So there were three options:
~ Follow my body.
~ After checking Google to to learn that I should see if my pupils are unevenly sized (they weren’t — a good thing), I could  go to the hospital emergency room where I would sit for a few hours under fluorescent lights
~ I could ignore it, push on, then wonder days later, why I feel wonky-blinky

I did the first. I lay on the floor and — this is why I’m sharing this tale — my body did not want to rock. She went right into that slow roll we did one day in Summer Movement Monastery. My skull rolled very slowly along the floor into gravity, the cervical spine quietly extending  and realigning. From time to time my spine wanted to gently twist rather than extend and contract, the head blow having come at an angle. My spine unwound. My cerebrospinal fluid had a chance to distribute itself (I could actually feel this pulse underneath the top layer of sensation), and whatever chemistry was happening inside my cranium could stabilize.

Nausea subsided. The light-headedness and weirdness around my eye sockets muted. I sat up, gently. All those sensations rose then subsided as well. Mostly.

I move around delicately. Keeping an eye on things, I lie down from time to time and let my body do what she needs. It brings me immediately back to the acute level of awareness I cultivated during retreat. Why does it take a blow on the head to get there?

I had strong dreams which I can’t remember — part of their charm, but it was a relief to sleep deeply, to dream fully, to be in a world not nailed down. A world of odd intuition, paradox, pockets of clarity and pockets of dark fragments that weren’t frantic but simply unordered. Chaos. The word ‘chaos’ implies pandemonium but it can be quiet, floating, peculiar. Chaos may contain both potential and unraveling without knowing which is which. Chaos is the Is Not for a mind that favors categorization and definition; for a bodymind that lives in a cognitive netherworld, this Is Not is a balm, a boon, a peace, an Is Not Is-ness.

Not exactly Wujud, but clasping its edge. Wajad.

When I taste Is Not Is-ness — the pure place that has no white light, no angels — insanity departs, fear departs, bone-deep exhaustion departs. I drink happiness.
Without it, my life is slow death.

How do I look at the brain and body? Well, after all this training I see them as groups of specialized cells that cooperate to sustain and create the experience of our lives. Further, cells are cities built by intelligent molecules, so at all levels of our being we are the result of cooperating entities.

As for feeling events happening in the brain, when I have mentioned to some of my friend scientists that I can sense things happening in my brain, they reflexively state there are no pain receptors in the brain. My response is, the sensations of brain activity I’m referring to aren’t pain, they are sensations of activity. So, I too have those sensations, so yeah, I think people can sense parts of the brain at work. Can most people? I don’t know. That being said, what is the mechanism by which we target specific areas of the brain? Are we guided by these sensations or does the very act of doing things that require and stimulate those parts of the brain produce the sensations we later report?  I can’t answer that yet.

AND MORE FROM URVASHI:
The short answer is yes, you can directly target different parts of the brain via actions. Those areas experience plasticity (learning) as a result of those actions. Over time, you will get better at those actions because of molecular level changes in the tissue subserving those actions.

With regard to breathing, the brainstem is involved in normal respiration. So, one region you may be targeting is the group of cells in the brainstem that monitor and stimulate normal respiration. Maybe.
It is as likely that you are targeting the anterior and posterior serratus and abdominal muscle groups that assist inflation and deflation of the lungs. This means the motor regions in the cortex are addressing relevant motoneurons in the spine, thus overriding signals from the brainstem that would normally recruit these muscles for respiration.

There have been a few scientific studies directed at understanding just what the patterned respiration in yoga is doing to the brain and body. No studies have been done on Sufi practices, to my knowledge (yet . It is clear these practices cause plastic changes in the cardiovascular and nervous systems. The exact mechanism of these changes is unclear. I will dig around and see if I can find copies of these papers to send you. It is probable that cell groups in the basal ganglia and forebrain that subserve executive attention control are driving conscious control of respiration, but I haven’t seen any studies on this question. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. Must run now! More later!

Sufi Master, Maneri, has said of subtlety. “Being the most subtle, the Divine must permeate all, for the greater the subtlety, the greater the quality of permeation.”

We can enter the perception of subtlety by treading along the path of breath into deep interior meditative states where the Ego-self ceases to dominate, and where “I”-ness fades. When our ‘story’ — riddled with competitive-ness, arrogance, complaining, resentment, grasping, envy, self-criticism, rage, and other destructive qualities — still binds our awareness, subtlety will not appear. Subtlety is delicate, a wild creature that skirts danger.

Yet subtlety is powerful. It can sweep us away from our repetitive, redundant small self into our Essence.

Subtlety cannot be muscled into being, yet without a sincere invitation, it will not appear. The door to subtlety is sincerity. The door is willingness. Only the heart of one’s heart can offer a sincere invitation.

Breathing must, of course, be awake, not mechanical. And beyond that, as we breathe, we must let the heart of our heart offer a sincere invitation. We must be willing to give up what we think we are, willing to be lost in intimacy.

I wonder if now we truly live in something like the Victorian age before the advent of the car,  where ghost stories blossom. Of course our  current stories are realer than 150 years ago. Certainly they reach farther.
I  wonder if my struggle to stay embodied and or deepen my embodiment, regardless of how pleasant or not, is simply a directive, a ‘project,’ so-to-speak, and its own kind of performance art, and thus a project that can be put aside until a new one is taken up. (But then I would lose the life-long aspect of doing ‘aware embodiment’ until death, or until close enough to death to report the project back.)

Until now I have decided that embodiment is realer; that it is the route  to Truth; that, on earth, it is root of Truth. When I operate from this premise, I am the most cohesive. Why does it feel like this project is arcane? (Though I don’t mind being or feeling arcane.)