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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
The point is to stabilize and calm the body-mind-spirit complex, a harmony which is called yoga.
Taking drugs, even alchohol, stresses the body and mind, and may distort and cloud the spirit. This work against yoga / equanimity / clarity.
There are traditions that uses drugs ritually, so is part of those traditions. Though, it is often a more perilous and dedicated path. Not everyone needs to live life as a sage or munk.
So doing sadhana (practices) will work over time. It's not a competition.
Because they destabilise the mind, which is particularly dangerous when pursuing powerful spiritual practices where balance and stability of body, mind, emotions and energy are basic requirements.
An imperfect analogy is taking drugs and then driving fast on a windy mountain road.
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.
I think it's a bit of a I want my cake and I want to eat it too mentality, or maybe just ignorance. The Buddha did teach to refrain from taking intoxicants, I guess there was a reason he said that?
For some reason, since meditating fairly regularly over the last 5 years, I seem to be quite attune to the troubles drugs and alcohol cause me. It's probably one of the dangers of new practitioners who download applications and get started without any background fall into, they haven't read some of the wise teaching that other may have been exposed too.
I'm not a Buddhist per-se, but I do believe the teachings exist for a reason.
I also remember having a very rough time early in my practice, I think I did too much too early and I was also using Marijuarna which seemd to make some of the issues worse. I backed off that and I recovered and meditate now with no issues.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Mindfulness is one of the 7 factors of awakening. It's a skill, a pre-requisite to the work of insight and transformation that is the path of Buddhism.
It's literally just the skill to not get distracted by the small waves.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are equal number of these where after a short training montage the protagonist is not only an expert in said tradition, but in many cases better than the long term practitioners.
So maybe people are focusing on the second lesson rather than the first.
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".
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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Transmission occurs when one has fully internalised a practice that one has learned from a master (of that practice).
You may be able to teach yourself meditation from a book, without a teacher. But that can't confer on you the confidence that you're doing it right. Many practices depend critically on confidence. Of course, you have to be confident that your master has really mastered the particular practice; you gain that confidence by knowing that the master received transmission, from someone who received transmission... etc. That line of transmission is referred to as the "lineage" of that practice.
There are no ritual formalities for mindfulness; every monk learns mindfulness, from other monks. The first monks learned it from the Buddha; but if you're going to learn the practice from a layman, you need to start inquiring into your teacher's transmission lineage.
In tantra, there are rituals that accompany the process of mastery: permission to study the text, a reading of the text, a commentary on the text from the master.
But these rituals are not the transmission.
There's usually some kind of "inner" transmission that depends on a personal relationship between the master and the student. But even that doesn't seal the transmission; the student still has to internalise the practice, which might take years.
It's very interesting to look into the process by which tulkus "produce" innovative practices. Often, the teaching is delivered to the tulku by enlightened beings, who learned the practice from some Buddha other than The Sage of the Munis. The tulku must then practice the teaching, usually for many years, until the insight stabilises, before it's safe for him to disseminate it.
...I don't really want to hear about your religious beliefs, tbh, I've had a lifetime of it already, and I've decided you're all charlatans.
Especially if you unnecessarily revert to jargon when trying to explain your beliefs, you mention "tulku" four times, but define it zero times. This is indicative of in-group signaling.
May I suggest that you not read articles about Buddhist meditation then? Less still the comments? I sort-of supposed that nobody would read these comments if they weren't interested.
I avoid articles about pay in the SF area, AI models, Tesla cars, and many other topics. If I read one by accident, I just move on - I don't post a comment whingeing that I'm not interested.
I don't belong to an "in-group" here; I used to be a Buddhist, but I no longer profess any religion. The subject still interests me though; I devoted 40 years of my life to it, and unsurprisingly it has had quite an impact on me.
For what it's worth, a tulku in Tibetan Buddhism is a re-incarnating lama. I realise that I used the wrong word; what I meant was "terton", which is a revealer of hidden teachings. Those hidden/revealed teachings are a specialty of a minority of Tibetan Buddhists - so an "in group", almost by definition. Tertons an interesting subject - if you happen to be interested in such things.
the article is about mindfulness and many Buddhist commenters have said the article is not about Buddhism, it's about a perverted form of meditation, but you're here defending Buddhists hijacking that topic and saying that everybody else should move on... not throwing shade, just sayin.
