[HN Gopher] My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown
___________________________________________________________________
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown
Author : mudita
Score : 415 points
Date : 2021-07-20 06:57 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danlawton.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danlawton.substack.com)
| avalys wrote:
| This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious
| reason.
|
| I'm just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning
| here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually _work_ ,
| even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here
| in the West.
|
| Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-
| woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies
| from their money.
|
| The fact that it could be dangerous and mentally destabilizing,
| and lead to such dramatic changes in personality and outlook as
| described in the linked articles and reinforced by replies here,
| is obviously reason for caution - but it also signifies strong
| evidence that this a very powerful and effective practice. I'm
| much more interested in learning about meditation than before
| reading the article.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I've got ADHD and 7 minutes of guided mediation in the mornings
| changed my life. I didnt believe it would when a doctor
| suggested it. But it did. I cant really explain it but I sure
| wish I knew about it earlier in my life.
| groby_b wrote:
| Any kind of guided meditation? Specifically focused on
| aspects of ADHD? And how did it change your life?
| bruja_gorda wrote:
| It's not the meditation that is destabilising. It's the weed:
|
| > I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying
| legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus
| pond at UCLA.
|
| What's left unsaid is that the majority of this "practice" goes
| hand-in-hand with "recreational" use of weed. Scare quotes
| because once you start reading revelatory texts under the
| influence, and probably meditating under the influence, the
| road to psychosis is just a few turns away.
|
| I've had friends who went mad reading the bible or The Eagle's
| Gift, or The Tenth Insight, while smoking weed. I can't explain
| the mechanism, but smoking weed and opening yourself up to all
| the enlightened bullshit of the New Age, or the Old Religions,
| can tear a hole in your mental health, big enough for a truck
| to drive through.
|
| People who believe in the supernatural are already half-mad.
| The weed comes along and closes the deal.
|
| Without weed, meditation is as woo-woo bullshit for California
| yuppies as you thought originally.
| kirse wrote:
| At least for the author, it worked because he _wanted_ it to
| work. "Seek and you shall find" is another spiritual
| principle. i.e. His faith in the process is what produced the
| results:
|
| _I began meditating in search for a decrease in stress and
| anxiety. I got that..._
|
| I've always found the "empty your mind" meditation quite hokey.
| Number one because I find that exercise is naturally
| meditative, and also healthy to boot. And second, in Christian
| prayer you are focused on something - whether God or Jesus or
| your cares or thankfulness, etc, and the point is the reverse -
| to fill your mind with what is good and holy. God has no
| interest in creating empty-minded self-focused people, he wants
| them full of thoughts of love, compassion, mercy, and others-
| focused on the good deeds that flow from that.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Most meditation I'm familiar with (of the Buddhist variety)
| is more about focusing the attention on the meditation object
| than about emptying your mind. I'm certainly not familiar
| with all the different meditation schools though.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| the Soto style of zazen meditation is about emptying the
| mind though.
|
| I think the parent misunderstands meditation though - it's
| not an empty practice for the self-absorbed; it's only been
| repackaged that way as mindfulness.
| m12k wrote:
| It's important to set expectations. Meditation won't make you
| happy - and that's not the point of it. What it can do is let
| you be more present of mind, less prone to flights of fancy or
| worries. It teaches you a practice where you look into yourself
| and actually face what's going on in there, and gives you some
| gentle coping mechanisms to help lay to rest intrusive thoughts
| and feelings that have started "looping" in you. So the goal of
| becoming "enlightened" should probably be read more as
| "unburdened" or even "undistracted" - it's freedom to
| experience the moment you are in more clearly with fewer
| distractions and "ticks". What you do with that freedom is up
| to you. And it's not a state you achieve once and for all, it's
| something you do again and again, both to wipe the slate clean,
| and to train your ability to do so. It's more like taking out
| the trash, or daily stretches to stay limber, and less like a
| religious awakening (those who claim otherwise are
| hallucinating or having a mental breakdown like the author of
| the post).
| tyjen wrote:
| Yes, it's surprising to people outside the retreat meditation
| community. If I read this blog entry prior to folding
| meditation practice into my daily life, I'd be equally
| surprised. There is a lot of commercialization and Westernized
| metaphysical woo-woo stuff to sift through to discover the type
| of meditation discussed in Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, or
| Dhammapada, so the initial and superficial impression of
| meditation generally perceived from a Yoga class at the local
| strip mall or YouTube guided meditations are of different
| varietals. The perception being that meditation is terrific for
| destressing and wouldn't lead to a psychotic break.
|
| When you start to peel back the conditioning layers that define
| you, the sensations that reveal themselves can become
| destabilizing if you choose to focus on those distractions
| instead of allowing them to pass and refocus on the meditation
| object. If you're not prepared for what lies ahead and/or do
| not have a devoted mentor, the strands that define you and
| serve as identity reference points can snap leaving you with an
| existential crisis.
|
| Also, while many meditation retreats and programs are designed
| to separate yuppies from their money, the retreats I'm familiar
| with operate on a donation basis to remain open for everyone
| independent of financial status.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >it also signifies strong evidence that this a very powerful
| and effective practice
|
| I still see no reason to think it's a beneficial practice
| though. PCP is also powerful and effective with effects on your
| psyche all over the place.
| cs2733 wrote:
| Ha! I salute your openess.
| [deleted]
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I love how when the west gets something and does its own
| interpretation that it's "watered" down as if the west can do
| nothing right and we're all spiritually and morally bankrupt
| idiots.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| the West has its own spiritual traditions, that the type of
| people who meditation is pitched towards have completely
| abandoned. Mindfulness and such are spiritual practices
| stripped of their philosophical roots and repackaged in a
| consumable form.
|
| If SE Asian companies were selling the Lord's Prayer as a
| quick de-stressing technique for busy atheist office workers,
| I'd say they were missing the point too.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| I applaud your current open-mindedness, although your past
| open-mindedness could have used a tweak.
|
| If you are serious about looking into meditation further, read
| Sam Harris' book Waking Up. Sam Harris is about as far from a
| "woo-woo bullshit" practitioner as you can get. He was one of
| the leaders of the New Atheist movement, and has a PhD in
| neuroscience.
| praptak wrote:
| It is a practice that does _something_ , by which I mean
| something observable via MRI. Here's a meta analysis of the
| papers on MRI scans of meditators' brains:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471247/
|
| The cautious conclusion is that meditation is on par with being
| a cab driver in a large city (which also shows up on brain
| scans).
| logicalmind wrote:
| I'm 40+ spent a lot of time stressed out about work, family,
| etc. Rather than go the medication route, I decided to try to
| just find ways to calm and de-stress myself. Certainly exercise
| works to some extent. But I also learned meditation.
|
| I'm not interested in any religious aspects of it, I don't pay
| any money towards it. I believe I started by reading a book on
| how to do it, then listened to some guided audio on what I was
| supposed to do. With that knowledge I was able to continue on
| my own.
|
| Specifically, my mind would tend to get stuck in loops of
| problems or worries, especially right before bed. What I really
| learned from doing this is that I would consciously reset my
| mind back to the present once it started going down these loops
| about the past or future. I do this for about 10-20 minutes
| before bed so that I can sleep without my mind racing and
| keeping me up. Even now I've noticed I don't have to do it as
| much or for as long when I do because I've learned to control
| my thoughts a lot better when I need to.
|
| I know meditation goes much further beyond this (as outlined in
| the article), but just having this level of skill is very
| valuable if you have this type or racing mind. I very much
| differentiate between meditation as a skill and meditation as a
| way of life. The skill part is valuable for anyone.
| avalys wrote:
| This article might as well have said "The Shenrikki school of
| telekinesis is popular, but if you're not careful while
| practicing you might accidentally crack the foundation of your
| house or give your spouse a concussion, and no one will warn
| you about this. " and then a bunch of people jumped into the
| thread to say "Yes yes, this happened to me, and my home
| insurance didn't cover it!"
|
| My reaction is: wait, what, really, this is an actual risk
| here?!
| beaconstudios wrote:
| if you want to continue in that vein of complete scepticism,
| you could just claim that all those people are experiencing a
| placebo effect.
| seanc wrote:
| I forget where I heard it, but someone once said "The mind is
| like a boomerang. If you throw it, there is a very good
| chance it won't come back."
| uoaei wrote:
| > designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from
| their money
|
| Can I ask how the generic advice of "sit for 20 minutes a day
| paying attention to your own attention processes" costs
| anything?
| avalys wrote:
| Are you disputing the fact that there are a very large number
| of people who charge money for instruction, training,
| retreats, etc. around the concepts of meditation and
| mindfulness?
|
| Are you suggesting that "sitting for 20 minutes a day paying
| attention to your own attention processes" will lead to the
| profound revelations, mental changes, existential crises,
| etc. described in the article and in comments posted here?
| samat wrote:
| 20 minutes a day -- unlikely. 2 hours a day for 10 years --
| you bet.
| michael1999 wrote:
| The author is a professional meditation instructor,
| describing attending professional meditation training and
| conferences. Someone is paying money.
| cranesnake wrote:
| Every therapist I've gone to has suggested this meditation,
| along with cognitive behavior therapy and medication.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I think it's supposed to change your personality right?
|
| For example, making one less reactive?
| fossuser wrote:
| There's decent empirical evidence of an effect.
|
| It's not a huge surprise when you think about it - therapy
| works because of helping people change how they think.
|
| The reason it's often dismissed by skeptics is because it's
| often surrounded by a lot of religious woo and other nonsense
| so people often dismiss the entire thing.
|
| I have a pet hypothesis that it can make anxiety worse if
| you're not careful due to Hypervigilance
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervigilance) - anxious people
| tend to have issues with ruminating and paying too much
| introspective attention to their bodies already. Most
| meditation rhetoric appears to be targeted to people who never
| introspect. Getting control over ruminating thoughts is
| helpful, but I've found mindfulness to be a mixed bag
| personally.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| This will sound esoteric, but I feel should say it: sometimes
| when you are involved in a practice for which you have no
| context, you will open a door to things for which you have no
| name. You won't be able to name what you see or what you feel,
| and this can cause everything to come crashing down. An
| experienced guide can help you avoid this outcome.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > dissatisfied California yuppies
|
| What do you think the primary demographic of HN is?
| nabla9 wrote:
| (background: I have been doing zen meditation for 20 years.
| Several hours per day and participated in 50 intensive retreats
| or so).
|
| Absolutely. If you meditate so much that it starts to work, it's
| like any effective medicine or treatment. It has potential for
| adversarial side effects. Even mentally healthy people get into
| some crazy states and can experience meltdowns while meditating.
| I have seen several cases of people having full blown psychosis
| needing psychiatric care.
|
| Saying that if you get into a bad place you are not meditating
| right is also wrong. Buddhist tradition knows about these, but
| they are described in a way that often makes people think it's
| some kind of philosophical otherworldly metaphor. They can be
| pleasurable or horrifying or just weird. Japanese zen tradition
| calls all these just makyo (the realm of demons).
|
| Everyone who has meditated long enough has encountered them. You
| can read sutras to see Buddha fighting with crazy. Almost every
| honest autobiography from famous meditation teachers has mentions
| of them. Zen Master Hakuin had probably the most famous complete
| meltdown. He called it Zen sickness.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuin_Ekaku#Zen_sickness He had to
| stop and seek help.
|
| Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not
| safe.
|
| --
|
| Making things worse: Meditation attracts people with mental
| issues, and many treat them as a substitute to medication or
| therapy. Meditation is neither. It can be used as part of
| therapy, but it's not a substitute. Better get your
| therapy/medication right and then meditate moderately if that
| feels fine.
| addicted wrote:
| This is key. Meditation is not a substitute for therapy or
| professional mental health of any sort.
| mapcars wrote:
| This doesn't match my experience. Professionals can help you
| only to the extent they understand themselves. Do they
| understand nature of consciousness, mind, thought? Most
| likely they do not. Meditation is supposed to bring one to
| the state where you get control over those things and if it
| happens there is no question of mental issues for this person
| anymore.
| nabla9 wrote:
| That's overly idealized and wrong view. Meditation together
| with mental treatment often works really well but they are
| not direct substitutes. There are meditation therapies that
| mix the two.
|
| What meditation does to the mind is not completely
| separated from the mental health, but it's not on the same
| line either. Understanding the nature of your mind heals
| only minor neuroses, and sometimes with depression.
|
| You can be mentally ill and still have "prajna wisdom" or
| being "realized" in a very fundamental way. "Prajna wisdom"
| does not translate directly into normal wisdom or mental
| health (can help in some cases). The history is full of
| mentally ill meditation masters, "funny monks" and "crazy
| wisdom" that is crazy in real way and just not metaphor.
|
| In religious settings people have tendency to attach attach
| every good thing to meditation in linear way. Morality,
| mental and physical health, everything. In reality you get
| "something completely different" (in the Monty Python way).
| It can help you in other things but it never solves other
| problems in your life.
| mapcars wrote:
| So how do you know what is mentally healthy? How do you
| know those meditation masters were mentally ill?
| mapcars wrote:
| >Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are
| not safe.
|
| That sounds wrong to me, meditation is supposed to destroy all
| meanings of life, not to give anything. Also doing or not doing
| anything at all is not safe. There is no safety - once we are
| alive we will die.
| nabla9 wrote:
| > meditation is supposed to destroy all meanings of life, not
| to give anything
|
| Those are all metaphors to describe something "Die before you
| die so you don't' have to die before you die", "See your true
| face before you were born", "enlightenment", "entering the
| stream of holy", "satori", "be one with everything", "be
| nothing", "emptiness". None of those descriptions will help
| you understand. You either meditate or not. Then you can
| describe what happens to you in your own words contradicting
| everybody else. "Well, there is sitting
| meditation, there is walking meditation. Oh,
| and then, of course, especially in the West,
| there is talking meditation. No good."
| mapcars wrote:
| Sure, my point is that losing meanings in the process can
| be quite crushing experience or liberating depending on
| one's attitude.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| He was born, succeeded in living a meaningless life, and
| died.
| bluepizza wrote:
| > In the aftermath, I floated for months in a state free of
| discontent.
|
| This is interesting. As a human, I always have something to be
| discontent about. It never stops, and it is not supposed to stop
| - as those are my instincts driving me.
|
| I love my mindfulness moments, and being able to look into my
| emotions. But I wouldn't want to stay months without discontent.
|
| Overall, several of the author's quotes point to a very extreme
| practice. He is mixing internal state and reality as if it was
| one and the same. These two factors are bound to lead to
| problems.
|
| But I don't see most people doing 30 min per say having these
| issues.
| rickbad68 wrote:
| It sounds to me like the author had a severe anxiety attack for
| the first time. And just throwing out a wild guess that they
| possibly had recently experimented with ayahuasca or some other
| form of DMT.
| KingFelix wrote:
| it would be interesting to know this. and/or what other things
| he was involved with prior to his experience
| plutonorm wrote:
| I also experienced something similar. While meditating at work I
| experienced a state of profound bliss and extreme bodily
| sensations. What followed this was a disintegration where I
| dropped into an existential crisis that lasted for about a year.
| However during this time I faced a number of demons which I
| hadn't been able to face up until that point. Now, about 5 years
| later I am in a good place and am ramping up my meditation
| practice once more.
|
| Meditation is what it says on the tin, a way to uncover real
| truth. It's powerful and dangerous. It's a path for truth
| seekers, who are willing to pay whatever it takes to see what is
| truly there. For me its a blessing.
|
| For most these experiences are ones of positive disintegration
| rather than negative. After the dark night of the soul has passed
| we find ourselves more fully integrated than before.
|
| For many that's not something they were after and in this way I
| agree with the article, meditation is being miss sold.
| maxduckworth wrote:
| If you are open to sharing, what did you do, if anything, to
| make it through the year of crisis? Did you stop meditating
| like the author, seek outside help, continue meditating or
| something else?
| stevebmark wrote:
| The end goal of mindfulness is to make you realize that you don't
| exist, and to make you realize you don't have free will, and
| there is no you. While it's all true, it's not a good place to
| leave someone without a next step. It can be useful to make
| people realize that their thoughts aren't their own, which can
| help with anxiety. Maybe it can also lead to meltdowns like the
| one in this article if you continue the practice long past "I
| don't exist and I have no free will."
| t0mbstone wrote:
| I think you might have a misunderstanding about the end goal of
| mindfulness.
|
| There is more than one way to practice mindfulness, but the
| goal of any mindfulness technique is to achieve a state of
| alert, focused relaxation by deliberately paying attention to
| thoughts and sensations without judgment. This allows the mind
| to refocus on the present moment.
| mlang23 wrote:
| > This terrain was fresh. I had never previously experienced a
| psychotic episode and have no history of mental illness besides
| occasional bouts of mild anxiety and depression. ... > Why did I
| start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a
| fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy
| kiss, and a stray comment I didn't take fondly. The evening ended
| hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my
| shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life.
|
| YYMMV, but I feel the author is having problems they dont want to
| really accept. That is what the contradiction in the two quotes
| above indicates.
|
| Aside from that, I couldn't help but think about people having
| access to too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give
| you the most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it
| sort of becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip
| probability suddenly skyrockets. Or, put another way, even
| Siddhartha didn't find awakening in the samana practices. They
| were only the first step (of three) to reach his goal. You can
| overdo everything, even the very very nice things.
| icybox wrote:
| Alan Watts used to say "When you've received the message, hang
| up the phone."
| salemh wrote:
| A former student of Alan Watts, then a Taoist monk, found
| Orthodox Christianity after his searching, and has become a
| revered Priestmonk across the Orthodox world - he offers his
| own journey and offers the Eastern Orthodox Christian
| perspective of seeking God and His revelation.
| https://orthochristian.com/81732.html
|
| https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/illuminedheart/father_.
| .. >The impersonal concept of deity was actually an
| experience of the non-being from which we have come
| [already], and that the true understanding of God - the
| highest, fullest understanding of God is God as person, as I
| AM - He has revealed Himself as I AM. Archimandrive Sophrony,
| from His Life is Mine
|
| Small short booklet Fr Seraphim Rose wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Revelation-Human-Heart-
| Seraphim/...
|
| In my own journey out of buddhism, taoism, stoicism,
| psychadelics, Fr Seraphims writings helped clarify why their
| was still a hole in my soul, and why western Christianity
| made no sense to me.
|
| In the Orthodox Christian perspective, they are the Church
| that followed the Council of Jerusalem (the Book of Acts),
| the earliest writings of the Church (St Ignatius, the
| Didache, etc.) then all the councils which codified the canon
| of scripture, the Ecumenical Councils, etc. Every council
| must affirm _previous dogma_ ; believed everywhere, by all
| (Orthodox Christians), and at all times - so the below
| article on the Essence and Energy distinction of God, by St
| Gregory Palamas, affirms the early writings of St Basil and
| the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church who were fighting
| heretical notions of what God is - the Church defined what
| _He is not_. The Cappadocian Church fathers affirm the
| Apostles and scriptures, etc.
| http://orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/florov_palamas.aspx
|
| This is a nice comparison video of Tabernacle and Jewish
| Temple worship, and its continuation in the Orthodox
| Christian temples. The western church in Rome was of the same
| One Mind of Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until
| 1054, and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against
| their dogmatic innovations, and yet now are splintered into
| thousands on thousands of beliefs.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkmh68urI6A
|
| WHAT IS THE NOUS AND HOW IS IT DISTINCT FROM THE SOUL?
| https://orthochristian.com/79038.html
| rdtsc wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, lots of good references and well
| written.
|
| I especially like the one from Florovsky. I'd just like to
| leave a reference to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm for those who may
| be wondering what this is all about.
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| This just sent me down such a hole reading about Fr
| Seraphim Rose, thanks.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of
| Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054
|
| The political/administrative disputes of 1053-1054 that
| directly produced the Great Schism didn't involve
| theological change on either side, so this (or the inverse,
| painting the Orthodox as the moving party, which I've also
| seen) position is simple factional-identity reinforcing
| revisionism.
|
| > and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against
| their dogmatic innovations
|
| Quite a few of the things Protestants objected to in the
| Roman Catholic Church were features it still shared with
| the Eastern Orthodox Churches (and many of them, both in
| the shared category and not, were not issues of dogma), so
| no, that's not true in much the same way as the preceding
| claim about 1054 wasn't, even before any debates about
| which issues of dogma or other doctrine may or may nor have
| been innovations.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > why western Christianity made no sense to me.
|
| What specifically? You haven't explained what made no sense
| to you and what finally made sense to you in Eastern
| Orthodoxy (I would also avoid lumping Protestantism in with
| Catholicism under the label "Western"). Could it be that
| you simply did not understand? Here, I would stick to
| traditional Catholic teaching as the point of reference as
| the veritable source for orthodox doctrine and tradition,
| not some Protestant innovation or corruption.
|
| Mind you, the Catholic Church understands God as the Ipsum
| Esse Subsistens. Thomistic metaphysics uses this term. Thus
| God is understood as Existence itself, as Being, not _a_
| being (you might say that God does not exist, but rather
| _is_ , or to abuse the terminology, _is existence_ ). God
| is the "to be". This is to be identified with the "I Am" of
| Exodus 3:14.
|
| > This is a nice comparison video of Tabernacle and Jewish
| Temple worship, and its continuation in the Orthodox
| Christian temples.
|
| The Catholic mass is liturgically, etc. the continuation,
| fulfillment, and perfection of the sacrifices made at the
| Temple of Jerusalem. The _altar_ is where the perfect,
| unbloody sacrifice of Christ is offered at each and every
| mass. This sacrifice is the very purpose of the mass.
| (Following the destruction of the Temple, the Jews have no
| priesthood, no temple, and no sacrifices, only synanogues.)
| So that is no news from a Catholic POV (it may be for
| poorly catechized and Protestantized Catholics today, but
| that 's a different story).
|
| > The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of
| Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054 and then
| subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic
| innovations, and yet now are splintered into thousands on
| thousands of beliefs.
|
| I'm not sure you have an entirely accurate view [0].
|
| [0] https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/eastern-schism
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| One of the major problems with American 'orthodox' are that
| they embrace only the easy parts of orthodoxy. Often I've
| heard that 'orthodox dont believe in original sin' and
| other such nonsense. These beliefs are widespread in
| westenized, modern orthodox but aren't true of much of
| orthodox practice in the east. St Gregory Palamas was a
| wonderful theologian, but we have tried , only in the last
| century to built a system of thought around him that his
| works simply dont and cant support. This is obviously due
| to an awareness of the more codified thought of the western
| church. Sometimes, I've even heard orthodox claim that the
| latin fathers are manifest heretics when they have been
| saints in the east for centuries! One of my American
| friends almost treats St AUGUSTINE as someone to be
| dismissed.
|
| The consensus of the fathers includes all of the fathers,
| if you must cherry pick a subset or an individual to make a
| point its simply not in the apostolic tradition.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Good point.
| brodo wrote:
| I think the biggest problem is that people who had an ego
| death experience are trying to experience it again by dosing
| up when it is largely a set and setting issue. Firstly, you
| can't have a life-changing, ecstatic experience of being
| connected to the universe every couple of weeks. Secondly, if
| you don't have some philosophical or religious framework to
| frame the experience, I imagine it can be really devastating.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Consumerism paired with sensationalism. Some people take
| psychedelics like others consume television... To amuse
| themselves. Remember what Tim Leary wrote in the
| psychedelic experience? If you have hallucinations, you're
| doing something wrong. But that is getting a bit off-topic
| regarding the original post.
| hderms wrote:
| man, I love Alan Watts. We're so lucky to have so much of his
| actual speech recorded as the tone of his voice and the way
| he communicates ideas are really fascinating
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I agree with your conclusion.
|
| I'd go a step further and state there is no such thing as a bad
| trip. There are just situations where loss go of control can
| result in the surfacing of things that are unresolved... and
| unpleasant. No one has a bad trip without the latter.
|
| Another reason why psychedelics should come with clear warning
| labels that describe bad outcomes for specific situations.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| A bad trip can tell people unthruths or falsehoods that they
| then believe. That is objectively bad.
|
| In other words, a bad trip can manifest pathologies where
| none existed before.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| The problem there is belief, not the psychedelics. It can
| happen with happy or blissful experiences as well.
| lm28469 wrote:
| How's that different from a "good" trip that make you
| believe you're in direct contact with god or even god
| himself though ?
|
| It goes both ways, you can't say the "good" experience is
| the truth and the "bad" experience is false. They're both
| the same thing and are just a mirror of your internal
| state, your job is to analyse them and decide what value
| you want to put on them. There is no "objectively" good or
| bad
|
| I think a looot of people are conditioned by what they read
| on internet about psychedelics, they spend hours watching
| videos and reading about experiences before trying it for
| themselves and are already fully trapped in some form of
| mental cage of what they experience will/should be.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Yes, much better to just casually drop 100 mcg on a
| Wednesday night in your friend's basement at age 16 like
| I did, no preconceptions...
|
| (To be fair, some of my friends still cite that night as
| a distinctly positive life-altering experience)
| lm28469 wrote:
| I'm not saying people should casually use psychedelics
| without any knowledge of them, especially not at 16 and
| especially not in a basement. I researched the safety of
| it and the general effects (during/after the trip) to
| make sure I'd be physically able to go through it. Once I
| learned there was virtually no risks for the dose I
| "knew" I was in a good mental state to have the
| experience.
|
| It has to be something you want to try (not something
| your friends semi forced you to join), you have to be
| aware it can be unpleasant, and you have to do it in a
| safe place (both mentally and physically), given that not
| much can go seriously wrong.
|
| My first time was 200ug of lsd in the middle of a desert
| at night by myself, I had the idea after reading 1/4th of
| a book from Alan Watts, the way he talked about
| psychedelics made me curious and I didn't want to be too
| influenced by his experiences/descriptions which made me
| decide to stop reading and try it out.
|
| It was my best trip, I gave up and replicating the
| experience after 4 or 5 times (over 3 or 4 years) and I
| stopped thinking about psychedelics since then.
|
| Since then I learned two things:
|
| - I'm much prefer tripping alone than with people,
| especially if the people I trip with aren't very long
| term/close friends I 200% trust on everything.
|
| - Tripping inside isn't particularly enjoyable, I can't
| imagine tripping in a basement. I vividly remember
| feeling claustrophobic during my first trip, and that was
| in the middle of a desert probably 50km away from any man
| made structure
| icybox wrote:
| I see your point, but I prefer to live in a free universe. We
| don't ban electricity or knives ... and both can do harm.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I prefer so too.
|
| Let's not jump to conclusions. I wouldn't propose a ban on
| anything when a warning label or full disclosure would do
| just fine. I've edited my comment accordingly
| warent wrote:
| My psychologist taught me that fear, anxiety, etc. destructive
| emotions are surface events, bubbling up from somewhere deeper.
| Mindfulness can be used as a resource for us to be with that
| fear; in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh "those painful emotions
| are like a child crying out. A child needs love and attention.
| Hold them with love, be with them."
|
| Once we can be with it, then we can start to follow it down to
| its roots. Shining light into the darkness is how we heal.
|
| Unfortunately the author seems to have gone astray down a false
| path that seems to be very common in western civilization
| called spiritual bypassing. Basically spiritual bypassing is
| when you use things like meditation and spirituality to get
| _around_ your deep seated psychological wounds. Doing this is
| just a form of avoidance and repression which causes the wound
| to fester, which can eventually culminate in more severe
| symptoms like what the author describes.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I couldn't help but think about people having access to
| too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give you the
| most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it sort of
| becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip probability
| suddenly skyrockets."_
|
| I'm not sure about that. Psychedelics can bring to the
| surface all sorts of unconscious traumas, repressed memories,
| and/or issues people have trouble dealing with on a conscious
| level -- fear of death being a classic source of difficulty
| during "bad trips", but also other things such as physical or
| emotional pain, or making you face the way you've been
| treating others or been treated by others, etc.
|
| Many people just can't handle that... especially if they've
| been running away from facing those things their whole lives,
| which many, many people are.
|
| Suddenly - bam - you're face to face with your own death,
| say, living through it in excruciating detail.. and, yeah,
| that can be very tough to deal with, and many people react to
| a "bad" experience by trying to run way even further, but
| once you're on the psychedelic rollercoaster there's rarely
| any easy way out until the psychedelic wears off, and most
| psychedelic therapists these days suggest that instead of
| running away one should run towards the uncomfortable
| material, facing it squarely and surrendering to the
| experience, and this often results in cathartic relief and a
| "good" trip afterwards.
|
| Of course doing this with a trained therapist who can help
| you before, during, and after the psychedelic session is
| better than trying to deal with it alone, which many people
| just aren't prepared to do.
| hashkb wrote:
| Trust the trajectory.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Fear is only illusion.
| mlang23 wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=TG2i_UoBEeg :-)
|
| Sorry, not the most constructive reply ever, but I couldn't
| resist...
