Skip to content

AYP Wiki

A living encyclopedia of AYP

Extreme Sensitivity Protocol

A concrete, nine-step protocol for practitioners whose nervous system is releasing obstructions faster than it can integrate them — the extreme end of sensitive meditators. Lesson 160 addresses a case where 5–7 minutes of mantra deep meditation produced bright colored lights before the eyes, then headaches, forcing the session to stop, followed at night by violent, unusually realistic dreams.

The protocol

1. Shorten the session

  • Start with 10 minutes, once a day, before breakfast.
  • Rest afterward for 5–10 minutes lying down, longer if needed. Coming out slowly is critical.
  • Do this for a few days. If it's stable, add a second 10-minute session in the early evening (not near bedtime — see below).

2. Don't extend beyond the allotted time

Even if you're lost in thought or sensation, stop at 10 minutes. Time spent in thoughts, sensations, dissolving obstructions, etc., all counts as meditation time. Don't push past the limit to "finish" what's arising.

3. Switch to witnessing when sensations are strong

If strong sensations or headache come up during the session, stop the mantra and let attention rest with the sensation. Don't force attention on it — let it be easily drawn to where the intensity is. This is the witnessing technique applied in-session: pause the primary procedure, let the sensation dissolve in silent presence, then resume when it subsides. If it's too much to sit through, lie down and continue being easy with attention.

Lesson 160: "Try not to get up until the sensation subsides. Then you will know the dissolving process has completed."

4. Very active daily life

Engaged activity during the day and evening is essential to stabilize the purification happening during meditation. People, family, walking, creative work, service — whatever fits the practitioner's temperament. This is the standard grounding principle, but it matters more for sensitive practitioners because the release is more intense.

5. Never meditate right before bed

Always meditate before activity, never before sleep. The violent dreams in the case were partly because there was no activity window between meditation and sleep to absorb the release — it spilled directly into the dream state.

6. Build up gradually if stable

If 10 minutes twice a day is stable and daily life is going well, try 15 minutes twice a day for a few weeks. If that's stable, try 20. If at any point discomfort returns, back off to the last comfortable level and stay there. No timeline. It might take months or years to reach the standard 20 minutes; it might never reach it.

7. Consider adding (or leading with) SBP or asanas

For some sensitive practitioners, a few minutes of light spinal breathing pranayama before meditation helps smooth the mantra practice — SBP is the primary polarity-balancing tool and can stabilize unruly energies. For others, light asanas before sitting practice helps. Some practitioners may find that only asanas work for a period, with DM added back later.

Lesson 160: "Maybe you will find that only asanas once or twice a day with or without spinal breathing, and no meditation, are what you need to do for a while until the obstructions get cleared out of your nervous system a bit. Then you can try and add meditation later. Where there is a will, there is a way."

8. For the most sensitive: breath as object

If the above protocol still doesn't produce stable practice, the fallback is breath-as-object meditation (from Lesson 367), which is more passive than mantra DM and produces less proactive penetration into stillness. For very sensitive practitioners, this is the sustainable form. See sensitive meditators for the full breath-as-object discussion.

9. Self-pacing is permanent, not a phase

The practitioner in Lesson 160 is explicitly told: "Self-pacing matched to your experience is what you should do. This is the key to long term success in all practices." For extreme-sensitivity practitioners, self-pacing isn't a recovery phase to be endured until "real" practice resumes — it is real practice. The goal is stable daily progress at whatever level the nervous system can actually sustain, for the rest of the practitioner's life. See self-pacing.

See Lesson 200 for the follow-up with this same practitioner, covering how the protocol played out over time.

How it relates to other practices

Source lessons