A number of reasons. FWIW, I was trained in a Tibetan tradition.
- I had from the beginning espoused a non-religious view of Buddhism. About 20 years in, my teacher stated that Buddhism was definitely religious, and that devotional practices like pujas were non-optional. I didn't like it, but if you take on a teacher, it behoves you to at least try to go along with the teaching - which I did.
- I learned some things about Tibetan history that were the opposite of my earlier, naive beliefs. Pre-communist Tibet was not Shangri-La.
- While I never practiced tantra, the tradition was tantric; I eventually learned some important things about tantra that I found unacceptably obnoxious. I can't go into detail, because I don't want to undermine anyone else's commitment to tantra.
- The group that I had been involved with gradually changed, I became an outsider, and things got difficult. Friends in the group cut me off.
- The behaviour of Buddhist nationalists in places like Myanmar and Srilanka towards non-Buddhist minorities appalled me - this was the tipping point.
- I did my back in through long sitting sessions. The amount of my life that I had spent sitting was beginning to look like heavy expenditure for no obvious gain (I wasn't making much progress).
These are my reasons; they don't apply to anyone else, and I don't deprecate Buddhism or Buddhists. I just gradually came to see that I'm no longer one of them.
There is a great deal that I integrated from Buddhism. It remains the basis for my morality, and my world-view is still largely based on Buddhist thought. But I no longer do any kind of formal practice, and I don't identify as a Buddhist.
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.
I've had plenty of curiosity in my life time, and have drawn my own conclusions. Here's three of them.
1) There's no scientific evidence for chi. Or qi, ki, whatever you're calling it in an Asian language, because it's just, like, deeper.[1]
2) "Energy" is the most wooly thinking word ever in pseudoprofound proclamations. For the love of Jesus. (Who most likely existed, but was very definitely not the son of YHWH)
3) You can believe what you like, and I'll believe what I like. And if I ever develop fantastical beliefs, I promise I won't expect you to treat them as real things deserving of your serious consideration. And I'll hope you do me the decency of reciprocating that implicit respect.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Why would it? You're stuck with yourself every waking moment. Every evening when you go to sleep you're trying to do 'nothing' where any random idea can pop into your head. Every morning you wake up and start out with your own thoughts. Are those times uncomfortable and distressing?
Every time I take a walk I'm stuck in my head too.
Most people I've met (perhaps this is a cultural thing) spend most of their waking life trying to stave off "boredom" (using phones, books, trying to mentally distract themselves towards specific things), which as far as I can tell now means "I'm alone with my own thoughts and nothing to distract me".
>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.
> 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.
You seem to be comparing meditation to neurosurgery. I have no idea why you think this comparison is valid. Meditation is voluntary control of attention, which you've been doing all of your life, not neurosurgery. No doubt using this in novel ways will present challenges.
> 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? Democracy was invented thousands of years ago, and we've been through many other systems of govenment since, and yet now everyone believes that democracy is the best way to organize a highly complex global system of intelligent agents. Does it seem implausible to you that a system of governance that's thousands of years old is still the best we know?
Frankly, I have no doubt that a tradition that's thousands of years old and that has had hundreds of thousands of adherents in that time, could have worked out most or all of the challenges it raises. That's a huge sample set if you were analyzing this scientifically, and these spiritual practices were quite systematically explored.
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.
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.
When I was a kid / teen, I could get into an altered state by repeating a word (any word) in my mind. After a short while, I would "disconnect" (I don't know how to describe it) :)
Can we step back here and realize we're talking about what amounts to breathing exersices here? There is no need to be gatekeeper here - you don't get magic Jedi powers by practicing breathing a bunch.
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.
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 ...."
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.
At that point it's just a truism. Most sports injuries, aside from the ones caused by physical contact with another player, are the result of some mistake in form that, in hindsight, could have been prevented.
"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.
Goal-oriented meditation is not Buddhist meditation.
I once read a book by Aleister Crowley, that included a series of meditation practices intended to increase your personal power. The instruction was very similar to the instructions I had received for a type of mindfulness.
