This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
This week we’ve been exploring samadhi — right samadhi, to use the Eightfold Path language, where “right” means appropriate, skillful, useful. In this morning’s session, Linda takes the exploration somewhere a little unexpected: into the question of distortion.
Does samadhi distort experience? And if it does, is that a problem?
A word that needs some care
The phrase “samadhi distorts” is one Linda encountered early in her training, and it’s stayed with her — though carefully. Here’s why it needs care: the common definition of distortion is a change that causes something to be seen, heard, or understood inaccurately. Tell someone their samadhi is distorted and it doesn’t land well.
But set that aside for a moment and look at what actually happens as samadhi deepens. As the body-mind becomes more collected and settled, the usual sense of solidity softens. What felt fused together begins to loosen. The sense of what continues, what stays the same, can shift. Time moves differently — a meditation can feel like it lasted five minutes or an hour. The body can seem lighter, bigger, or less defined than usual. Sounds that are normally pleasant might suddenly seem sharp or startling.
Something is changing. Something is different. That much is clear.
A range of accuracy, not a pinpoint
Linda’s way of working with this is to think about accuracy as a range rather than a fixed point. Samadhi experiences offer a different perspective — a different view of experience — but not a complete or final one. No single perspective gives us the whole picture, which is partly why we share and reflect together.
In deeper samadhi states, perception can become very simplified. The usual distinction between yourself and something else can fade. You might be absorbed in something that feels unified, whole, interconnected — the kind of experience that Zen points to when it says the sun is always there behind the clouds. These are real experiences. They carry genuine weight and meaning.
But they are also conditioned. They arise within particular circumstances, they have a texture and a tone, and they pass. Even the experiences that feel most complete, most like this is really how it is, carry the marks of construction when we reflect on them later. They’re not the whole of reality — but they may be more whole than what we’re ordinarily used to feeling.
What samadhi is actually loosening
In Reflective Meditation, samadhi is encouraged to develop through relaxing, drifting, and allowing hypnagogic states — the dreamlike imagery and body-states that arise at the edge of sleep. When we don’t dismiss these as distractions, they begin to loosen something.
What’s being loosened, Linda suggests, is our habitual way of constructing experience. Most of the time, in ordinary meditation, things appear fused, solid, and given. We’re not questioning them. Samadhi disrupts that. What seemed like a single emotion turns out to house thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and reactions — layers that reflection can start to see more clearly once samadhi has loosened the seams.
This is where samadhi connects directly to the teaching of conditionality and dependent arising. Rather than treating these as metaphysical or cosmological teachings, Reflective Meditation keeps them close to lived experience: how are things actually conditioned? What is arising in dependence on what? Samadhi steadies the mind enough that these unfolding conditions become more visible. What looked singular starts to appear layered, contingent, complex, dependent.
Distortion as disruption, not deception
So here is Linda’s more subtle definition: samadhi distorts not by misleading us with inaccurate experience, but by disrupting what seems normal. It interrupts the habitual way we fuse reality together — the solid, unquestioned way we usually move through our lives and our meditation.
That disruption can be welcome. Sometimes it’s disconcerting or startling. But either way, it allows other things to come into view. Not a final answer. Not the complete picture. But a changed way of seeing — steadier, more porous, more capable of noticing what’s actually there.
That, Linda offers, is where samadhi shows its value.
