a noisy mental environment you can't pick up on those connections -- which I've called whispers. When the mental environment is quieter, however, the whispers can be detected. This is a very common experience, although often what people find happening is that they have lots of "creative" ideas in meditation. It's the same principle, that these subtle connections between different areas of experience are noticed when the mind is quieter, although for some reason the connections your mind is making are seemingly more random. So this is quite normal, and it often happens after just a few weeks of meditation. It sounds like there's little or no significance to these memories, so I'd suggest just ignoring them and keeping going with the practice.
I am fairly new to meditation, but have found that I can get into a deep state pretty easily, seeing white and purple light on a regular basis. However, when I am meditating I feel a war inside of myself. There's a part of me that "put the brakes on" out of fear that I will not be able to wake up or bring myself out of the meditation. This anxiety manifests as a tightening in my chest. I know that my fear is rooted in my thoughts. Any suggestions?
Hi, Toni.
Thanks for writing. It would be good to know more about what you consider to be a "deep state" and also to hear more about what form this white and purple light is taking, and also the relationship between these deep states and the anxiety you're experiencing. Presumably you're not experiencing anxiety when you're actually in a deep state, for example.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
Thank you for your reply. Since I am a novice, I can't accurately guage what a deep state exactly is. However, I meditated again and this time, I didn't feel the same anxiety. I did it on my own (not in a group setting) and so didn't have the pressure of being on someone else's timeline.
The white and purple light looks like a ribbon of heat. The purple is pale but does turn to a darker purple at times. The white light sometimes becomes a burst of white light that then subsides.
Something else that happened this time around that has never happened before was that, at the end of my meditation, before I opened my eyes and as I was trying to pull myself back out of the deep well, I had the feeling like there was a cloud of energy enveloping my whole body. When I went to raise my hands, my hands suspended themselves (I didn't feel as if I was doing this voluntarily) about four inches from my body. When I moved my hands up and down along my torso, the "cloud" of energy was consistent along my body. When I "woke up" I had the desire to embrace something and so I hugged my dog.
This is all very exciting to me. I feel connected but my mind wants to know if this makes sense...whatever sense means.
Thank you for any input you have to offer :)
It sounds like you're experiencing what we call a samapatti, which are experiences that beginners often experience as the mind is starting to quiet down, but when we haven't yet learned to be more fully attentive to the body. They're not of any significance in themselves, and they're best ignored. Basically you can regard them as mildly hallucinatory experiences where the mind is taking random neuronal firings and seeing patterns in them. Some people are more prone to these than others.
You haven't actually said anything about what you do in meditation, but if you're doing mindfulness of breathing you should make a bit more effort to be aware of the actually physical sensations of the breathing rather than getting absorbed in these images, which are really just distractions.
That is very interesting, but also confusing to me. I didn't know that my focus should be solely on my breathing and not the images. I thought that the breathing was a way to plug into everything else and once I started seeing things or experiencing the lights, I should go towards the images. Again, excuse my naivete as well as my Type A thinking, but I always thought that by quieting myself through meditation I would gain insight and so I thought the images were tools to gain that insight. I'm probably overthinking this, huh? Regardless, this is very fascinating and I am grateful for your help :)
No, these images have nothing to do with insight. These are other kinds of experiences called nimittas that can be more helpful. Sometimes nimittas are visual, but they can appear in any sensory modality. When they are visual they're more stable and connected with the object of the meditation, and they can help take you deeper into meditation. Not everyone experiences nimittas, although people who are prone to samapattis are more likely to experience them.
hey bodhipaksa...thanks for your considered answer to my call for help ;)
My practice has consisted 99.99% of the time of midfulness of breathing...the 4 part method upheld by tmembers of the triratna order.