I never tried Crowley's practices; but still, for weeks after reading that book, I had a feeling of dread, as if something awful was following me around.
Tai Chi is intense and goal-oriented; it's a martial arts system. The katas look like some kind of calm "yoga in motion", but the katas are not the core of Tai Chi.
I mean, yes and no. It's a martial arts system in the sense that it incorporates combative mechanics, and I do know of people who attempt to incorporate it into combat against resisting opponents, but some people take issue w/ calling it a martial art because of quack "masters" claiming to be invincible (but then getting their ass kicked within seconds by some MMA dude), and also partly because the popular calisthenic variety is not combat-oriented.
IMHO the biggest dissonance between western idea of "intense" vs eastern is that westerners think of intensity as optimizing for burst amplitude (in martial arts' case, specifically honing combative prowess), whereas easterners think of it as a matter of consistent holistic development (core strength, balance, attention, etc).
It's definitely possible to do malpractice when you are it alone. I never had a teacher and I did get burned on misinterpretations. Though looking back, it doesn't seem to be a big deal, but it did cause me some suffering.
2 major mistakes for me was going too much in either direction (relaxation vs. force).
I had a phase where I wanted to relax too much, or just let it come or let it manifest, either by trying to chill so much as to become sleepy, or by just trying to see with the naked eye. In either case it was a thought loop trap.
And I had a phase were I was too obsessive and used a lot of force. Like I really wanted to concentrate too hard and that also screwed me up a bit.
In either of these cases I could make a statement that meditation screwed me up, but I persisted with it and I can say that after 4 years, the benefits were very well worth the effort.
Also a big mistake was skipping the instructions. I.e. instead of just counting the breath or following the breath, I jumped at the unassisted version. I think if I just sticked to the very simple instructions and tried less of inventing my own way or outsmarting what's in the book, I would not run into these issues.
Note that I'm talking about zazen too, while the article is about mindfulness, it's a bit different although I never tried mindfulness.
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.
> 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.
This is true at least in part due to the monetization of mindfulness, as a previous poster stated. The import of mindfulness into western culture strictly as a tool to manage stress has turned it into a cure all for general audiences.
There are certainly risks. A long retreat may exacerbate existing psychopathologies like depression due to the extended isolation.
I'd liken meditation to something like exercise. Exercise is good in general, but you still have to manage and work around injuries. I wouldn't suggest you walk 5 miles with a sprained ankle. And so it is with meditation.
But yes, I also figure this isn't talked about enough - especially in the context of mindfulness as a product.
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.
I did a 10 day Vipassana course a few months ago. I went in with no expectations, except to disconnect from the online world for 10 days. The course had a subtle yet profound effect on me. But I couldn’t put my finger on it till I incorporated the practice in my daily life.
Since then, I have been practising Vipassana and/or Anapan every day (sometimes twice a day) and I realised that my entire life had been coloured by my anxiety. Now, when my anxiety shoots up, I am much more aware of it than before and can actively self-soothe. Every time I meditate, it feels like someone threw cold water on a hot metal plate. Another way I like to think about it is that I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve “cleared” my mind, so much as “defragmented” it, like a good old spinning hard disk. Usually tears form in my eyes in most sessions.
I continue to practice it every day. I am very grateful to have been through this experience. I experience a little bit more compassion towards myself, and hence, other people. I have a long way to go but this first step has given me much hope for the future.
My experience was very high level of calmness in day to day life. I sort of felt like Neo of the Matrix where I knew what to do in any tough situation and my action was based on objective analysis of the situation vs mind getting colored with different emotions. All tough decisions seemed less difficult to make because you can now separate emotions from the situation. To give an example - As soon as I reached home after finished the course, I learnt that my grandmother is in coma after suffering from a brain stroke. Everyone around me was in a panic state as to what is happening and what to do. I could think more clearly and immediately went into action mode (is she getting right care, how do we get a second opinion, what are our options etc). I accepted reality as it is. Similarly, I had to make a major decision that I was confused about (which is why I went the course in the first place), I think I was able to make the right decision (it's been few years since the decision was made and I am happy about it).
