All right, so I used to be pretty intuitive-I knew who was calling me without caller id or special ringtones, I would be singing a song and would turn on the radio to find that that song was on, and such little things like that. I also had very strange dreams in which I'd get a very vague picture of something and then that something would happen in the following week or so. Just little things like that. I'm really big on sleep walking and talking and one night I had a dream I was watching myself make my bed in the middle of the night and woke up to me sitting at the foot of my bed with my bed made. (I've wondered if I had a subconscious-leaving-the-physical-body-at-night thing like I've read about but anyway... ) Over the past year or so, these things have seriously declined in frequency and I kind of miss them so I decided to start meditating to try and hone that stuff. I did it for the first time for quite awhile the other night and I had quite a freaky experience. What felt like 2-3 minutes turned out to be 30, so I think I was definitely "in the zone" but I had this very freaky dark, negative feeling and I haven't the slightest idea what it was. I can pretty much say it scared me s***less. I just sat there trembling and breathing heavily for awhile and thinking very positive thoughts... lol!

When I was most intuitive I was having a lot of problems with my mother and new stepdad. There was a lot of fighting and what not and I wound up moving in with my dad, by far a more positive environment.

That was a year or so ago and I don't know if I've accumulated some sort of bad karma or "juju" in a manner of speaking or if I've just got some really negative energy hanging around me. Hell, I'm scared it could be involved with either something paranormal or satanic, although I have not meddled in either. I'm not an extremely religious person but... I don't know. What do you guys think, you think a sage stick, some better feng shui, working on my karma, prayer..

I think you had better indulge in some positive aspects of feng shui. Move your furniture around to different angles and see if that works. Try different combinations, but no couches up against walls.

Meditation is a very good practise. There are some people who experience meditation. Some are very good experiences but it can also create some emotions or feelings on the negative side as well. See in meditation and learning about meditation one of the most important things to remember is whatever feelings or thoughts you get. Do not become them but observe them as if your on the outside looking in. Fear can make matters worse, but you need to realise that your protected and the only thing to do is recognize certain feelings and thoughts but do not let them make you but you yourself make them. If that makes any sense at all.

My suggestion is when your meditating, what are you meditating on or what are you thinking or focusing on? When ever you lose focus you need to feel through these feelings and they will pass. If you let them?

Do not push these thoughts or feelings away, you need to reconise them for what they are and then learn to let go of them.

I personally used to meditate at least an hour a day, but there are many different forms of meditations and as far as the time experience that is normal.

For me, I have had many experiances people have named. E.S.P, Dreams that come true. Knowing things before they happen. So many things I can list but the more I meditated the more I feel that I experienced it. The more peace I felt as well.

Best wishes in your experiences and sometimes life changes to the point where your intuition does not seem as strong. Almost like phases but working at it is important, but I know your stressing right now, and maybe that is contributing to your experience in meditation.

There are different types of meditation Transcendental meditation and some others can open you to wrong spirits. Good meditation is more focusing on your inner being and freeing yourself to truth. To be more open to what you are talking about is get more insync by not cluttering up things with your own thoughts like maybe, what if's, I wonder how, etc...
Don't limit your world to only focusing on your sight, sound and reasoning.

Spirit guides and chants can open you to bad spirits

There are different types of meditation Transcendental meditation and some others can open you to wrong spirits. Good meditation is more focusing on your inner being and freeing yourself to truth. To be more open to what you are talking about is get more insync by not cluttering up things with your own thoughts like maybe, what if's, I wonder how, etc.....
Don't limit your world to only focusing on your sight, sound and reasoning.

spirit guides and chants can open you to bad spirits

Could you elaborate please..

There is nothing wrong with a mantra. Or visualization techniques or relaxation techniques, or even praying. There are so many different kinds of meditations but I personally never heard of meditation opening you up to bad spirits or spirit guides.

Okay I am still trying to figure out what kind of meditation were you doing. I am waiting to here from you so we all can help you further.

Meditation opens you to the spiritual realm and some forms of meditation can open you to good spirits or bad.

I ran across this while I was looking for what I am trying to explain

Back in 1979, when I was living in Pune, India, as a starry-eyed devotee of the infamous guru Bhagwan Rajneesh, something happened that has disturbed me to this day. A man who had just come down from Kathmandu after completing a thirty-day Tibetan Buddhist meditation course killed himself. I had met him the night before, and we'd had coffee together. I don't remember what we spoke about, but he was friendly and didn't appear distressed. But the next day he climbed to the top of the multi-storied Blue Diamond Hotel and leapt off.

