Amazing spiritual experience in meditation My dear friend
I hope my email finds you happy and well.
I have been reading your articles again and am thinking of you a lot these days, because my yoga practice has been of such an amazing quality.
I am working very hard, but am blissfully happy!
One day sometime last week, I had a relaxation that took me away. 
We had covered our eyes with eye bags and I felt my forehead open as my body fell away. It was the strangest experience I have had in a long time.
My skull seemed to open just above my eyes. I could feel the pressure of this space opening up, in my eyeballs!
It felt like the bone and skin were drawing back to expose a great crater in my face! I became a little frightened, because it actually was a little painful - or perhaps just disturbing!
I was afraid suddenly, that someone would come and lift the eye bag and see my brain through the hole in my head! I was afraid that he would ask us to sit up and open our eyes before the skin grew back over the opening!
Of course my sudden panic disturbed the process and the hole closed over again. I found it difficult to get up and walk after the class.
I think that the class had opened new channels for me. The standing postures we had practiced earlier had been focused on aligning ourselves with an inner center line. I was feeling extremely light.
We had practiced Sirshasana after and I could barely feel the weight of my body on my arms and head. Perhaps this had something to do with it.
I remember the first time I had experienced the purple spinning dot behind my eyes, and I had, had the sensation of being drawn down a tunnel with a light at the end. I had been just as shocked and terrified.
No one can tell you what you might experience in a meditation. In time I became comfortable with this experience.
I grew to enjoy this quiet, purple passage into myself. I welcomed it. A few times before, I have had similar corporeal experiences.
I remember during one meditation, experiencing the sensation of sinking into the wooden boards of the studio floor - I could smell the linseed oil, that was used to keep the wood supple, all around me.
It permeated my skin. I became the wood.
From a distance, I heard my teacher ask me to become aware of my breathing again and slowly start to move my fingers and toes. Again the panic!
I couldn't move my fingers and toes - I was encased in wood! I was the floor - floor can't move. At last I began to stir, I felt as though I was crawling up from out of the floorboards as each limb became flesh and blood again and I was resurrected!
I am always striving to reach higher or deeper levels of consciousness, but I often forget that when it first happens, I experience the panic and fear.
I guess that is the way it is with our consciousness. How well she protects me: This experience does not compute - it falls outside the boundaries of "safe" rationality - sound the alarm bells - panic.
I realize that I need to reprogram and retrain my mind to accept things out of the ordinary, so she does not trigger the alarm every time. It is like conditioning myself to cope with fear of heights when I am climbing.
When I am in an exposed situation, my mind sets off the alarm. I cope with it by breathing and refocusing. I need to practice this with meditation also.
Although, admittedly, it is easier to refocus in a solid, tangible situation. The rock is real, the distance to the ground and the next safe ledge is measurable and I know what my body is capable of physically - I have practiced the moves.
So then how do we practice the moves when meditation seems so unpredictable? When we move in a plain that is immeasurable? When then the environment around us is intangible and unknown? Like the universe!
Why have the ancient sages not drawn maps to guide us? They simply give us some skills and we set off on these journeys of discovery all on our own.
What more do we know?
Still, this does not stop me from packing my little cosmic backpack and setting off on another journey again. I will go first down the familiar paths and then, one day, I find a new one and experience the vulnerability that one feels in an unfamiliar place that’s just a little dangerous!
Will I be able to retrace my steps? What if a storm comes up? Will I find my way off this mountain? Will I find my way through it? What lies on the other side?
I will keep searching. So much to tell you about! So many questions I have.
Hope that we are together again soon to catch up on all our thoughts.
Missing you
Lee
(This email is written by a wonderful spiritual person & a Yoga Teacher, Lee-Anne Nel who is in search of spiritual applications of Yoga since many years. She was in Brazil for some time & this email describes her spiritual experience while she was meditating. With her consent, we are publishing this amazing experience which can be helpful to many Yoga students worldwide who are trying to understand the spiritual journey of human soul in this universe.)
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Experiences of patients