Seeing Colours During Meditation: What's Actually Happening
Globes, stars, colours, light brighter than anything you’ve seen while awake. What are these strange things we sometimes see in meditation? Why do they happen? And what should you do when they appear?
If you’ve seen colours or lights during meditation, you haven’t done anything wrong. And there’s probably nothing wrong with you either.
In the Buddhist tradition, these lights have a name: nimitta. They’re described as a fairly ordinary stage of a settling mind, rather than a special gift or a warning sign.
They tend to appear when you’ve been sitting still for long enough for your body to fade into the background. The advice is actually quite simple: bring awareness and kindness to whatever you see, and don’t go chasing it.
And if the experience frightens you, talk to an experienced meditation teacher rather than trying to work it all out on Google.
I’ve been teaching mindfulness for over twenty years and have trained more than 500 teachers since 2013. This question comes up more than almost any other, and it’s usually asked quietly, after the class has finished.
What do people actually see?
It happens most often during longer sits.
When I’m guiding a thirty- or forty-minute meditation, or teaching on a mindfulness teacher training, people sometimes come and tell me about their experiences afterwards.
The descriptions are remarkably consistent.
Colours, often more than one. Bright lights, which people often describe as brighter than any light they’ve ever seen. And very often, the body goes first.
People tell me that their body disappeared. And they mean that quite literally. It was as though their body simply wasn’t there any more.
Then comes the part I find most interesting.
Some people are frightened by the experience. Most aren’t. In my experience, the majority find it genuinely pleasant. And the question they usually ask me is almost never, “What’s wrong with me?”
It’s:
“How do I get back there?”
That’s worth saying because if you’ve searched for this after being surprised or frightened by what happened, you may have found websites telling you that you’ve opened something, awakened something, or reached some special spiritual state.
But the people sitting in front of me in real rooms mostly describe the experience as blissful.
And then they want directions back.
Is it normal, or is something wrong?
It’s common enough that researchers have gone looking for it.
A team at Brown University interviewed 28 Western Buddhist practitioners about their meditation experiences. Nine of them, 32%, mentioned lights or luminous experiences without being asked about them at all (Lindahl, Kaplan, Winget and Britton, Frontiers in Psychology, 2013).
The lights fell into two groups.
There were discrete lightforms, described as globes, jewels or stars.
And there were patterned or diffuse lights, more like a shimmer or a brightening laid over everything.
The same paper is careful about something I want to be careful about too.
In a clinical setting, someone saying they see lights could easily sound like someone who needs a diagnosis. The authors point out that this is a real risk of misreading the experience.
Their conclusion is that these experiences are likely to be benign, although they can certainly be distressing if someone wasn’t expecting them.
So: common, well documented, and much older than the research.
What the Buddhist tradition calls it
The word is nimitta.
It’s a Pali term, and in the Theravada tradition it refers to a mental sign that can appear once concentration has settled, particularly during breath meditation.
Buddhaghosa wrote about it in the fifth century in the Path of Purification. His list of what people might experience is oddly familiar to anyone who’s spent time sitting in a room full of meditators.
He says it appears to some “as a star or cluster of gems or a cluster of pearls”, and then goes on to mention braided string, wreaths of flowers and puffs of smoke.
That was fifteen hundred years ago.
And people are still describing globes and stars to me after a Tuesday evening class.
I found this out in much the same way most people do: by experiencing it first and reading about it afterwards.
On longer retreats, my body would become still and calm, my mind would quieten, and then the lights would come.
When I later studied what the tradition had to say about it, I found it rather a relief.
It had a name.
It was a stage.
Other people had been here before.
Why does it happen?
Here’s the explanation that makes most sense to me, and it starts with something rather strange about how our senses work.
Your senses respond to change.
When nothing changes, they stop reporting.
Look steadily at a patch of colour without moving your eyes and, after a while, it will begin to fade. It sounds unbelievable until you try it.
