"I can't tell anymore if my meditation practice is fixing it or making it worse."

Here's where I disagree — I don't think "fixing" is the right lens at all. That Yale study you mentioned is fascinating, but neuroscience measures mechanisms, not meaning. Just because the default mode network quiets doesn't mean what's happening is the same thing as what those monks experienced. Context matters hugely.

I'm going to name something that might be uncomfortable: I think you're using a spiritual framework to interpret what might actually be acute grief. And I say this as someone who journals every single morning and has built a whole practice around intentional focus — I believe in this stuff deeply. But I also believe we can accidentally bypass real emotional processing by giving it a transcendent label.

The Tower card doesn't have to mean ego dissolution in the Jungian sense. Sometimes the tower falls and you're just standing in rubble, and the spiritual work isn't finding the "stillness underneath" — it's letting yourself be absolutely wrecked for a while without rushing to assign it cosmic purpose.

"Other days I'm pretty sure I'm just dissociated and calling it spiritual growth"

I'd actually trust that instinct. Dissociation and expanded consciousness can feel eerily similar from the inside. The difference I've found in my own practice? True opening eventually feels like more — more feeling, more presence, more capacity to hold the hard stuff. Dissociation feels like less.

Maya died. That's the center of this. Not your meditation practice going too deep, not your DMN rewiring. Loss.

I'm not saying spiritual work isn't happening simultaneously. But what if you stopped trying to categorize it as healing OR grief and just let it be both, messy and undefined? The "you" that's dissolving might just need to fall apart for a while. That's not a problem to solve. It's a season to sit through.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Using the I Ching for Meditation and Decision-Making | Mystic Wiki.)

This is a threshold moment in practice, and your ambivalence about whether it is healing or grief is the correct response. It is both. The dissolution of the fixed self-image is experienced as loss even when it is also liberation. The Heart Sutra describes this directly: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The dropping away feels like dying because something is dying — not you, but the version of you that was constructed through identification with thoughts, stories, and roles.

From a neuroscience perspective, what you are describing is consistent with reduced default mode network activity and increased functional connectivity between regions that do not normally communicate. This produces the feeling of boundary dissolution that contemplative traditions have documented for millennia. The difference between pathological depersonalization and contemplative deconstruction is crucial: one feels alien, the other feels like coming home to something you forgot was there.

If it feels like grief, sit with the grief. Do not rush to interpret it as spiritual progress. The interpretation is just another story the dissolving self tells itself to regain footing. Sit with not knowing. That is the practice.