You also become comfortable as to who you are vs seeking validation about yourself.
I just got back from a 10 day Vipassana course a week and a half ago. So this whole thread is timely.
I went with no expectations except wanting to give the technique an honest try. On Day 5 I experienced anxiety and a panic attack. Never had one before - ever. I didn't know what I was feeling. On Day 6 it got worse. On Day 7 I almost quit but after talking to the teacher and course manager decided to persist. On day 7 I cried thru all the meditation sessions. I also felt some incredible highs which many people compare those achieved thru drugs - which I've never used myself. On that day I experienced feelings of extreme compassion and gratitude. On Day 8, my anxiety and panic attack got worse. It culminated in me passing out in the meditation hall. I passed out briefly but at that point I decided I had had enough and asked to leave immediately.
I've spent the last week+ trying to recover and hoping I didn't do any permanent damage to myself. In the past week I have experienced much minor feelings of anxiety but have been able to deal with them. I believe I will be ok but this has been an illuminating experience. Before this, I too never ever thought that meditation and/or mindfulness could have any negative or adverse reactions. So this is all new. I just wanted to pass on my experience objectively.
The one thing I really would say is that I wish these courses did a much better job of screening/counseling folks before they embark on the course and also have a better plan for how to address those people who experience something like I did. In that moment, I wanted to know that I was ok and felt like I wasn't getting the answers I needed. All I was told was to continue to work thru it. I am not sure that is the best thing for everyone. My body clearly was telling me otherwise.
Note: I am no teacher of Vipassana and merely a student (that too not advanced), so my thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt.
The folks running the course do have a screening by asking you certain questions in the enrollment form and they do ask you to talk to someone if you are confused or concerned about any question. It is not a strong screening but screening nonetheless. How effective it is, I don't know and it also comes down to how forthcoming the student is in clearly stating his/her condition.
Having said the above, people do experience intense emotions like you mentioned as I observed first hand. My take based on what I learnt in the course and afterwards is that throughout life since we are born, we experience life and it builds up certain kind of emotions in ourselves. Depending on who had what experience in life, the build up can be very strong. Vipassana attempts to rid you of the emotional build up that one has accumulated. The act of crying or shouting, or anything else is an act of getting the emotion out of the system and be left with a cleaner state of mind. How long the emotional outburst will continue will depend on how much one has accumulated in life.
I would summarize this as - In order to fill a cup with afresh, you must empty it first. You can't fill an already full cup.
One may also want to read U G Krishnamurthi. One of his quotes that I really like is `When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself.` another way to interpret this is that emotional build happens when you action is in conflict with your inner self and over a period of time, the build up keeps growing resulting in problems (I have had emotional build ups that I have worked very hard to get rid of).
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
Currently I meditate way less than I should. There have been a few months where it was as if I was only mind wandering the whole day (stressful period), so then I meditate a bit more to calm myself down.
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.
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.
'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 ñanas, or "knowledges of suffering".'
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.
I'm inclined to agree with you. The comparison being made between the two states seems almost like a way for this particular Buddhist to cast shade on the Christian mystical tradition. "Oh yes, we know about that; that's when you're not doing it properly".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Sorry for the late reply. I'd never had a bipolar experience before the retreat. It is my firm opinion that 10 days of a complete silent retreat was too much stress and triggered it.
I believe teachers and assistants are supposed to keep an eye out for things like that, specifically. Sorry it didn't work out like that for you; and best of luck
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.
> 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.
It was a long time ago now, 11 years or something. I think I was probably fairly happy, but, maybe at a little bit of a loose end.
The main reason I went on it was because doing a meditation retreat was suggested at a leadership seminar I went to! I was keeping a blog and I thought it would be "interesting" to go on the course. I was right about that ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
I don't think it derailed it, I think it actually highlighted a very important point.
You're right that disregard for the side-effects are common, but this disregard is also often in discussions where the dosage is low and so probably fairly safe.
Dose always matters, and this should be more widely communicated for meditation practice.