Physicists demonstrated this properly in 1952 by holding an image perfectly still on the retina and watching it disappear from view (Ditchburn and Ginsborg, Nature).
Now imagine sitting very still for half an hour.
Not much is changing in your body. So the feelings in your body gradually quieten down and recede.
That’s the “my body disappeared” experience people describe.
And it doesn’t have to be mystical at all.
Your attention simply isn’t being fed by the usual stream of sensations.
And attention has to go somewhere.
So it goes into the mind.
If the mind has also become calm, as it can on retreat or after a long period of practice, you’re sitting in something rather like an empty room.
And that’s when the mind can start to show itself.
One of the ways it can do that is through light.
The Brown paper reaches a similar conclusion by a different route. It compares deep meditation with sensory deprivation, where reduced input can actually make the visual system more excitable rather than less.
Simple visual phenomena can then follow.
Scientists have their own names for some of the shapes people see: phosphenes and photopsia.
I think of it as a cousin of dreaming.
At night, you lose awareness of your body first. Then the mind comes alive and produces all sorts of things.
In deep meditation, the body can recede in a similar way. But you remain gently and calmly conscious while it’s happening.
You’re awake in the room where the dreams are made.
Whether that’s the whole story, I genuinely don’t know.
Psychologists have barely studied these deeper states. Buddhist practitioners, on the other hand, have been studying them for two and a half thousand years.
And they were remarkably rigorous about it.
So I’d call them the scientists of the inner world.
If you’re having lots of these experiences, their maps are the detailed ones.
What should you do when you see them?
Four things, in this order.
1. Notice it and let it be there.
You don’t need to work out what each colour means. Bring the same awareness to the light that you’d bring to a sound outside the window.
2. Be kind to it.
This is the bit people sometimes skip.
Kindness towards the experience helps prevent you from gripping it. And gripping is often what makes it disappear.
3. Don’t chase it.
The surest way to lose a nimitta is to want one.
Go back to the breath, or whatever your practice happens to be, and let the light do whatever it wants to do.
4. Don’t grade yourself on it.
Seeing lights doesn’t make you an advanced meditator.
And never seeing them doesn’t make you a beginner.
Plenty of deeply practised meditators never see a thing.
If what you saw frightened you, or if it came with other changes you weren’t expecting, please talk to an experienced meditation teacher rather than a search engine.
That’s not me being cautious for the sake of it.
Some people genuinely find these experiences unsettling. Having someone who’s been there before can help you make sense of what happened.
There’s no substitute for that conversation.
What comes next, according to the tradition
In the Theravada account, the nimitta isn’t the destination.
As practice deepens, the light is said to become brighter and steadier. It can become a doorway into the jhanas, states of absorption that the texts describe as deeply blissful and as clarifying what’s actually going on.
I’m reporting that, rather than claiming it.
If you want a proper explanation from someone who has spent decades exploring these states, read Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond by Ajahn Brahm (Wisdom Publications, 2006).
It’s the clearest book I know on what to do when a nimitta arrives and how the different stages fit together.
I go into all of this in much more detail on my advanced teacher training, but you certainly don’t need to become a teacher to read the book.
For the ordinary foundations underneath all of this (settling the body and steadying attention), that’s what I wrote my books about, including Mindfulness For Dummies.
The short version
Seeing colours during meditation usually means you’ve become quiet enough for your body to drop out of your awareness and for your mind to become more visible to you.
It has a name.
And it has a fifteen-hundred-year-old description.
It’s pleasant far more often than it’s frightening.
So be aware of it. Be kind to it. Don’t chase it.
And don’t let anyone tell you it’s a grade.
If you’d like some company while you practise, I sit with the Daily Mindfulness Club every weekday morning at 7.30am UK time, live.
Nobody there is trying to see lights.
That’s rather the point.
A few related things worth reading: falling asleep during meditation, which is the other “is this normal?” question I’m asked most; how long you should meditate, since longer sits are where this tends to show up; and how to stop thinking, for the quieter mind that makes any of this possible.