Did My Meditation Teacher Trigger My First Out-of-Body Experience?

Now I wonder where one consciousness ends, and another begins

Photo by Hans Luiggi on Unsplash

The first time my consciousness left my body wasn’t on purpose. In fact, it felt like I was dragged out of my body, trying to hold on for dear life. 

It was the last night of my yoga training in Rishikesh. By the end of the training, my teacher had begun inviting me to meditate with him outside the regular program.

It was exciting and scary at the same time. I'd always wanted to find a teacher who could initiate me into the deeper aspects of meditation. So when he told me he'd noticed I was breaking through in my practice, I asked if he would meditate with me one-on-one. 

And then there was this one night, we had sneaked out after our graduation celebration and met in his room to meditate. I was excited and anxious and didn't know what to expect all at the same time, but I surely wasn't prepared for reality to unravel. 

I don't know what I was expecting, but definitely not what happened next. 

There were no instructions, no guided meditation. I just watched my teacher become really quiet and introverted. I was wondering what he was thinking or preparing to do when I noticed something unsettling. 

First, I thought my vision was playing tricks on me. 

His face slowly expanded—like a video distortion filter.

The more I focused, the more his face inflated into a big, round balloon. 

I couldn't believe my eyes, so I blinked and looked at his face again. The same thing happened. I blinked again, looked back, and his face blew up even bigger. 

In confusion, I asked him, what is going on? He told me not to look at his face as he was entering meditation. 

But I couldn't look away either; it was the most disturbing and unsettling thing I had ever seen. But I wanted to see where it was leading. I couldn't help my curiosity. 

So I fixed my gaze at his face as he was meditating with his eyes open. 

First, his face inflated again, until there appeared this white light that opened up from the middle of his face and slowly consumed the picture. It was bright, and the bigger it got, the more it swallowed the whole scene surrounding his face. 

At this point, anxiety hit me badly; I wasn't sure what was going on or whether I was ready for it. It felt like I’d missed my chance to step back and was spiraling into the experience at full speed. No brakes.

My heart was racing as I tried to hold onto the ground beneath me. But it was futile; the room crumbled away until it was only me and a black screen.

My thinking was, wait, a screen? It felt like I was in a theatre before the movie started. But there was no one but me. 

Then the darkness gave way to a scene.

Rolling hills.

Soft light.

No horizon.

Everything impossibly still.

It was a simple landscape. Beautiful. Peaceful. 

And then I noticed something else: I had merged with the screen, moving through the landscape as if I were the sky itself. 

Now I don't know for how long I was floating like this, actually. It could have been 20 minutes; it could have also been two hours. I forgot everything for a minute. 

Until I remembered and suddenly found myself back in my body. 

While I was still coming back to my senses, wondering what the hell just happened, I heard my teacher's voice. 

Softly but firmly: 

"How was meditation, dear?"

I just stared at him.

He looked completely ordinary again.

The room was exactly as I’d left it.

Nothing had changed.

Except me.

I didn’t ask him many questions that night.

Instead, I carried the experience with me for years, trying to understand it through neuroscience, psychology, meditation, and eventually through listening to hundreds of accounts from people who had had out-of-body experiences. 

One thing surprised me.

My story wasn’t unique.

The closest parallel I found came from accounts of shared death experiences. People described becoming part of a loved one’s dying experience — watching them enter a light or encountering deceased relatives as though they were there themselves.

It left me with one question: can one person’s state of consciousness directly affect another’s?

We already know human nervous systems constantly influence one another.

A calm person can calm an anxious room.

Panic can ripple through hundreds of people within seconds.

Meditation researchers have even shown that experienced practitioners can measurably influence the physiology of people sitting nearby during certain practices.

If our breathing, heart rhythms and emotions synchronize so naturally…

Where exactly is the boundary?

What if consciousness isn’t something our brains produce…

What if it’s something we participate in?

All I know is that after that night in Rishikesh, one question has stayed with me ever since: 

Where does my consciousness end — and yours begin?