So while I don't think it's valid to extrapolate results from an intensive retreat (high dose) to casual meditators that meditate maybe 20 mins a day (low dose), pointing out the relevance of dosage is insightful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The general theme I'm seeing in this thread is that vipassana is not for beginners, not a panacea, and not representative of buddhism/meditation/mindfulness as a whole. There are multiple people downthread comparing intensive vipassana retreats to diving head first into high impact sports.
The problems that the OP experienced appear to be directly related to this dynamic (doing a 10 day retreat a mere two years into meditative experience, and characterizing his practice as gateway drugs), whereas several comments are pointing out the importance of the eightfold path (a system aptly named after eight pillars of conduct) as a prerequisite, or suggesting less "hardcore" east asian traditions.
On a more fundamental level, I'm actually surprised nobody brought up yet the basic fact that sitting on your ass for 12+ hours per day for days on end gets physically painful. Just google "vipassana back pain".
My takeaway would be: don't assume all meditation techniques are the same. Vipassana retreats in particular strike me as quite extreme commitments.
No ten-day meditation retreat is for beginners. I had been meditating daily for ten years before I ever did a seven-day retreat.
You certainly don't need a ten-day retreat. Even a one-day retreat is rather extreme, for a beginner. A two-hour session, starting with instruction, and ending with 30 minutes of practice, is a reasonable way to approach Vipassana as a beginner.
Right, I was conflating two separate points there: one is definitely about lengthy extreme programs, but another is that some people mentioned that it's better to spend more time with other forms of meditation (e.g. samatha) to develop other aspects of the eightfold path first, before getting into vipassana.
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.
So after coming back, I had the opportunity to speak with some old yoga teachers who had been around for a while and studied how modern organizations like the "Vipassana" one by Goenka was created. Vipassana used to be only administered to people who were already very 'fit' to meditate 6-8 hours and who were ready to 'go deep'. Think years of training at an ashram, doing all the marshal arts/yoga things. (think shaolin/ashtanga yoga, not that easy lululemon fluff). I also spoke to a chinese massage person who dealt with lots of martial arts students (these guys were tough) and some had come back from the center _fuucked up_ in their nervous system.
I think its a symptom of our western culture where we can try things out without the necessary 'pre-conditions' or prerequisites taken care of.
If your comfortable sitting cross-legged for around 2-3 hours upright, no back support, and dont have knee pain after a session like that, also have no stress and no psychological issues... then perhaps its for you. Some people seem to benefit from it... others, it makes them 500% _more_ crazy than before.
I also hear its great for criminals whose minds are so 'set' in their ways its hard to mentally break through to them. some videos have been made about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phHib5VaCeE
I think for lots of the HN crowd, we are type 'A' learning personalities who can endure a lot of pain pushing through to achieve knowledge etc... however, pushing through against your own inner psyche is usually a bad idea, you want to gradually go up against it, and use bodily medidations like yoga to work with the Trauma. Sitting in a static position for 6-8 hours and doing intense absorption technics like the OP Article, can be a recipe to set off a bomb in your nervous system. I think a better solution for a lot of people is to see a therapist to talk about mental health (finding a good one is hard in itself), and then add in sustainable exercise routines to stay healthy.
I'm also shocked by "you're doing it wrong" comments, "get a teacher" advices (this is addressed in the OP article as well), and a barrage of anecdotal evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, after a short amount of mindfulness meditation (perhaps about 10 hours cumulatively; never more than 30 minutes per day), I began to struggle with uncontrollable awareness of bodily sensations. My consciousness would gravitate uncontrollably toward a certain bodily sensation, and I became unable to decouple my consciousness from the sensation. The harder I'd try to focus on something and ignore the sensation, the more intense the sensation would become. This would culminate in a panic attack.
The issue mostly subsided after a month or two, but it never fully went away. I've become convinced that mindfulness meditation is precisely the opposite of what an anxious, inwardly-focused person needs. If there were a way to train the mind to selectively attenuate information/signals, on the other hand, that would be very helpful.
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).
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?!
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.
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?
I once had an intense, drug-like experience from meditation and even have a straightforward (if speculative) explanation for what went on.
Basically, one day I was curious and I decided to try the concentrate-on-your-breath exercise to see if I could go for ~30 minutes of focus (using a timer) without my mind wandering or any conscious thoughts. It was unexpectedly really, really, hard. I had to try again and again probably for 5 hours but eventually got pretty close I think.