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I'm sure the author would love to hear more about your
| diagnosis of his condition based solely on the content of an
| essay.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| To be fair the diagnosis does align with the authors
| complaints.
| mlang23 wrote:
| If someone puts a posting on the net, they likely have to
| accept that there will be reactions to it. That said, I am
| not looking forward to a fist-fight with a wanna-be-monk,
| so distance is probably the key. Dont you feel a fist-
| fighting drinker is a rather comical mindfulness
| practicioner? A bit like the gay nazi, or whatever
| stereotypical contradiction you wanna imagine.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| > I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who
| were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators. They were
| both kind, compassionate, and welcoming, suggesting various ways
| that I might alter my meditation practice to alleviate my
| symptoms > > In fact, in Britton's study, 60% of the participants
| reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers,
| rebutting Davidson's argument that experienced meditators don't
| end up in difficult territory.
|
| It sounds like a scary failure mode due to survivorship bias,
| where meditation retreats don't have experienced leaders, because
| those that have had adverse effects of meditation simply stop
| teaching it. I wonder how many other fields suffer from the same,
| where it's easy to deny anything could go wrong until it happens
| to you, and that removes you from the race.
|
| > A few months ago, I began dabbling with teaching mindfulness
| again, which may seem surprising. [---] I feel that I could do
| something for my students that wasn't ever done for me: tell the
| truth.
|
| This is great, and I hope Dan succeeds in making it sustainable.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Finance comes to mind. You make money every year, until you
| don't.
| golyi wrote:
| I believe a lot of people are doing meditation in a similar way
| as they would do a workout session and it simply doesn't work.
| It's supposed to be your time off and enjoyable. I've seen a lot
| of starters that are extremely focused on doing at least 30 mins
| a day, and it's just incredibly hard. Start small, start with
| whatever you're confortable with, it could be a minute for all
| it's worth and increase progressively but make sure that that
| minute is mindful.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Definitely, to the point where in addition to getting a stipend
| to go to the gym from a previous employer, they offered to pay
| for a mindfulness / meditation assistance app.
|
| I mean they could also reduce the pressure to perform and to be
| on top of everything a bit. I get that enthusiasm is contagious
| and FOMO is a real problem in tech, but the company should have
| done more to slow people right the fuck down.
| jb_schirtzinger wrote:
| Uh taking drugs and then meditating is probably going to lead you
| straight to the demon that disposed you to taking drugs to start
| with.
| motohagiography wrote:
| One could see how meditating could lead to a break like that.
| When you do something that connects your mind to the real and
| physical present inside your senses, which can suppress the
| reflections and noise from the way we interpret the
| representations of the world around us, coming back is jarring
| and panic inducing.
|
| This bad meditation effect sounds like the same effects of hyper-
| paranoia from cannabis, or a "bad trip," on hallucinogens, which
| can have dramatic short term and pervasive long term effects.
| DantesKite wrote:
| "I was a guitar string being tuned beyond its highest range. The
| string popped. A spike of fear slashed through my guts. And
| that's when I split apart."
|
| I read on Twitter about this one guy who gave himself brain
| damage by constantly working for months on end while programming.
|
| It's interesting that a few others described a similar sensation.
| Their brain feeling like a guitar string. There's a moment where
| they can detect something goes wrong.
|
| It seems like they put themselves through a very stressful
| situation and triggered a cascading effect.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > I read on Twitter about this one guy who gave himself brain
| damage by constantly working for months on end while
| programming.
|
| Link? I'm interested.
| bckr wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003207
|
| https://archive.is/KD74v
|
| "So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain"
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I remember that thread, the "I burned all the glucose out
| of my brain & gave myself seizures" isn't how things work.
| It seems like he has unresolved mental health issues (which
| I'm sure were either caused or exacerbated by burnout), and
| came up with a rather strange self diagnosis.
| diimdeep wrote:
| 4000 hours of meditation practice is a lot.
|
| I'm doing guided meditation(with Headspace) for 20 min each day
| and right now on 10 day streak and feeling good so far.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Over 10 years? That's a bit more than an hour a day. That was
| the minimum that my former teacher expected of his students.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| The guy just had a panic attack and didn't know how to deal with
| it. Getting kinda tired of the sensationalist articles acting
| like they discovered some unheard of horror that no other person
| has ever known.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A mind is a terrible thing to waste - or to tinker with
| haphazardly. I'm reminded of when Palm came out with "Graffiti",
| their stylus-stroke way of entering western characters into the
| thing. Folks were hospitalized with aphasia, where they couldn't
| figure out how to write normally any more. They'd jumped the
| well-work grooves they'd been in since primary school and
| couldn't find their way back.
|
| As adults we are a wired mess of stimulus-response formed by
| uncoordinated childhood and young-adult experiences. To start
| pulling those wires and plugging them in elsewhere, risks losing
| something. Maybe something you value.
| julesnp wrote:
| _Folks were hospitalized with aphasia, where they couldn 't
| figure out how to write normally any more._
|
| That's quite an extreme reaction. Do you have any links about
| this? I'm unable to find anything through Google.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| How did we give the hacker news "hug of death" to substack.com ?
| This is basic text on page, pretty lightweight right?
| [deleted]
| saltmeister wrote:
| "essential in the Buddha's awakening" yes...experience something
| beyond... way above the stars and far across the sea you clown of
| a human being
| kazinator wrote:
| Major selection bias here.
|
| From a 10,000 foot view it looks like:
|
| "Flaky dude attracted to Buddhist retreats who uses words like
| _jhana_ had a freak out. Say it ain 't so ..."
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| That's what you see at 10,000 feet? Nothing about the frequency
| of nervous breakdowns/psychosis among meditation practitioners
| with no personal nor family history of mental illness? I think
| you might need some prescription lenses at that altitude.
| [deleted]
| raincom wrote:
| A similar story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19222467
| tralarpa wrote:
| > As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR),
| I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A
| longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice
| over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation
| retreats.
|
| These numbers are telling everything you need to know about the
| the state of meditation in the Western world... His teachers were
| probably not much better.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Yep, it's totally divorced from the teachings it developed in.
| No wonder there's issues.
| briantakita wrote:
| > Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I
| started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya,
| a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn't take fondly. The
| evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist,
| misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High
| Life. My girlfriend was not happy. I wasn't happy. Something had
| to change.
|
| > That speck in time represented a constant battle I had waged
| over the prior decade with anger and other negative emotions. I
| drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I
| had volatile relationships with women. My mind wandered
| uncontrollably.
|
| > I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying
| legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond
| at UCLA
|
| > Yet, somewhere six or seven years into my practice, whatever
| progress I was making petered out. I was experiencing a growing
| sense of bodily agitation and began self-medicating with drugs
| and alcohol. Looking back, it was also during this time period
| that I had my first dissociative experiences, in which elements
| of my sense of self became separated in a way that impaired my
| ability to function.
|
| Perhaps he has some unresolved deep-seated emotional processes
| that have not been mastered, seeking a silver-bullet "cure",
| whether it be meditation, drugs, or alcohol. He would need to
| take responsibility over these "low-level" pains & train his
| psyche, body, & soul to handle this feedback mechanism in a
| holistic way, seeing these pains with his conscious mind, instead
| of disassociating his consciousness from them. Blaming
| meditation, drugs, alcohol are blaming the symptoms of a deeper
| issue. People recoil after touching a hot surface for good
| reason.
|
| Note that dissociation is the conscious psyche's firewall against
| trauma.
|
| > I was halfway to awakening.
|
| Building consciousness is a continuous journey, not a waypoint
| where you can be halfway toward, since there is no end.
|
| > Before her death, Vogt sent two emails to the retreat center
| about her challenges, at one point writing that she thought her
| distress was "a sign that I need to give up my life for a more
| pure one."
|
| She probably needs a better framework to view her life. This is
| where upbringing & social conditioning come into play.
|
| > In sifting through a patchwork of spiritual, psychological and
| biological frameworks, I have had to mix and match and to trust
| less in the words of experts and more in my intuition. It's been,
| like much in life, an inside job.
|
| People desire a simple silver bullet to solve all of their
| problems. Life is complex & the map is not the territory, so it
| can be disadvantageous to be too dependent & only focus on the
| map.
|
| > If you're a meditation teacher or hold a powerful position in
| the mindfulness industry, perhaps take a moment to question what
| sort of legacy you want to leave. Transparency, honesty and
| humility are often the core values of religion, but are typically
| abandoned the moment a sacred idea is critiqued.
|
| > Is it the fate of the Western mindfulness movement to follow
| this trend? Is there some wiggle room around the idea that more
| awareness is always better? Is there potential for a pause in our
| desperate attempt to prove that we've found a magic bullet for
| all our ills?
|
| He acknowledges the "magic bullet" singular tool to solve all
| problems mindset as being problematic.
|
| > My faith did not crumble gradually -- but collapsed like a
| Jenga game, leaving me to pick through the ruins and to wonder,
| with tremulous apprehension, if anything was salvageable.
|
| This sounds like the Shamanic Journey, where the soul is cut to
| pieces to be reassembled. Kindof like refactoring code.
| josyulakrishna wrote:
| I can only say that, please do not practice any advanced kind of
| meditation without a guru/experienced teacher and don't do drugs
| or alcohol if you are meditating.
| blix wrote:
| I've been starting a personal meditation practice, but I have
| no teacher outside what I read (mainly Easwaran). Do you have
| any recommendation for how one might find an experienced
| teacher while living in the west?
| Nursie wrote:
| Wow, there are a lot of judgemental and defensive responses here,
| from people who are allegedly working towards greater self
| knowledge and detachment...
|
| So many saying some variation of "he's not doing it right". Yet
| with ten years of practice, it doesn't seem like this person was
| just dabbling or dipping their toe in the water.
|
| Surely, even if they are "doing it wrong" that just goes to prove
| the point, that what's being taught and lauded so much as a
| panacea by some in the western world is potentially dangerous?
| And such dangers are downplayed or hand-waved away?
| throwaway34241 wrote:
| > that just goes to prove the point, that what's being taught
| and lauded so much as a panacea by some in the western world is
| potentially dangerous?
|
| I'm not an expert or even regular meditator but I can
| understand some of the defensiveness here. There is an analogy
| I think holds up: Imagine a headline "How I hurt myself
| exercising", in a world where people are so unfamiliar with the
| idea of physical exercise they may arrive at the conclusion
| that exercise is dangerous.
|
| The word meditation these days just means almost any sort of
| mental exercise. They could be totally different exercises,
| with totally different goals.
|
| The sort of meditation that is often praised and practiced by
| the general public is usually something like 15 minute attempts
| to relax and be undistracted, in a world with constant
| distractions. The sort of meditation that you see people write
| about mental breakdowns about are usually 10 day silent
| retreats where you try to accept the impermanence of all things
| or achieve ego death or something.
|
| It seems very similar to the dangers of physical exercise. In
| some types of exercise like weightlifting, technique is
| important to avoid injury, but you can still get injured with
| correct technique. Some extreme sports are inherently risky.
| Even doing light exercise some people may get unlucky and have
| a heart attack.
|
| But despite all this saying "exercise is risky" is probably too
| broad a generalization. I think especially the sort of
| meditation you see commonly talked about and praised in
| mainstream culture is pretty far off from these intense 10 day
| retreats that the negative experiences are usually about.
| andrewzah wrote:
| 10 years doesn't really mean much by itself. If I incorrectly
| practice guitar for 10 years, I'll have experience of
| practicing the guitar incorrectly, and maybe RSI/health issues
| from not learning correct posture, etc. There is no rule that
| I'll actually get "good" at guitar by practicing that way.
|
| "that <what>'s being taught and lauded so much as a panacea"
|
| Lauded by whom? And <what> exactly? Buddhism? Meditation? Those
| are very different and learning from an experienced
| practitioner is important.
| Nursie wrote:
| > If I incorrectly practice guitar for 10 years, I'll have
| experience of practicing the guitar incorrectly, and maybe
| RSI/health issues
|
| Whether the person in the article practised incorrectly or
| not is not really the issue. The narrative on and praise for
| mindfulness in recent years has not included any warnings
| that there may be dangers. Quite the opposite, it is usually
| posited as an unambiguous positive.
|
| Your idea that this person was 'doing it wrong' is quite a
| hand-wavy posture to start with, especially as the author
| finds that such problems have been described by experienced
| practitioners.
|
| > Lauded by whom?
|
| The article mentions whom - the various interested parties in
| mindfulness, the great and the good that attend and throw
| conferences, those that throw workshops and run retreats. To
| some extent mainstream journalism and society at large, and
| even hacker news - mindfulness has been favourably covered
| here and in a variety of other places over the last several
| years, never have I seen a warning that you may experience
| mental health problems if you do it badly, or too much, or
| whatever.
|
| > Those are very different and learning from an experienced
| practitioner is important.
|
| Oh I'm sure they are, and I'm sure it is. Do you have
| evidence that the author was not learning from experienced
| practitioners? Or are you merely knee-jerking to the defence
| of something you personally like?
| andrewzah wrote:
| > Your idea that this person was 'doing it wrong' is quite
| a hand-wavy posture to start with, especially as the author
| finds that such problems have been described by experienced
| practitioners.
|
| How they handled it and went about it was wrong. Actual
| experienced practicioners may face those problems (see
| dukkha nanas / the dark night of the soul), but with proper
| instructors there are well-known ways of dealing with it.
|
| > The article mentions whom ... the great and the good that
| attend and throw conferences, those that throw workshops
| and run retreats
|
| What I was getting at is that <what> is ambiguous.
| "Mindfulness" is anywhere from jhana, "intensive
| meditation", etc, to more elements of stoicism. Practicing
| stoicism has just about nothing that can actively harm
| anyone or is dangerous. As pointed out in this article's
| discussion, the author has been conflating terminology
| which demonstrates a lack of understanding.
|
| > Do you have evidence that the author was not learning
| from experienced practitioners?
|
| Firstly, problems like the ones described in the article
| are well-known. Knowledgeable instructors are upfront about
| them and provide frameworks and guidance for dealing with
| them, instead of, as per the article, just "suggesting
| various ways that I might alter my meditation practice to
| alleviate my symptoms".
|
| This looks to me like a case of the blind leading the blind
| in a consumerized and repackaged version of meditation that
| advertises "mindfulness/meditation" as a cure-all for one's
| problems. There is a reason that Transmission [0] is a
| thing. Just like even if I practice guitar for 10 years,
| that doesn't mean I'm actually qualified to teach it or
| provide useful guidance.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma_transmission
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| But the point stands, if the most popular method of teaching
| guitar is wrong and can lead to serious injury then potential
| students need to be aware of the risks.
| alex504 wrote:
| This is the key takeaway.
|
| This guy didn't do anything that the majority of meditators
| in the West aren't doing. Taking such a serious piece of
| advice from a book by some random guy (who seems like a
| nutjob) is a particularly foolish thing to do but the
| authors mindset that led him to that decision isn't an
| outlier. To recap he
|
| - Had no teacher
|
| - Mix and matched various concepts and techniques from
| different traditions that he inevitably had a poor / loose
| understanding of
|
| - Had a drug and alcohol problem
|
| - Trained an intense schedule for years
|
| And when he got himself into a bind none of the teachers he
| went to could help him out because they are all doing the
| same thing, more or less, minus the drugs and alcohol.
| badkitty99 wrote:
| Well said!
| m12k wrote:
| A lot of people come into meditation/mindfulness with this
| preconceived notion that you sit down, close your eyes, focus on
| your breathing, and find your inner bliss. In my experience,
| nothing could be further from the truth. You sit down, close your
| eyes, focus on your breathing, and come face to face with the
| tornado of thoughts and emotions that is raging inside you. It's
| like running htop on your brain to find the runaway background
| processes that are consuming all your processing power.
|
| It's what you do once you get to that place that matters. In the
| eastern tradition, you're supposed to observe the thoughts and
| feelings with non-judgment, accept them for what they are without
| "running along with them", then let them be as you return your
| focus to your breathing. IMO that's good advice - up to a point.
| I think actually solving some of the problems weighing on your
| mind should absolutely be part of your toolbox. (Stressed about
| work? Maybe talk to your boss about setting more humane goals).
| And finally, for the really big things you find, that can neither
| be solved nor accepted easily (the skeletons and/or demons),
| you're going to want to supplement meditation with something
| else. Maybe just reflection, where you take time to actually dig
| into it instead of trying to let it go. Maybe therapy where you
| get help to unpack it. Maybe even medication to help you be less
| anxious when you try to unpack it.
|
| Whatever you do, don't scale up the duration of meditation if you
| find yourself dissociating. It's supposed to be intense, but not
| psychedelic. Start with short sessions (5-10 mins) and only
| increase the duration if you find that you're able to
| consistently return your focus to your breathing. If the thoughts
| and feelings take you for a ride that you can't get off, and you
| scale up the duration, then you're basically giving yourself a
| bad trip.
|
| Done right, it can be a kind of conscious garbage collection to
| help ground you and train your awareness to return to the world
| at hand. Done wrong, it can be gambling with your sanity,
| removing avoidance as a coping mechanism without anything to
| replace it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| This.
|
| I blame a modern world that puts a tv-box of constant stimulus
| over our heads. Folks rarely have a moment to their own
| thoughts, and have zero experience dealing with them.
|
| I grew up on a farm. I had many hours a day with my own
| thoughts. I grew up quite comfortable with long silences and
| stillness. No storm rages in my head when I'm alone - more like
| a little wind, and I can easily deal with it.
|
| I remember getting to college and encountering people who
| turned the TV or radio on the instant they got home. It took me
| years to understand why anybody would do that.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Done wrong, it can be gambling with your sanity
|
| I think the point of the article is that it's not clear what
| 'wrong' is, and it's certainly not made clear that there are
| potential serious negative mental health consequences.
| m12k wrote:
| Absolutely, I think it's important to not victim-blame or
| fall into that "just do it correctly and you'll be fine"
| trope that the author of the post describes. If you want to
| try meditation, always ease into it with shorts sessions,
| listen to your body and take note how you react to it along
| the way, and do not continue (or at least downscale it) if
| you find that your mind has a tendency to dissociate or
| otherwise freak out from it. And frankly, those 10 day silent
| retreats scare me - as someone who does short sessions once
| or twice a week, I probably feel the same way about them as
| someone who microdoses would feel about munching several
| fistfuls of shrooms.
|
| I think part of the problem here is also the mysticism that
| this is steeped in. Hallucination, out-of-body-experiences,
| dissociation - none of these are ok, or signs that you're
| "transcending" or any bullshit like that. The "end goal" here
| isn't to dissolve your brain and merge it with the universe -
| in fact there is no end goal, just like there is no end goal
| for going to the gym (and it's absolutely possible to over-
| train there too, cf. rhabdomyolysis).
| damontal wrote:
| What do you mean by dissociating? What is that?
| m12k wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder
|
| TLDR, it's when some of the core associations in your brain
| start collapsing. E.g. you lose your sense of self, the world
| starts feeling unreal, your emotional responses to the world
| get out of whack. I think of it as semi-random rewiring of
| the connection between regions of your brain. Changing the
| layout of the connectivity of your brain is indeed a purpose
| of meditation, but always slowly over months and years. Doing
| so in a sudden, violent or random fashion most certainly
| isn't.
| babyblueblanket wrote:
| Dissociation also is any sort of abstracting from reality.
| This happens in daydreaming for example.
| raincom wrote:
| In fact, lucid dreaming is one of the techniques used in
| 'buddhism'.
| metabagel wrote:
| "I think actually solving some of the problems weighing on your
| mind should absolutely be part of your toolbox."
|
| Yes, after meditation. I love your analogy of "garbage
| collection". For me, it's like flipping over playing cards,
| becoming interested in each card, and then remembering that I
| don't need to get fixated, and then discarding that card and
| returning to focus on my breathing, only to forget and flip
| over another card. Eventually, I spend less time flipping over
| cards and more time just sitting without judgement.
|
| I am a lapsed meditator, and I will resolve to get back into
| it. Meditation helps me to remember who I am and what I really
| want.
| awb wrote:
| Thank you for this. I stopped meditating for a while after I
| stopped judging things like my own happiness or lack of
| happiness. I find greater meaning in life by striving for
| happiness and solving problems rather than accepting things as
| they are without judgement.
|
| I do appreciate meditating though to observe the background
| thoughts that are consuming energy as you mentioned. But I like
| my conviction and plan to keep it :)
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| Wow. Like a few others have commented, I'm surprised to see the
| amount of positive associations people have had with meditation.
| I'll admit, I definitely never thought the benefits of meditation
| were anything more than the placebo effect, though I've also
| never had reason to give meditation any real thought as a
| solution to my problems, because I've fortunately always been
| able to cope and function through them to find solutions. This
| article definitely opened my eyes a bit, however.
|
| That being said, I've been actively weight lifting or doing other
| sports since I was a teenager, and I often wonder if that has
| helped contribute to my successes. For example, proper weight
| training takes years of practice to develop a solid mind-muscle
| connection, and I find both the moments between sets and the
| repetitions themselves help train mental focus. This is
| especially true with heavy weight lifting because you need to
| visualize the movement before you do it, and as you're going
| through the movement you need to focus carefully on your muscle
| tension throughout your body.
|
| For those who have never seriously trained, it is probably easy
| to dismiss that weight training can have a positive impact on
| one's ability to focus. I assure you, a few sets of heavy squats
| takes a toll on the nervous system as well as the musculoskeletal
| system. Likewise, I find that when I am in a proper training
| regimen, it is easier to eat better and easier to sleep deeper.
|
| I've never done any guided meditation, so if there are any active
| athletes who have practiced meditation as described in the
| article, I'd be interested to here your thoughts.
| rofws wrote:
| Is it possible that the author suffering from undiagnosed
| depression?
|
| I've been a regular meditator for a few years and one thing I've
| found is that the the initial stages, meditation enhances
| whatever you're feeling subconsciously. That is why some people
| have intense emotional experiences at the beginning.
|
| Secondly, mindfulness is not a 10 minute scheduled practice. It
| has to be followed throughout the day. However, you need to
| gradually ease into it, starting with 10 mins.
|
| It's like pouring milk into a glass. If you start gently, there
| won't be a splash. But if you turn your milk container upside
| down over the glass, there will be a big splash and possibly
| spilling.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| > And I didn't have a history of any major trauma prior to the
| retreat
|
| Yeah, right.
|
| > in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar ... I
| broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled
| about 16 bottles of Miller High Life ... > That ... represented a
| constant battle I had waged over the prior decade with anger and
| other negative emotions. I drank too much. I occasionally smashed
| printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships ...
|
| Would put my money on unacknowledged childhood trauma.
| littlethrowaway wrote:
| Heh, a very similar thing happened to me actually, and while I
| agree about the fist-fight comment, I honestly didn't have any
| childhood trauma. Came from a loving, pretty privileged family,
| but I still went off the rails with a 10 day silent retreat!
|
| It's extremely easy to dismiss people like this, but, have a
| care, there are real people on the other end of your dismissive
| comments.
| goodpoint wrote:
| The author claims not to have "history of any major trauma
| prior to the retreat" while also describing a decade of anger
| and negative emotion culminating in a serious fistfight.
|
| unacknowledged childhood trauma is a real thing, it's not
| uncommon and does not constitute "dismissive comments" in any
| way.
|
| Ironically, you are being very dismissive of eurasiantiger.
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't want to dismiss your personal experience, this is
| just a general comment. "a loving, pretty privileged family"
| is not uncompatible with "childhood trauma".