The Bhagwan, at his first lecture after the man's suicide, tried to reassure us by saying the man had already reincarnated as a more enlightened soul. But I was quite upset and remember thinking how strange it was that someone should kill himself after a meditation course. Isn't meditation something you do to get--at the very least--peace of mind? I wondered whether he might have had a mental illness and perhaps shouldn't have taken the course in the first place. Even if he had, shouldn't the meditation have helped? It didn't occur to me that the meditation itself might have caused a mental imbalance that tipped him over the edge--that meditation could be dangerous for some people. Has such a notion ever appeared in the mainstream media, let alone the myriad New Age magazines?

Since the 1970s, meditation has become increasingly popular in the West and is promoted as a way to reduce stress, bring about relaxation, and even manage depression. It's now being used in classrooms, prisons, and hospitals. Here in Australia, meditation groups and teachers have popped up like mushrooms: hundreds head off to the free (donation only) ten-day Vipassana courses, or sit and meditate with groups such as the Brahma Kumaris or Sahaja Yoga. There is a general assumption and belief that meditation is a secular technique and is good for everyone.

The most common types of meditation taught include sitting still and concentrating on the breath, silently repeating a sound (mantra) or visualizing an image. What is often overlooked is that these Eastern meditation techniques were never meant to be methods to reduce stress and bring about relaxation. They are essentially spiritual tools, designed to apparently "cleanse" the mind of impurities and disturbances so as to attain so-called enlightenment--a concept as nebulous as God.

In the Hindu scripture The Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says to Arjuna:

Sitting and concentrating the mind on a single object, controlling the thoughts and the activities of the senses, let the yogi practice meditation for self-purification.. . By always keeping the mind fixed on the Self, the yogi whose mind is subdued attains peace of the Supreme nirvana by uniting with Me.

And Sri Lankan-born K. Sri Dhammananda, who before his death in 2006 was the foremost Theravada Buddhist monk in Malaysia and Singapore, wrote: "No one can attain Nibbana [nirvana] or salvation without developing the mind through meditation. Meditation is a gentle way of conquering the defilements which pollute the mind."

What is interesting is that Buddhist and Hindu teachers, even the Dalai Lama, have occasionally pointed out the potential hazards of meditation. Dhammananda warned:

The practice of meditation has been abused by people. They want immediate and quick results, just as they expect quick returns for everything they do in daily life . . . the mind must be brought under control in slow degrees and one should not try to reach for the higher states without proper training. We have heard of over-enthusiastic young men and women literally going out of their minds because they adopted the wrong attitudes towards meditation.

Dr. Lorin Roche, a meditation teacher, says a major problem arises from the way meditators interpret Buddhist and Hindu teachings. He points out that meditation techniques that encourage detachment from the world were intended only for monks and nuns. He has spent thirty years doing interviews with people who meditate regularly and says many were depressed. He says they have tried to detach themselves from their desires, their loves, and their passion. "Depression is a natural result of loss, and if you internalize teachings that poison you against the world, then of course you will become depressed."

The Dalai Lama has said that Eastern forms of meditation have to be handled carefully: "Westerners who proceed too quickly to deep meditation should learn more about Eastern traditions and get better training than they usually do. Otherwise, certain physical or mental difficulties appear."

I don't remember any such warnings when I began meditating, and probably wouldn't have taken much notice if there were. Along with fellow seekers, I regarded any negative experiences as healing or just clearing out bad karma.

I meditated a lot in the 1970s and thought I was superior to those who didn't. Thankfully I didn't have a breakdown (though sometimes I was surely "out of my mind"). I had all sorts of bizarre and strange experiences and in the early days often felt bliss and ecstasy. There were a few occasions where I felt as though I was "one with the universe", and I once began hallucinating that the trees outside were vibrating with white light, convinced I could hear the sacred Om sound booming through the Himalayan night.

In addition to Hindu meditations--which involved mumbling mantras of various kinds (I even spent time with the Hare Krishnas in Vrindaban where I used a 108-beaded mala to chant "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare ." throughout the day)--I also attended five ten-day Buddhist Vipassana retreats. The teacher was S. N. Goenka. His organization now leads retreats worldwide and they are by far the most popular meditation courses offered. They involve sitting for up to fourteen hours a day, watching the breath and sensations in the body and trying to become detached. The aim (apart from enlightenment) is equanimity. Blissful feelings have to be disregarded, along with feelings of physical discomfort--even excruciating agony--that may arise from prolonged sitting. Meditators are not allowed to talk, write, or read. There is no evening meal, just a cup of herbal tea.

