There are many things that come to mind when you think about meditation, but strangest meditation experiences may not one of them. I’ll admit, I would have been with you on this. Before I began a daily meditation practice, words like spiritual, insightful, mindful, enlightening, and calming came to mind whenever I considered meditation. But ‘strange’? Can’t say that ever occured to me.
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
– Epictetus
Most days you meditate, the experience is quite uneventful, even mundane. Sure, you feel more focused, relaxed, and prepared to take on your day, I know I do, especially when I’ve managed to wrestle Monkey Mind into submission. But most days are kinda average.
Yet after faithfully meditating daily for over nine months now, I’ve certainly had some of the strangest meditation experiences I can imagine. I can’t really think of another way to describe them. And so far, I’ve had five of these strange and powerful experiences really stand out.
Paper Tigers
You may be wondering: what do strange meditation experiences have to do with tigers? Plenty, actually. In many ways my five strange meditation experiences allowed me to confront some lingering paper tigers that had long haunted my mind.
These include things like emotional baggage, preconceptions, and entrenched habits. Without the proper tools to disassemble, examine, and disband them, paper tigers appear very powerful. But, in fact, they are only as powerful as we allow them to be. We give them power, and with time, patience, and training, we can learn how take that power back.
These ‘strangest meditation experiences’ were accidental and unintentional, which adds to their mystique. They all just kinda happened, out of nowhere. But when I gave myself over to them, each was life changing in its own way. I’ve listed them from least strange to strangest. Number one is the craziest and most impactful thus far! You be the judge. And as always, I invite you to share your strange meditation experiences in the comments below.
5- The Day Pot Quit Me
This was my first strange meditation experiences and it happened rather early on. About 35 days into daily meditation, I lost all desire to smoke or use marijuana. I’ll never forget it.
That morning, after I wrapped my meditation, I thought to myself, “I’m done with pot.” Then I got up from my chair, opened my safe, and removed my stash. I emptied all of the contents of the various bags and jars into one big mason jar. Soon I filled the jar with pot gummies and candies, marijuana flower, cannabis oil, pre rolled joints, and half smoked roaches.
When I finished, I walked out of my office and across my yard, stopping when I reached my back fence. My yard backs to greenbelt and nature reserve. I looked out across the landscape of peppertrees, eucalyptus, and honeysuckle. Then I took one last look at my stash and handful by handful tossed it all over the fence. Gone!
I chuckled to myself about the squirrels and rats that would soon be tripping balls before heading back into my office to start my work day.
You see, I never began meditating with the goal of quitting pot. I did so with the hope I could regain control over my alcohol addiction. Pot was collateral damage, an unintended consequence. What makes this so strange is:
- I had been a daily pot smoker for over twenty years
- I stopped cold turkey, have zero cravings, and have never looked back
When my longtime pot toking friends ask me why I quit smoking pot, I reply, “I didn’t quit pot, pot quit me.” This usually results in a quizzical look, and then I say, “Yeah, I don’t understand it either. It just happened one day.” Bye, bye crazy addiction! Gone without a trace.
And I haven’t touched marijuana since, despite ample opportunity to do so. While strange and inexplicable, pot quitting me is not my strangest meditation experience.
4- Entering The Energy Field
This is where things start to get a bit, shall we say, stranger. There I was one morning about twenty minutes into a twenty-eight minute guided breathing meditation when suddenly it happened. I entered the energy field.
What is the energy field? I’m not sure this is the technical term for it, but I describe it as a place somewhere just before an outer body experience (which I haven’t truly experienced, yet), but still very much anchored in the material world.
You’re still in your head, but your body feels very far away. You’re just kinda floating in space. It’s a very liberating feeling, bordering on exhilarating. Since my first time in the energy field, I’ve managed to get back there a few more times, but not by trying. It remains very much an accidental experience. In other words, it just happens of its own accord, whenever it chooses to.
So much so, that when I realize consciously that I’m floating here, I’m almost immediately sucked back into my body and cannot replicate the experience. My lesson here is learning to let go, to give up control. When I am able to do this, I remain in the energy field. Otherwise, I’m booted out.
As metaphysical as visits to the energy field may sound, it gets even weirder.
3- The Magic Rock
As I’ve progressed in my meditation, I’ve moved from simple five minute breathing exercises to forty minute deep meditations. Lately, I’ve been trying various ‘third eye’ meditations on YouTube. These are designed to help you to open your ‘third eye chakra”, otherwise known as your spiritual eye.
I was practicing the one I’ve linked below early one evening when I had my third strange meditation experience. I was following the meditation teacher who was leading me down some stairs, through a door, and into a beautiful garden.
This is a common visualization exercise in both hypnosis and meditation, and it wasn’t the first time I had been taken through this particular protocol. Anyway, so there I was walking through the garden listening to the teacher when I saw a smooth round gray rock lying on the side of pathway. I had the urge to bend down and pick it up, so I did.
Doing this resulted in one of the strangest meditation experiences I’ve had. I pick up the rock and I notice that I can feel it in my hand. I can physically feel it: it’s weight, temperature, girth, and smoothness. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I was actually holding this cold gray rock in my hand.
Staying with this experience, I examined the rock before placing it down again on the pathway.
Now do I believe I was actually holding a rock or that I somehow materialized one in my hand? No. But what made this experience so impactful was the realization that the mind is so powerful that it can replicate every detail of a rock (in this example) and reproduce the physical sensation so perfectly.
