Ryan M. Kay
2025 Fire Kasina Retreat in Florida
This piece contains a summary of my first meditation retreat; which happened to be a three-ish week fire kasina retreat.This retreat took place in October of 2025. Please note that I will not discuss other retreatants’ experiences or details unless it is somehow relevant to mine. In such cases I will be careful to avoid personal details. Also, though this retreat had optional participation in some research studies which I did participate in, I will not discuss the research itself.
My background: I have been meditating in some capacity since about 2013, though I took 2021 and 2022 almost completely off. From 2013 to 2020, I mainly did samatha/shamatha oriented practices. I rarely sat for more than 20 minutes, with many months being either 10-15 minutes or nothing at all. In 2023, I came across Daniel Ingram’s book and some exposure to the TWIM tradition; doing my best to follow TWIM instructions until early 2024 when I found myself at odds with it in many ways.
In 2025, my practice became much more regular and I began to post practice logs and get help from people on the Dharma Overground. This led to my practice improving substantially in the Spring/Summer of 2025. In the two months prior to the retreat, I began more insight oriented practices of noting for the first time in my life, as well as more open and choiceless practice. I still consider myself relatively new to insight but will discuss how that has progressed later.
In August of 2025, I was practicing 1-4 30 minute sessions a day in that style. During September I followed that same protocol except for doing a 2 hour sit once per week. If you are curious about any of the lead up to this retreat, I logged every day in that period in my practice logs on the dharma overground.
Retreat format: As mentioned before, it was a Fire Kasina retreat. The schedule was 16 full days of practice and an optional number of days to “power down.” It was also a “retreat for adults” meaning that outside of a few specific meeting times and jobs, we dictated our own practice schedules.
The retreat was not a silent retreat and we were allowed to be as digitally dark as we wanted to be. I avoided news at least 98% of the time and generally avoided any media except some dharma talks. I did keep in brief but pretty regular contact with my partner, friends, and family; usually in the evenings after dinner.
Expectations: Going into this, I expected to have a very substantially altered state of consciousness and plenty of visual phenomena. I hoped to experience some formless Jhanas as that is an extremely rare thing for me at this time. I also did not believe I had experienced a cessation before and thought that might be neat. However, though these thoughts were in the back of my mind, my main goal was to practice well (neither be lazy nor be a star meditator) and be a good person to my fellow retreatants. For anyone going into something like this, I feel like this was a great attitude. Though the demon of expectations did eventually hit me at a point, I feel like I saved myself quite a lot of suffering from this attitude.
In terms of practice schedule, my goal was to hit an average of 8 hours per day.
General thoughts on my retreat practice: I ended up meditating somewhere around 8.5 hours per day on average. That number was specifically how many hours of fire kasina practice; not including some general stuff like chilling mindfully on the patio, going for walks, some kundalini sessions, or doing visual meditation while falling asleep with a sleep mask. My longest day was about 9.5 hours and my shortest was 6 hours. That short day happened to be my birthday, one of my cooking days, and a day where a very worldly issue that needed to be dealt with immediately and took most of the evening to sort out.
If I do another fire kasina retreat in the future, I would consider sitting more consistently around 10 hours. I do not have any regrets about aiming for 8 but I felt as though I could have handled more.
I will discuss more details later but I did not react to fire kasina practice itself in ways which I expected. I am someone who always has lots of disorganized and sometimes organized static, colors, waves, and pixels behind closed eyes. So much so that I can actually tune into it a bit with my eyes open with lights on. I also have a very vivid “Mind’s Eye” or visual imagination, possibly much more vivid than the average person.
Though I did see more visual phenomena than usual, it was not much beyond what I normally get using a sleep mask during my regular meditation this summer; outside of a select few cases I will discuss later. What I mean is that occasional 3D objects, 2D phenomena, and rare fully formed and photo-realistic scenes are something that I do get at home. It was mainly that the frequency and duration increased somewhat.
Also, peculiarly, I got the majority of visual phenomena during the early-mid section of the retreat. Though some very vivid things did manifest in the last few days, that last week of the retreat overall had much less going on. I also did not have much open eye visual distortions beyond a kind of vipassana-ish view of things becoming bendy and weird.
In terms of concentration states, this is a really tricky one that I feel like I do not fully understand myself. There were definitely some days of feeling “murky” as we say, which can be some combination of sleepy, grumpy, and have flavours of the “Dukkha Nanas” if you are into that frame. This seemed to hit me substantially less than some others in terms of intensity but not duration. I never had a point where the after image of the light/candle was hard to find unless it meant I was dipping off into hypnagogic 3rd Jhana land. With little exception, my lows were generally not that low, and my highs were generally not that high.
For the latter half of the retreat until the 15th, I felt a pretty constant level of equanimity and concentration but nothing far beyond what I get at home after a good 30 minute sit. The main difference was that the equanimity was very consistent even outside of the formal sessions.