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Suggest you book an appointment with a professional to talk
| about your childhood and family dynamics. Everyone has a
| different sense of normal unless we compare.
| 8note wrote:
| Why childhood, vs unacknowledged trauma as an adult?
| maxduckworth wrote:
| I think it's just more likely that unacknowledged trauma
| originated in childhood. It's certainly possible to have
| unacknowledged trauma as adults, but it's less common because
| 1) it's closer in calendar time and therefore easier to
| remember and 2) you are more developed and able to actually
| identify what is traumatic.
| rkachowski wrote:
| Yeah, on the surface level it looks like the author exchanged
| an intensity for impulsive and aggressive behaviour with an
| intensity for mindfulness and meditation.
|
| I wonder if this is a symptom of going far too much in a
| direction people don't normally do, similar to how people can
| and do die from water intoxication but almost never under
| regular conditions. The naive guidance of the meditation
| teachers saying "more of a good thing is always a good thing"
| with regards to meditation having the same role as organisers
| of a water drinking contest.
| nerror wrote:
| Interesting post, but part of the post feels fairly disingenuous.
|
| "One might wonder if these wounded meditators had preexisting
| conditions that triggered these experiences. Most of us don't, a
| finding similar to Britton and Lindahl's study, which reported
| that 57% of practitioners suffering adverse effects didn't have a
| trauma history and 42% had no psychiatric issues at all prior to
| meditation practice."
|
| The framing is disingenuous. If you flip it, nearly half of
| people who have negative responses to meditation had trauma
| histories, and nearly 60% had previous mental health conditions.
| bruja_gorda wrote:
| The author is a lost cause. He messed himself up following the
| teachings of clueless gurus. Then, when he realised he was just
| damaging his mind, he switched to different gurus. Now he's
| teaching meditation again, so he is himself taking on the mantle
| of the clueless guru, spreading around his mental illness to more
| unknowing victims.
|
| This never stops. These people never face reality. The lure of
| the supernatural, of enlightenment, of insights, of metaphysical
| experiences, is too strong and they eventually lose the ability
| to tell the difference between reality and the crazy teachings of
| their books and their masters.
|
| Madness is the loss of the ability to discern the boundary
| between reality and imagination. Meditation is just one of the
| many ways that supernatural and metaphysical sects have to push
| the mind beyond that boundary, lock the door behind it and throw
| away the key.
| NaN1352 wrote:
| Healing trauma is a much better approach, look into Julie Brown
| talks, "Nurturing Resilience" by Kathy Kain, Irene Lyons channel.
|
| Vipassana is a form of trauma healing anyway, to clear the
| nervous system from your past essentially, and then keep going
| further where the ego itself as a form of "contraction" in the
| entire musculature and nervous system, also lets go.
|
| The problem with those retreats is Vipassana is a completely
| outdated approach that was made for people living 1000+ years
| ago. The world, our lives drastically changed since.
|
| A buddhist on a podcast said "trauma is the human condition".
|
| Practicing gratitude, loving kindness, compassion are spiritual
| practices and also part of healing trauma... and should provide a
| much more stable ground for opening the body .
|
| Or for a purely physical approach Yoga is great, though after a
| while... yoga will also surface anger, etc... if it needs to be
| processed.
|
| I also did retreats 3 times. Yes I felt an immense love when I
| was there, and I was still miserable years later ... when I
| finally looked into therapy in general, and then trauma
| specifically.
|
| When you go into the body and build capacity to feel the intense
| emotions that may be there, some say possibly even inherited
| trauma from before birth, you need to balance it out with some
| kind of grounding. THAT grounding is somewhat provided on
| retreats by the safe environment, and whatevers going on
| energetically (very strange)... but essentially they dont teach
| you that or very little, so then they send you on your way and
| now you know how to intensely feel the body, but you have no
| tools to handle the intense levels of fear, anxiety, grief and so
| on..that may come up.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" The problem with those retreats is Vipassana is a completely
| outdated approach that was made for people living 1000+ years
| ago. The world, our lives drastically changed since."_
|
| The world has changed, but I'm not so sure people have.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Actual title: When Buddhism Goes Bad
|
| The author was practicing a specific kind of Buddhist meditation
| while at a 2-week meditation seminar. It sounds like he was
| meditating most of his waking hours?
|
| This is not about "mindfulness" as you probably think of it.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| One should meditate always, also also during their sleep. let
| alone while doing chores, walking and talking. Formal sitting
| meditation is just a minor part.
| nix23 wrote:
| Not sure about during sleep, but meditation is nothing else
| then to life and think in the present, give your brain a task
| and focus just on that, then the next one. If you go into the
| future or past do it intended.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > give your brain a task and focus just on that
|
| Not really. It is important to maintain conscious. When you
| simply "focus on just that" you may then just wake up once
| the task is complete and find out you've went through it
| automatically like if it was a [non-lucid] dream.
|
| As about meditating while sleeping - I have not explored
| this part enough. Renowned Dzogchen teachers Tenzin Wangyal
| Rinpoche and Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche have books on
| this subject. A Zen teacher quoted by Alan Watts also said
| "when you are hungry - eat, when you are tired - sleep" and
| explained that ordinary people don't actually follow this
| as they think about countless things while eating and see
| countless dreams while sleeping. If we go slightly farther
| than secular mindfulness dares to go and consider the
| Buddhist religious goal of after-death liberation, they say
| "dream yoga is not an essential part of practice, but how
| do you expect to stay conscious in death if you can't even
| stay conscious in sleeping"?
|
| As for me, I consider unmindfullness a voluntary death,
| throwing parts of the life time you have been given (by the
| G-d, or figuratively - whatever you prefer to believe, this
| doesn't change the matter) away. You only live and actually
| own/use your time when mindful. When you are not it just
| disappears. AFAIK even Immanuel Kant believed something
| like this.
| Nursie wrote:
| > You only live and actually own/use your time when
| mindful. When you are not it just disappears.
|
| This sounds both judgemental and obsessive, just so you
| know.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Why? Now I'm here and enjoy the moment. Now I'm not and
| the body just lives on its own doing it's job like a
| robot could when I could be dead and not mindful of
| anything. A minute is gone. To me this seems rather
| simple. Perhaps my verbal abilities are not enough to
| explain.
|
| Once, as a schoolboy, I've heard about Buddhists who
| train to always stay consciousness while living, talking
| and whatever, I considered this amazing and have then
| progresses from 80% daydreaming an 19% struggling life to
| some way more (although still very far from 100%)
| present, more mine and more happy.
| 8note wrote:
| I don't think that's sufficient.
|
| Being mindful and doing nothing is still doing nothing.
|
| You should be doing measurable work, otherwise your
| minute is gone, and it's just as gone whether you're
| mindful during that time or not. You still changed
| nothing, and you can't backtrack to tell if you were
| doing nothing or being mindful while doing nothing.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| This is a matter of philosophy, your "world view". AFAIK
| Buddhists don't believe you have to change anything or
| even pursue a happy state. As for me at this phase of my
| development being mindfully happy (and not hypnotized
| happy like under narcotics or in a pleasant dream) makes
| the most sense (and happiness often comes when you do
| anything mindfully - AFAIK this is called "sukha"). And
| in fact this is not useless even from a practical
| (economical) point of view - this is genuine recreation
| letting you take the most out of your resting (and even
| doing chores) which makes you more stable and efficient
| after that.
| Nursie wrote:
| Well, you appear to be telling others that their lives
| and experiences have no value without mindfulness.
|
| You also seem to be telling us that the only way you feel
| your life experience has any value is through this thing
| also, that your own experience is hollow or even non-
| existent without it. That seems somewhat extreme.
|
| I would make the same comment to (for instance) someone
| telling us that they live every moment of their lives
| through Jesus, and that without his love life can have no
| meaning.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| "Being with Jesus" is a rather vague concept which.
| Different people may understand it differently. Often it
| even is primitivized to just attributing yourself to a
| church.
|
| What I am telling, however, is a simple difference
| between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and
| living in awake state. Let's take it to the extreme:
| imagine you were given a choice to spend the rest of your
| life in deep sleep (the kind you can't remember dreams
| after) and wake up just minutes before die. Would you
| agree? Would you consider such life making much sense or
| value to you? I wouldn't. To me it seems almost the same
| as dying straight away.
|
| In fact Christianity includes the doctrine of Nepsis
| which is very much related to this (although many people
| believe it only means avoiding alcohol).
| Nursie wrote:
| > "Being with Jesus" is a rather vague concept which.
| Different people may understand it differently.
|
| Which is why I said if someone tells me that _" they live
| every moment of their lives through Jesus, and that
| without his love life can have no meaning."_
|
| > What I am telling, however, is a simple difference
| between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and
| living in awake state.
|
| Do you not see how judgemental that appears, that unless
| people join in with your special thing they are
| effectively automata, asleep, may as well be dead?
|
| I'm glad you have found benefit in your path through
| life, but I'm not sure one should assume that yours is
| the only valuable way to live, or indeed the only way to
| actually 'live'.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I believe I get your point now, hopefully you will
| understand mine.
|
| Looking from the outside, from the practical (economical)
| point of view the value/meaning of a unit does not depend
| on whether it is conscious or not - it just does the same
| job. Somebody probably can replace me with a future
| version of GPT3 once and not even my mom will notice (as
| she lives in a different country and my job also is
| writing e-mails).
|
| Looking from the outside, from the moral, empathetic and
| spiritual points of view (although devotees of some cults
| will argue), and from my own actual view all lives are
| absolutely equally valuable and meaningful. I really feel
| and see this way, not because this is a moral or
| religious law.
|
| I don't judge anybody based on anything, let alone on how
| mindful their are. I even go further and believe no
| criminal is actually a wicked person - they just feel and
| act the ways they do because they are not mindful about
| how bad (and conditioned) their actions are and how they
| could avoid them. In many cases this even is a scientific
| fact.
|
| Looking from the inside, however, I indeed believe I
| enjoy more value out of my life if I am more awake,
| conscious for longer and more frequent periods of time.
| Simply saying it's not worth to pay for ticket and go to
| a cinema if you are deadly tired and will most probably
| fall asleep there anyway. One night on a vacation I got
| terribly drunk. The next morning we went to a museum and
| that was a waste because I could barely stand on my feet
| fighting drowsiness - there could be no paintings on the
| walls and I would not notice. The day passed as if there
| were no such day, I've got nothing but the next number on
| the calendar.
|
| Do you understand what I mean? It absolutely isn't my
| goal to argue the hell out of us or convince you people
| with ADHD (like myself) are worthless, I only keep
| writing to make sure what I wrote is understood correctly
| (not necessarily agreed with).
| Nursie wrote:
| I understand that's how you feel, that without meditation
| and mindfulness you do not feel fully awake and
| 'conscious', though I suspect what you mean by
| 'conscious' is different to what I might mean. I am glad
| you've found something that increases your enjoyment and
| appreciation of your life.
|
| I enjoy and appreciate mine, too.
|
| And hopefully we all learn pretty quickly that drinking
| too much can utterly ruin the next day....
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| This could be a nice end of the conversation as it was
| obviously meant to be but now I feel very curious about
| this:
|
| > I suspect what you mean by 'conscious' is different to
| what I might mean
|
| What do you mean? I would sincerely appreciate if you
| could dedicate some more time and try to explain.
| Nursie wrote:
| Well, to me, the semantic definition of being conscious
| is simply to be awake, rather than asleep, insensible,
| anaesthetised, blacked out or whatever else.
|
| You seem to have a slightly different definition, I
| think, based on these remarks - "It is
| important to maintain conscious" "I've heard about
| Buddhists who train to always stay consciousness while
| living, talking and whatever," "I enjoy more value
| out of my life if I am more awake, conscious for longer
| and more frequent periods of time"
|
| I maintain consciousness whenever I am awake, because
| that's what being awake is, as far as I understand the
| word. The second quote, well being conscious is a pre-
| requisite for me talking (unless you count mumbling in my
| sleep, which does happen). And I don't think in that last
| quote you're talking about deliberate sleep deprivation
| so you can be awake longer (you could be?).
|
| It just made me think you were not using the word in the
| same sense I would. Do you think it's possible to be
| awake (i.e. not asleep) without necessarily being
| conscious? If so that would just confirm we have
| different definitions of that word.
|
| I could be wrong.
|
| (And I don't especially want to direct this conversation
| towards "what really is consciousness?" because it's a
| very slippery eel of a topic)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I see. Thank you for the explanation. Indeed, we mean
| slightly different things.
|
| Have you ever (I would be surprised if you never ever
| had, but perhaps this doesn't happen to you often) went
| outdoors and then suddenly started wondering if you have
| turnt off the stove/iron, locked the door and taken the
| key with you? This happens to me every day because I
| always exit "unconsciously" in the meaning of the word I
| intended. When we go together with my wife she would ask
| me "have you taken the key"? I respond "yes"
| automatically (here I am speaking but "unconsciously")
| because such is the habit and I am "daydreaming"
| ("unconscious" as I label it) at the moment, we lock the
| door (it locks itself when closed) and then I always feel
| a boost of adrenaline (in such a degree I have even
| started taking beta-blockers as this caused heart ache)
| and think "have I? bloody hell! I probably haven't, we
| will have to call a locksmith, wait an hour and pay $100
| to get back in" (and occasionally this turns out to be
| the case). Then I become "conscious" and tell myself it's
| not a big deal, whatever, check the pockets calmly
| (usually finding the key) and go on. The very phenomenon
| of such strong anxiety at the moment itself takes place
| because I still am not really "conscious" at it (if I
| were I wold understand it's not a big deal). This
| wouldn't occur if I were leaving the home "consciously".
| I could put a huge red "wake up" sign on the inside of my
| door but I know I will get used to it soon and it will
| stop working.
|
| The "doorway effect" has even gotten some scientific
| recognition recently[1].
|
| Another example of unconscious speaking is when I am
| reading or writing something and somebody talks to me - I
| get less than 30% of what they say and "consciously"
| answer "yes" to everything then have no idea what did I
| agree with (and often can't even remember I said
| anything). And this is not intentional behaviour - they
| started when I was reading and I was not "conscious"
| enough to make a "conscious decision" (I tend to believe
| this phrase is pretty standard English) and switching to
| just listening them.
|
| This is what I meant.
|
| [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-
| walking-throu...
| Nursie wrote:
| The doorway effect is fascinating. I don't tend to
| experience worry on leaving the house as you describe (I
| know many do), but I certainly walk into rooms and forget
| why I'm there.
|
| I would talk about the issues you raise more as issues of
| attention, focus and division of attention, than whether
| one is conscious or not.
|
| Though semantically of course I agree that there is
| overlap between being conscious _of_ something, of your
| surroundings, of other people, of your actions etc. When
| someone says just "being conscious" without a particular
| object, I think of something different. Language is a
| funny, imprecise and overloaded thing.
| kup0 wrote:
| I feel like "awareness" might be a good term to describe
| what they are meaning by "conscious"
|
| I think they mean conscious as in "to be conscious of",
| for example: I exited my house while daydreaming/thinking
| about other things, so I was not "conscious of" the fact
| that I did not bring my keys with me _aka_ I did not have
| _awareness_ or was not operating _in the moment
| /mindfully_ because my mind was elsewhere
|
| I think they're attempting to describe the difference
| between being present/aware of every moment we
| experience, vs. a habitual 'autopilot state' that we can
| find ourselves in (the phenomena of driving somewhere and
| then not even remembering the drive there, for instance)
| where we're really not aware of what's going on in our
| lives, because the mundane things are so habitual that we
| don't even need to be fully aware of what we're doing to
| do it - but that _alternatively_ , choosing and teaching
| ourselves to be aware at all times, even during our
| mundane, habitual routines, is potentially a better way
| to exist
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Exactly. The only problem with this explanation is
| "daydreaming/thinking about other things" doesn't really
| imply "my mind was elsewhere" it often is "nowhere" in
| these terms. Oftentimes I'm not unaware of something just
| because I concentrated my full awareness on something
| else, I may be completely unaware of one thing (I should
| have been concentrated at) and just slightly aware (like
| of in an ordinary non-lucid dream) of the other I've been
| distracted to. Or this can even be just one thing I'm
| concentrated at (and not thinking about anything else)
| yet not really aware of it (this happens often when
| reading (it harms retaining then), writing (making stupid
| mistakes), speaking (making you say things and make
| sounds you wouldn't want to), watching TV or, if you
| kindly excuse, nose picking). Whenever I am doing a
| pleasant activity (like just doing nothing or watching a
| TV show) I force myself (with partial success) to be
| aware of every moment of it so I actually enjoy it rather
| than fall into a sort of a hypnotic state and "wake up"
| once it is over. This improved my life a lot and I would
| hardly learn to do so without a clue from the Buddhists.
| Nursie wrote:
| And if one does, one may end up with mental health problems.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I'm still on the theory that this person already has some
| problems.
|
| He says he has no history of mental illnesses (except for
| mild anxiety and depression), but that what provoked him to
| pursue meditation was a bar fight that began with vague
| details around jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray
| comment.
|
| > Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in
| 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over
| some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn't
| take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a
| window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about
| 16 bottles of Miller High Life.
|
| I'm not sure that makes sense to me at all, and the overly
| romantic prose doesn't help with credibility.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| If one does not, they end up with [often undiagnosed]
| mental health problems anyway. Everything is dangerous, you
| just should try your best to do it the right way under
| supervision of a qualified person and stop if it goes
| wrong.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Everything is dangerous
|
| This is not what is being promoted by the
| mindfulness/buddhism-lite industry that the article is
| talking about.
|
| > you just should try your best to do it the right way
| under supervision of a qualified person and stop if it
| goes wrong.
|
| This appears to contradict "One should meditate always"
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > This is not what is being promoted by the
| mindfulness/buddhism-lite industry
|
| Every industry is corrupt. But if you are lucky and smart
| enough you can actually get away with something good for
| you.
|
| Out of curiosity, I have even attended a course in
| extrasensory abilities once. Paradoxically, besides some
| useful self-regulation and some trance-based techniques
| they also taught observing your thoughts and feelings
| detachedly and taking them critically which has boosted
| my rationality and helped me so many times. And good for
| them, they were pretty serious about making sure people
| with mental issues are not allowed to participate. Sadly
| most of the industry don't care.
|
| > This appears to contradict "One should meditate always"
|
| Almost nobody can meditate intensely for long periods of
| time in the beginning. You just do your best to awaken
| from unconscious daydreaming and stay conscious as often
| and for as long as you comfortably can. If you try and
| immediately find out you actually can (although not
| necessarily comfortably) maintain undisturbed conscious
| concentration for long periods of time you should go to a
| doctor or a Buddhist teacher experienced in meditation
| techniques and things which happen to people on this way.
| Choosing the latter absolutely doesn't imply you have to
| take the religion and believe in their saints - you only
| really need the psychotechnical (and the philosophical
| maybe) guidance.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Sadly most of the industry don't care.
|
| I think that's the point of the article, though not just
| about people participating who have mental conditions -
| most of the industry does not care about the potential
| negatives.
|
| > Almost nobody can meditate intensely for long periods
| of time in the beginning.
|
| I don't think this is really the issue here, the issue is
| that doing so seems to have the potential to cause (or at
| least trigger) mental health problems for some
| practitioners, and the advice to just "do it more and
| practice better" when distressed is specifically called
| out as harmful.
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| Says who? (Citation needed)
| justmedep wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nhat_Hanh
| beebmam wrote:
| Sounds like cultish behavior to me.
| mensetmanus1861 wrote:
| this is taking the advice literally IMHO. Most of the time
| you end up being in a calm and attentive state of mind where
| you are focusing on the present.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Good for you. Most of the time I don't. Being particularly
| prone to daydreaming (or deep unconscious though productive
| hyperfocused flow state at best) and having attention
| problems is what got me interested with the subject in the
| first place.
| mcguire wrote:
| In the midst of all of the "You're just doing Buddhism wrong!"
| comments, I would like to point out the PLOS One paper mentioned
| in the article, "The varieties of contemplative experience: A
| mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western
| Buddhists" (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/
| journal...).
|
| " _In one of the only prospective studies to use qualitative
| methods to deliberately ask about adverse effects, Shapiro (1992)
| [67] found that 63% of meditators on an intensive Vipassana
| retreat reported at least one adverse effect, with 7.4% reporting
| effects negative enough to stop meditating, and one individual
| hospitalized for psychosis._ "
|
| It appears that mindfulness-based meditation is being prescribed
| or promoted with no regard to the side-effects.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| That's kinda funny because there are thousands of different
| ways to do Buddhism, and there are just as many, if not more,
| ways to do mindfulness and meditation.
|
| For this reason I think it'd be really good on the one end to
| start pairing up terms and systems with psychologies and
| gifts/preferred methods of perception, in order to make these
| systems more effective...
|
| And on the other end to build comprehensive guidelines for the
| ethics of promotion of mindfulness and meditation. Be Like Me
| is not a suitable ethical standpoint from which to prescribe
| such a tool or system.
| abledon wrote:
| 10-day vipassana retreat was worst decision i did in my life
| lol
| 2mol wrote:
| well please elaborate, now I'm curious!
| thevardanian wrote:
| I mean... That's exactly what the "you're just doing Buddhism
| wrong" crowd is saying.
|
| There's a vast variety of methodologies and approaches to
| meditation, that come with their own effects, some bad some
| good. This is all quite well documented among the practitioners
| over the centuries. And beyond documentation, that's also why
| it's heavily suggested that one have guru or someone to
| actively guide and judge "progress", at least among the Hindus.
| Retric wrote:
| The study was looking at guided meditation which consisted of
| 60% of it's sample. So, suggesting a guide on it's own
| doesn't solve the issue.
| thevardanian wrote:
| Having better guides is exactly what will solve the issue
| though. Unless you're making some kind of inherent
| argument, where all meditation is inherently nebulous and
| impervious to methodological approaches.
|
| The guides may or may not be qualified. So the real problem
| is the lack systematization of it in meditation, more
| specifically a more reliable metric to judge "guides". As
| the extensive literature on meditation quite clearly
| outlines the limitations and dangers of various practices.
|
| Tantra for example is quite clear about the dangers of
| practicing it.
| Retric wrote:
| Suggesting the guides themselves are the problem is a
| different testable idea. I am not saying it's wrong, but
| without knowing what guidance is better there isn't
| anyway for someone to implement it.
| [deleted]
| dayvid wrote:
| An intensive Vipassana retreat is just that, an INTENSIVE
| retreat. I've meditated for ~10 years. I don't think anyone's
| FIRST meditation experience should be a 10-day Vipassana
| retreat. I don't think anyone's first silence experience should
| be a 10-day Vipassana retreat. That's like going to a Navy Seal
| bootcamp when you've never exercised in your life.
|
| A lot of Buddhist or meditative practices also have close
| student-teacher relationships. You should have an active human
| coach guiding you through the process, because shit comes up,
| people have different mental health setups (just like a
| physical therapist has different workout plans for people with
| injuries and physical conditions) and if it's just DIY
| experimenting, you can encounter something and get screwed.
|
| A good example of this is the Tim Ferris podcast where he did a
| 10-day Vipassana retreat and decided to fast for a certain
| number of days to amplify the effect and almost had a complete
| mental breakdown. It worked out and led to a very vulnerable
| podcast down the line (https://tim.blog/2020/09/14/how-to-heal-
| trauma/), but these are things to keep in mind when going into
| deep waters.
| fossuser wrote:
| > "A lot of Buddhist or meditative practices also have close
| student-teacher relationships. You should have an active
| human coach guiding you through the process"
|
| This seems to also open the door to a lot of fraudster con-
| man types and cults, so worth being wary of that relationship
| imo.
|
| The author seemed to have experienced a bit of this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization which I've
| felt before and can be quite scary.
| [deleted]
| murphyslab wrote:
| > promoted with no regard to the side-effects.
|
| Many people are blind to the inherent risks of anything which
| can be labelled as "natural". We've been socially conditioned
| through health campaigns and advertising to believe that if
| something is "all natural" or part of a certain "organic"
| lifestyle it literally cannot precipitate any kind of harm.
| Those kinds of "appeal to nature" arguments are all around us,
| constantly. And many people see meditation as falling within
| the scope of "natural remedies". So it's not surprising that
| people would, by their conditioning, believe meditation to be
| innocuous.
| odomojuli wrote:
| "As I lay there musing in the brisk darkness, I suddenly sensed a
| tightening inside me. It was as if I was being ever so gently
| wound. Then quickly, the pressure intensified, and I breathed in
| rapid-fire staccato and violently shook. I was a guitar string
| being tuned beyond its highest range. The string popped. A spike
| of fear slashed through my guts. And that's when I split apart."
|
| This has come up in a number of threads about burnout which
| frequent Hacker News. It's anecdotal per account and I've found
| weak evidence to corroborate its actual basis however... I think
| it's interesting that a lot of people report hearing the same
| thing: a guitar string, bending and snapping in their head. More
| specifically, a bass guitar.
| i_dont_know_ wrote:
| I definitely feel bad for the guy, and I hope he got/gets the
| full help he needs.
|
| That having been said, I think there's something about meditation
| traditions that come from and are part of monastic traditions vs.
| meditation techniques that have been removed from their monastic
| roots.
|
| Basically, he was meditating at monk-like levels, and if he were
| actually in a monastery, he would probably have gotten help at
| some point beforehand. Maybe he was neglecting part of his
| health, or emphasizing one technique over another without being
| fully-rounded in his approach, or a number of other similar
| things that would have been caught by a community/teacher in a
| monastery. They literally have hundreds of years worth of
| meditation troubleshooting under their belts, though some of it
| is codified in ways that directly intertwine with religious
| beliefs/practices.
|
| But when you try to remove the practice from the culture
| surrounding it, there's a danger that you left behind some
| important pieces. I find it kind of scary that he mentions there
| are recovery groups and such, especially for meditation teachers.
| I mean, it's awesome that they're supporting each other and
| recovering, but this seems like a red flag that maybe the
| a-religious form of meditation as it's being taught and marketed
| right now needs to go back to the source and figure out what
| monks are doing differently, or, even better, make sure they
| immerse themselves deeper into the source cultures to be able to
| troubleshoot adequately.
|
| I guess it's like eating an olympic athlete's daily meal while
| ignoring the rest of their training regimen as "religious
| superstition" and getting drastically different results and being
| surprised.
| treebot wrote:
| > Basically, he was meditating at monk-like levels, and if he
| were actually in a monastery, he would probably have gotten
| help at some point beforehand.
|
| This is spot on. It seems to me like the author took meditation
| and removed it from it's cultural, historical and spiritual
| context. In Buddhism, the community of other practicioners is
| extremely important, as well as the teacher, and it seemed like
| the author didn't have those. Meditating for 10 minutes a day
| on your own is fine, but meditating for hours a day and going
| on week long retreats without a proper teacher or community
| does seem like opening up the door for things to go wrong or
| get too intense or for one to become confused or lost. The red
| flags should have been when the author began convulsing or
| disassociating or feeling bad. I think the warning is not about
| the ill effects of meditation, but rather the ill effects of
| practicing meditation deeply without the proper grounding in
| tradition, spirituality and community.
|
| To be fair, it's not really the author's fault that he removed
| meditation from it's proper context. All of the workshops he
| was going to did that as well. You go, do 1-2 weeks of really
| intense meditation, and then leave. You might never see those
| teachers again, or at least not for a while. It's on you to
| integrate your experience, which can be very difficult.
|
| I hate to invalidate this author's experience, but I really
| think it was that the author was not doing it right. It's okay
| to say this. If you start deadlifting every day for 30 days,
| and then blow your back out, and then try to say there are
| negative effects of deadlifting, the proper response would be
| "you're not doing it right." Because that would be the truth.
| Again, it's not totally his fault for not doing it right, as
| all these retreats seemed to enable not doing it right. I think
| he should spread the word about what happened, but it shouldn't
| be "meditation has some bad side effects" but rather
| "meditation can have some bad side effects when not done
| correctly. This is how to do it correctly." The article doesn't
| really present much of any framework for understanding how and
| when the bad side effects occur, and a solution for avoiding
| them. Which is why it's getting a lot of pushback I think.
