Do you sweat excessively while meditating? I’m asking because it is uncommon to start sweating because of meditating, except under certain conditions. You may want to try out a few suggestions and see if it helps. These suggestions are based on the assumption that you are practicing meditation in a proper way and your mind is gradually shifting to be quiet instead of continuing to be in the doing mode. Meditation is a non-doing being practice and when you sit with this practice the body metabolism slows down whereas sweating occurs when the body metabolism accelerates. Let us see if this is happening because of extraneous factors or because the meditation itself is triggering a limbic reaction due to trauma around the practice.
List of suggestions to rule out extraneous factors:
- Meditate in the early morning before sunrise or late evening after sunset and sit with the practice for not more than ten minutes.
- Do not eat or drink anything at least for 30 minutes before sitting to practice. You may sip a small amount of plain room temperature water if you are very thirsty before practice.
- Have bath in room temperature water, add a cup of rock salt to one bucket of water and use this for the bath. You may use plain water to wash off the salt residue from your skin at the end. Do not use hot water for the bath and do not rub your skin vigorously during the bath or after the bath while applying body lotion. Do it very gently and slowly or do it after the meditation.
- If you routinely do gymming or running or yoga or any exercise, do it before the bath and do not drink anything very cold or very hot after that. Drink something tepid or mildly lukewarm.
- Choose a comfortable, cool, airy place to sit for the meditation, preferably air conditioned room during summer.
If you find that you are not sweating before starting to meditate after doing all the above, but you start to sweat after starting to meditate then we will have to take a different approach. Stop the meditation practice that you are currently following. I would suggest that you first read the following articles to understand what is meditation and to learn some tools for grounding and settling down restless energies.
Selvan Srinivasan · 1y
How long does it take to get into a meditative state when you start practicing meditation?
You could be sitting for several minutes or even hours but never get into a meditative state even though you have managed to force your mind to have no thoughts by concentrating or focusing all your attention on something. Meditation is the cessation of mental activity and this means the mental doing that we do in our mind stops and our mind rests quietly. If we wilfully force our mind to stay quiet, it is a doing. If we strongly concentrate or focus on one specific thing, then it is a doing. Meditation is a state of non-doing being. Thoughts arising in the mind due to whatever happens in the body or in the surrounding is not mental doing, it is just an arising phenomena. To compare, breathing happening in our body is not physical doing, it is an arising phenomena and it continues to keep happening even during deep sleep when our body is at complete rest. Meditation is complete rest to the thinking-mind. Only the aware mind is awake and alert and it simply sits as a witness to all that arises in the present moment. Getting back to your question, it takes just a few seconds for me to go through a mental shift into a meditative state now. But in the beginning, 30 years ago when I started with the practice, if I am sitting along with my mentor or guru who initiated me into the practice it would happen within a few minutes and if I am sitting by myself it would probably happen after fifteen minutes sometimes or never happen most times. But if I practice some energy movements or gentle yoga stretches before sitting with an eyes open practice called FGCB, it would invariably happen within a few minutes. Please read the following article if you are interested in learning more about it.
Instead of meditation, simply practice a few minutes of Fixed Gazing and Conscious Breathing (FGCB) along with some gentle practices such as tapping or rubbing hands or deep crossing movements or some other energy movements that you can find in my YouTube Channel.
FGCB is explained below:
Selvan Srinivasan · 1y
What are some breathing exercises for beginners who struggle with focusing on their breath while meditating?
Do this for just three minutes and see if it helps. Sit on a straight back chair with feet flat on the floor, the entire soles of the feet from tips of the toes to the heels firmly contacting the floor. Keep yo