I will talk about what happened on the afternoon of the 15th and the remainder of the retreat later.
Challenges: For me, the biggest challenge was adjusting to the schedule and routine. At home, I have a pretty specific flow of things I like to follow. Wake up early, hydrate, have a light/easy to digest meal, do some cardio or workout, then meditate. In order to avoid derailing the entire retreat, most of us had to isolate ourselves in our rooms during the early mornings of the first week.
The house, though nice, had wooden walls, and I thought I was directly on top of another person’s bedroom until I realized later in the retreat that we used that room exclusively for the research. So in short, not being able to follow that routine made the mornings tricky to navigate. This is a normal thing for me; I really need routines to feel well and struggle without them.
The second issue was sleep in a few different ways. Sleep was an issue for most of the retreat due to a number of factors. Racy mental states often tended to happen for me later in the night making it tough to fall asleep. Being outside of my regular sleep schedule made it difficult to sleep past 4:30am and stay up past 9:00pm. I also had very powerful and disturbing dreams around days 5, 6, and 7 which made for very unrestful nights.
Lastly, I only started to notice that I did not seem to need my usual eight hours until well into the retreat. This meant that I was going to bed earlier, laying in bed awake, then waking up early anyways; cutting into some practice time.
In retrospect, I will try to better adapt my routine for the circumstances at hand. Some level of sleep disruption was inevitable but my goal of “getting up early” just to spend 1-2 hour sitting in my room being too sleepy to meditate was not skillful. Better to sleep in more, do my exercise regularly, and go to bed later.
To wrap this up, the challenges were very manageable. I definitely would manage my time, energy, and sleep differently, but I feel like the friction was pretty minimal and almost entirely due to my own inexperience in a retreat setting.
Fireworks and Entities: I am sorry to say that I may disappoint some of you here. Did I see some things that fit my definition of “entities”? Yes. But only three times, behind closed eyes, and on the 2nd screen. Without going into much detail, think of the second screen as what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. For a more detailed explanation, refer to the site resources.
On roughly day 3, while attending the red dot (a mental after-image that shows up after closing my eyes after staring at the light), two arms reached around from behind the red dot and started playing with it. Stretching it, squishing it, and the like. This lasted for about 5-10 seconds, and the arms reminded me of something out of a Dr Seuss book. Skinny, long, cartoonish, and it had striped sleeves.
On day 4 or 5, not sure, I saw what I thought of as bigfoot’s arm reach up and pinch the red dot before disappearing. It was a thick, furry, humanoid arm with claw-like finger nails. Not full colour but detailed enough that I noticed the fur.
On day 5 or 6, a two dimensional character that looked sort of like Super Nintendo Mario showed up to the left of the dot. It was telepathically pushing around this wooden platform thing into the red dot, which caused the red dot to move around the field of view. Again, this lasted only a few seconds.
My reaction to all of these was similar. I did not feel a sense of fear and they all had a sort of playful energy to them.
Somewhere around day 5 or 6, I had a series of three very vivid dreams. Two of them were at night and one was during a sort of “napitation” during mid morning. The first was a nightmare which started in a fear realm (dark, scary, impending danger) opening up into the most beautiful and vivid lucid dream I have had since my teenage years (when I used to try to induce them). The second dream had kind of a demonic trickster feel to it which followed with feeling an intense and rapid psychedelic portion of the dream.
After the second dream finished I immediately woke up to the most intense 2nd screen visuals I would experience on retreat. I was wearing my sleep mask and could see my entire visual field full of portions of humanoid masks (think of the masks from the robots in the movie “I, Robot”, except more angular). There was one single fully formed mask, and it was staring right at me from what felt like two feet away.
Apart from the fear realm dream, this was the only other time I felt fear, and it was a different kind of fear. This was the kind of fear one feels when encountering a mountain lion or bear on a walking trail. It is a sense of heightened awareness, standing still for a bit, and a sense of potential danger. I suspect much of that fear came from the fact that all of the eyes and the fully formed mask seemed to be staring at me directly.
The face did not do anything and it faded once I took my mask off and opened my eyes. But that gave me a sense of “okaaaaaay… we are not playing around anymore.” Incidentally, apart from the third dream, which was hyper detailed but otherwise uninteresting, I saw almost no visuals worth mentioning.
In general, I saw a variety of shapes and washes of colour. Around day three, where I experienced the “White and Gold” (though it was teal-green for me), most of the 2nd screen was filled with non pixelated, bright teal bands and waves. I had only skimmed the glossary though and did not understand that this was the “White and Gold” until about a week later in the retreat.