I have tried the metta bhavana with some really positive results but for some reason stuck dogedly with the Mof B, probably mistakenly thinking that this was the main key to real progress.
lols...I suspect that you might now feel that your feelings as to precisely what lies at the heart of the problem Im experiencing with my practice, as indicated in your message to me offers a definite sense of vindication. ;-)
I think that you are most probably right about my needing to go deeper and thus on to vipassana meditation.
I guess my next question is therefore...how do I best proceed from here?
can you please reccommend a good book for me to work with?
with thanks from my heart
simon
I'd highly recommend doing as much lovingkindness practice as mindfulness of breathing. It's a powerful practice,and I'd say it's well-nigh essential to "real progress." In fact it's an important component of being able to trust ourselves, and trust our experience as we shift from trying to "fix" our experience to simply sitting with our experience, noting how it arises and falls. It's also handy from the point of view of changing how we relate to people in our lives.
Usually my meditations never last longer than half hour. Nonetheless, recently I have been able to go pretty deep into concentration. I meditate with my eyes closed (opening them now and then to make sure I don’t get too sluggish), and what I have noticed is that when I am in a deeper state of meditation (or when I think I am), whenever there is the slightest sound I will often feel a sudden burst of energy, (for lack of a better way to explain it), that radiates through my body but particularly in my head, like behind my eyes or something. I think it feels good I am not sure because it is so subtle and so quick that it is gone as soon as I recognize it. I have been thinking and I don’t know if this is also a good sign of progress in concentration or calmness or what have you, or on the other hand it could be a sign that I am getting sleepy or less attentive and therefore am slightly startled by even the quietest noise. If you think it is the latter, what are some suggestions for not getting sleepy or less attentive in sitting meditation? (I usually sit in a chair with back support because I have back problems)
Thanks!
It's very hard to comment on someone else's experience. So I can't know whether you're startled by these sounds, of whether it's something else. But generally an increased sensitivity to inner sensations like this is a good sign.
But it's best not to get too caught up in whether or not we're making progress. Yes, some reassurance is good, but that reassurance needs to come from trusting the practice, rather than reaching some kind of benchmark. Because you can hit periods where for months it seems like your meditation practice is falling to pieces. And that doesn't matter if you trust the practice; you just keep going. If your confidence is based on "achievements" then you'll be thrown off balance by those challenging times.
So what's a good sit? It's a sit that you do. Any sit that you do.
Hello,
I am 21 years old boy.
I am having major depression and many phobias and I started Mindfulness meditation (I am native Buddhist)..Today is 28 hours of meditation.
When I start meditation I feel very tight, pulling like feeling inside my head and it happen even not meditating now. But not painful..and nice feeling.
Specially on top of the head and forehead area, feeling like pulling, tightness like that. and heart beating very much,
Is that normal ?
Am I correct way to resolve my phobias ??
Please tell me
Thank you.
Hi. When I was in my twenties I started meditating on my own and after about eight months I began to have involuntary profane and blasphemous thoughts about God and Jesus when I got into an aware but thought free state (Mindfulness). The first time it happened I decided to stop meditating until the next day. The next day the same thing happened. I stopped meditating completely after the second episode. About a year later I decided to take meditation up again and after a few months the same profanity laced thoughts crept back into my mind. I once again gave up meditating because these thoughts were so intrusive that it felt like I was actually being attacked. It is now about 17 years later and I’m now once again meditating. The thoughts haven’t come back but if they do I’ve decided to ignore them and to push forward with my meditation and not give up. My questions: what are these thoughts, where are they coming from, why was I having them, are they dangerous and was I somehow being harmed by them?
Also I've been waking up at 3:33am for a few nights straight. Any idea why?
Hi, Marlow.
I'd imagine that part of you is really pissed off by God, and that when you got into a more relaxed state and let your guard down, this part was able to make itself heard. I don't know if there's anything in your history that ties in with that theory...
As for why you're waking up at a certain time, I don't know. When my daughter was a year old she used to wake up at 4 AM every day, give or take a couple of minutes. There was no getting back to sleep after that, so I hope you're more fortunate :)