|
| The article also has a really bad title: "When Buddhism Goes
| Bad". The article hardly talks about Buddhism. Things like the
| four noble truths, the eightfold path and other important
| Buddhist concepts are not mentioned at all. Meditation is not
| the same as Buddhism. In fact, it seems like his mediation
| practice was actually missing true Buddhism, and that might be
| how this whole thing occurred. Regardless, the only thing that
| went wrong here was meditation practice, not Buddhism.
|
| Props to the author for sharing, and I hope everything goes
| well for him, but I have to push back on the way he's trying to
| communicate this warning.
| jbgt wrote:
| Indeed, in Theravadin Buddhism the Buddha is said to have
| taught monks and laypeople skillfully, to their appropriate
| level.
|
| The Anapanasati Sutta, which is about Englightement through
| mindfulness of the breath, is cited by many teachers as "the
| shortcut to liberation". But the target audience of the
| discourse was an assembly of the most developed monks to give
| them the final tweak.
|
| For laypeople, in for example the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha
| teaches simple things on how to develop Morality and
| Confidence, which are with Right Understanding the starting
| points of the Path.
|
| I am always amazed at the simplicity and clarity of the
| teachings.
|
| https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.th...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Lapsed Buddhist here.
|
| > The Arahat Daniel M. Ingram
|
| According to the instruction I received, there have been no
| arahants since a few decades after the death of the Buddha.
| Choose your teacher carefully. Many meditation teachers are
| charlatans; watch out especially for those who claim to be
| enlightened.
|
| > The type of meditation I had been practicing was jhana
|
| ...or "dhyana", if you go with the Sanskrit version.
|
| The OP spends a lot of his words talking about "mindfulness" and
| the industry associated with it. But if he was practising the
| dhyanas, he was NOT practising mindfulness as such. Practising
| the dhyanas is serious, headbanging stuff, involving deep,
| single-pointed concentration. The dhyanas build on mindfulness,
| which is really a basis for all practice; but single-pointed
| concentration is almost the opposite of normal mindfulness
| practice.
|
| The OP is correct that the "mindfulness industry" blames the
| faults of meditators for bad experiences. I've known people who
| survived bad experiences with meditation, but who were finally
| broken by being gaslighted by their teacher.
|
| The "mindfulness industry" minimises the risks of meditation
| practice. The industry generally claims to be secular, or at
| least, to not depend on a religious interpretation. If you
| folllow an openly-religious meditation teacher, you shouldn't
| hear that reassuring touchy-feely nonsense; instead you will be
| told that the path you have embarked on is dangerous, and that if
| you aren't prepared to stick it out to the end, then it would be
| better not to begin.
|
| And if you arrive at meditation as a result of psychiatric
| problems, step away quickly. You need to be mentally fit to
| undertake meditation practise.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > According to the instruction I received, there have been no
| arahants since a few decades after the death of the Buddha.
|
| I don't believe that is the standard view. I haven't heard it
| before at least. And it seems odd to me that anyone would claim
| this, seeing as no one knows every person who's lived in the
| last 3500 years.
|
| >The industry generally claims to be secular, or at least, to
| not depend on a religious interpretation. If you folllow an
| openly-religious meditation teacher, you shouldn't hear that
| reassuring touchy-feely nonsense
|
| I think you are labouring under some dogma, all due respect.
| mping wrote:
| In Mahayana tradition, there are many many Arhats (not only
| in the Mahayana but in the Hinayana too), and some
| Bodhisattvas, even today. Of course, they don't announce it
| but they were certified by Patriarchs.
| [deleted]
| SMAAART wrote:
| The journey to the center of self in anything but easy; the ones
| who do it seriously, will eventually face their own demons; and
| it's not easy to look deep into the mirror.
|
| The mirror, just like the abyss, will start looking back at you,
| and it's ugly AF.
| 5tefan wrote:
| I have a soft spot for Buddhism teachings. Don't know ehy. But I
| don't have the habit of meditating. It comes easy to me to let go
| of things. I do okay to let go of emotions but some emotions
| stick and it takes an effort to kind of pull you away to not sink
| with them. You can't ignore that. You have to make that effort.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > The terrain of fractured, disruptive and altered states of
| consciousness has often been explored in Buddhist teachings
| through the centuries, but when these practices made their
| journey into Western culture, a sufficient understanding of the
| downsides of meditation was lost in transit.
|
| Why would one go on a serious retreat not led by a real Buddhist
| teacher? Is there a shortage of geshes already?
| simiones wrote:
| How do you tell a _real_ Buddhist teacher from a fake one?
|
| What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not
| believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > How do you tell a real Buddhist teacher from a fake one?
|
| This is notoriously difficult. Buddhist teachers are
| extremely reluctant to criticise one another; you won't get a
| straight answer if you ask "Should I go on a retreat with
| teacher X?". Ultimately you have to rely on your own
| intuition, which makes it a bit of a game of dice.
|
| > What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not
| believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?
|
| Good luck finding a secular meditation tradition with more
| than about 20 years of accumulated knowledge underlying it.
| Find a real teacher with a lineage; if your inclination is
| secular, discount the religious elements of the teaching you
| receive.
|
| A secular mindfulness teacher has no lineage support-
| structure to support their teaching activity. And generally,
| they don't have the experience and insight that comes from
| practising a wide variety of techniques in addition to
| mindfulness.
|
| Vipassana has been mentioned, in the article, and here in
| comments. Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the
| belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you
| have a self is itself a mark of psychosis. Vipassana is a
| form of mindfulness; but it's a big mistake to think that
| Vipassana practice can be secular. It's entirely founded on
| the (religious) view that belief in an independent self is
| the root of "suffering".
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the
| belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you
| have a self is itself a mark of psychosis."_
|
| This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism
| and mainstream "Western" psychology.
|
| If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal,
| others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism
| you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already there).
| But according to mainstream Western psychology you're
| mentally ill.
|
| Which is it?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I'd say one should judge by other symptoms: what emotions
| does the patient experience and how do they behave. If
| the patient is depressed, apathetic and/or persistently
| euphoric, walks naked in the middle of a city, ignores
| his chores or attacks people "because they are illusory
| and the hand isn't even mine so why not" that's an
| illness. If he behaves like an reasonable compassionate
| person and seems happy that's good - a reasonable degree
| of dissociation can actually make a person better,
| happier and more stable mentally.
|
| Simplifying I'd conclude that this is not a binary but an
| spectral phenomenon: there are 2, both undesirable, poles
| of extremity and a harmonious middle.
| Naturally/culturally people are more inclined to self-
| association and a slight shift to the opposite generally
| is desirable. Dissociate from your mind but don't in a
| degree when you loose it.
| loopz wrote:
| A lil' bit of both actually!
| denton-scratch wrote:
| In Western psychiatry, the loss of a sense of self is
| dissociation, and is a mark of psychosis (to diagnose
| psychosis, you'd need some other marks, especially
| delusions or hallucinations).
|
| I was over-simplifying when I said "destroying the belief
| that you have an independent self" - the cause of
| suffering is _attachment_ to the sense of an independent
| self. Attachment in general is seen as a cause of
| suffering, but attachment to the sense of self is the
| hardest attachment to get rid of.
|
| The term "ego" is used in Western discourse about
| Buddhism, as a cipher for the attachment to the sense of
| self. That is not what is meant by "ego" in Freudian or
| Jungian psychiatry (basically, the focus of
| consciousness). I wish Western Buddhists would stop using
| that word.
|
| Western psychiatry doesn't pretend to address anything
| like the state of nirvana. It's mainly concerned with
| curing pathological conditions. I don't think any
| reputable psychotherapy traditions propose to take you
| any further than a condition of being free of the most-
| obvious kinds of hang-ups (Jung and his followers might
| be exceptions - I'm not sure - Jung's views were very
| expansive).
|
| The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to
| psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for
| meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it
| works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to
| psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for
| meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it
| works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.
|
| By the way, why does is not? What do you mean under
| Western psychology at all? Freud and Jung? If so, is it a
| mere incoincidence the models of the mind they invented
| are different from that of Abidharma or did they sort of
| look on the object from different angles?
|
| When trying to model a mind there are obvious elements
| everybody can note (can they?): the mood, the memories,
| the focus of the attention, the sense of self, rational
| logic, computational intelligence, slow and fast decision
| functions, self-control, compassion, random thoughts
| popping up and making mental noise, attitude, instincts
| (like fear, jealousy, arousal, etc), probably some other.
| Why do different thinkers come up with different models?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, Western psychology purports to be "science". That
| means that results have to be replicable, testable, and
| observable. The Abhidharma was created by meditators, for
| meditators. Those people were not constrained by
| scientific method.
|
| Some of the stuff in the Abhidharma reflects teachings of
| the Buddha; but most of it was constructed by monks,
| after the Buddha's death.
|
| I don't know of anyother models of mind, other than
| Western psychology and Abhidharma. There must be other
| models; I'd be surprised if Vedanta, for example, didn't
| incorporate a model of the mind.
|
| I suppose the dominant model of mind in a society
| reflects the preocccupations of that society.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Western psychology purports to be "science". That
| means that results have to be replicable, testable, and
| observable."_
|
| Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but the
| testability criterion was seen as inadequate and was
| replaced a while back with falsifiability[1], but even
| that has its own problems.
|
| String theory's claims are supposedly untestable. Is it
| not a science?
|
| I'm not a physicist, but I've heard there are cloud
| chamber experiments for which the only observer is the
| physicist performing the experiment, and are not
| reproduceable and yet are published in physics journals
| all the time.
|
| That's not to mention that while many experiments are in
| principle reproduceable, in practice they usually don't
| get reproduced, and even if they were reproduced at one
| point they're not going to be continuously reproduced
| over and over again by each researcher (who has not the
| time, education, budget, or interest to reproduce every
| experiment they've ever read and not yet read but that is
| still an accepted part of the overall body of scientific
| knowledge).
|
| Science, just like pretty much every other human
| cooperative endeavor, largely runs on trust... trust that
| what one reads and learns is mostly accurate. As
| skeptical as they make themselves out to be most
| scientists just don't run out and try to replicate every
| experiment under the sun or every a large fraction of
| them. They just trust the results they read are more or
| less accurate, or expect someone else to catch them.
|
| Back to Western psychology. Some branches of it (like the
| Cognitive/Behaviorist branches) do purport to be more
| "scientific", but others like Freudian, Jungian,
| Humanistic, and Existential and Transpersonal psychology
| (not to mention art therapy, dance therapy, drama
| therapy, somatic therapy, life regression therapy, etc)
| aren't so big on the "science" bit, and aren't so
| interested in experiments or the scientific method at
| all.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Buddhism is not a religion per se. I'm sure there are cults
| around it, but as Dalai Lama put it: if science shows
| Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change. Good luck
| finding that sentiment in any actual religion.
|
| If you require more proof, make it a priority to seek
| understanding of "Buddha-nature".
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > make it a priority to seek understanding of "Buddha-
| nature"
|
| Seriously? Buddha-nature teachings are regarded as
| heretical by many Buddhists. They assert that all beings
| have this buddha-nature innately, and that it is
| indestructible, because it does not arise dependent on
| causes and conditions.
|
| That is very much a religious view, and in direct conflict
| with the traditional teaching that ALL phenomena without
| exception arise dependent on causes and conditions.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| > They assert that all beings have this buddha-nature
| innately, and that it is indestructible, because it does
| not arise dependent on causes and conditions
|
| Yes.
|
| > in direct conflict with the traditional teaching that
| ALL phenomena without exception arise dependent on causes
| and conditions
|
| With all due respect, make it a priority to seek
| understanding of "Buddha-nature".
|
| Try the Koans.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Studying koans is not a very good way of gaining
| understanding of something like Buddha Nature; they're
| designed to create confusion. I wasn't in a Zen
| tradition, and I'm no longer a Buddhist; I appreciate
| your respect, but I'm not about to start trying to figure
| out koans. [Edit: aren't you supposed to have a master,
| when you're working with koans?]
|
| Note that I'm not declaring Buddha Nature teachings to be
| heretical; in general, I think the really deep divisions
| between the various Buddhist philosophical positions were
| (are?) more political than anything else, and I've never
| considered them important.
|
| I've studied both the Uttaratantra and the
| Uttaratantrashastra, under the direction of a western
| academic who specialized in the subject (and also happens
| to be an ordained Buddhist nun). I've also done
| meditation practices designed to deepen understanding of
| Yogacara-style thought. I think I have a reasonably good
| understanding of the subject, for a lazy, lay
| practitioner.
|
| The accusation of heresy is because it's very easy to
| misinterpret Tathagatagarbha teachings as monism.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| > aren't you supposed to have a master, when you're
| working with koans?
|
| Buddha is my master, teacher and guide, etc. This is all
| sorts of hilarious from a Zen perspective; interpreting
| Tathagatagarbha as monism, or Buddha as anything, heh.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Regarding anything as heretical is a religious view.
| Discard it and check yourself through experiential
| practice and logical exercise. There are many
| Buddhist/Bon teachers who will never insist on you
| accepting any idea/dogma nor judge you for thinking
| different and only guide you to how to actually see it,
| without harming yourself. Needless to say, as a rather-
| rational thinker, this is the kind of gurus I prefer.
| Orthodox dogmatists are there for a different kind of
| minds. People are different and there are to be ways and
| teachers optimal for all kinds of them.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Discard it and check yourself through experiential
| practice and logical exercise.
|
| Discard what? I have said elsewhere in this thread that I
| am a _lapsed_ Buddhist. I hold no religious dogmas. It 's
| not me that considers buddha-nature teachings to be
| heretical.
|
| And what are "experiential practice" and "logical
| exercise"? These sound like some kind of private jargon
| you are using to support your "rather-rational" approach.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I mean you don't have to agree to dogmatic and mystical
| parts of what a practitioner teaches to still consider
| and use some techniques and/or philosophical ideas you
| can also find in their teachings.
|
| Experiential practice is when you do something and
| experience the result. Rub your hands and feel warmth
| appear - this is an experiential practice of experiencing
| warmth in your hands. Meditating a certain way you can
| experience a particular state of mind. This is important
| because some things are either impossible or useless to
| describe - you have to experience them and a particular
| practice may trigger the experience.
|
| Logical exercise is when you exercise logic and come to
| conclusions.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Buddhism is not a religion per se."_
|
| There are many types of Buddhism, and some types are
| definitely very religious.
|
| Take Pure Land Buddhism[1][2], for example, one of the most
| popular forms of Buddhism in Japan, believers of which
| essentially pray to the Buddha for salvation and hope to be
| reborn in a heavenly land. It has some interesting
| similarities to Christianity.
|
| Buddhism as it's actually practiced in parts of Asia has
| many magical, "superstitious" components, like believing
| that a red string connected to a statue of the Buddha can
| transfer magical power from the Buddha to what the string
| is tied to. Believers pray to Buddha all the time for
| protection, luck, or even wealth. Some Buddhists believe in
| magical effects from tattoos made by Buddhist monks or that
| a Buddhist funeral would bring an auspicious rebirth.
|
| Speaking of rebirth, the belief in reincarnation (which is
| central to most forms of Buddhism) is certainly religious
| in nature. Same with the belief in karma.
|
| Also, one reason that Buddhism has been so successful
| around the world is that it can co-exist with and even
| absorb local religions to such an extent that many people
| who consider themselves Buddhists still believe in all
| sorts of gods, demons, or spirits, and for them Buddhism is
| not seperable from such beliefs.
|
| It's only certain types of Buddhism in certain contexts
| which have been desacralized.
|
| _" as Dalai Lama put it: if science shows Buddhism to be
| wrong, then Buddhism must change"_
|
| He might have said it but I'm skeptical as to just how much
| change he'd be willing to subject his version of Buddhism
| to.
|
| Anyway, the Dali Lama is a representative of just one form
| of Buddhism: Tibetan Buddhism, which is far from
| representative of Buddhism as a whole, and one that's
| pretty far from being secular compared to, say, Zen or
| Chan.
|
| Even when focusing on just the more secular forms of
| Buddhism, at what point does veneration of the Buddha
| become worship? Is faith in the effectiveness of the
| Eightfold Path, the Buddha, and the Sangha all that
| different from Christian faith in God or in the
| effectiveness of works, faith, or grace (depending on one's
| denomination) in being saved?
|
| There's been a concerted, conscious effort to desacralize
| Buddhism to make it more palatable to Westerners, but if
| you look at how Buddhism is actually practiced in the
| places where it came from before it got to the West it's
| pretty clear that it's a religion.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Land_Buddhism
|
| [2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-pure-
| land/
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > Is faith in the effectiveness of the Eightfold Path,
| the Buddha, and the Sangha all that different from
| Christian faith in God
|
| Unlike the Christian G-d, the Buddha does not judge, does
| not punish, does not forgive and has not died in tortures
| for your sins, this way enabling priests demand you feel
| guilty. AFAIK the Buddha taught you should pursue the
| Eightfold Path as a tool to attain your ultimate goal,
| not as a law breaking which is evil and a subject to
| punishment.
|
| > Buddhism as it's actually practiced in parts of Asia
| has many magical, "superstitious" components, like
| believing that a red string connected to a statue of the
| Buddha can transfer magical power from the Buddha to what
| the string is tied to. Believers pray to Buddha all the
| time for protection, luck, or even wealth. Some Buddhists
| believe in magical effects from tattoos made by Buddhist
| monks or that a Buddhist funeral would bring an
| auspicious rebirth.
|
| > There's been a concerted, conscious effort to
| desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to
| Westerners, but if you look at how Buddhism is actually
| practiced in the places where it came from before it got
| to the West it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
|
| Some times I contemplate what a blessing it is we have
| been born in the west and given highest monastic kinds of
| Buddhism right away instead of being born in a Buddhist
| country where only (mostly) monks can pursue
| enlightenment and the laymen only know worship and
| magick. I know a monk would probably laugh at this and
| tell I don't understand the point and I believe I know
| why, nevertheless I won't deny such an idea visits me
| occasionally.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Unlike the Christian G-d, the Buddha does not judge,
| does not punish, does not forgive and has not died in
| tortures for your sins, this way enabling priests demand
| you feel guilty."_
|
| The gods are not the same, but the _faith_ seems very
| similar to me.
|
| What is the difference between a Pure Land Buddhist
| believing chanting the nenbutsu[1] ("I take refuge in the
| Buddha of Inconceivable Light!") in order to get in to
| ensure rebirth in to Amitabha's pure land and a Christian
| saying they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior
| in order to get in to heaven?
|
| Not much, from what I can see.
|
| Even in the more secular forms of Buddhism, Buddhists
| regularly follow the precepts, take refuge in the dharma,
| Buddha, and Sangha because they believe it'll get them to
| enlightenment. And some believe "just sitting" for 20
| years or whatever will make them enlightened.
|
| Interestingly, some forms of Buddhism preach that one
| should not be so goal-oriented and should "just sit"
| without reason or expectation. That also sounds not very
| different from blind faith to me, where the believer is
| encouraged to throw reason out the window and "just
| believe" or "just do" (whatever the religious authorities
| tell them to).
|
| _" FAIK the Buddha taught you should pursue the
| Eightfold Path as a tool to attain your ultimate goal,
| not as a law breaking which is evil and a subject to
| punishment."_
|
| Well, the "punishment" in the case of Buddhism is
| supposedly just the iron law of karma and rebirth in to
| the world of suffering. It's not meted out by a god in
| Buddhism's case, but it still serves as a very effective
| stick on the Buddhist faithful.
|
| _" Some times I contemplate what a blessing it is we
| have been born in the west and given highest monastic
| kinds of Buddhism right away instead of being born in a
| Buddhist country where only (mostly) monks can pursue
| enlightenment and the laymen only know worship and
| magick."_
|
| Is secular Buddhism the highest kind? Just as in any
| major religion, there is great disagreement among the
| various Buddhist traditions as to which is the truer
| Buddhism. Many of these branches don't accept each
| other's most sacred texts as being as authentic or as
| important as their own, which preach radically different
| understandings of the Buddha's teachings.
|
| One of them really might be more authentic, and
| everybody's got their own opinion on that, but ultimately
| who's to say?
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nianfo
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Did Buddha teach rebirth from life to life, or from
| moment to moment? Given the context of the Teaching, the
| latter seems a better fit.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Here's what they have in common: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Basic_points_unifying_Theravad...
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > Speaking of rebirth, the belief in reincarnation (which
| is central to most forms of Buddhism) is certainly
| religious in nature. Same with the belief in karma.
|
| By the way, it is worth mentioning, not all Buddhist take
| this literally. Alan Watts told there were some
| Buddhists, understanding kind of like this (in my own
| words, I can't find the original quote now):
|
| At any given moment you are never the same person you
| were in the previous. Your personality changes, your body
| atoms get replaced with new ones. The past you is already
| in the past. Today you are distinct from yesterday you.
| You are reincarnating right now. Like an immutable value
| in functional programming can never be changed, you can
| (or you can't, this depends on the programming language)
| just assign a similar value derived from it with some
| change applied to the same identifier. So if you
| practiced well, the future you (in this life time from
| the conventional point of view) is a reincarnation of you
| which will reap the fruits of "good karma" (karma being
| just the causes (mostly mental) causing you to behave a
| certain way and get into certain situations because of
| this - nothing mystical). And the fruits are there: even
| if good doings fail (not necessarily) to lead you to good
| health and financial prosperity, mental practice results
| are here to greatly help you cope with any problems you
| face and also to help you behave in a more constructive
| way.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > There's been a concerted, conscious effort to
| desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to
| Westerners
|
| This is a big generalization without a clear definition
| of what is "sacred".
|
| > it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
|
| I understand what you mean but using the world "religion"
| creates a lot of generalizations.
| simiones wrote:
| > if science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must
| change. Good luck finding that sentiment in any actual
| religion.
|
| This is actually not that uncommon, despite some popular
| image problems.
|
| For example, catholicism has a long history of scientific
| thought being used to change the common understanding of
| their scriptures. Even the infamous treatment of Galileo's
| asssertions about the Earth moving around the sun were more
| a question of scientific debate and politics than any
| religious dogmatism: a lot of powerful people in the church
| simply considered the heliocentric model better science and
| a settled matter, and used their political power to silence
| opponents.
|
| In fact, today most christian churches regard the
| scientific understanding of the world (big bang theory,
| evolution, geological times etc) as correct, and consider
| the biblical accounts to be metaphors and reflective of a
| deeper truth about God's involvement in creation. I believe
| the same holds true for most muslims, though I am not sure;
| and I have no idea if it does or not in hinduism. Young
| Earth creationists and other groups taking the bible as
| literal truth (6000 year old earth, literal 6 days of
| creation etc) are a small but vocal minority.
| User23 wrote:
| > a lot of powerful people in the church simply
| considered the heliocentric model better science and a
| settled matter, and used their political power to silence
| opponents
|
| It's good to remember that human nature hasn't changed
| and the same thing is almost certainly happening today
| too.
| Y_Y wrote:
| The Vatican runs a research observatory that produces
| good scientific output.
|
| Also they have a mega-rare tld: http://www.vaticanobserva
| tory.va/content/specolavaticana/en....
| User23 wrote:
| Alas, the world may never see yeshi.va and di.va, to name
| a couple.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's not unheard of. After spending a year in a meditation center
| I have been in contact with several people that burned out. My
| teachers forced me to take more time off to avoid this.
|
| Meditation is wonderful, but it's powerful. Something powerful
| can be misused to hurt yourself, otherwise it wouldn't have much
| of an effect. A saw that can't cut your fingers will not be very
| practical.
|
| Having a proper environnement helps a lot to limit this, and the
| right people with you, but it's not bulletproof.
|
| I feel my practice is too taxing sometimes and slow down. One
| should not create an idea of what the path looks like and force a
| way into it until some kind of landmark is reached. Espacially
| with our lifestyles, going steadily, but gently, is important.
|
| I have several friends, including myself, that reverted to using
| intoxicants, material comfort or distractions for a while because
| we couldn't handle more. Then after some time, went back to a
| more strict practice. Or didn't and accepted to stay at that
| level.
|
| It's hard, pace yourself. Other practitionners should not judge
| you, we all have struggles.
| ohgreatwtf wrote:
| lotta zen bhuddist teachers on prozac
| pphysch wrote:
| Western "Buddhism" as repackaged solipsism is totally
| antithetical to the teachings of the Four Noble Truths.
|
| Probably because the Four Noble Truths are antithetical to
| Christianity, liberalism and capitalism, the core aspects of
| Western culture.
| Uhthrowaway wrote:
| 'Enlightenment' appears to be thrown around liberally while it is
| clear that few people achieve it (if at all that word refers to a
| concrete state) perhaps spiritual practice mixed with great
| expectations underlines the same lack of clarity or understanding
| and trust which lead the west to esoteric ego infalting
| practices.
| [deleted]
| ganzuul wrote:
| We don't really have the language to discuss the subtle emotional
| states involved when experience turns uncomfortable. Music with
| movement is better at communicating it.
|
| People are going to keep poking around in their minds and finding
| things that disturb them. There is a lot to be said for learning
| to stay with the difficult things, if you can not yet afford
| yourself faith.
| ljm wrote:
| I can relate to this a lot, also with my own experiences of
| Somatic Experiencing and forms of therapeutic breathwork.
|
| I did a few retreats myself, with the knowledge going in that it
| would be fucking brutal and that I could bring a lot of shit to
| the surface that I'd repressed for years. I had a therapist
| before, during, and after, as the primary focus was healing
| integrated with tantric practises.
|
| Even then it was 6 years of deep introspection, an enormous
| amount of suffering, and eventually a complete mental break that
| led to a few suicide attempts, self-harming and a year or so on
| medication. I didn't blame the retreats for that, or the
| meditation, and I still don't. I just didn't have the capacity to
| deal with it all and I never had a good coping mechanism in the
| first place, yet I was still facing this incredible amount of
| torment head on. Truly staring into my own abyss.
|
| I would not recommend this, or any kind of deep meditation, to
| anyone. Not unless they have a support network in place and only
| if they understand that it is a difficult journey that can and
| will see things getting worse for you before they get better.
|
| These days I'm off the medication, and I'm a different, more
| resilient, more self-aware person. Enough to know that what's
| done is done, the past is exactly that, and there's a lot more
| for me in the present moment. I am still very fond of what I
| learned through Tantra in that sense, and I'm glad I found my way
| through enough of that past trauma to start being able to live
| with it.
| littlethrowaway wrote:
| Ha! I thought it might have been vipassana. My own experience of
| this (a 10 day silent retreat, not having done meditation before)
| was a full blown manic-psychotic experience (never having had any
| such thing before, nor in family history). If you're interested,
| I made some audio files [0] talking about what happened.
|
| I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take
| regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them to do a
| 10 day silent retreat. I honestly think it's like taking a
| regular person and allowing them to go down a grade 4 or 5 river.
| They might make it, but they might get seriously hurt too.
|
| I actually raised this point with the local (New Zealand) health
| and disability ombudsman. I said that vipassana ought to have a
| psychologist to assess people as they left, or at least
| _something_ like that. Nothing changed as far as I am aware.
|
| I hope the author continues to get better. It was a long journey
| for me.
|
| [0]. http://livingvipassana.blogspot.com/2010/02/bipolar-
| chronicl...
| renewiltord wrote:
| This sounds exciting and novel to experience. The risk thrills
| me. What's the fastest way to self administer?
| DantesKite wrote:
| Sit and do nothing for a few months until you go insane.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ah, that's a pity. I was hoping something like a sensory
| deprivation tank or whatever would accelerate the process.
| I, sadly, do not wish to assign that much time to this.
|
| Maybe when I retire! Thanks for the advice!