Afterwards that day, the physical world was amazing. You know how kids get excited about mundane stuff or firetrucks or dinosaurs or whatever? Everything was just intrinsically super stimulating and interesting, even just the interaction of light and shadows, etc. It was like life had some sort of "interesting" volume knob, and after eliminating the loud sounds the volume got turned up on things that were previously too quiet to hear. I'm pretty sure as a young kid I had experienced the world in this more intense way but forgot it was possible.
My hypothesis is that it was kind of the opposite of burnout or shell shock - that there's some sort of internal adaptation to the level of external or internal stimuli, and just like overly stimulating/stressful environments or thoughts are known to cause people to feel numb (burnout), maybe reaching an exceptionally calm mental state can cause someone to feel whatever the opposite of numb is.
The effect wore off the next day, and I didn't attempt it again because it was incredibly difficult and also time consuming. But it's left me curious about it. If enough practice would make it possible reach or maintain such a mental state with a less-than-herculean amount of effort, it seems like that would be a nice mental skill to have...
Also, if it's possible to get into some profoundly different mental state after 1 day of meditation, it makes me a bit curious (and a bit concerned) about what could happen in 10 days...
If anyone else has had a similar experience and could weigh in if they've found an extended course helpful that would be really appreciated.
I found it very, very difficult to get to no conscious thoughts for 30 minutes, so much so that I haven't tried it again, and I'm someone who's mind is I think usually pretty quiet (I don't have a running dialog or anything like that). But the results as far as I'm concerned were not negative at all, so if there's some practical benefit to pursuing that sort of technique further I'd strongly consider it.
That's not mindfulness. I don't know what it's called; it sounds like some kind of auto-fascism.
Noticing thoughts, and noticing that you've been distracted, IS the practice. Everyone has the running dialogue, all the time. One remarkable thing about mindfulness is the way it shows just how fast that dialogue runs. I had no idea that it was possible for me to have 30 thoughts in a couple of seconds.
> Everyone has the running dialogue, all the time.
Actually this varies! It seems like most people have it, but some people don't (including me). People are often surprised the other exists. [1] I obviously still think, but most of it is non-verbal.
> noticing that you've been distracted, IS the practice
I'm talking about the exercise with the goal to focus awareness on the breath. Of course I found myself thinking all sorts of stuff at first, but I approached it with the goal to be undistracted with pure awareness on the breath. It was very difficult and took a long time, and I can't explain how exactly I did it, but I think I largely got there, and it put me in an intensely altered mental state afterward.
Maybe not having a normal running dialogue made it easier? It still felt extremely difficult though.
I guess quite a lot of my instruction may have been 'idiosyncratic'.
The way I was instructed, focus on the breath isn't a 'goal', it's a sort of home-base - where you come back to when you notice thoughts (or physical pain, or whatever - it's all 'thoughts'). I was told not to approach it with a goal, and not to look for signs of 'success'.
I think the results differ, even for what appears to be exactly the same practice, depending on your attitude.
People have been meditating/praying/whatever for thousands of years, so it is probably helping people some how.
Most of the day I working, and after that running around getting dinner, doing chores and running errands. Even if I am playing a video game I am making an effort to something. Even reading or watching a movie I am working to concentrate , watch and understand.
If I go to a quiet, comfortable place and just relax for a few minutes, my brain goes from a harried state of going from one task to another to one where it can just relax.
I suppose woo-woo can surround it. Maybe once a month I think to meditate, although in the past I have done it more.
For myself, meditating tends to relax me if I have had a harrying, stressful day. It decreases my anxiety. It has never caused an anxiety attack or the like.
If I sat down to meditate for some time, and became aware that I was very anxious, I would not think I was anxious due to meditating, as what is anxiety creating about sitting down and doing nothing (unless you have something urgent to do - then you just don't sit down and meditate)? My perception would probably be that I was already existing in a state of anxiety much of the time, and did not think about it much of the time due to the quotidian tasks that were to be performed, but now that those were not around, I could finally be made aware of the mental state I am in and do not have to push aside for something else. Perhaps a sensory deprivation tank can cause reactions in emotionally stable people, but I don't see how meditating for a few minutes/hours can. In a non meditative way I suppose logical self-reflection can be initially unpleasant for some people, meditating in a way is self-reflection on one's current natural emotional state when quotidian distractions are pushed aside, and I suppose some people who have had "bouts of mild anxiety and depression" might "meltdown" when they decide to start to come to terms with their anxiety and depression.