In terms of 3rd screen phenomena, which have a quality of being photorealistic (again, refer to the glossary for a better explanation), I recall one distinct scene. It was like being a go pro or similar such camera device immersed in grassy wetland in the pacific northwest. I did not feel anything, which might imply more of a “4th screen” phenomena, but it was as clear and vivid as real life visually.
Insight into impermanence (anicca) and Anatta (nonself): Between roughly the 7th and 12th days of the retreat, I did not have much visual phenomena occurring. I had very, very deep equanimity, but on a conventional level, this was the most boring period of the retreat. I already had some ideas about inclining more towards insight practice towards the end of the retreat and started to do so.
Although I had read most of MCTB2 and had some ideas about what vipassana was in practice, I still did not feel like I “got” it on a practical level. Though I definitely had a taste of impermanence (anicca) experientially, I had only started noting practice two months earlier. I also had a theoretical grasp of things being impersonal and ownerless phenomena, but still “felt” like something sitting behind my eyeballs; however absurd that seemed in so many ways.
For those curious, I never felt like my noting speed exceeded more than about 2-3 notes per second. Speed was not my goal, I just did what felt natural.
Over the course of the 13th and 14th day, I began doing my best attempt at vipassana. This mainly looked like noting things and eventually dropping the noting once there was enough momentum (another way is to look at this is just letting it decide when to stop). In practice, awareness was quite expansive due to my level of concentration, and attention would flow around, usually every second or few seconds, to whatever sensation it wanted to. The sound of the ceiling fan, the light bulb, the red dot, colours and static, the sound of screaming kids, sports cars in the distance, or the sounds of people talking.
Though my practice was still pretty choiceless in feeling, we were repeatedly given some advice to investigate sensations around the head and look for 3D, bouncing things associated with sense of self, controlling, doing, and so on.
On the 13th, I began to notice two things, not as sudden realizations, but rather as realities that were slowly developing. The two realizations were that I was drawing arbitrary lines of self versus non-self in this field of consciousness. Why does the ceiling fan feel like less of a self than the nonsense random visual thought that popped into the mind moments after? Why does my reflection in a mirror feel more like self, then looking at my arm feel more like a self than that? There was a bit of discursive questioning on this level but the difference is that I started to really watch the fluxing impermanence and the fact that all of these different things that I was placing arbitrary boundaries on, are just things arising and fading in the same space of consciousness.
One key observation was that there were clearly times when the group of sensations around the head which felt like “me” were absent from the conscious space. Once that began, it felt like I was really starting to do insight practice into the three characteristics.
On about five occasions, while doing this investigation, a deep visceral sadness would arise for somewhere between a few seconds and a minute; without any specific memory content. Immediately following that sadness, which I assume was some vipassana state, a deep visceral response of compassion would arise. Following that compassion would arise a very deep peace and equanimity. I was given some skillful advice to “lean into” that sadness which I did do. What I took from that advice was not to try to prolong it but to really attend and be open to it when it came up.
On the 14th, as I recall it anyway, I was also told by some of my fellow retreatants that I might need a bit more surrendering and a bit less effort. I intuitively felt the same way and tried to find a better balance of getting the vipassana noting going then dropping the note. For those curious, I began to use the notes “look at it do that” instead of labelling the specific sensations, which worked well in this instance.
On the 15th before lunch, I read a compilation of posts from “shargrol” on the topic of stream entry and cessations. The general message was also not to try too hard and that it will happen on its own if it does.
After lunch, during my second sit, I found myself in a state where vipassana was doing its bouncing around but guided by some level of prompting by the intention stream to investigate aspects of the conscious space felt tied to a sense of self.
For whatever reason, it became very apparent that my sense of gaze (this was a bit abstract of sensation), the muscles of the eyes, and the general area around the eyes and forehead, were the sensations most strongly associated with a feeling of “self.”. At some point shortly after, I became aware of a brick-like sensation of solidity in that area, and the vipassana process stopped bouncing around to investigate this area specifically.
What I recall next was a momentary shift into a slightly hypnagogic, not really paying attention kind of state, followed by what I call the zoom in zoom out phenomenon. This phenomenon is something I have experienced since I was a child, though it happened in a different way this time. It looks as if the entire visual field behind closed eyes is being zoomed in and out rhythmically (maybe every 200 milliseconds or so) like one would do so in a digital word document or image editor. The zoom in zoom out happened three or four times, but unlike ever before, it felt like it was smacking me in the face about three times.
It had a sense of violating the observer/observed sense of distance and perspective; as if these things smashed into each other. However, I did not experience what felt like a full shut off. Such a thing may have happened but I only recall the zoom in zoom out and how it felt after without much interruption between. In any case, that brick of solidity in my eye area and forehead was gone.