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I honestly think it 's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will
| take regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them
| to do a 10 day silent retreat._
|
| I did a Vipassana 12 day retreat (years ago) but I didn't find
| it to be that wild.
|
| The hardest part for me was actually sitting down 15? hours a
| day. Had I known what I was going to do I would have prepared
| by doing exercises to strengthen my back.
| mircea wrote:
| How would you describe your psychological state before going to
| your first 10 day meditation retreat?
| mandmandam wrote:
| Bi-polar is specifically screened for as a contra-indication
| for retreats, at least Goenka ones (along with Reiki practice,
| interestingly). They may still allow a diagnosed individual on,
| but are supposed to give extra attention.
|
| What retreat did you go on, and did they ask about bi-polar
| experience pre-retreat?
| javajosh wrote:
| They screen for a variety of things, but people aren't always
| honest. Psychosis and bipolar are two criteria. There may be
| more. They will also reject people if they are just clearly
| off their rocker -- Vipassana at these centers is
| specifically NOT for people with serious mental illness.
|
| Reiki is a problem, I speculate, because it puts you in the
| habit of imagining sensation beyond your body, and this may
| lead to some problems. There may also be a spiritual aspect
| to it. One counter-point is that there is one meditation
| practice that goes beyond the body: metta. So maybe its a
| specific issue with Reiki (like how you'll never see a
| teacher wearing black and/or red at a retreat).
| pier25 wrote:
| > _They screen for a variety of things, but people aren 't
| always honest._
|
| And there is a form of milder bipolar disorder called
| cyclothymia that is rarely diagnosed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia
| lamalic wrote:
| I've read quite a few blog and social media post of bipolar
| people not responding well to meditation. Neither have I. I
| actually thought I might have seen your post before.
|
| People don't seem to accept either that 1. You're tired and
| have been willing to try a lot, 2. Even the mystical panacea
| doesn't help.
| Sawamara wrote:
| Yep. It makes big money, but it is literally gambling with
| people's sanity.
| lukasb wrote:
| It's free.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I suppose we have two different "it"s happening here
| JimTheMan wrote:
| "Why my swimming practice, which involved me swimming the english
| channel every day, eventually led me to drown."
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| An unkind sentiment. Every individual is unique, and some can
| stomach challenges that would make others fall to their knees.
| It's our different strengths and weaknesses that make us.
| JimTheMan wrote:
| While terse, the sentiment was to highlight that maybe it
| isn't swimming that is the issue at hand here. It's swimming
| the english channel every day.
|
| A normal activity that when pushed to the limits of
| endurance, can overwhelm an individual. But that doesn't
| necessarily make swimming or meditation something to be
| feared or avoided.
| alex_duf wrote:
| As someone who experienced countless panic attacks, I find the
| description of his symptoms to be very on point with my
| experience.
|
| I've hit rock bottom about 10 years ago, experiencing these about
| three times a week. The road to building myself back was pretty
| long and is still an every day effort, but nowadays I only
| experience these once or twice a year, if any.
|
| If that's of any help to anyone, I've found countless of little
| things that put together helped a lot. They aren't ground
| breaking by any mean, just sharing my experience and tips:
|
| - Therapy. yes, good old fashioned therapy. Shop around to find
| the right person. - Life change, I moved from one country to
| another. Spoiler alert, the panic attacks followed me, but it
| certainly gave me more confidence. - Identify your triggers. It
| took me years, but my trigger was a stomach inflammation that I
| identified as being my heart having an issue. So I changed my
| diet, stopped smoking too. - Exercise. Finding what you like is a
| long and painful process, I only found what I liked around 30.
| For me it was hiking, then climbing, then more recently
| (pandemic), yoga.
|
| I hope that's useful for someone.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I found his description of a Panic Attack well documented.
|
| I have never convulsed though. My panic attacks were very brief
| compared to the authors.
|
| "The next four hours were a hellscape of terror, panic and
| paranoia. There were almost no thoughts, only my body begging
| to escape my skin, convulsing like a fish fighting for life.
| The fear was a bottomless trench."
|
| The last line hit home with me.
|
| I've only had one bad Panic Attack. What I didn't realize is
| how it would affect my anxiety levels in the following years.
|
| I'm on a long half life benzodiazepine, and a drug they give to
| opioid addicts, but the anxiety is still there.
|
| I have noticed my anxiety levels impiroved a bit with age.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| I'm guessing the "convulsion" he's talking about was just
| adrenaline tremors. I had these a lot after panic attacks, my
| legs would shake like crazy. The thing I read that basically
| made them disappear was that if you watch animals like a
| zebra or something after they been chased by lion... they
| usually twitch and shake all over. I used to get really upset
| and more panicky when they happened which just made them even
| worse.
|
| It's a completely normal response after an adrenaline rush
| and it's actually a sign that your body is calming down.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Glad to hear you're doing better. I had a similar experience
| about a decade ago. Went through 2 years of feeling awful,
| changed a lot of things and got better. Had an attack out of
| nowhere last year and felt off for a few months until I
| remembered exactly how I got out of it before. Each time you
| realize you can get better with your set of tools it becomes
| less scary.
|
| You definitely get to the point where they're just kinda meh
| and you move on with life.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Isn't this a repost of a repost, where the underlying facts are
| that he did a bunch of drugs, and then blamed his bad trip on
| mindfulness?
|
| Edit: yeah here it is
|
| > I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation and
| began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Looking back, it
| was also during this time period that I had my first dissociative
| experiences
|
| So, guy takes a bunch of mind altering drugs for years, admits to
| having difficulty controlling his emotions his entire adult life,
| and yet blames meditation for his psychological instability.
| Definitely been posted here before. Completely unreliable
| narrator. Meditation is not a replacement for psychological help
| based on the practice of medicine. The guy probably needs to talk
| to an actual psychiatrist who has worked with former drug
| addicts, not just ignore his problem with feel good retreats
|
| The truth is he probably fucked up his meatware with drugs. The
| meatware malfunctioned, and he let it go untreated for years
| bloniac wrote:
| Sounds like a psychotic episode.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| A former coworker of mine went to a silent meditation retreat.
| He's been recovering ever since.
| mircea wrote:
| Without more details you're just announcing your biases to HN.
| pajtai wrote:
| Everything has a down side. Exercise is the most helpful thing
| you can do for your health, but you can break your leg running...
| or even die of a heart attack while running.
|
| This is a great article to highlight how little most people think
| about what the "healthy" amount of meditation is and how to know
| if you're over doing it or are suffering an injury from it.
| xiii1408 wrote:
| There was an excellent article in Harpers about this a few months
| ago: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-
| psycholo...
|
| I had no idea, but schizophrenic breaks and other psychological
| symptoms are not uncommon at meditation retreats, and staff are
| often untrained on how to deal with it.
|
| Sorry this happened to you OP, and I hope you're able to get
| effective help.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Important sections:
|
| >As early as 1976, Arnold Lazarus, one of the forefathers of
| cognitive behavioral therapy, raised concerns about
| transcendental meditation, the mantra-based practice then in
| vogue. "When used indiscriminately," he warned, "the procedure
| can precipitate serious psychiatric problems such as
| depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation."
| Lazarus had by then treated a number of "agitated, restive"
| patients whose symptoms seemed to worsen after meditating. He
| came to believe that the practice, while beneficial for many,
| was likely harmful to some.
|
| >One case study, from 2007, documented a twenty-four-year-old
| male patient who had slipped into "a short-lasting acute
| psychotic state" during "an unguided and intense" meditation
| session. He was referred to clinicians following the onset of
| "an acute sensation of being mentally split." He saw vivid
| colors, hallucinated, and was overcome with severe anxiety. At
| the height of the episode, he was tormented by "delusional
| convictions that he had caused the end of the world" and talked
| of suicide. The man had experienced one previous hypomanic
| episode and had a history of untreated depression. The authors
| posited that "meditation can act as a stressor in vulnerable
| patients."
|
| >Even as academic interest in meditation has mounted, with
| hundreds of new papers published every year, the question of
| adverse effects has received little attention. Most studies
| don't monitor for negative reactions, relying instead on
| participants to report them spontaneously. But the research
| that does exist is not reassuring. More than fifty published
| studies have documented meditation-induced mental health
| problems, including mania, dissociation, and psychosis. In
| 2012, leading meditation researchers in the United Kingdom
| published a set of guidelines for meditation instructors,
| noting "risks for participants," including depression,
| traumatic flashbacks, and increased suicidal ideation. Four
| years later, the U.S. National Institutes of Health cautioned
| that "meditation could cause or worsen symptoms in people with
| certain psychiatric problems." Jeffrey Lieberman, the former
| head of the American Psychiatric Association, told me he'd seen
| this in his own practice. "The clinical phenomenon is real," he
| said. "There's no question about it."
|
| >[...]
|
| >Britton and her team began visiting retreats, talking to the
| people who ran them, and asking about the difficulties they'd
| seen. "Every meditation center we went to had at least a dozen
| horror stories," she said. Psychotic breaks and cognitive
| impairments were common; they were often temporary but
| sometimes lasted years. "Practicing letting go of concepts,"
| one meditator told Britton, "was sabotaging my mind's ability
| to lay down new memories and reinforce old memories of simple
| things, like what words mean, what colors mean." Meditators
| also reported diminished emotions, both negative and positive.
| "I had two young children," another meditator said. "I couldn't
| feel anything about them. I went through all the routines, you
| know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them
| and all of that stuff, but there was no emotional connection.
| It was like I was dead."
|
| ===
|
| There seems to be something of a catch 22 here. Normal people
| generally don't meditate. Some people meditate shallowly, and
| experience light effects. But if you're the kind of person who
| is interested in meditating for 10 hours a day, either to run
| away from something or go on some mental journey, then you lose
| your mind and either become a basket case or a yogi.
| theqabalist wrote:
| Forgive me if anyone has said as much, but something that
| directly stands out to me about all of the comments heretofore
| mentioned is that they are treating a state of consciousness in a
| formalist way, as if the mind exists independent of the body. The
| brain's activities and the things the mind experiences are very
| much situated in the realm of bodily states. One state that is
| very common amongst people who follow certain paths is
| malnutrition.
|
| I am not necessarily going to try to start a flame war over which
| diet or whatever could cause which set of nutrient deficiencies,
| but I think its a salient point that he has self professed
| clinical symptoms (like convulsing muscles) and never sought
| medical help, only seeking more help from the same overly formal
| realm of rules.
|
| Additionally, the author mentions following all these buddhist
| frameworks, but in Theravada at least, part of the eight fold
| path is not drinking or doing drugs, yet he says he would drink
| and do drugs when he didn't get the jolt he wanted from the
| practice. Alcohol and drugs, while not necessarily inherently
| bad, are great at depleting the body of essential things like
| vitamins, minerals, and neurotransmitters needed for proper brain
| functioning.
|
| The only real treatment he gives to this is saying, "no
| preexisting conditions." Of course, I hope I don't have to
| explain that just because you haven't been diagnosed with a
| deficiency of some kind, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I also
| find his later comment that another practitioner had "no
| preexisting conditions except anxiety," to be particularly
| problematic. Anxiety is a preexisting condition, which lends some
| probability that his evaluation of preexisting conditions could
| be overly lax, and his consistent search for confirmation bias
| that Buddhism would solve his medical/biological problems could
| cause him to downplay actual preexisting conditions.
|
| Anyway, I agree with many of the other people that dark nights,
| etc are well known phenomena, so I don't want to downplay any of
| that. I just wanted to add to the conversation that nutrition is
| very important, and if you fuck that up, you can get really
| fucked up psychologically due to dysfunctional parts.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I had pretty much the same symptoms as this guy with zero
| meditation, just caffeine overdose. When I stopped drinking
| coffee and tea all symptoms, including dread and feeling that
| something is very wrong, muscle twitching and other odd
| feelings went away.
|
| And I didn't even drink that much by coffee drinkers standards.
| lolc wrote:
| I found it strange him mentioning drinking coffee in the
| retreat, especially in the morning after experiencing strong
| dissociation. In general I would have thought they'd skip the
| coffee.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Switched to decaf for the same reason.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Me too. Can now drink even 6 cups of decaf daily with no
| problems. And it tastes exactly as good.
| leksak wrote:
| I'll acknowledge some bias on my part as someone who has
| experienced more disassociative episodes (unrelated to
| meditation) than I care to have had but I think some of the
| replies here are very callous given how scarring I've found those
| experiences to be.
|
| My first contact with mindfulness-based meditation was cognitive
| behavioural therapy through mental health professionals and
| haven't received any warnings to heed.
|
| Seemingly, the author has had to endure their fair share and
| maybe a modicum of sympathy is warranted - at least.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| If anything some of the comments here prove his point that
| those invested in the practise have an interest to protect it
| and therefore say the author was meditating the wrong way.
|
| It's honestly so weird reading comments like those on HN of all
| places.
| dvh1990 wrote:
| From my experience, what the writer is talking about is a
| transcendental experience that sounds awfully similar to what
| happens under psychedelics. Experiences like this are highly
| influenced by set, setting and expectations, and can go wrong.
|
| Meditation is an incredibly deep practice, and if you engage in
| it you must be aware that it is much more than a stress-relief
| tool. Many people meditate with the explicit purpose of reaching
| that state. When you keep that fact in mind, experiences like
| what was described in the article are desired and welcome.
| stupidcar wrote:
| If we're to believe the author, they meditated for 10 years and
| attended numerous classes, seminars and retreats. Clearly they
| _were_ engaging it as more than a "stress-relief tool".
|
| The article I will take as a single data point, about one
| person's experiences. But comments like yours, and others in
| this thread, worry me far more. Collectively, they exhibit the
| dismissiveness, defensiveness, condescension and victim-blaming
| that is absolutely typical of members of religions/cults both
| spiritual and secular. Anyone who can describe the experiences
| related in this article as "desired and welcome" has lost any
| sense of perspective.
| thinkyfish wrote:
| I've found that many people (myself included) start down the path
| of Vipassana(analysis) type of meditation too early or from a
| position where we weren't prepared for the consequences. I wish I
| had spent more time with metta(compassion) and samatha (calmness)
| meditation and build up stability/forbearance and
| kindness/compassion first before starting to de-construct
| experience. It is said that one type of meditation leads to the
| others and even with Vipassana you might have the realization
| that "I'm suffering because I was doing a thing, I laid the trap
| and stepped in it" and achieve peace of mind, but that won't
| happen on a schedule. I would recommend any busy person to avoid
| Vipassana until they have more experience and focus more on
| sense-calming (avoiding sensuality), and compassion/generosity
| practice. It will bring a quicker (though possibly less deep)
| taste of the peace of mind that is possible.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Strongly agree. It seems quite common in the west to go into
| the deep end without the necessary foundations. Certain ethical
| behaviours, strong compassion for others, a desire to do this
| for the good of the world not just for yourself etc. These are
| all essential parts of any spiritual path and just trying to
| reach straight for insight is potentially dangerous imho. I'm
| not a Buddhist as such but for me every aspect of the eightfold
| path is utterly essential and mutually supporting.
| blunte wrote:
| Is it surprising that extended, intensive mental practice (in
| this case, mindfulness style meditation) can reshape how our
| brains work?
|
| As babies, we form our sense of being - from what touch "feels"
| like to what food tastes like - from our experiences. And we tend
| to go through life adding and slightly modifying those
| fundamental neural pathways we've built.
|
| But if you then do a 180 and start practicing and reinforcing
| very different pathways, where will you end up? In the article,
| where he ended up seems bad indeed, but that is relative to where
| he started (and where most of us live).
|
| Probably many of us here have at one time or other spent way too
| much time and focus on one obsession. Take chess, for example. If
| you spend hours a day focused on chess, it will absolutely
| reshape the way you think, and that will bleed over to non-chess
| moments. You may find yourself sitting at a restaurant, mentally
| playing out the possibilities and scenarios of an impending
| conversation with the server where you will attempt to avoid
| having to buy dessert (because you don't want it, or whatever
| your reason). Or you may find that in the middle of a meeting,
| you suddenly only exist on a chessboard, stuck in a game problem
| you have been trying to find a good answer to.
|
| But with this mindfulness meditation, especially since it also
| explicitly closes off external reality, you will be building some
| very strange new paths in your mind. Stay there too long, and
| perhaps you get lost.
|
| The old wisdom is probably worth heeding here: all things in
| moderation.
| draw_down wrote:
| This is just sad to read. You wonder what is the point of all
| this stuff. Imagine inducing trauma in yourself for no
| discernible reason. Why, why?
| JesseMeyer wrote:
| Meditation is a blade with no hilt.
|
| I _accidentally_ fell into a vipassana state of mind after the
| first time trying a particular religious chant, seriously, from
| out of the pains of boredom as a 20 year old.
|
| At the time I lived nearby mountains, and after 'coming to', I
| saw them through the window. I cannot describe to you the
| overwhelming feeling of beauty and awe that crashed over me. It
| was as though this was the very first time I had ever seen
| mountains. I think the best description I can manage comes from
| 'Both Sides Now' by Joni Mitchell.
|
| 'I've looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down, and
| still somehow It's cloud illusions I recall I really don't know
| clouds at all'
|
| The experience was so disorienting. As if I was seeing the
| mountains for what they were directly through my senses and not
| mediated by my knowledge of what mountains were like,
| linguistically.
|
| It changed my entire life -- weeks later later I lost my job and
| fell into a 5 year extreme depression / anxiety spell in the
| attempt to reconcile my adolescent religious upbringing with the
| continued insight from that experience. Absolutely worthwhile, in
| hindsight, but it cost me near everything for it.
| pantulis wrote:
| As with many other types of exercise, practitioners are bound to
| have injuries. I'd even say the injuries the author suffered are
| equivalent to breaking a leg while running.
|
| This is the take away for me:
|
| > "I believe that these practices, with the correct framework,
| dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving
| mental health. "
| pantulis wrote:
| While most people are safe --most of us struggle to keep a
| 30-min daily meditation practice- there is also a lesson to be
| learned: there is no such thing as a free, harmless lunch.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If someone spends one or two entire days doing little more
| than eating, and then has a horribly unpleasant night, I
| don't think that disproves the free harmless lunch.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > This is the take away for me
|
| Well, perhaps you haven't read the article; the OP is saying
| that meditation is dangerous, and that meditation teachers
| don't warn you of the dangers. Isn't that the opposite of your
| "take away"?
| pantulis wrote:
| It is a verbatim copy from the article, somewhat hidden in
| one of the last paragraphs (perhaps you didn't read the whole
| article? sorry could not resist!). Which was kind of
| surprising given the previous content, but it makes sense.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Horrible premise.
|
| None of this is Buddhism and "using" Buddhism doesn't do what you
| want it to do.
|
| It's like someone saying "I tried to go to confession at the
| Catholic church but I don't feel any better after killing and
| raping. This doesn't work!"
|
| or saying "I went and got baptized but I don't feel any
| different! I'm supposed to be saved! Where are my just rewards
| and I'm supposed to be able to see Jesus!"
|
| erm ...
| the-alchemist wrote:
| I try to follow the more science-y literature and news on
| meditation, so here's my take.
|
| Diana Winston [1] runs the Mindfulness Education at UCLA's
| Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). In her book, The Little
| Book of Being, she describes a mental breakdown--for lack of a
| better word--during an extended meditation retreat, just as this
| author. She spent a year as a Burmese nun, too.
|
| In it, she talks about how she would cry every day on some
| retreats, even in front of her meditation teacher. Looking back,
| she credits the experience to some psychological issues (my
| words, not hers).
|
| Sam Harris PhD, one of most unforgiving people of bad science,
| has a great meditation app, Waking Up [2], which I really like.
| In it, he specifically says, if this is causing you harm, or
| you're losing touch with reality, STOP immediately.
|
| He likens it to exercise. Exercise is great for you; hell, it's
| one of the best things you can do for your mind and body, and the
| research is very clear on this.
|
| But, some exercises might be bad for you. If you have a bad
| shoulder, DON'T DO PUSHUPS. If you have bum knees, STOP JOGGING.
| You need to talk to a professional to find out how to do work
| around your specific injury.
|
| Most of us aren't able to self-diagnose our psyches like this.
| It's almost impossible. There are, however, trained meditators
| out there of various religious and non-religious persuasions that
| can help you on your journey.
|
| My two cents, and others have mentioned this too, is that
| removing some of the "Eastern aura" of meditation is great for us
| in the West. Less robes and incense, more love and kindness. The
| Dhali Llama has said that the Buddhism that he here in the West
| study is some of the "purest" there is.
|
| But there's thousands of pages in Buddhist literature about all
| the demons and bliss you can experience during meditation, and
| how to approach it and understand it. Put it into context, some
| one to tell you, "Keep going, you're starting to get it", or,
| "Stop, you're doing it wrong, you're doing more harm than good."
|
| BUT going on a 10-day silent meditation retreat, even one day, is
| insane if you've never meditated. Much like running an
| ultramarathon with no training. If your body doesn't break down,
| your mind certainly will.
|
| Personally, when I started meditating, I couldn't do >5 minutes
| at a time. Took me weeks to get to 20 minutes. And you gotta do
| the reading or join a group to help you understand what you're
| going through, which also was very helpful for me.
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/dianawinston [2]: http://wakingup.com/
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Also see _" The Dark Knight of the Soul: For some, meditation has
| become more curse than cure..."_
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...
| cranesnake wrote:
| Vipassana and Marijuana lead me to a full-blown psychosis for 2
| weeks in a medical center which unraveled my mind and the
| perception of my world. But I also feel I have a deeper
| understanding of myself and how balances in my mind work, having
| now recovered. I was forced to reconstruct my mind manually.
| Before this my control over my depression and anxiety was null,
| but now I may be getting off of medication soon.
| camdenlock wrote:
| > I thought awakening was right around the corner and now feel
| broken and betrayed
|
| While I feel sympathy for the author, I can't help but think that
| this is ultimately a self-caused problem. You shouldn't be
| absorbing yourself in a meditation practice with the goal of
| "awakening" or "enlightenment" or whatever. That's dragon-chasing
| nonsense which will lead you to bad times.
| bserge wrote:
| Ah yes, the realizations of pointlessness of life, inevitability
| of death and the prison-like construct of our physical bodies for
| our actual minds.
|
| Don't need meditation to get there. But more importantly, you're
| supposed to keep going and find peace with it. Not stop and run
| away in terror.
|
| You have yet to succeed at awakening.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Congrats, you failed awakening._
|
| This is needlessly dismissive and condescending. It's like
| saying "Congrats, you failed running a marathon" to someone who
| suffers an injury after 20 kilometers.
| bserge wrote:
| Hmm, I didn't intend it that way, you're right.
| plutonorm wrote:
| And yet it has a grain of truth. Which tickles me.
| saltmeister wrote:
| you're both clowns in fact
| sjayasinghe wrote:
| I interpret the author's difficulties and frustration as a
| byproduct of a particular misapprehension of Buddhist teachings
| in modern society. Many modern-day practitioners, both in the
| east and the west, are under the impression that simply by
| mechanically practicing mindfulness meditation they will
| eventually reach a state of enlightenment. Unfortunately, this is
| a misunderstanding that the Buddha himself addressed in the
| teachings. The Noble Eightfold Path is at the heart of Buddhist
| practice, and it's structured such that "right view" comes in
| first place, while "right mindfulness" and "right concentration"
| come at the very end. According to these teachings, it's
| impossible to attain the right kind of mindfulness conducive to
| the cessation of stress without first satisfying the precondition
| of right view. Without right view, the practitioner is
| essentially flying blind. The modern mindfulness movement in its
| zeal to secularize these practices is incapable of accepting the
| proposition that the right teaching has to be first grasped
| before embarking on the practice, as this contradicts the purely
| empiricist approach of mechanically practicing mindfulness with
| the expectation that this leads to enlightenment. The author's
| comments such as "I thought awakening was right around the corner
| and now feel broken and betrayed" are indicative of such an
| expectation being broken. The Buddha explains the danger of
| misconceiving the teachings using the snake simile, in which the
| Buddha compares the teachings to a snake that has to be first
| grabbed by the head and then tail. Trying to grab the snake by
| the tail first will only result in being bitten. This simile can
| be applied quite literally to the structure of The Noble
| Eightfold Path, where right view can be interpreted as the head
| of the snake, and right mindfulness/concentration as the tail.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Came here to say something similar. When I was about 20 some
| close friends of mine started practicing (and eventually
| ordained) with the American Theravadin monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu,
| which got my meditation practice started. Unfortunately I made
| the mistake of doing a lot of sitting and not a lot of learning
| of the Buddha's teachings at that time, other than reading some
| Pali translations and listening to Thanissaro Bhikkhu's dharma
| talks here and there. It got to the place where I didn't have
| the proper view to make sense of things that were happening and
| it felt like sitting was making life harder, so I gave up daily
| practice.
|
| About 10 years later I encountered the Diamond and Heart sutras
| from the Mahayana traditions and things made a whole lot more
| sense. It allowed me to get back to daily practice, which I'm
| very thankful for. It's not a teaching emphasized in the
| Theravada traditions that many of these American "mindfulness"
| movements draw from - although it's there - but the teachings
| on emptiness (sunyata) I found to be transformative for my
| practice. When the author writes things like "...elements of my
| sense of self became separated in a way that impaired my
| ability to function", it makes me think he'd benefit from
| learning the teachings on emptiness and the doctrine of the two
| truths.
|
| This is all to say that I find it pretty irresponsible and
| potentially dangerous to have people with very little
| understanding of the Buddha's teachings get thrown into 10-day
| silent meditation retreats where you're sitting for 10 hours
| per day as often seems to happen. Or to divorce the practice of
| meditation from the teachings as is common in lots of modern
| western "mindfulness" spaces. Many traditions teach these
| things slowly, over the course of months and years, while
| moving you along as your understanding deepens for a reason.