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.
Basically I went from having little to no control over racing thoughts to being able to focus much better. That is hugely helpful in work situations but also in life. I can actually give attention to people when speaking with them.
Cognitive behavioural therapy is the most extensively studied form of therapy, with a pool of evidence supporting it's usage as a first line psychological therapy.
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.
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.
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.
> Mindfulness and such are spiritual practices stripped of their philosophical roots
Mindfulness is only stripped of it's "philosophical" (read: spiritual) roots, if you strip them. Perhaps you are confusing commercialised "mindfulness" with mindfulness.
Would that make the Lord's Prayer twice repackaged (or re-gifted if you will) since it's a middle eastern practice already packaged as a consumable for the West?
No it wouldn't. There's a difference between a religion spreading, and taking the bits you like and secularising them like it's some kind of feel good buffet.
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.
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.
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.
The parent definitely does not misunderstand meditation, and is quite aware that there are two primary types - focused-attention and open-awareness - the latter of which is generally what gets packaged as mindfulness meditation these days. In fact, the parent has zero interest in becoming a fully detached and non-judgmental blob of cells regarding his thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are part of his unique human narrative and personality.
Or was that too judgmental? Maybe I should just let all these HN comments float by like the Buddhists say I ought. No need to respond or draw conclusions about anything in life, ever, just let it all pass by like a bird in the wind.
It's a very common misunderstanding to believe that the Buddhist ideal is nihilism. The point is actually to become fully present in the world; the "attachment" you're supposed to let go of is your desire for things to be different from how they are, in the same way stoics say to let go of things you cannot control.
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.
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.
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.
I was born Buddhist, studied at two Buddhist schools, and we were practicing meditation every day for nearly 90% of the year.
Reading that this person practiced Dhyana sounded very odd and irresponsible. What a vast majority of people here practice is Sathi (calmness) and Meththa (compassion), because it helps in regular activities and always have a positive impact.
Meditation practices like Anussathi, Vipassana, and Dhyana takes a lot more preparedness, and almost always is mentored by a monk.
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?
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I acknowledge that there is controversy over Ingram calling himself an Arahat. I think it's a disagreement about the definition. Ingram has been very clear about what he thinks the requirements for being an Arahat are and why he thinks he satisfies those requirements. One could argue that his definition does not meet the requirements of the title.
Regardless of what you think of his definition of an Arahat is, Ingram's book is the best written reference I know for describing the "Deep End" of meditation, and the "Progress of Insight" as it can manifest in practical terms.
The article talks about Willoughby britten and Daniel Ingram as references. Here's a video of them being interviewed together.
Shinzen Young is a good person to talk to about the "Deep End" of meditation. He doesn't write a lot but here's a video of him talking about the distinction between "Dark Night"/"Dukka Nanas" and mental health issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5B70ac_9M&t=56s
I'm horrified that there are "certified" meditation instructors that don't know this stuff.
> 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.
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.
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.
> recovery groups and such, especially for meditation teachers
Some meditation teachers will fuck you up. Especially if you're a woman (most teachers are men), and especially if you're involved in tantra. Choosing a good teacher is critical, and very, very difficult.
Trungpa was a superb teacher. But even he left a trail of damaged students in his wake (and not just women).
> 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.
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.
>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.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
He was teaching "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction", which isn't really a thing. If anything, it's an example of the very commercialised kind of mindfulness teaching that he's railing against.
If you visit the website mbsrtraining.com, the second link on the main menu is "Buy MBSR". Looks like the course materials cost just under $200. You also need to buy videos, attend retreats, co-facilitate retreats, and have supervision, as well as doing a lot of private meditation, if you want to be an accredited teacher. Sounds like a significant investment of time and money.
I can't find out from the website what licence these teaching materials are distributed under; that's a bit shifty, because I bet you're not allowed to reproduce them or distribute them.
