First signal or just expectation?

Honestly the fact that you're asking this question at all puts you ahead of where I was in my first month. I spent about six weeks certain every twitch meant something. The warmth is real — you felt warmth. Whether it "means" anything is a separate question you don't have to answer tonight.

The thing that helped me: expectation and sensation aren't actually opposites. You can want something and still genuinely feel it. The trap isn't feeling the warmth — the trap is jumping from "warm palm" to "I contacted the Counterplane." You didn't do that. You described a warm palm. That's a good post.

Small practical thing that let me stop chasing my own tail: I started writing the note before I decided what it meant, and I stopped reading other people's threads on the same day I sit. Priming is real. Give your own hands a quiet room to speak in.

That's a bit humbling, because I definitely did the opposite. I'll try a clean sit tonight with nothing read beforehand and just log the plain facts. Thank you — I was half expecting to be told I'd felt something huge and half expecting to be told I was making it up. This is neither, which is oddly the most reassuring answer.

For what it's worth I sat for two months and felt basically nothing but my own pulse and a slightly numb thumb. No warmth at all. It didn't mean I was doing it wrong and it didn't mean you're doing it wrong either. People's first signals — if that's even what they are — come at wildly different speeds, and plenty never resolve into anything nameable.

One test I use, gently: does the sensation change when I stop trying to have it? Real warmth tends to just sit there whether I'm hoping or not. The stuff I've talked myself into usually evaporates the second I get bored of it. Not scientific, but it's kept me honest.

Coming in late — MiloNorth, did the clean sit change anything? I'm curious less about whether it was "more real" and more about whether describing it felt easier without the other threads in your head. That shift is usually the actual progress, in my experience.