|
| I'd recommend taking your practice slowly, preferably with a
| skilled Buddhist monk to guide you. Read the sutras. Find a
| tradition that resonates with you personally. Know that there
| are risks involved and often times the practice will be
| difficult and confusing. It's not a magic pill to make you a
| better worker under capitalism.
| lazide wrote:
| Amen (hah) - I doubt (up until recently with these getting
| more visibility) it was ever a problem enough that retreats
| are screening for this.
|
| Additionally, retreats taught in 'weight loss' fashion are
| only going to make this worse, as there may be no one with a
| comprehensive grounding or experience even present on the
| retreat.
|
| This is one area where years of experience (and depth) and
| accuracy/correctness matter a lot. Which is hard. And
| expensive. And hard to scale.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Americans are in the habit of treating all goals as achievable
| in a systematic manner and to break down all obstacles into
| simply more things to learn and apply. With materialistic and
| worldly goals this works very well.
|
| However by ignoring the soft needs of self in favor of the hard
| needs of ego, one applies the above methodology right up until
| their psyche falls apart because there's nothing left holding
| it together. The ouroboros runs out of tail to eat.
|
| And Buddhist tenets, as understood by Westerners, don't help.
| Anatta, the doctrine of no-self, does _not_ mean you can just
| ignore the needs of your psyche! It means your self is
| illusory, constantly changing. Illusions, have rules! They 're
| durable, they don't just go away because you naively decided
| they don't matter anymore.
| nineplay wrote:
| I've frequently seen "Buddhism" adopted by westerners from a
| secular or Judeo/Christian background and treated as though
| it's some sort of feel-good practice which lets them feel
| vaguely superior to other religions without any serious changes
| in beliefs or practices.
|
| I saw a well regarded movie recently where the main
| characterized Buddhism as "a philosophy rather than a religion"
| which made it clear that no Asians had been involved in the
| making of that film. I was with a friend at a Asian market and
| he looked snottily at some of the Buddha statues and said
| "Those don't have any relationship with _my_ religion". I
| wanted to ask if they'd ever been in a Thai restaurant. It's
| such a dismissal of the way Buddhism has been practiced in
| cultures for a couple thousand years - but this white American
| clearly knows better.
| bobthechef wrote:
| I don't understand the mention of "Judeo/Christian
| background"[0] or the invocation of race where religion is
| concerned (cultural is downstream of religion, anyway), but
| in any case, it is true, based on what I have read, that
| "American Buddhism" as practiced in the United States is sort
| of a consumerist ethos dressed up in Buddhist garb. The case
| is similar where Hinduism is concerned. The phrase "I am God"
| coming from the mouth of a traditional Hindu means something
| different than it does coming from an American who has
| immersed himself in a kind of Hindu-coated consumerism. The
| latter is sort of a pantheistic claim, at least
| theologically, while the latter is likely the expression of
| consumerist egoism.
|
| [0] Btw, I would suggest using "Christian" or "Jewish or
| Christian" instead of "Judeo-Christian". There are important
| incompatibilities between post-Christian Talmudic Judaism and
| Christianity (itself fractured) that cannot be glossed over
| with a hyphen.
| nineplay wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out, it is an unfortunate
| shorthand and I should stay away from it. I tend to use it
| as a hand-wavy way to say "fair-skinned Americans who
| probably celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah growing up" but
| I'll stop.
| pradn wrote:
| Throughout Buddhist history, the contemplative, meditative,
| "philosophical" Buddhism has always been practiced by a small
| minority of monks and nuns. Even at the height of Buddhist
| fervor in the middle of the first millennium, far under 0.5%
| of the population of, say, China were monastics. (In fact
| most of those simply had certificates of monkhood that
| exempted from corvee labor - taxes in the form of labor, and
| weren't seriously committed to spiritual practice.)
|
| Most Buddhists have been lay followers content to pray at
| temples to ease their worries and bring good luck, seek the
| monastics for ceremonies like weddings and funerals, and
| donate to monasteries to keep their spiritual practices
| going. The whole of Mahayana Buddhism is far more concerned
| with the worship of spiritual intercessors called
| Bodhisattva's, those who have achieved enlightenment but have
| chosen to stay behind to help devotees. This form of Buddhism
| constitutes the bulk of religious practice in East and South
| East Asia. To ignore it in favor of only one strand of
| Buddhism is like seeing Christianity only through the eyes of
| Flagellants or Dominican monks or anchorites.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| The source of the conflict is that when most people in the
| US say "Buddhism", they mean "Buddhism that was exported to
| the US in the 60s." which was an odd combination of
| monastic and secularized. It's actually a strange combo
| when you think about it. Most Buddhists are more like
| Americans on Easter Sunday.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Why villainize the "white American", portraying them as
| "knowing better"? Yes, the mischaracterization of Buddhism is
| disrespectful, but it comes from ignorance, not malice.
| copio wrote:
| How can you pick and choose without on some level being
| aware of what you are excluding?
| nineplay wrote:
| It is ignorance that borders on arrogance. They must know
| that Buddhism is over two thousand years old. They must
| know that it is central to many cultures all over the
| world. Yet they somehow are confident that their way is the
| 'right' way.
| medstrom wrote:
| Ah, the amorphous "they". Like the amorphous "many". I'm
| not sure there's all that many that do this.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I was with a friend at a Asian market and he looked
| snottily at some of the Buddha statues and said "Those
| don't have any relationship with _my_ religion"._"
| [deleted]
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I saw a well regarded movie recently where the main
| characterized Buddhism as "a philosophy rather than a
| religion" which made it clear that no Asians had been
| involved in the making of that film."_
|
| Asians are as capable as anyone else at secularizing Buddhism
| (or of doing anything else, really).
|
| Take the example of D T Suzuki[1] himself -- the man who is
| arguably more responsible than anyone else for bringing
| Buddhism to the West.
|
| _" In the mid-20th century, Japanese lay scholar D. T.
| Suzuki was instrumental in creating a Zen which would be
| acceptable to Westerners, a project undertaken to position
| post WWII Japan as a modern, powerful nation and its culture
| as refined and superior in the face of Western hegemony.
| Suzuki sought to remove Zen from its historical and cultural
| context and make it accessible and applicable to everyone.
| This extraction cut its ties to monks and monasteries, the
| precepts, sangha life, rituals and teachings, and set up
| instead the individual internal experience of awakening as
| the only reliable "truth." Positioning Zen as based on the
| truth of personal experience protected it from rejection as
| superstition or as a creation of a bewildered community. At
| the same time, it could not be replaced by science or
| rationalism because the awakening experience was said to be
| subjective and ineffable. It was beyond all the limitations
| of organized sects, cultural manifestations, or political
| exigencies. As Robert Sharf explains,"_
|
| _" The notion of "pure Zen"--a pan-cultural religious
| experience unsullied by institutional, social, and historical
| contingencies--would be attractive precisely because it held
| out the possibility of an alternative to the godless and
| indifferent anomic universe bequeathed by the Western
| Enlightenment, yet demanded neither blind faith nor
| institutional allegiance. This reconstructed Zen offered an
| intellectually reputable escape from the epistemological
| anxiety of historicism and pluralism."_[2]
|
| _" Several scholars have identified Suzuki as a Buddhist
| modernist... Buddhist modernist traditions often consist of a
| deliberate de-emphasis of the ritual and metaphysical
| elements of the religion, as these elements are seen as
| incommensurate with the discourses of modernity. Buddhist
| modernist traditions have also been characterized as being
| "detraditionalized," often being presented in a way that
| occludes their historical construction. Instead, Buddhist
| modernists often employ an essentialized description of their
| tradition, where key tenets are described as universal and
| sui generis. It was this form of Zen that has been
| popularized in the West... In his discussion of humanity and
| nature, Suzuki takes Zen literature out of its social,
| ritual, and ethical contexts and reframes it in terms of a
| language of metaphysics derived from German Romantic
| idealism, English romanticism, and American
| transcendentalism."_[1]
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_T_Suzuki
|
| [2] - https://ancientwayjournal.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/orig
| ins-o...
| nineplay wrote:
| I don't have any problem with practicing a seculars form of
| Buddhism. I have a problem with somehow believing that it
| is the only way to practice Buddhism. Suzuki removed it
| from its historical and cultural context, but he wouldn't
| have acted as though the historical and cultural context
| didn't exist.
| dorchadas wrote:
| > I have a problem with somehow believing that it is the
| only way to practice Buddhism.
|
| Or, worse, that it's _more_ authentic than any types of
| Buddhism practiced in areas that have traditional
| Buddhism. I saw /see this attitude a lot. It just reeks
| of arrogance and ignorance.
| astrophysics wrote:
| Ugh, a WHITE american. They are the worst. Also, what is a
| racist like you doing in a thread about mindfulness?
| lhorie wrote:
| I'm confused by this comment. Do you mean to say that
| Buddhists ought to engage in religious flame wars? FWIW,
| Buddhism is fairly centered on self-improvement, with
| idolatry being generally seen as respectful reverence, or at
| worst as lucky charms.
|
| I don't see the problem in taking just the teachings of a
| belief system while ignoring the idolatry aspect. In fact,
| some western takes on religion could use less idolatry.
| nineplay wrote:
| I think it is pure ignorance to call Buddhism a "philosophy
| rather than a religion" and sneer at idols. You might as
| well sneer at a display where a round, black-and-white ball
| is called a 'football'. It shows a complete lack of
| knowledge about any form of Buddhism practiced anywhere
| outside of your little world view
| lhorie wrote:
| So, for a bit of perspective, as a child, I was mostly
| exposed to the ritualistic aspects of buddhism, which is
| probably the closest experience to what a westerner
| thinks of when thinking of "religion". Do I think that
| people prioritizing mindfulness to de-stress and calling
| it Buddhism are kinda missing the point, sure. Do I get
| offended that they aren't aware of the existence of
| things like buddhist prayers, for example? No, not
| really. Honestly, assuming that "bastardizing" buddhism
| would offend people like me seems like needless SJW-ness
| for its own sake, especially considering Buddhism has
| already been bastardized to the wazoo throughout history.
| </two-cents>
| nineplay wrote:
| Can I rid myself of the "SJW" label if I say that I'm not
| offended, I just think they are idiots?
| lhorie wrote:
| I didn't mean to call you one, sorry if it came out that
| way. Personally, I just tend to see this the same way I
| see grammar nazis (in the context of language being a
| malleable construct over time)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Buddhism is fairly centered on self-improvement"_
|
| That's one aspect central aspect of some types of Buddhism,
| but compassion is also central in many forms of Buddhism,
| particularly in the Bodhisattva traditions and teachings of
| the Mahayana branches of Buddhism, where the goal of self-
| improvement is sacrificed for the sake of easing the
| suffering of the rest of humanity.
|
| Community (the Sangha and the lay people and every other
| sentient being) is also very important to many forms of
| Buddhism, and many Buddhists are socially active or at
| least engage in charitable works which are as much about
| helping others as anything else.
|
| That's not to mention the selflessness and the giving up of
| attachment to goals like "self-improvement" at higher
| levels of Buddhist practice that is also emphasized in some
| forms of Buddhism.
|
| _" idolatry being generally seen as respectful reverence,
| or at worst as lucky charms"_
|
| There's lots of idolatry throughout the real practice of
| Buddhism around the world. Lay Buddhists in particular (on
| whom monastic Buddhists are so dependent, and without whom
| monastic Buddhism would would largely cease to exist) often
| pray to the Buddha for protection, luck, cures and wealth,
| and worship various gods and spirits. This is all Buddhism
| to them, and Buddhist monks are not free of such beliefs
| either.
|
| In Tibetan Buddhism belief in gods and magic is widespread,
| as it is South East Asian Buddhism. Buddha is effectively
| treated as a god in Pure Land Buddhism, where he is prayed
| to for salvation and in hopes of being reborn in what is
| essentially paradise.
|
| Claims that Buddhism as a whole is secular, atheist, not
| idolatrous, "scientific", etc, are not credible. Sure, some
| forms of Buddhism are (particularly the kinds that have
| been created for Western consumption), but many others
| aren't.
| lhorie wrote:
| > Buddha is effectively treated as a god in Pure Land
| Buddhism, where he is prayed to for salvation and in
| hopes of being reborn in what is essentially paradise.
|
| I knew of Buddha being prayed to (mostly for luck) and of
| prayer for salvation separately, but not both
| simultaneously, that's interesting. I was personally
| exposed to prayer rituals for deceased family members,
| but my understanding is that the prayers aren't directed
| at Buddha per se, it's more seen as the act of praying
| itself helping to open a path to everlasting peace or
| something like that. IMHO, this is several degrees
| removed from the original teachings though, similar to
| how there are multiple abrahamic denominations with
| various degrees of "quirks".
|
| I'm also aware of some historical conflicts branched off
| of some of these "interpretations", hence why I tend to
| look for historical common ground between buddhism
| flavors.
| hangonhn wrote:
| "Do you mean to say that Buddhists ought to engage in
| religious flame wars?"
|
| We have engaged in far worse than flame wars. Buddhists
| have fought in actual wars at various points of history and
| done other not so great things. For example, D.T. Suzuki is
| known for his writing on Zen Buddhism but he was also
| something of a right-wing nationalist.
|
| I think GP is advocating that we approach Buddhism in its
| whole form rather than just the bits and pieces we are most
| comfortable with.
| rendall wrote:
| Buddhists are currently engaging in the genocide of the
| Rohingya in Myanmar. No philosophy is beyond being
| subverted to evil, and ascribing to a particular
| philosophy will not protect you from doing evil.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Buddhism always had a lifestyle aspect to it in the West. We
| have benn in Ladakh once, for the monastery festival season.
| There we also witnessed a procession around one the holy
| mountains. The monastery festivals were quite touristic,
| especially the ones in famous locales. This procession was a
| purely local thing, besides my parents and myself there was
| another tourist couple. The people there measured, above
| 3,500 meter over sea level, heat and dust the distance of the
| route in their body length for a full day. That quashed any
| illusions I might have had about Buddhism being an "easy"
| religion.
|
| Also the people their were just sincerely nice. I didn't want
| to bother them, keep a distance during their break. 20
| minutes later I had lunch with them.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| The author wasn't ignorant: "I'm extremely knowledgeable of
| both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read
| countless books on the subject."
| [deleted]
| arbitrage wrote:
| The author obviously isn't ignorant. The comment you failed
| to respond to directly is talking about "a particular
| misapprehension of Buddhist teachings in modern society."
|
| This is not about ignorance, and framing it as such is
| directly supporting the thesis of the original article.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| Misapprehension is a function of ignorance. If you're free
| of trapped priors, you'll eventually sort out your
| misconceptions, as you learn more.
|
| Regarding this particular slice of turkey on the table,
| since you insist: "[T]his is a misunderstanding that the
| Buddha himself addressed in the teachings."
|
| The teachings? The teachings a person would likely be
| exposed to and eventually come up understand, if they've
| read countless books on the non-secular/Buddhist practice
| of meditation?
|
| Regardless, if failing to "correctly" understand a bit of
| squishy woo-woo in Buddhist religion is the difference
| between safe meditation practice and psychosis/nervous
| breakdown, then that's all the more alarming.
| kjaftaedi wrote:
| Regardless of whether the author understood the
| teachings, he clearly ignored them with the drinking,
| drugs, and coffee.
| Sawamara wrote:
| The author was not ignorant. He was also nowhere near close
| to any sort of enlightment, or else he would not have thought
| things like that.
|
| This is, however, a moot point. The article is important and
| a warning to a lot of people. The current state we live
| creates such a tense situation for most people that these
| hardcore retreat-size meditation doses can literally act like
| shocks to both the trained and the untrained.
| jbgt wrote:
| I am very happy to read this. Most people in the west
| understand Mindfulness in isolation, and often only mindfulness
| of the breath as meditation. And the intention is to "feel
| calm" or "not think", or want the Headspace experience on
| steroids or believe they can brute force their way to
| "Englightement"...
|
| Without Right View and Right Intention, without the morality
| development of the Noble Eightfold Path, there is no wonder
| that they practice unskillfully, and develop unfulfilled
| expectations.
|
| I highly recommend reading / listening to the talks / going to
| retreat at (1) for a firm foundation for practice; for more in
| depth reading from one of the most important Theravadin monks
| who brings balance to the practice and emphasizes wisdom (2). A
| nice podcast (3) with also a good balance of teaching.
|
| I hope this helps people better understand meditation / mental
| development beyond mindfulness and concentration practice.
|
| 1 https://rosemary-steve.org/data/practice.htm
|
| 2 https://www.watnyanaves.net/en/home
|
| 3 https://tunein.com/podcasts/Religion--Spirituality-
| Podcasts/...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _as this contradicts the purely empiricist approach of
| mechanically practicing mindfulness with the expectation that
| this leads to enlightenment._
|
| This isn't really an empiricist approach. Empiricists look at
| what works, and (from what you're saying) this _doesn 't_. I'm
| not sure what to call it, but that's the wrong word.
| pphysch wrote:
| You are describing what could be called pragmatism;
| "empiricism" has specific epistemological meaning.
| jessedhillon wrote:
| In this sense, this person is talking about empiricism as the
| outlook that only what can be measured matters. Hours spent
| in meditation can be measured, but your embodiment of right
| view can't (or isn't, at least).
| sjayasinghe wrote:
| I'm using the word here to mean a philosophical position
| which only accepts knowledge that can be gained via direct
| meditative experience and rejects everything else. I'm open
| to suggestions for a better word to describe this position.
| mcguire wrote:
| Empiricism sounds right. " _The Empiricism Thesis: We have
| no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S
| other than sense experience._ "
| (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-
| empiricism/#E...)
| lhorie wrote:
| I think it can be summarized as "recklessness" (i.e.
| jumping the gun without proper understanding of/regard to
| foundational concepts)
| kovyrin wrote:
| > I think it can be summarized as "recklessness" (i.e.
| jumping the gun without proper understanding of/regard to
| foundational concepts)
|
| Well... I tried to approach it properly. You google or
| look up in wikipedia a bunch of info on Buddhism, then
| you find most popular authors writing on the topic. You
| end up with "Zen mind, beginner's mind" and a few others.
| None of them tell you it may hurt you, none of them
| mention doing it on group settings or with teachers, they
| recommend you starting alone and doing it daily. One of
| those foundational books (don't remember which one),
| recommended doing an hour a day... How is one supposed to
| know that it is dangerous?
| lazide wrote:
| In general, one key tenet you will find even in those
| books is a focus on 'being' and 'experiencing' reality
| over taking as truth an abstract knowledge of how
| something 'should be'.
|
| An approach that might work better could be a gradual and
| expanding exposure, talking physically in person to
| others, and exposing oneself physically to the practices
| and reality of a number of different sects and groups
| over time - while evolving your own understanding with
| book reading. It is very unlikely that meditating, or
| following basic practices, is going to cause anyone harm
| - but definitely not impossible based on their state of
| mind or circumstances. Given a large enough group trying
| something, it is inevitable someone will have a terrible
| outcome. It doesn't mean others won't have amazing
| outcomes, however.
|
| It is our own individual responsibility to take ownership
| for making the decisions we make, taking the path we
| take, and owning the results, or we lose all handle on
| the little we can actually control and become even more
| lost.
|
| Going to a meditation retreat (12+ hrs) without a solid
| grounding and understanding of the context would be a bit
| like hopping on a race motorcycle on a track day right
| after getting a learners permit - ill advised, and
| unlikely to result in anything healthy. Not impossible it
| wouldn't go well however, and not something likely to
| need screening for from the retreat (or track) side.
| Usually most people would realize pretty quickly even if
| they were dumb enough to get started and quit before
| anything really terrible happened.
|
| If someone doesn't know or recognize that, they are
| unlikely to find the right ways to get in trouble -
| usually.
|
| Book knowledge can help expand or refine knowledge, but
| should always be validated and integrated with personal
| experience. There are too many conflicting ways to take a
| specific passage, too many personal traumas or gotchas,
| too many environmental variables for anything else
| frankly.
|
| It should not be your only or especially your only
| foundational knowledge about something so fundamental as
| how to understand or approach reality and yourself.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Maybe getting your only information from a cursory
| grazing of wikipedia isn't approaching the topic
| properly?
|
| The article in question isn't about meditating once a
| day. It's about meditating aggressively for TWELVE hours
| a day two weeks straight, and how it negatively affected
| the author.
| lhorie wrote:
| > How is one supposed to know that it is dangerous?
|
| It isn't supposed to be dangerous, but if you dive head
| first into hardcore "retreats" with unrealistic
| expectations, that might end up badly, yes.
|
| For starters, if you have to seek recommendations on the
| Internet, you're probably already several steps detached
| from the original tradition. Buddhism has an insane
| amount of breadth: there are west asian flavors and east
| asian flavors, and there's literally thousands of years
| of history to go with them. Some forms of practice don't
| even focus on meditation (for example, as a child, I was
| largely exposed to ritualistic aspects of the japanese
| flavor). If you're interested in it as a westerner, it's
| likely because you've heard of mindfulness in the context
| of mental health benefits, but that's in large part a
| western concept bolted on top of the original tradition.
|
| It would be helpful to try to understand where stuff is
| getting lost in translation. Learning more about the
| original Buddhist philosophy and its roots can help give
| more context on things like what enlightenment is
| supposed to be about (coming to understand _what_ it is
| is actually kind of the point) and how meditation and
| mindfulness are supposed to fit in.
| blastro wrote:
| amen.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| > _I interpret the author's difficulties and frustration as a
| byproduct of a particular misapprehension of Buddhist teachings
| in modern society._
|
| I interpret his difficulties as an experience of how the brain
| is an organ and has physiological responses we're not often
| prepared for.
|
| Most people would agree that going on a retreat where you run
| 20 miles a day would have adverse consequences for your body.
|
| Yet the same kind of workout for your brain doesn't garner the
| same respect or caution.
|
| Perhaps the dogma/teachings of Buddhism prepare people for
| these things better than Western adoption of mediation
| practices, but to me they don't get to the heart of the matter,
| which is true understanding of the brain. Just like kosher
| practices protected people from disease before the germ theory
| was understood.
|
| Ultimately until we accept that our brain is a physical organ,
| that self does not stand apart from body, our mental health as
| a society is going suffer.
| lazide wrote:
| The brain as an organ analogy doesn't also reflect the self-
| reflective, self-influencing, learning side of it well.
|
| A kidney doesn't remember the last time someone abused it and
| react reflexively when they see that person. It also doesn't
| tend to go into tight loops of racing thoughts about that
| person randomly either.
|
| If you treat it like it is a simple organ (x thing happens,
| give drug y), it can lead to some really toxic long term
| effects with avoidance of environmental or self regulatory
| issues, lack of awareness of what is going on and how to
| correct it, etc. I've seen it personally, and lost friends
| and loved ones to the effects a naive 'medical' approach can
| have.
|
| The reality, near as we can tell, is the brain is an organ,
| that in ways we don't understand is also part of what we call
| 'self', which is also part of the system of our body, which
| is also part of larger systems that we interact with and
| influence us.
|
| I don't know of any monks that, if you broke a leg, would say
| 'Meditate and your leg will be healed'. Most monks, if you
| had not yet gone to a Doctor to have it fixed, would ask you
| something along the lines of 'How can I help you?' to help
| you see the need and get you there, or ask you to sit with
| them so you could see the need yourself.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Since this is a long article, here's a summary for fellow readers
| -- it's mostly about the negative side effects of meditation that
| the author believes is under-documented or under-reported due to
| the 'hype' of meditation as the 21st century cure-all. He talks
| about dissociative experiences (which is well documented in
| medical research), it being a pseudo-religion, and lastly, his
| belief that the extended use of meditation is the 'opposite' of
| stoicism in the way that it can render a person not less, but
| more susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses, like one of a
| traffic jam. He also attempts to make a biological argument on
| how this works by invoking something he calls the limbic system
| feedback loop, however I have found that argument unconvincing
| due to lack of any actual evidence.
| mcguire wrote:
| The author does not mention stoicism at all.
| mettamage wrote:
| > He talks about dissociative experiences (which is well
| documented in medical research)
|
| Experienced this as well.
|
| > it being a pseudo-religion
|
| IMO, too simple. Many experiences feel quite pseudo-religion
| like.
|
| > more susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses, like one
| of a traffic jam
|
| Didn't experience this. In fact I believed I was more or less
| invincible and became pretty deluded. Thankfully a part always
| stays skeptical. Being skeptical saved me and it made me stop
| meditating for a while and now I have it at a level where it's
| beneficial.
| froh wrote:
| looking for a good level for myself, I'm curious which
| practice and level you find beneficial for yourself?
