Can the holy spirit make you feel dizzy

Q: I have a question regarding my Centering Prayer practice: Lately, I have noticed that as I finish my sit, open my eyes and come back to the external, I have been experiencing lightheadedness. It has happened a couple times even before I stand up. I am not worried about it, just curious about your insights that could maybe help me understand what is going on physiologically?

That being said, the Centering Prayer method is a Christian form of meditation and at times things happen out of our normal experience. Fr. Thomas taught us that “thoughts” was an umbrella term for every perception, including body sensations, sense perceptions, feelings, images, memories, plans, reflections, concepts, commentaries, and spiritual experiences. If we find ourselves engaged with any of these, we are to return ever-so-gently to our sacred word. Your experience of light headedness is a body sensation and, if there is not a medical reason for this phenomenon, it is a thought to let go of during your  prayer time and also as you return to ordinary awareness. After our prayer time we are encouraged to remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes. During this transitional period, we may choose to pray a prayer of gratefulness inwardly or recite the Lord’s Prayer. It allows us to bring our practice into our normal activities.

Scientists have found that dizziness during or after meditation can be caused by tension in the neck and shoulders. This tension may affect your inner ear or you may simply have an undetected ear infection. Be aware of how you hold tension in your upper body and head during and outside of the prayer time. Consider doing a body scan prior to Centering Prayer to notice if you are holding tension in that area. As you scan, release the tension in any areas before starting to pray.

Dizziness may also be a feeling of disorientation after the experience of oneness or sense of unity with Divine Reality. For most us, this is not our “regular” experience so when it happens our bodies may choose a disorienting dizziness to “try and make sense” of the unknowable.

Whatever it is, this is your own personal experience with your God, and we are taught to let those experiences come and to let them go – to not hold onto them and not dwell on the psychological experience of the prayer. If you take this attitude of surrender and letting go in the prayer time, you will bring the same attitude as you remember God with you in your everyday moments.

I hope this has been helpful. Please let us know if you discover anything new about these experiences.

Peace be with you.

Leslee Terpay

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And a reader wrote in to share this: “I experienced dizziness during Centering Prayer (CP) several years ago a few times in the middle of my morning prayer. At the time I was recovering from hip replacement surgery. In the morning upon awakening & after using the restroom, I would sit for the standard 20 minute practice. About half way through I started to feel dizzy. I stopped & measured my blood pressure and discovered it was very low, almost dangerously low. I laid down and rested for a few hours. My blood pressure returned to normal. It happened again the next day. I decided to eat a light breakfast & do the morning sit later in the morning. I also reached out to Tilden Edwards who suggested that I use Visio Divina as a prelude. I did that for several weeks and eventually returned to the standard CP practice. My take away from this experience is that CP, like other mediation practices, lowers the blood pressure. For people with low blood pressure, they may need to be aware of this effect and adjust their practice to maintain a healthy blood pressure.” – Lydia M.

As these weeks drag on, I continue to feel off-kilter, pretty much all-day-every-day. I notice how often I search for words to describe my experience and ways to understand my disorientation. Today I have a new word to add to jitters, discombobulation, and the fertile void. Vertigo. A medical condition whereby one experiences profound dizziness.

I’ve had vertigo before. It was just a few weeks after the shingles. (This combination is not uncommon, by the way.) When I would get up out of bed, or rise from my yoga mat, suddenly my head would spin, the room around me swirling, all at once losing my bearings. Yet I’d never considered the sensation of vertigo a descriptive word for my experience of life right now.

That is until I came across the idea of vertigo while reading The Dark Night of the Soul by Gerald May. The dark night is a term devised by St. John of the Cross to describe a season in our spiritual life when God seems absent to us and our senses are incapable of finding our way “back” to God. St. John described the “spirit of vertiginis,” as a “dizzy spirit,” a spirit of confusion, sent as a messenger from God and intended to prepare us for the transformation that happens during a dark night.

May recognized it as an experience specifically designed for “people who refuse to relinquish the idea that if only I could understand things, I could make them right.” Oh, I so I resemble those people! I see it in my grasping mind, tenaciously trying to apprehend and comprehend my current experience and why it’s so dang hard!

I have felt “dizzied” by the effect of this pandemic, by social distancing and isolation. I can’t fully explain why I feel so sad, why I’m chafing inside, why my mind keeps groping in the dark for explanations and understanding. When I wrote about the pandemic being a fertile void, I referred to its definition as an experience “where meaning-making ceases and being begins.” Yet my thoughts still try to grab hold of something firm, seeking to make meaning, to explain “why” and tell me “what to do” and “how to fix it.”

But the vertigo persists, life around me swirling, all at once losing my bearings.

This week as I read about spiritual vertigo, this term pried open some space in my scrambled thoughts, allowing a ray of light, of hope into this muddled chamber. It seems that this ancient phenomenon, as St. John and May describe it, is precisely what I need because of my tendency to “lean on my own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5-6) and my own senses to find my way through this disorienting time.

May concludes, “Sooner or later, there is nothing left to do but give up. And that is precisely the point, the purpose of the ‘dizzy spirit.’ In each relinquishment, the person’s faculties are further emptied and sensitized and, more important, reliance upon God is deepened.”

As we notice the horizon of life on-slant and the typical points of navigation no longer providing for stable footing, it’s a formidable opportunity to relinquish dependence on our own faculties and perceptions, to empty, to give up, and instead rely upon God and let God lead this dance in the dark. Shall we? Let’s!

The Fertile Void

Discombobulated

The Jitters