I continued meditating, and perhaps 15 or 30 minutes later, I found myself again in a slightly drifting state of attention after some more directed investigation. This time, I recall having three distinct “cuts” in the conscious experience in rapid succession. Afterwards, I felt like much more solidity around the head had vanished and that something felt different. The analogy that came to mind was feeling like one of those gum ball machines with the glass or plastic bowl on top, except the bowl was empty. Spacious, equanimous, and very blissful. At that point it felt like that meditation was done for now and I headed to the patio.
Sitting on the patio in a nice neighborhood in Orlando, I noticed that everything was a bit more vivid, spacious, and detailed in the visual field. This is not the first time I had experienced that, nor the most intense, but it felt very nice. I also noticed a profoundly reduced level of mental and physical tension in the body which caused me to laugh in relief from time to time.
I did not realize it immediately, but I was extremely high. Either that or I got progressively more high over time. This became very apparent once I sat down for dinner and would notice the intention to bring my fork to my food arise then drop into bliss and stillness immediately after. Normally I eat rather quickly but it took me about 40 minutes to eat my food that night.
To be specific, apart from feeling extreme levels of bliss, awareness, spaciousness, and a lack of tension, I felt as though my brain simply did not have the excitatory neurotransmitters necessary to carry out intentions that were arising. I did not have any aversion but it was apparent that I was in a state which was, while wonderful, not very functional. It also led to plenty of laughter with myself and the others.
It was also the first time in the retreat where I felt like navigating US airport security would quickly result in me being taken to a back room to endure who knows what.
To close this section off, I do not know exactly whether or not I had cessations, whether or not that was stream entry, and am not particularly concerned right now about labeling as such. What I do know, which is true for me regardless, is that I gained deep insights into the impersonal nature of phenomena, or “anatta”. Everything I could find that day was seen as impersonal and on the same level in that regard, regardless of other qualitative differences.
Meditation felt different after that: For the remainder of the retreat, sitting felt strange in ways that I had trouble grasping. I had one full meditation day after the insight events, and one partial day due to some obligations for the scientific study which I was participating in.
It is still tough for me to pinpoint but it felt like prior to the events, I had these sorts of expectations and frames about what meditation was. These frames had been developed from some kind of perspective, both psychological, and quite literally from some perspective of having a controller. These frames would arise and try to influence the unfolding process which would immediately create some kind of tension and rejection. Then it would return to just kind of letting it unfold the way “it” wants to.
This most jarring aspect of this was that I no longer felt like I could do “concentration” practice at all. That is not to say concentration and samatha jhana wasn’t coming up; these things did come up as a natural process. However, staring at the red dot continuously, was just not in the cards. The thing wanted to keep bouncing around to this broad space of awareness and cycle between noting, noticing, drifting, and equanimity.
In much simpler terms, it felt like I needed to “just sit” and relearn how to meditate from this new perspective; which is mainly what I did.
Short term aftermath of the retreat: As I write this section, I have been home for a number of days, had one full travel day, and one power down day prior to that.
The effortless spaciousness quality did fade, though things still feel much more spacious than prior to retreat. The very palpable background bliss shortly after the insight experiences also faded and have been replaced with a more neutral equanimity that has remained pretty strong so far. It feels like it is both more stable and inclined to return to equanimity.
The tension in the head has returned slightly but is still significantly less than before. There is also still a subtle feeling of “centerlessness” in the sense that the gaze, eyes, and forehead region used to feel like a “center” of the conscious space. Again, I feel less “centerless” than closer to the insight events, but still pretty far from baseline. It also feels like there is some kind of void in the center of the head which can be rested in somehow. It feels pleasant to do so, not in a blissful or joyful way, but in a sense of peacefulness.
Regarding the general sense of self, it feels like things have moved to a more subtle layer. I do not think I can unsee the things that felt like the seat of the self being impermanent. But my intuition is that there are still sensations, perhaps more subtle ones, which will need investigation. The work does not feel done but it feels like work has been done.
In closing, though it sounds a bit cliche, this retreat for me felt like winning the lottery and being a part of something quite special. There are other things that happened on this retreat that I do not wish to share publicly but had great impacts on my wellbeing. I could not have expected nor asked for anything more.
Update ~30 Days later: I still feel a slight but wholesale reduction in the mind’s tendency to cling to anything at all. The same range of emotional responses come up, though less frequently and with a shorter half life. The centerlessness quality is still there but it does not feel effortlessly accessible; it requires some looking for unless I happen to be in a state of equanimity.
I would say the most distinct thing that still feels different, is that I still do not feel this subtle, background sense of “something is wrong” and “I need to do something about it.” This is most apparent during formal meditation, where the sense of being a controller or needing to control things has not even come close to returning to a pre-retreat level.
Whereas before there was a subtle (at times not so subtle) craving to get some states or do something to make that happen, there is just a sense of watching it unfold. In other words, the sense of pushing and pulling against whatever happens during the sit feels at least 90% reduced.
Fire Kasina 