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Thanks for the summary.
|
| Not the first time I hear about these negative side effects,
| but every time I'm reminded of the possibility I'm surprised.
|
| It also reminds me however that my meditation practice is
| infinitely shallower than what people suffering negative
| consequences describe.
|
| There was a time where I would practice very rigorously (for me
| at least) and all I can remember is that I felt more empathy
| and emotion but never in a bad sense. I remember getting
| tearful if I heard a story of human suffering, and I also
| remember getting quasi-orgasmic sensations with food. Never
| things like losing it at a traffic jam.
|
| I wish I could recover the positives, but unfortunately I don't
| remember what my practice consisted of back in the day. Maybe I
| should go to a class or something.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I personally had intense experiences pretty quickly but
| didn't overdo it after. I (now) have a healthy respect of
| psychedelic experiences.
|
| As another commenter said, don't overdo things.
|
| Edit: whether you get more intense experiences likely is some
| function of how stable and sensitive you are, what other
| experiences you already had and how much you meditate.
|
| I imagine that very grounded people don't get problems as
| quickly. That's a good thing, not shallowness.
| emoII wrote:
| > It also reminds me however that my meditation practice is
| infinitely shallower than what people suffering negative
| consequences describe.
|
| Actually, the author describe people having similar negative
| experiences just from dabbling with meditation apps, so the
| catalyst is not necessarily a 14-day silent retreat, but
| rather something more intangible, in which case it could
| happen to anyone, really
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Trying to <<gain>> something from mindfullness/budism is a bad
| one. Is adviseable that people with drug use history refrain
| from using drugs for an extended period of time before taking
| on other mind altering experiences. I believe the grove of the
| brain need some repairing. Disrupting natural processes like
| breathing is not adviseable for beginners and probably
| unnecesary anyway. Beware of powerfull exercises and quick
| fixes, people get damaged by reckless/selfish/clueless gurus
| very often. Usually slow, gentle exercising over longer period
| of time is more benefical. For sone meditation in motion like
| Tai Chi works best. And finally you will not stop being an
| idi0t just by meditating, you are likely to turn into an idi0t
| with a lot of energy! Probably the biggest pitfall.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| > _it's mostly about the negative side effects of meditation
| that the author believes is under-documented or under-reported_
|
| Before this article, I didn't know meditation could have _any_
| adverse effect. Until today, I haven ' read a single depiction,
| a single _mention_ of meditation going wrong. Except in
| fictions.
|
| So this claim that one does not simply learn about the negative
| side effects of meditation sounds very plausible to me.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanus1861 wrote:
| I did a 10 day meditation (vipassana) few years ago. I remember
| some fellow meditators (majority of the sessions are in a hall
| full of meditators) having emotionally intense experiences
| (someone would cry inconsolably, someone will shout for few
| moments suddenly). I personally per say did not experience any
| such external emotional outburst but definitely got better
| clarity and calmness towards daily routine life.
|
| The output of meditation is supposed to be a clearer mind from
| before and it may take a while to reach the desired state of
| mind. Stoicism should not be misinterpreted as having no zest
| for life. One psychologist I know told me something that made
| an impression on me "Just because life is going to end or that
| many good things come to an end eventually doesn't mean you
| should not enjoy the present". I am sure different people have
| different outcomes but I think the purpose of meditation is to
| learn the joy of life. One could see stoicism as being
| pessimistic towards life. I personally see meditation as a tool
| that hopefully helps you derive the joy of living in every
| moment of your daily existence while not being attached to it
| so that that if the circumstance changes, you don't lose the
| joyfulness and adapt to the new things in life knowing that the
| change won't last either.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| These sorts of things have been dealt with for centuries by
| Buddhists, it's a fairly common effect when you start with
| Zazen. This is why taking one part of the practice and
| abandoning the rest (most specifically, an experienced teacher)
| isn't a great idea for everyone. Most of the time all you need
| to hear is "just let whatever comes up during Zazen go, and
| return to the moment" but alas, if you don't things can go a
| bit wrong.
|
| I don't think it's actively harmful, but the "mindfulness
| industry" is full of charlatans and poor advice, and it does
| make me rather sad that it's being monetised in such a way.
|
| Just sit.
| [deleted]
| throwaway_zen wrote:
| > the "mindfulness industry" is full of charlatans and poor
| advice
|
| Thank you for saying this.
|
| There is an endless, dangerous trend of dismissing monastic
| traditions like Zen and trying to extract meditation from its
| context, under the assumption that teachings and formal
| practice are unnecessary.
|
| It happens in scientific research on meditation as well as on
| popular McMindfullness.
| babyblueblanket wrote:
| Isn't this a common/popular stereotype in so many movies?
| Hoity-toity protagonist believes they're more
| educated/better than the savages who follow old tradition,
| then have to eat some humble pie.
|
| An age old tale we can't seem to learn.
| [deleted]
| blunte wrote:
| Every industry is full of charlatans and poor advice.
| Unfortunately, some cost you more than just lost money or
| lost time.
|
| In this case, however, the participants may more likely be
| vulnerable. They are seeking some solution to their
| problems, and mindfulness is promoted as one. As the author
| makes the case, it really was a solution to his problems.
| But it seems he took it too far.
| lhorie wrote:
| One take I heard about yoga that kinda applies here is "if
| yoga is injuring you, your _understanding_ of it is wrong "
|
| I think the underlying issue with all these asian-
| spiritualism-turned-western-nouveau-health is that western
| people sometimes come in wanting things to be intense,
| clinical and goal-oriented. But that's literally the opposite
| of what most of what these disciplines are all about. Asian
| health upkeep practices (yoga, tai chi, meditation, radio
| taiso, etc) are mostly about gentle but consistent practice
| to keep gears oiled for the long run. Most of those aren't
| even meant to be healing disciplines.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| "western people sometimes come in wanting things to be
| intense, clinical and goal-oriented."
|
| That describes me exactly. I spent forever look for a
| "quantified meditation" course.
|
| I even kept a mediation journal where I could track how
| many times I lost track of my breath in a 5 minute session.
| I started out around 50 and was desperately trying to get
| to 0.
|
| I even used an app that counts taps, that I would rest
| under my finger, so that I could mark each failure as
| quickly and easily as possible. Without trying to
| "remember" the count of failures because it would distract
| me from the breath.
|
| I felt that if I could get to 0, that I wouldn't be ready
| for enlightenment, but I would at least achieve ACCESS
| CONCENTRATION and be able to enter the stream. At that
| point, it could become a spiritual practice, but I wanted
| to develop sufficient concentration abilities and conquer
| my ADHD before thinking too much about what mediation was
| actually for.
|
| It's been really hard for me to let go of the idea that my
| meditation needs a score to track my progress.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Woah that seems really the polar opposite of what I
| practice..
|
| I think you're doing yourself a bit wrong with this
| approach.
|
| Can I suggest a book to you? It's "Sit down and shut up"
| by Brad Warner, it may help.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Just downloaded it from Audible. Thanks.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, that feels bad and opposite
| indeed. I wonder what percentage of westerners approach
| it with this type of gym mindset?
| oasisbob wrote:
| _if yoga is injuring you, your understanding of it is
| wrong_
|
| That feels a lot like either victim blaming, or being fed a
| No True Scotsman truism and accepting it.
|
| One could say the same thing about staying within their
| skill level for any high-risk adventure sport. "If that
| advanced ski course is injuring you ...."
| [deleted]
| lhorie wrote:
| It's interesting that you brought up high risk sports.
| The context of that quote was related to people injuring
| themselves by being too aggressive on stuff they should
| know better (one example was a relatively advanced
| practitioner pulling a calf muscle on a downward dog of
| all things). That's an example of a type of injury where
| the person sets goals (e.g. stretching to some specific
| previously achieved limit) without paying attention to
| the current state of the body (e.g. it's a fairly well
| known phenomenon that muscles are tighter in the morning
| than early evening, especially before warm ups).
|
| Yoga isn't about quantified stretch goals, it's a daily
| fitness regime. So if you pull a leg muscle by going on a
| super deep downward dog first thing in the morning
| without warming up because you're aspiring to reach some
| guru-like level quickly, instead of seeing yoga as a
| fitness program to carry your body to old age, then yes,
| your understanding of the practice _is_ wrong.
| justsomeuser wrote:
| I think you are ignoring the fact that people have different
| brains. Sure, persist through mild discomfort.
|
| But would you advise people who are hallucinating to do the
| same?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| My teacher would, and has, yes. But I wouldn't advise
| anyone to do that, or even get into that situation in a
| hippy dippy setting with a bunch of dreadlocked "teachers"
| who have studied just one aspect of the Buddhist tradition
| from deepak chopra, no.
|
| The stuff that comes up, including the hallucinations, are
| brought to the surface through your practice, but they are
| not caused by it. The only way to deal with them is with an
| experienced teacher, therapist or with self discipline (the
| latter i only include as seemingly this is what shakyamuni
| apparently did).
|
| Everyone is different, I agree, but sitting with
| inexperienced people and expecting some enlightenment
| experience is definitely going to go wrong for you.
| shmageggy wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of inappropriate advice that the
| author is cautioning against. He was not just starting out,
| he had experienced teachers, and the horriffic panic-attack-
| like state he was not something that could have been
| addressed by "returning to the moment".
| cyberpunk wrote:
| He was an instructor in "Mindfulness-Based Stress
| Reduction" -- sorry, this is not a real thing. He's been
| teaching things he clearly does not understand, and his
| mind was blown by this. When I say "a teacher would tell
| you to come back to the moment" it's not quite as simple as
| I make it sound, the key thing is who the advice is coming
| from (read: an actual zen teacher who has received
| transmission, not a charlatan mindfulness camp fleecing
| wannabe mindfulness bro's out of several hundred dollars to
| sit with no experience for 10 days).
|
| I don't really have much sympathy here, it seems, but I
| don't really understand how one could not expect something
| like this to happen unless they really avoided speaking to
| anyone with actual experience (which, yes, means a zen
| monk, and not someone who spent 3 days in a Hilton
| doubletree learning how to teach people to 'breathe' and
| 'unlock their chakras' -- which is all bollocks.)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" the key thing is who the advice is coming from (read:
| an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not
| a charlatan mindfulness camp fleecing wannabe mindfulness
| bro's out of several hundred dollars to sit with no
| experience for 10 days)"_
|
| Why Zen specifically? There are many different types of
| Buddhism.
|
| Even if it does have to be Zen, which kind of Zen? Rinzai
| or Soto, or some mix of the two (which some Zen schools
| advocate)?
|
| And why Buddhism, anyway? Meditation is practiced in many
| different religious traditions.
|
| "mindfulness" is itself rooted in the Theraveda -- not
| Zen -- Buddhist tradition, but that doesn't necessarily
| mean that the "right" way to meditate must be a Buddhist
| way as opposed to, say, one of the many Hindu forms of
| meditation.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I can only speak from my own experience as a Soto zen
| Buddhist. It's ridiculous really, to spend years staring
| at a wall.
|
| Of course there are many paths, however I am only aware
| of the one I've been down. So, yeah, I have zen tinted
| glasses on such subjects and whatever I am saying should
| be taken with the appropriate sodium chloride.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| No one is obligated to list every facet to anything just
| to tickle your "I'm included in what some random person
| is saying". The commenter is speaking out of _their own_
| experience. It 's not about you. Actually add something
| regarding those other practices instead of virtue
| signaling.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| The OP is mentioning different forms to probably indicate
| some forms might be easier to learn.
|
| If you don't have anything positive or constructive to
| add, why not stay silent? That too is a form of
| mediation.
| shmageggy wrote:
| So, to clarify, you are aligning with the view he's
| opposing in the article that if someone has a profoundly
| negative experience due to meditation they're just "doing
| it wrong". That the practice, when done a certain way,
| carries 0% risk for very bad effects?
| stelonix wrote:
| No, he's stating what the author seems to have missed:
| mindfulness is not Buddhism; mindfulness is _based_ on
| some Buddhist teachings. The author talks about
| meditation, mindfulness and Buddhism as if it were all
| the same thing, but that 's not true. It just shows that
| whatever they're selling as "mindfulness" lacks what
| basic zen teaches. The author is blissfully ignorant of
| Buddhism and it's not his fault: that's how he learned
| it. What's his fault is that he's spreading what he
| learned as if it were truth, which simply isn't.
|
| There's no worldwide buddhist conspiracy to shun the
| "bad" parts of meditation, the post author learned from
| teachers with no qualification.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| If one is thinking about these experiences as "right" or
| "wrong", they have certainly failed.
|
| Uncomfortable, sure. Experiencing the dark night of the
| soul is not meant to be comfy. It can be rewarding
| though. Sometimes it is merely insight into our physical
| and psychological make up though. I don't care what kind
| of adventures one gets into but if you start getting
| extreme with them, you're eventually going to experience
| some really sketchy, uncomfortable, and even life-
| threatening situations.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Yes, essentially.
| shmageggy wrote:
| That just seems wildly unlikely to me. We're talking
| about a practice whose goal is to manipulate the brain,
| an organ that has been called the most complex object in
| the universe, something that centuries of science have
| only begin to understand, and that comes with vast and
| poorly understood diversity across people. There are
| first hand and scientific accounts of this happening,
| albeit rarely, to experienced and knowledgeable people.
| To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a
| foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered
| states of consciousness seems implausible.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Well, keep in mind this is a practice that as far as we
| know people have been practicing for at least 2600 years,
| I think doing things like a 5-10 day Vipassana retreat is
| _not_ a risk free thing, but you really shouldn't be
| doing those unless you are ready.
|
| I follow the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, my teacher
| would not allow me to go to Sessin (which is a multi day
| meditation retreat) until I had been practicing for like
| two years, and I had a lot of stuff come to the surface
| at my first one that really disturbed me... however, I
| had my teacher there, and he knew exactly what to say and
| do to help me through it as he has been through the same.
| He would not have permitted me to leave in such a
| disturbed state.
|
| This guy would not be able to do that for his students,
| and even for himself he didn't even know about such
| things. This is bad, and more stories like this will
| happen as long as charlatans are taking one aspect of an
| established practice and ignoring the rest.
|
| As a whole, shikantaza when practiced with a teacher is
| safe. Things like breath awareness, vipassana and such I
| think are harmful, but that is due to my training and
| perhaps I am wrong, but for sure, meditation without the
| "rest" is largely a money machine these days, and people
| will be harmed by that.
|
| Edit: I would also add that shikantaza as opposed to
| other forms of meditation is not about manipulating the
| brain in any way, but simply observing it. This is why we
| do not do things with a goal, such as counting of breaths
| or trying to still the mind. Simply sit, observe, and the
| stillness comes with no effort. There is no goal, and no
| enlightenment. There is no separation of practice and
| experience, the practice _is_ enlightenment.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| Interesting. I had never even imagined that meditation
| could be so distressing. I don't know anything about Zen
| really, do you feel the article gives a good impression
| of being in a disturbed state from meditation or would
| you say it's likely inaccurate in general?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| All zazen enables you to do is observe yourself and your
| reality very closely; this includes the good and the bad.
| Seeing under the veil of the stories we spin for
| ourselves to function can be extremely freeing but at the
| same time also very difficult to cope with.
|
| I can't make a call either way in the authors mental
| state, but clearly there was stuff going on unrelated to
| meditation which he clearly needs some help dealing with.
| krageon wrote:
| > I had never even imagined that meditation could be so
| distressing.
|
| It was not evident to you that taking some time to be
| alone with yourself could be uncomfortable? It's almost a
| polar opposite to how most people live their lives. I am
| genuinely curious what made you believe otherwise - I
| cannot imagine it.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| He mentions sharing his experiences with teachers who
| seem to be clueless, not his fault, is it?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| You can pick your teachers...
| Zababa wrote:
| Reading about your experience makes me realize that the
| mindfulness industry is probably another case of trying
| to remove the human element to improve scalability, with
| terrible results.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Or profit heh. How much do you recon headspace is worth?
| ;)
| mandmandam wrote:
| >To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a
| foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered
| states of consciousness seems implausible.
|
| ... Why would that be implausible, at least for non-
| pedantic values of risk-free?
|
| More and more, modern neuroscience confirms aspects of
| Buddhist teaching; from the nature of self to the
| workings of emotion. Buddhist meditation practice has
| been shown to have real and permanent (and positive)
| effects. Monks have studied the workings of the mind in
| altered and unaltered states for lifetimes, over
| thousands of years. Can you name any practice more
| effective? Because if you can, I'm certain the monks will
| be interested.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > an actual zen teacher who has received transmission,
| not a charlatan
|
| I'm really hoping you were going for darkly ironic
| humour, if not, please reread your sentence I quoted and,
| I don't know, contemplate on it.
|
| Received transmission? From the Trisolarians perhaps?
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Transmission is a form of teaching/learning.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's just another word for matriculation - to contrast
| from those that learn meditation from YouTube.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Transmission refers to receiving chi, or a spark of
| energy from an advanced teacher. Perhaps less snark, and
| more curiosity would serve you on topics like this.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Transmission simply means their teacher considers them
| ready to also become teachers, it's not some whoo science
| fiction mind meld or something... There are some cases of
| teachers giving this out inappropriately however these
| are rather obvious if you were to speak to one who has
| achieved the real deal vs not..
|
| Buddhism is largely an oral tradition, in that the
| teachers who exist today can trace their education back
| up a tree, this is all I mean by transmission.
| spadros wrote:
| I've practiced zen and Tibetan Buddhism for years. They
| both contain lots of "spiritual bullocks woo" at times,
| as does most forms of Buddhism I've encountered. You
| really need to filter out the good parts for yourself, I
| find. There are many paths to "meditation" or
| "mindfulness"; I disagree that those are necessarily
| separate traditions. This sounds like a "No true
| Scotsman" type fallacy.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| This is really what led me to soto, I don't buy into the
| ritual, the chanting (unless it's at a sessin, and even
| then only for the bonding experience) and the codes and
| so on of a lot of the other sects. Soto to me is a very
| pure expression, I'm also not a big fan of the Sotoshu
| (my teacher calls them the "funeral directors
| association") and the more established Soto schools like
| the SF Zen Center.
|
| Soto, as I understand it, is all about just shikantaza.
| The rest is optional. I don't shave my head and wear
| robes, I just sit.
|
| It took me a while, but this shoe fits. I read Dogen and
| he seems to agree with this for the most part, but of
| course ymmv.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| The author certainly had a meditation practice, maybe even
| a meditation habit. But it sounded very naive and like
| amateur hour to me.
|
| I would think any moderately well-traveled psychonaut would
| not be surprise by anything that the author experienced..
| stelonix wrote:
| This is exactly what I took from it. He uses the terms
| "mindfulness" and "Buddhism" interchangeably, but they're
| not. Buddhism has ways to deal with meditations that "go
| bad", but mindfulness takes the Buddhism out of the practice.
|
| Mindfulness is not Buddhism.
| ljm wrote:
| I wouldn't conflate mindfulness (or capital M mindfulness,
| you could say) with meditation either.
|
| Meditation has always been a deeply spiritual practice;
| Mindfulness attempts to turn it into a psychological,
| clinical one.
| loopz wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > "I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway,
| buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an
| on-campus pond at UCLA. I was unsettled yet intrigued by
| Britton's message. Some of the adverse experiences she
| had described were similar to challenges I had faced.
| But, at this point I was a decade into my intensive
| mindfulness meditation practice. I was too deep to get
| out. "
|
| There's just so many things that is bad with this new-new
| age wave.
|
| First of all, doing spiritual practices generally do not
| go hand-in-hand with taking drugs. Just taking marijuana
| or hash may bring panic attacks, and even psychotic
| episodes. If you rely on drugs to keep your emotions in
| check, you're already dealing with them wrong. Meditation
| together with drugs won't help that, but may worsen
| things if done intensively.
|
| Second, there's no such thing as "intensive mindfulness
| meditation practice". Mindfulness is gentle and short,
| and more about stillness than meditation.
|
| Third, "intensive meditation" is something everybody
| should be wary about. Max 20 minutes is recommended per
| day, and there is no need to do more in order to "get
| anywhere faster". Most important of all, do it with an
| experienced teacher you trust. The most important
| ingredient in meditation is to let go and relax, and is
| not yet another "work".
|
| In the end, something can always go wrong. Not everyone
| can deal with meditation, and not sure if there's a way
| to ensure to filter out people. Often people come to
| classes because they have some issues, not when
| everything's alright. So there are already things to deal
| with. Recommended is that people doing medication like
| antipsychotics, should be prescreened from joining class.
|
| In the end, meditation is a powerful tool. But not sure
| the stress of Western life is the right way to channel
| the clarity and calmess one may get from it. You may come
| back from long retreats, but need tools to deal with the
| stresses in modern day life. So just meditation may be
| too confusing or not enough, to deal with one's life once
| more.
| ljm wrote:
| Intensive meditation does seem to be oxymoronic, too.
|
| Meditation will take you down many unknown paths:
| difficult paths, painful paths, joyful paths...
|
| An intensive meditation sounds more like a doing, like
| hitting the gym hard on a 30 day diet plan, rather than a
| state of being meditative and progressively turning
| inwards. You can't intensively find your inner peace, as
| an intense thing isn't a peaceful thing.
|
| To my mind, intensive meditation is still going to result
| in something that feeds the ego, rather than something
| that feeds the soul. You wouldn't call it intensive if it
| wasn't ego-driven.
| cranesnake wrote:
| Marijuana intensifies many aspects of the mind. It's
| dangerous, but it like jumping into deep water to learn
| to swim, or training to drive on a fast, manual car. If
| you can bring your mind back from psychosis, you can
| bring it back from the lesser anxiety you felt before.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Crazy.
|
| Agree with everything, although I would say at least in
| Soto 45 mins seems to be the maximum for one period
| during sessin, and 15 of that will be kinhin (walking
| meditation), I tend to do about an hour a day in two
| sessions, but any longer and there isn't really any
| reward.
|
| Drugs are a hard no, I mean do them all you want but
| don't combine the two.
| loopz wrote:
| Of course, different traditions will have different
| meditation techniques of varying lengths. There are many,
| and best to follow one path where people don't experiment
| too much on you and themselves. That the same techniques
| have been practiced for a looong time (think: like a
| vaccine!).
|
| As a "beginner" meditator, 20 mins a day is plenty
| though. As an "experienced" meditator 20 mins is enough
| too (you may in time meditate anytime/anywhere).
|
| It's when people take on themselves to "do much more",
| mix several spiritual practices or follow cults that do
| extreme regimes that things might sometimes get crazy.
| Most people do OK, but there are people who need
| medication or have deep-rooted issues that maybe should
| not be doing meditation, at least not until those issues
| have been settled.
|
| Another issue is that some deeper practices were
| basically developed for monks, to be learned after years
| of initiation and acceptance.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >Meditation has always been a deeply spiritual practice;
| Mindfulness attempts to turn it into a psychological,
| clinical one.
|
| Interestingly this is covered in the context of
| psychedelics too (which in my opinion are often touted in
| a similarly misleading way) by Dr Rick Strassman's
| fascining _DMT: The Spirit Molecule_. Making things like
| this too clinical or for lack of a better word _mundane_
| can alter their effects enormously.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed that you shouldn't conflate them, but there are
| many types of meditation that you can practice and:
|
| - not all are rooted in spirituality
|
| - some are directly related to mindfulness
|
| I find that if I meditate regularly, I'm more likely to
| catch myself practicing mindfulness by accident in my
| daily life. In those moments I usually discover something
| about my surroundings that I didn't know before. Really
| practical stuff, like an unexplored trail that's a better
| way to take on my commute home from work.
|
| Intentionally practicing mindfulness is fine, but for me
| it's the cases of being mindful without explicitly
| setting the intention that make it worthwhile. They're
| really pleasant, nothing spiritual about it.
|
| And meditation is linked to those moments because, if I'm
| lucky, it causes them.
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| Here is a multi-hour playlist from a retreat by Sujato on
| the main mindfulness sutta that covers various points
| like this;
|
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL70fWqztn7OXdbGqWEOvhO
| Vqf...
| namlem wrote:
| Mindfulness is a category of meditation, which has been
| somewhat bastardized in the West. Most Buddhist practices
| incorporate both mindfulness and focus-oriented types of
| meditation.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| montenegrohugo wrote:
| Appreciated!
| raincom wrote:
| Isn't (esp dissociative experiences) what is called "dark
| nights" in the Buddhist traditions?
| bencollier49 wrote:
| The "Dark Night" is typically attributed to St. John of the
| Cross, although I'd be willing to believe that the term has
| been used in other traditions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul
|
| Ah, note the last paragraph in this article:
|
| 'In modern mindfulness practice, many authors have named a
| similar phenomenon in meditation as the dark night of the
| soul after the poem. It is often described as a lengthened
| and intense state of depression or ennui caused by errant or
| irresponsible meditation practices. Author John Yates
| compares it to a Theravadan term, dukkha nanas, or
| "knowledges of suffering".'
| Leparamour wrote:
| >irresponsible meditation practices
|
| I can't imagine what an irresponsible meditation practice
| would look like. Any pointers?
| orwin wrote:
| Meditating alone for starter? Meditating too long.
| Meditating before your day start and you get into
| stressfull situation.
|
| It should be done step by step, carefully.
|
| I think philosophers talked about habitus, and nowadays
| we might be able to "fix" phobia with a mix of MRI and
| reinforcement learning, slowly. Or how to reduce your
| fear of falling when rockclimbing, by falling "on
| purpose" when you are in between pitons by an
| increasingly large length.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| It's worth ruminating on the fact that all medicines are
| also poisons. This is why homeopathy is so safe.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Ah, this needs explaining - any tool which can cure can
| also cause injury. Too much of a medicine will kill.
|
| Homeopathy is useless, which is why you can't harm anyone
| with it.
|
| Meditation _does_ work, which is why is can also be
| dangerous.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| In Buddhism, one big one would be not keeping in mind the
| primary goal of non-attachment. Non-attachment to bliss,
| horror, expectations, and certainly not to any goal.
|
| The Biography of Naropa would make an amazing horror
| movie. Really wild read as well.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Meditating without an experienced and well trained
| teacher.
| bobthechef wrote:
| I would be very careful in comparing what St. John means
| and what is meant in the Buddhist sense. See [0] for those
| interested in a brief comparison.
|
| Selected quotes:
|
| "The ultimate end of man for Christians is union with God,
| while for Buddhists it is Nirvana (complete detachment, or
| a state of nothingness)."
|
| "For Buddhists, salvation is a privation of individual
| consciousness; for Catholics salvation is an eternally
| fulfilling relationship with a loving Creator."
|
| "For both Buddhists and Catholics "detachment" is
| important, but for Catholics detachment is not an end in
| itself. St. Francis de Sales preached that man must desire
| to "possess his soul" rather than allow it to be possessed
| by worldly things. Catholics pursue this for the purpose of
| elevating their soul by offering it back to Christ. So
| detachment is a means to a rich and meaningful "higher
| awareness" (if you will) that reaches its culmination in
| seeing God face to face."
|
| So this (temporary) dark night of the soul ultimately leads
| to a deeper, perhaps more mystical relationship with God.
|
| [0] https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/catholicism-
| and-b...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| He may have a good grasp of what Catholicism is about,
| but his grasp of Buddhism seems pretty shallow. I would
| not take this article on faith.
| rocqua wrote:
| The article mentions that he experienced this, read about the
| dark night and the advice to "push through it" and that that
| advice backfired horribly.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Yes, this is mentioned explicitly in the article too.
| blunte wrote:
| I think it's also worth noting the extent of time and focus he
| dedicated to this practice before the negatives appeared.
|
| Putting in 10% of what this guy put in would likely give you
| measurable benefits without the disassociation risks, unless
| you already have some mental peculiarities.
| stinos wrote:
| _in the way that it renders a person not less, but more
| susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses_
|
| That should be _can render_ I think, the author seems well
| aware that what happened about him isn 't bound to happen to
| anyone.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Good idea, I just corrected it. Thanks.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Do poor people have breakdowns? Always read about rich or middle
| class people having breakdowns or burning out. Dude is on a
| Buddhist retreat and has a meltdown, but I feel like poor people
| rarely get like this, they just trudge on.
| rain1 wrote:
| I've been meditating for years and never had any problems.
| calkuta wrote:
| Like psychadelics, these meditation practices are a journey to
| the limits of our consciousness. Acceptance of all that comes is
| an essential starting point.
| pphysch wrote:
| Sounds like a bad trip. Not saying it was in this case, but I
| could definitely imagine seedy retreats putting a little
| something "extra" in the evening supper to boost the spiritual
| RoI of their service offering.