When I finally gave up on seeking enlightenment in the late 1970s and returned to worldly life, I also gave up meditating--except for the occasional sitting still for a few minutes here and there, watching my breath in the Vipassana way. However, over the years I would beat myself up about my laziness: "You should meditate," my inner critic would harp. "Every day, for at least half an hour." But why? I now ask. Did it really do me any good? I manage my life perfectly well without it. If I want peace and relaxation, I have a massage, or soak in a hot bath or swim twenty laps at the local pool. Or I go for a long leisurely walk. Or I just sit in a chair and do nothing. Is meditation really as beneficial as its proponents claim?

Arthur Chappell, a former devotee of Guru Maharaj (also known as Prem Rawat), points out that meditation starves the mind of stimulus (sensory deprivation) and he wonders whether desensitizing the mind to stimuli may actually "affect one's ability to react properly with the level of fear, love, and other emotions required in any given social situation." Chappell says minds can atrophy--just like limbs do--if they aren't used for a wide range of purposes:

Many meditation practitioners have complained of difficulty doing simple arithmetic and remembering names of close friends after prolonged meditation. The effect is rather like that of Newspeak's obliteration of the English language in George Orwell's 1984.

In recent years neuroscientists have been examining the effects of meditation on the brain. Professor Richard Davidson of Wisconsin, a long-term Buddhist meditator himself, claims that meditation can "change neural states in circuits that may be important for compassionate behavior and attentional and emotional regulation." However, other scientists argue that Davidson's claims are unsubstantiated and that his studies have serious flaws ranging from experimental design to conclusions. Dr. Nancy Hayes, a neurobiologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, says that Davidson and his supporters promote research before it has been replicated. And what is really interesting, but never highlighted, is that Davidson himself points out that, for psychologists using meditation to treat their patients, "Meditation is not going to be good for all patients with emotional disorders and it may even be bad for certain types of patients."

Dr. Solomon Snyder, head of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, warns that during meditation the brain releases serotonin. This may help those with mild depression but too much serotonin can cause, in some, a paradoxical relaxation-induced anxiety. Instead of relaxing during meditation, these people become distressed and may even have panic attacks. Snyder says that in some cases of schizophrenia, meditation can launch a person straight into psychosis.

And what about all those good feelings one can experience in meditation? Is there another explanation, for example, for that transcendental feeling of being one with the universe?

Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of long-term practitioners of Buddhism while they were meditating and compared them with images taken when they were not. Newberg saw that blood flow to the posterior superior parietal lobe decreased during meditation. This area of the brain determines the boundaries of one's body in relation to the environment and allows us to navigate a complex three-dimensional world without bumping into things. "We know that the posterior superior parietal lobe plays that particular role because there are patients with damage in this same region who literally cannot move around without falling," Newberg reports. "They'll miss the chair they intended to sit on, and generally have a fuzzy understanding of where their body ends and the rest of the universe begins." He says that when people have spiritual experiences and feel they become one with the universe and lose their sense of self, it may be because of what is happening in that area of the brain. "If you block that area, you lose that boundary between the self and the rest of the world." Were the Buddhist meditators merely experiencing an odd side effect of submitting their brains to unusual conditions?

Dr. Michael Persinger, a professor of neuroscience at the Laurentian University in Canada, studied 1,018 meditators in 1993 and found that meditation can bring on symptoms of complex partial epilepsy such as visual abnormalities, hearing voices, feeling vibrations, or experiencing automatic behaviors such as narcolepsy. Note that epileptic patients who suffer from seizures in the temporal lobes have auditory or visual hallucinations, which they often interpret as mystical experiences. Some are convinced that they conversed with God.

In recent years Persinger set out to investigate so-called "mystical" experiences under controlled laboratory conditions. He got volunteers to wear a helmet fitted with a set of magnets through which he ran a weak electromagnetic signal. Persinger found that the magnetically induced seizures in the temporal lobes generate the same sort of hallucinations and mystical experiences reported by epileptic patients. Four in five people, he says, report a "mystical experience, the feeling that there is a sentient being or entity standing behind or near" them. Some weep, some feel God has touched them, others become frightened and talk of demons and evil spirits. "That's in the laboratory," Persinger notes, referring to subjects' knowledge of a controlled environment. "How much more intense might these experiences be if they happened late at night, or in a pew in a mosque or synagogue?"

Does this indicate that so-called mystical experiences may be caused by seizures, by a temporary malfunction of the brain circuitry triggered by abnormal conditions such as sensory deprivation or decreased blood flow to the parietal lobe? Is that what happened to me?

In addition to the neuroscientists' findings, there is anecdotal evidence that shouldn't be overlooked. Clearly there are potential dangers with long meditation retreats, particularly for beginners. Can Meditation Be Bad for You? by Mary Garden (http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/MaryGarden.html)

I really don't know what sort of meditation it would be. That's why I asked for more info regarding NOhelp4U's first post. Generally, what I attempt to do is sit in a quiet place, focus on my breathing, and redirect my mind when it attempts to wander.

