The contemplative science community has been wrestling with this for decades. Researchers like Richard Davidson and his team at the Waisman Lab have shown that neuroplastic changes from sustained practice don’t follow a neat staircase. They’re messy, highly individualized, and often regress under stress. That tracks with what I’m seeing in my own sitting. I’ll have weeks of deep absorption, then hit a wall where the mind just fragments. It’s not a failure of technique; it’s the nervous system recalibrating.

Jung’s model of individuation actually makes more sense to me than any traditional meditation manual. He didn’t view psychological growth as a straight line toward some fixed endpoint. It’s a spiral. You hit the Tower, things collapse, and then you slowly reassemble with the Hermit’s kind of grounded awareness. I’ve been tracking my sessions alongside tarot draws lately—not as divination, but as a symbolic mirror. When I’m stuck in that "dark night" phase where concentration shatters, the cards keep pulling up dissolution archetypes. It’s not a setback. It’s the alchemical nigredo doing its work.

Out here in Omaha, the weather doesn’t follow a schedule, and I’m starting to see my practice the same way. I’ve even been experimenting with AIOracle to log pattern recognition in my sitting data, though my reading in metaphysics keeps reminding me that consciousness doesn’t always submit to rigid tracking models. What’s frustrating is how many modern teachers still sell these progression maps like they’re guaranteed ROI. In my experience, the path is more like climate shifts than a ladder.

I’d love to hear how you all are tracking this. Are you using journals, dream logs, or just letting the practice unfold without measuring it? And for those who’ve navigated that breakdown phase—how did you recognize it was actually progression in disguise?

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: DMT and Spirituality: The Molecule of God, or Psychedelic Experience? | Mystic Wiki.)