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| " In 2011, I sat my first meditation retreat in the Vipassana
| tradition of S.N Goenka. I spent ten days in silence, focusing on
| my breath and body for 10 to 12 hours a day. It was grueling, but
| toward the end of the retreat I had a life-changing experience."
|
| In hindsight sight, maybe he should have got out on top.
| gerbilly wrote:
| The guy who invented this, the historical Buddha, recommended
| many more techniques than just vipassana.
|
| I think what happened in the west, is that--aside from zen
| centres/monasteries which draw upon a wider, established set of
| traditions and practices1--we have focused too much on a single
| technique.
|
| Especially in clinical settings. I imagine that to get your
| therapy to be approved in clinical settings, and to get funding,
| you have to publish papers and your paper can't be a survey of
| hundreds of differing 'treatment' approaches.
|
| You would get more traction by isolating a potent subset,
| preferably a single one, and then using it and publishing your
| results.
|
| None of what I said above is to imply cynical motives to the
| researchers doing this, it's just the usual reductionist
| worldview applied to a tradition spanning thousands of years, and
| what happens when "early results are promising."
|
| tl;dr: Buddhism is more than just Vipassana. There are multiple
| techniques that complement, counteract each other. The Buddhist
| 'system' included different approaches for different personality
| types. More is not always better.
|
| [1] Not that 'tradition' is sufficient to insulate these
| organisations from problems either.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| One item that i found intriguing is the research that negative
| experiences are more common than people think.
|
| One must wonder, why this is not common knowledge? Also, are
| there causation links, or not?
|
| My personal conclusion is that the sample is biased -- that is,
| some people seeking meditation are looking to self-medicate
| (subconsciously or not) on personal issues they wish to overcome.
|
| It would seem that perhaps a non-trivial portion of meditation
| practitioners are ending up with worse outcomes than they started
| out.
|
| One is left to wonder whether meditation practice should come
| with warning labels ( just like medication does for adverse
| effects)...
| ljm wrote:
| A lot of it can come from those self-help books that are, in
| reality, thinly veiled sales pitches intended to market the
| author as some sort of consultant.
|
| You'll only ever read about the happy path or the success
| story, with some lip-service paid to how difficult it is to
| actually do in practice. You'll rarely get the raw detail of
| it, or a fully authentic account.
|
| I'm not talking about quality literature here, but the short
| 250-pager you'd pick up in an airport bookshop that makes you
| feel good by the time you finish.
| sgeorge96 wrote:
| Ffs just be normal.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Also, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
| rnd0 wrote:
| Ok, fine. First define "normal", then answer the question of
| "normal according to who".
|
| If it was just that simple, you wouldn't have entire industries
| (self help seminars, retreats, religious cults of all kinds,
| pop psychology, and so forth) built on looking for an
| alternative.
| teekert wrote:
| Have you ever met a normal Human being? And was it a nice
| experience?
| barrenko wrote:
| The real point of meditation is immolation of the person doing
| it. Done correctly, no Buddhism or religion can help you. Vehicle
| is discarded after destination.
|
| Caveat empor, act accordingly.
| w4llstr33t wrote:
| I've practiced mindfulness and meditation for more than a decade.
|
| Mindfulness, as I've learned it, means being aware of your
| thoughts and feelings, introducing positive thoughts and
| feelings, and replacing negative thoughts and feelings.
|
| Meditation is also meant to be positive. You start with short
| sessions. The idea is to slow down and eventually stop your
| thoughts.
|
| From what I've heard, a lot people just fall asleep at Vipassana
| retreats, due to the long meditation sessions, which would not be
| very useful. The way I learned meditation is that short, focused
| sessions are better than long sessions where you don't focus /
| just fall asleep. Based on this article, it sounds like these
| extended sessions might even be dangerous for some (almost like
| sensory deprivation or psychedelics can be in some cases).
|
| Meditation on its own is not dangerous. The idea is to feel more
| grounded and centered after. The idea is to focus and develop
| your concentration. Otherwise, it's just "spacing out", which
| I've always been told is not meditation. If you space out and
| start to go into weird states of mind, that is not meditation,
| that is just dissociating / falling asleep / etc. There is a
| difference.
|
| There's nothing wrong with slowing down your thoughts. If people
| think that slowing down your thoughts is dangerous, to me that
| just sounds like the ego not wanting to lose its grasp. Egos can
| be almost as crazy as someone having a psychotic break. It's fine
| to let yourself rest in your natural state for a little while.
| Nothing wrong with that. In my experience, that actually makes
| you more balanced then someone overthinking their whole life /
| not being aware of what's going on inside themselves.
|
| I'm not a doctor, so get help if you need it, but one suggestion
| for a meditation practice is to start with 15 minutes a day,
| morning and evening. Set aside some space in your home and sit
| quietly for that period of time. Build up from there. Sitting in
| nature can also be helpful. If you start to feel weird, try to
| use your mindfulness practice during the day of focusing on
| positive things to get yourself out of it. Don't stay in a
| dissociated state, that is unproductive and potentially
| dangerous. If that doesn't work, stop and come back at a later
| time.
|
| Meditation and mindfulness are meant to support one other. They
| are not exactly the same, but they are related. When you start to
| meditate you will become aware of how many thoughts you are
| having (most people go day to day not paying that much
| attention). With mindfulness, you practice directing your mind in
| a more positive way (i.e. neuroplasticity, you are restructuring
| your mind with a positive intent). This helps your meditations be
| better and more productive, and helps your life be better and
| more productive.
|
| The way that I've been taught meditation and mindfulness are that
| they should be positive practices that support your life. If they
| are making life worse, something is off with that teacher or
| meditation school. Your own results can inform you if a teacher
| or meditation school is positive or not. If you're not getting
| positive results, that's not a good sign. These practices should
| make your life better.
| runyaga wrote:
| > replacing negative thoughts and feelings
|
| Really? That sounds like efforting.
|
| > The way that I've been taught meditation and mindfulness are
| that they should be positive practices that support your life.
| If they are making life worse, something is off with that
| teacher or meditation school.
|
| Um. This is not the accurate from vajrayana point of view and
| certainly didn't seem the case from the theravada school (when
| I practiced at IMS.). The waking up process is incredibly
| painful. As Ken Mcleod says - if you can avoid going down a
| spiritual path - avoid it. It is nothing but a pandora's box.
|
| Witnessing suffering is hard. I would say the first two years
| of practice for me was pretty difficult. Setting aside
| transient mental states - just being aware of my moment-to-
| moment suffering, striving, wanting, grasping, etc. Is hard.
| Very hard. It is neither positive nor negative.
|
| I am pretty convinced at this point that I have fully been
| brainwashed by Vajrayana teachings. I think something like
| Diamond Approach is more likely useful for people in the west.
| w4llstr33t wrote:
| I've studied Vajrayana, so it may vary per school.
|
| Nothing wrong with self-effort from what I've been taught.
| The idea with mindfulness if that if you are just aware of
| your thoughts, but don't do anything, it's not that helpful.
| It's like if someone is in a gutter and is mindful about
| that, they are still in a gutter. That can help them want to
| make a change, since that experience is probably not very
| pleasant, but the point is to make a change.
|
| The waking up process can bring up stuff, for sure, but the
| idea is to bring a positive mind the whole time. This is how
| you go through the stuff and don't just get stuck in it, you
| go through it.
|
| As far as I understand, past thoughts and actions build up
| karma which is basically the path folks will head down, since
| at that point it becomes automatic. That is the default state
| of being for those people. If they just go with it and don't
| try to change, they will do more of the same.
|
| Not everyone wants to get to the advanced stages of
| meditation, which can be intense. Some basic meditation and
| mindfulness can be used to improve peoples' lives though.
| Even just basic mindfulness, like what is taught by Chade-
| Meng Tan at Google, can be helpful. It all depends on what
| the individual wants. I'm not familiar with the Diamond
| Approach, but like I mentioned in my first comment, I think
| whatever people find that brings positive results in their
| lives is probably a good thing.
|
| It's posts like the article where I feel like certain
| spiritual teachers and schools are doing something wrong, if
| it's leading to someone having such a serious break down.
| That person might have had underlying issues, but as far as I
| can tell, meditation is pretty safe. Going farther on the
| spiritual path can be intense, and it's not for everyone, but
| what you learn in the basic practice helps you along the way
| so that you don't lose it when you get to the more advanced
| stages of meditation.
|
| You also mentioned non-duality which is a more advanced
| subject, i.e. looking at things as neither positive or
| negative. The way I've learned basic meditation and
| mindfulness is to try to think less, slow down your thoughts,
| be more aware of what you're thinking and feeling, and
| replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. This is
| pretty safe for beginners and the basics lay down the
| framework for more advanced meditation. I think it's good to
| hold off on the advanced subjects until people have a solid
| basic practice, but to each their own.
|
| I have found that there is some use in the beginning in terms
| of looking at things as positive or negative, so people can
| clean up their lives and minds, which allows for deeper
| practice as they progress. The end goal is to overcome all
| karma and go beyond good and bad, but I don't think people
| can be expected to do that right away, it takes practice. If
| people can even just think a little more positive, be more
| aware of everything that runs through their head, and maybe
| be a little less reactive with others, their lives will be
| better and likely their relationships, as well. That's
| probably pretty safe for the general public to try to do, if
| they want to. The more hardcore spiritual stuff is not for
| everyone (most people don't actually want it, they just want
| to feel a bit better, which is great, too).
| surfmike wrote:
| I see a lot of defensive comments here, but this post made me
| aware of the fact that there are a lot of documented cases of
| adverse effects of meditation as well. TLDR:
|
| > Willoughby Britton is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist,
| and associate professor at Brown University
|
| > The meat of Britton's talks was the results of a 2017 paper she
| co-published with her husband, Jared Lindahl, called the
| Varieties of Contemplative Experience1. In it, they examined
| distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of
| 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of
| adverse effects in their study, including involuntary
| convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual
| hypersensitivity--a far cry from the mainstream branding of
| mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
| krono wrote:
| This "Buddhist meditation retreat" in a tiny cabin in the North
| Carolina mountains goes way beyond the practicing mindfulness the
| author describes it as.
|
| As with everything else in life: don't overdo it.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| I am nowhere near the experienced meditator or Buddhist student
| that the author is but this part stuck out: " I described how on
| numerous occasions all my thoughts disintegrated and I bathed for
| extended periods of time in states of deep, non-conceptual bliss.
| I thought awakening was right around the corner "
|
| Isn't this particularly warned against in meditation? To me this
| is more akin to trance and in Buddhism, more akin to escapism and
| self-delusion. From a magical perspective, it seems obvious this
| guy was playing with fire.
|
| Just like the quote about how one can travel extensively and
| still leave all their preconceptions intact, people can meditate
| a lot and still leave their attachments intact. My impression was
| not that meditation leads to bliss; that's some New Age pap. It
| leads to awareness, and that includes the good, the bad, and the
| ugly.
|
| It sounds like the author may have delved into meditation enough
| to access the control panel, but that is a dangerous place to be.
| It's why there are so many safeguards built around it in the
| first place. I am just surprised that this was unexpected.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| So, the trouble is that meditation as a practice, was always
| embedded into a larger sense of spirit/community/whatever.
|
| The popularity of MBSR broke that largely, and now lots of
| people start meditating with the notion that it's just mental
| exercise (which it is, sortof) and are very unprepared for some
| of the negative side-effects (which are normally parts of the
| mind that your consciousness doesn't want to accept).
| ljm wrote:
| I wouldn't even call them negative, per se, even though you
| might perceive them as such.
|
| These are things you've held deep down that are, through your
| heightened self-awareness, being dragged kicking and
| screaming to the surface.
|
| Once the duck is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.
| You have to take care of the duck. Having a support network
| or community certainly helps, and the meditation just shone
| the light on what was already there.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| People like Aleister Crowley, Austin Spare, and modern
| psychonauts interested in chaos magic have worked/played in
| these spaces outside of established traditions and
| communities. And there have always been people like this. But
| they also fully expect some weirdness to occur.
|
| Meditation within a community and tradition is certainly a
| safer, and often more fruitful way to go about it, just like
| traveling anywhere with a group, a guide, on established
| paths, and with a good map. It's a good way to learn the
| ropes but some folks like to take more adventurous
| approaches.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Aleister Crowley
|
| I'm kinda with his student, Israel Regardie on this stuff
| though, which was that if you want to engage in spiritual
| practices, you should get therapy.
|
| Essentially the notion is that in order to deal with the
| divine/universe/whatever, you need to have dealt with the
| mundane.
|
| I think that this is really accurate, and would support
| this. Unfortunately, the "mindfulness" movement didn't
| really keep any of the baby when they experimented on the
| bathwater.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Agreed. I think therapy and counseling is under-rated and
| under-utilized. There are many situations in life where a
| counselor's help can be beneficial. It's not just for the
| weak, ill, or for people who have failed. And even the
| strongest among us have been all three at times.
|
| And New Age-type movements are not a good replacement.
| dogman144 wrote:
| "Sam Harris never warned me about _this_!"
| Zababa wrote:
| This is probably a relatively naive observation, but I've found
| that the way some people describe meditation and how their mind
| change is sometimes the same as how people describe their
| experience under psychadelics. These bad side effects of
| meditation sound a bit like a bad trip, but without being able to
| tell yourself that it's chemically induced and thus will stop in
| a few hours.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" These bad side effects of meditation sound a bit like a bad
| trip, but without being able to tell yourself that it's
| chemically induced and thus will stop in a few hours."_
|
| It's not uncommon to forget one has taken psychedelics when one
| is having a powerful trip, and just telling yourself that it's
| chemically induced and will stop in a few hours doesn't
| necessarily help.
|
| That's not to mention that while under the influence of
| psychedelics a single minute might seem like many lifetimes, or
| you could feel like you're in an infinite time loop and are
| never getting out, etc.
| Zababa wrote:
| That's totally fair. My point was, your experience (usually)
| stops at some point without you having to do anything. That
| doesn't seem to be the case with meditation.
| bingu wrote:
| Yes. From experience I can attest that they are two doors to
| the same house, so to speak.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Meditation under the influence, on the other hand, is a door
| to the ocean.
| jgilias wrote:
| Do you swim in it in eternal bliss? Or do you drown in it?
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Does "you" "swimming" or "drowning" "in" spatially
| experienced consciousness make sense?
| the_doctah wrote:
| >spatially experienced consciousness
|
| I understand it's supposed to be an abstract concept, but
| this statement still doesn't make sense
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| You experience your surroundings spatially through your
| senses every day. In the ordinary state of consciousness,
| this is sometimes called sense-experience. Now imagine
| experiencing your consciousness -- cognition, feelings,
| memories -- as the state of a boundless ocean, "you" in
| this case being the ocean experiencing itself in this
| way.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| As someone who dabbles in mushroom based psychedelics you are
| right. The sudden awareness of yourself, and even moreso the
| sudden awareness of 'not yourself' can be pretty frightening. I
| have had bad trips before, and they usually began with an
| untethering of yourself. Once you start floating outside of
| your life/personality, you can become very distressed with what
| is left. It can become almost scarring to see yourself from
| afar suffering so badly, but that be not yourself. It's hard to
| put into words, but that experience of intense disassociation,
| and the pain of being an observer to it is very real.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Definitely, there's more than one way to get to a different
| state of mind.
|
| Christian religions for example set a certain stage, create an
| atmosphere that puts people in a shared mental state.
| Meditative, perhaps. I can see (although never experienced
| myself) how that, if you let it "in", can lead to a "religious
| experience" / awakening of sorts.
|
| Worst one was that one time I was in an American evangelical
| church, the type where there's lots of music and the like. But
| also weird behaviour; during the sermon, lots of people around
| me had their hand up and were whispering "jesus", it was eerie
| as fuck to be honest. That line of churches does a lot with
| altering brain states though, one article I read mentioned
| measuring brain waves and seeing them enter an "alpha" state,
| similar to hypnosis and making people very susceptive to
| suggestions. Another example is exorcisms, where people go -
| let themselves go? - into a state of dissociation, speaking in
| tongues and spasming. I kinda see that as letting their own
| inhibitions go and letting the impulses take over.
|
| TL;DR not a scientist, just armchair theorizing and waffling.
| TL_DR wrote:
| Stop spiritual fornication and turn to the living God. Jeremiah
| 2:13 John 14:6
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I feel like saying something spooky like, "If you leave the front
| door open, you never know who will walk in", but the fact is that
| meditation is just a practice that emphasizes and strengthens
| certain brain states/EEG rhythms, neural synchronies, and given
| heterogeneity in brain structure, connectivity, and genomes,
| there will be no guarantee that this will be an entirely positive
| shift in neural dynamics. For analogy, for many people keeping
| themselves busy at work keeps themselves from constant rumination
| of a traumatic past.
| [deleted]
| shannifin wrote:
| I've had some very negative anxiety-driven experiences with
| dissociation (depersonalization / derealization / de-something-
| zation), usually when traveling to somewhere I'm unfamiliar with.
| It usually only lasts for 5 to 15 minutes rather than hours, but
| it does sound a lot like what he describes.
|
| Relating this to meditation: On the rare occasion that I try
| meditating, it doesn't trigger anything negative, but I have
| found that I can induce such negative dissociative experiences on
| purpose (at least to some degree) by inducing a certain
| meditative-like thought pattern. It's hard to describe, but it
| has to do with time. It's like the mind is usually thinking at
| least a fraction of a second ahead, it's focused at least just a
| little into the future. If you break that, then meaningfulness
| seems to collapse and... it's not good, and you have to snap out
| of it.
|
| I wonder if meditating is triggering something like that for the
| author.
|
| Instead of meditating, mindfulness, thinking about your own
| thinking and purposefully trying to dissociate from yourself by
| conscious force, it may be more helpful just to find something
| that helps you relax. The point is to clear away stressful
| thoughts and thought patterns by letting the mind focus on
| _something else_ rather than nothing (or itself).
| e9 wrote:
| What you describe in your example about mind stop being focused
| on the future sounds like when sound and video on TV is not
| synchronized and you become aware that you are watching the TV
| shannifin wrote:
| Haha... I hate that. I studied animation for a while years
| ago and became hyper aware of sound / video synchronization
| for a bit, it was super annoying. (Not nearly as bad as
| derealization though)
| weavie wrote:
| It should be noted that in the introduction to Mastering the Core
| Teachings of the Buddha, Daniel does say:
|
| > people who do strong and intensive practice can hurt them-
| selves and freak out. Just as serious athletes can hurt their
| bodies when they take a misstep or push themselves beyond their
| limits, just so serious mental athletes can strain their minds,
| brains, and nervous systems, and strained brains can sometimes
| function in very strange ways.
|
| > To rewrite the operating system rapidly while it is running
| doesn't always go so well in the short term or occasionally in
| the long term. Thus, while I will include nearly endless exhorta-
| tions to find the depths of power and clarity that you are
| capable of, I will also add numerous warnings about how to keep
| from frying yourself.
|
| > By "frying yourself", I mean explicitly severe mood instability
| and psychotic episodes, as well as other odd biological and
| energetic disturbances, with some practitioners occasionally
| ending up in inpatient psychiatric facilities for various periods
| of time.
| CretinDesAlpes wrote:
| This is an interesting discussion as I wasn't aware that
| meditation could go wrong if done improperly (never really
| thought about it). I have only started mindfulness recently, here
| in the UK via an NHS approved course (though not free...) called
| BeMindful. I haven't finished the course but so far I like it,
| and I am wondering what would you suggest for the best next
| steps?
|
| So far the list I have to explore is:
|
| * Thich Nhat Hanh and https://plumvillage.org
|
| * Joseph Goldstein
|
| * Sharon Salzberg
|
| * Apps (though I am a bit reluctant): Ten Percent Happier,
| Headspace
| damontal wrote:
| Try Gil Fronsdal. He's a good gentle meditation teacher.
| There's a podcast of his talks and guided meditations or you
| can find them here https://www.audiodharma.org/teacher/1/
| Buttons840 wrote:
| There's a wide range of experience being lumped under the terms
| "meditation" and "mindfulness" here.
|
| Alice finds a 5 minute walk after lunch improves her mood and
| suggests it to Bob. Bob mentions his brother was injured while
| walking a marathon. The ensuing conversation ends up not being
| very productive.
|
| For some, "mindfulness" means sitting for 5 minutes and observing
| the moment without goals, judgement, or expectation. For the
| author, "mindfulness" means week long retreats.
|
| As someone who sometimes suggests meditation, I am not saying the
| author is doing it wrong so much as I am saying that what he is
| doing is different than what I am suggesting.
|
| That said, the author's warning is important. Be careful doing
| the mindfulness equivalent of a marathon, but if your interested
| a 5 minute walk probably won't hurt.
| kixiQu wrote:
| > In a 2019 Vice article, Davidson suggested that those who
| have meditation-related difficulties simply aren't meditating
| correctly.
|
| > "I think that many of the people who are having difficulty
| and who are reporting that their problems are exacerbated by
| meditation are not meditating correctly, to put it simply and
| coarsely," he said, "Some might even say that they're not
| meditating. That they think they're meditating, but they're not
| really meditating.2"
|
| > His notion, contradicted by historical and contemporary
| accounts, is a fusion of victim-blaming and fundamental
| attribution error. Unable to entertain the possibility of
| deficiencies in the mechanism, he blames the meditator.
| kovacs_x wrote:
| my $.02 on this- just because you're not diagnosed and having
| "just anxiety and agression", doesn't mean youre ok and might be
| quite opposite- it's probably for a reasons, that your conscious
| mind protects you from, something you dont know and have
| forgotten, and no simple evaluation will find this out but when
| you yourself "stirr up" your unconcious mind, all this started to
| "leak" into conscious mind and it took you by surprise as you
| thought of yourself as "highly experienced".
|
| to me the cabin episode sounds like a LSD trip gone bad and no
| proper, experienced sitter resulting in a traumatic experience.
| nprateem wrote:
| Kundalini syndrome. Not great. Widely written about but you need
| to know where to look. Gopi Krishna is probably the most widely
| known case, but you only have to peruse Reddit's Kundalini subs
| for more.
|
| That's my issue with all this mindfulness stuff. A load of
| Westerners ripped the guts out of practices to shed the "dogma".
| But that "religion" they chucked out was the result of
| generations of people interpreting these strange experiences and
| is supposed to provide some kind of map of the terrain. Only
| since not everyone experiences spontaneous Kundalini events most
| of them don't understand the symbology.
|
| I'm told a guide is invaluable, if you're fortunate enough to
| track down someone legit.
| physicsgraph wrote:
| Whenever I read about a novice practitioner having a Kundalini
| experience, I wonder how experienced the retreat host(s) are.
| Or if the person had a mentor with sufficient experience.
|
| While there are many spiritual interpretations, there is also
| practical advice online for recovering. Walking outside
| (experiencing nature) is commonly suggested.
|
| Accidentally stumbling into this disorienting experience could
| be (and in the case of this author, was) traumatic.
| nprateem wrote:
| Kundalini goes up. Apparently to integrate the experience you
| need to bring it back down. This is the Descent of the Dove I
| think in Christianity (or the decent of grace). Whereas the
| kundalini is supposed to be hot sometimes described as liquid
| fire ("baptism of fire" - see where that comes from?), the
| descending current is meant to be cooling.
|
| The Taoists are most vocal about the decent, incorporating it
| into the Microcosmic Orbit practice. Some yogis do also
| mention it but for them it's related to a return to the heart
| rather than the lower dan tien.
|
| Anyway this is mostly theory for me at this point. I've seen
| enough to convince myself it's a real phenomenon but didn't
| see it through. I think I might not be too far off now
| though, but we'll see...
|
| As to your point about novices I have read that different
| people react in different ways. Some just seem primed for
| rapid progress while some have to work for decades.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _When Buddhism Goes Bad - How My Mindfulness Practice Led Me To
| Meltdown_
|
| Well, meditation and buddhism are supposed to be a way of life,
| not a stress reliever or a passtime. You can't be living like a
| modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side (or
| merely try to half-follow some general tenets in your everyday
| totally non-bhudist life).
|
| Or rather you can, and thousands do, and there are fancy retreats
| and the like, but then you're a tourist to the whole thing, and
| what you do has little to do with the original spirit and what
| makes it work - which is all about context (even if there's a
| plethora of second rate, several times removed from the culture,
| snakeoil books in the shelves selling this exact approach).
|
| Leonard Cohen spending 5 years on the monastery got it far more
| right.
|
| > _I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers
| who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators._
|
| Aka, some random guys who've read some books, perhaps studied
| under another random guy in the same line of work, opened their
| own retreat (or work in one), and play the role of buddhist
| luminaries for lucrative western audiences....
|
| > _As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR),
| I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A
| longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice
| over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation
| retreats. I'm extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and
| secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on
| the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned
| Western meditation teachers._
|
| In other words, they've made a mess of different practices,
| cultures, approaches, etc., mixing and matching, and always
| separating it from its context, from the culture they live in,
| from the environment, and from lifestyle commitments (aside from
| "medidation" itself).
| Nursie wrote:
| So to your mind this can all be neatly dismissed as "doing it
| wrong"?
|
| The guy in the article was a teacher himself, not someone just
| casually dabbling, and mentions that the people studying the
| negative effects are encountering trainers and teachers more
| often than casual meditators.
| coldtea wrote:
| Those are a dime a dozen. It's a scam industry, not very
| different from most martial arts schools or "holistic
| medicine", or things you can find in Sedona, AZ...
|
| You might find one rooted in the tradition/culture (and
| living it) practicioner in 1000, if you're lucky, but not in
| "mindfulness retreats" and corporate seminars.
| Nursie wrote:
| So one in a thousand practitioners might be doing it right,
| maybe.
|
| In which case the article is spot on correct - the western
| mindfulness/buddhism stuff is mostly potentially dangerous
| and, as promoted, can lead to all sorts of harmful effects
| which are often brushed under the carpet.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > but then you're a tourist to the whole thing
|
| There is a "householder" tradition in Tibetan Buddhism: you can
| be an advanced practitioner and teacher, while running a family
| and a farm. The classic example is Marpa. Marpa was no tourist.
| coldtea wrote:
| The rat race is no "family and farm" style environment,
| though, and the modern culture, workplace, lifestyle, and
| even personal mindset, of laymen doing this on the side in
| the west is so remote to the culture of those householders as
| to be alien (and totally counter and detrimental to those
| traditions).
|
| As for Marpa, he is not exactly a good example for a
| "householder" even of that era, as he was heavily involved,
| and worked/sacrificed enormously for his practice. So, yes,
| he was no tourist. But modern dabblers are.
| ejfox wrote:
| ah, my favorite type of hacker news post: "smart" western person
| finds a thing he doesn't understand, begins to understand 25% of
| it, and then decides to "fix it" like it doesn't have centuries
| of history and learnings around it
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