That is okay that is good in fact.
You can also search your soul

So that is a form of meditation and honestly there is nothing wrong with it.

Before you meditate take precautions to protect yourself.Surround yourself with the white light and block the negativity.Say it out loud or in your head.
You could be attracting spirits to you if you are intuitive.. negative ones are bound to come.

White light and all is more like white witchcraft.
God is the only one that should be your 'protection'.

White light and all is more like white witchcraft.
God is the only one that should be your 'protection'.

I agree.

Our brains are very much like car radios--you can tune into many different stations, or frequencies, on the dial. Unfortunately, most of us grew up in the society known as modern middle class American/European Western Civilization, and that society for the last couple of hundred years has been teaching people to believe that only one station on the dial--that they call ordinary waking consciousness, or Aristotlean subject-object dualism, is valid. This civilization teaches that all other stations on the dial, whether accessed through trance or sleeping dream or fever or trauma or drumming or entheogenic plants, are not important and only give nonsense information.

So keep in mind that of the many many cultures that have existed on the planet earth for the last hundred thousand years, only one has held this absurd "one station only" belief, and only for a few hundred years. All other cultures have recognized that the information our brains receive in these other states of consciousness are entirely real, and useful, and the things we do in dreams can have a profound effect on "reality" what I call the waking world. About seven years ago, a professional shamanic practitioner told me, "Had you been born in almost any other culture, at an early age the shaman or witch doctors or whatever would have taken you off and trained you in the use of your gifts." I think the same may well be true for you. You have the knack for slipping back and forth across the boundary between waking world and the dream worlds, Sister!

With regard to the sudden decrease in your psychic intuitiveness: It goes in cycles, and it is your birthright. It will definitely come back, so don't worry about that. Wanting it to come back, naming and claiming it as your own, is a good start, and setting a deliberate intention to train yourself in it and cultivate your talent will definitely help. I agree with Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way, when she said that the Universe likes creative people who claim their talents, and will bombard you with gifts as soon as you do. I don't doubt you want it back! It is a delight for us, just as those with great musical talent delight in their art. ;)

With regard to the negative feeling: There are people in the world who do evil. You, being a human being, yourself have a negative or shadow side. There are spirits who feed on human energy (I would not consider those evil, any more than a bengal tiger or AIDS virus is evil--it is a natural being doing what it is born to do). Feng shui, or other ways of setting up your environment (candles, personal altar, calling the four directions--whatever works for you!) with a specific intention of creating a safe space for yourself, is one way to protect against that. Another is to call upon the Divine (whether you call it God, Goddess, Spirit, or something else) to guide and protect you. Another is getting in touch with a guardian angel, patron saint, power animal, or other spirit guide who can help you in this work. Lastly, doing the hard housecleaning of working with your own shadow side, accepting and healing past woundings, and learning to love yourself, is essential, so that when you become better at using your gifts, you do not use them in the service of evil.

With regard to how to reconnect to your dreaming gift: Meditation is great for training the mind to hold intention, to be open to the richness of experience and to learn how to listen. As Ursula Leguin said, "To hear, one must be silent." You can also try to hone your dreaming skills. The basic exercises to improve recall, learn lucid dreaming and dream incubation, etc. are widely known. You might also benefit from learning the skill known as shamanic journeywork, spirit travelling, or trance dreaming. It is a wonderfully versatile tool and exciting adventure, and from what you say, you would quickly find you have a knack for it, I'm betting!

Don't forget to have fun!

Many Blessings,

Alder

Thank you,
Thank you!

Hi Krissy2991,

I agree with most of what is stated in these post, so I won't reiterate it,only to say that protection before you open up your mind is, so important...

I think the bad experience you had, was maybe because you weren't protected therefore inviting bad energy or entities into your mind.

You need to train to be able to open your mind in the correct way, a good idea would be to talk to a trained medium about this, they will point you in the right direction and show you the correct proceeder, that will keep you safe from bad vibes etc...

I have experienced the same as yourself and more,many times I have been tempted to take it further, but it frightens me so I leave it alone.
I think anything that comes natural to me or you is OK, but I'm not sure that we should be forcing the issue!!
I have witnessed the after- math, when someone didn't know what they were getting into,so be absolutely sure of what you are doing.

There is a differrence between meditation and paranormal,so please remember to pray for protection if you decide to continue.

Blessings

I believe you quite enjoyed your state of being highly intuitive ,
Well dear friend, you are one of us who had this power during the kid hood and this power got gradually declining as you grow up?