Strange, yes. Other worldly? No. But my next strange meditation experience sets the stage for that.
2- Past Lives
The concept of reincarnation and past lives has always fascinated me at some level. It’s comforting in a way to believe there’s not only something after this life, but that there is some master plan that guides us to perfection over the course of our soul’s journey incarnated over hundreds, possibly thousands of lifetimes.
In this spirit (pun intended), I found some past life regression meditations on soundcloud with Brian Weiss. I’ll admit, the first couple of times I did these, nothing of consequence happened. But the third time, I found myself in a Roman garden. I was wearing brown leather sandals, a white tunic, and a red sash/belt. I could see olive trees and an arched stone bridge built over a gently flowing stream.
As I went deeper into this meditation, I was transported to an ancient marketplace full of vendors selling their wares on either side of a cobblestone street. Finally, I was at the end of my life laying in a bed, long salt and pepper beard resting on my chest, surrounded by blurry images of people in various Roman attire. I could only make out a single face. That of a young woman who was obviously distraught at my condition. Maybe my daughter? Then I died.
Yes, you read that right. I died. In an instant, I zoomed out of my body, out of the villa, the city, and the continent until my body was suspended in space. The best way I can describe it is like a telephoto lens zooming out of my life. Then with a jerk, I was sucked back into my physical body. I gasped and opened my eyes. Wow! I was blown away. Since then I’ve experienced other past lives and deaths. Each time, I am awed and humbled. The cumulative result of these regressions is I no longer fear death or dying.
So What Happened?
Before you commit me to a mental hospital, hear me out. I can’t say with any certainty that what I experienced were actual past lives. When I do them, they are certainly realistic feeling, but simultaneously have a dreamlike element to them. Like holding the rock, what impresses me most is my mind’s ability to create these past life dream sequences with incredible realism, to the point of being virtually indistinguishable from reality itself. It’s akin dreaming while being wide awake and would be the strangest meditation experience of all, but there’s another that takes the cake.
1- Ghostly Visitors
As strange as it may be to pick up a phantom rock or experience the sensation of death in a past life, real or imagined, ghostly visitation tops the charts of strangest meditation experiences.
On this particular Sunday morning, I had decided to do a guided ‘inner child’ meditation. In this meditation, you visualize yourself as a child and sit down with your younger self for a discussion. During your visit, you forgive yourself for the things you did as a child, because, afterall, you didn’t know any better. You were young, inexperienced, and impressionable. Of course you’re going to make mistakes and do things you regret later through the lense of time.
There’s a bit more to the visit than I describe here, and the shit gets pretty deep, but that’s not the strange part, it’s just protocol. Anyway, I’m probably three quarters of the way through the meditation when my recently deceased uncle appears. He’s smiling at me with his soft, kind eyes. Without saying a word, he approaches me and gives me a big hug. As he releases me, standing behind him is another departed uncle with whom I was close as a kid. He gives me a silent, yet warm hug.
Behind him, is my dad who died of cancer almost exactly two years before this meditation. Again, no words, and another hug. Then my grandparents in succession and finally my mother-in-law, who was also taken by cancer far too young.
They were all lined up. Not a word from any of them, just hugs. By the end of the meditation, I had tears streaming down my cheeks. I was overcome with calm and peace. I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off of me.
Another Mental Trick?
Just like with my past life experiences, I’m not convinced I was visited by my dead relatives. However, the experience of their visits, especially the hugs, felt very real. And for each, I feel I had deeply repressed grief and remorse that needed to be worked out. So, I believe my subconscious mind saw the opportunity during my deeply meditative state to surface all of these folks and allow me to make peace with each in order.
Of course, there may be some of you reading this who believe in the occult and paranormal. You might be thinking that I was absolutely visited by spirits. Maybe I was. I can’t say. But I will reiterate that either way the experience was legitimate and has allowed me to make peace with my long buried grief.
It’s worth mentioning that a short time after this vision, I was visited by another grandparent who was notably absent from the hug procession. She and I lost touch decades before she passed away, so I wasn’t surprised by her absence. She appeared to me in a dream. In it, she entered the room I was in and took a seat by the door. Then, angrily, she glared at me in silence as I went about my business trying to ignore her.
The next day, I called my mom and told her about my dream. I mentioned that I never remembered gramma being angry, but that she was always very kind to me. My mother said, “Well, you didn’t know her at the end of her life. She died a very bitter woman. It’s very strange she appeared to you that way.”
Very strange indeed.
Strangest Meditation Experiences Final Thoughts
What these meditation experiences have impressed upon me is the power of the mind to heal itself through its ability to create powerful visualizations. Through these we are able to make peace with all kinds of things we didn’t even realize we were still dealing with. For me that was grief in the case of my deceased family members, inner child regrets, and my fear of death.
More impressive still is meditation’s ability to rewire the brain. How else was I able to give up a twenty plus year pot smoking addiction cold turkey with zero cravings or regrets? Or cut my drinking from 5+ nights a week to once or twice a month, and be able to stop after just a couple of beers instead of nine or ten?
Whatever we say about experiences such as these, we can’t deny their emotional impact and productive outcomes. I certainly can’t. And I look forward to the experiences that lie ahead of me as I press on in my journey of spiritual growth and healing.
If meditation is something you’ve considered trying, don’t let these experiences give you pause. I encourage you to give it a try and experience its transformative potential for yourself.