Anyway, I wouldn't make that investment, just to sort myself out; I'd expect a return on investment. You get that by gathering paying students.
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.
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.
> You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side
Well, you can, actually. Many people do, and they're not fakes (or "tourists"). It's not easy, and Eastern teachers aren't best-positioned to help Westerners with the difficulties.
There are Western teachers who have been trying to develop ways of teaching Buddhism to Westerners that address the problems. I believe Trungpa was the best of these teachers (he obviously wasn't a Westerner, but he understood Westerners better than any other Tibetan teacher, I think).
I studied under a Western student of Trungpa. I think my teacher was too afraid of letting-go of the ethnic and cultural baggage; all of his teachers were Tibetan masters, and I think perhaps he felt diminished for not being a real Tibetan.
So I don't think the Western teachers have nailed it yet. I'm sure some Western teacher will eventually figure-out a teaching programme that works fairly reliably for Westerners.
But they won't be able to "de-fang" Buddhist practice; it's intrinsically dangerous.
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.
(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 makyō (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.
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.
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.
In the case of Hakuin he said himself he was very ill.
In many other cases the description of "demons" and other things match what is now called psychotic episodes. There is difference with struggling with practice and being unwell.
The root teacher of Jamgon Kongtrul The Great was a man called Patrul. Patrul was a notorious drunk, and was known to beat up his students. He was still a kind man, and a legendary teacher.
Having psychological flaws doesn't disqualify you from being a realised master and a great teacher.
>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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I went to a therapist to work through the things that had come up. The existential crisis also led to a re-evaluation of the nature of reality - I now hold a panpsychist position. But the philosophical stuff, no therapist was going to be on my level and able to help. So that stuff I worked through on my own.
I stopped meditating as a practice immediately. I toyed with it sometimes during everyday life, watching the trees go passed on the train, trying to be indifferent as strong emotions rocked me. I was mostly too preoccupied with redefining who I was to be bothered by further exploration.
Also note that I was not strongly aware of the connection between the experience I had meditating and the psychological disintegration that followed. I considered it a possibility, but not a strong one. For me it was just an evolution that was in progress. A darkness that had to be faced and an existential horror that I had to make peace with.
It's only after the fact that I can clearly see the connection. Perhaps it is coincidence, but I think it is more likely not.
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.
I don't understand why people would think meditation does nothing. Your brain is connected to the rest of you and reducing stress is good for it even if that's all you believe you can learn to do.
But otherwise, paying attention to things is a skill that can be exercised just like muscles are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
> "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'.
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).
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....
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)
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
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.
Thank you for your reply- I know what you mean by "nowhere"- and actually that's a good way to put it. I was having a hard time articulating that myself but I agree- often my mind is "nowhere" instead of "elsewhere".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Heh, I have seen professionals, one literally said "I don't know why you're coming to see me!" ;)
What I'm curious about: Are you suggesting that it is childhood trauma that will trigger a bipolar episode (rather than the 10 days of silent meditation 10 days in a row!)
If "everyone" has childhood trauma, why don't we see a higher incidence of bipolar disorder in the population?
> Would put my money on unacknowledged childhood trauma.
My ex is a very experienced and well-trained child psychotherapist. She insists that all adult psychological problems are caused by childhood trauma.
She seems to rely heavily on R.D.Laing for that (she trained at the Tavistock); I thought Laing had been discredited, but it seems that nowadays he's back in favour.
[Edit] I don't agree with my ex. I think she must have fallen down an antipsychiatry rabbit-hole.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Bliss" is a side-effect of practice. It's a common error to mistake it for progress. Your teacher will draw your attention to the mistake - if you have a teacher.
"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.
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.
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)...
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.
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. "
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.
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.
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"?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
My teacher describes this issue as such: meditation is like going to the gym. You don't send someone with broken arm to the gym to make them better. Even though gyms are generally good, they should be avoided when you're injured.
Psychotic or neurotic mind needs healing, not intense training. This knowledge is present in genuine Buddhist schools that are not for profit organizations. The mindfulness industry have, sadly, the wrong incentives.
As a Buddhist myself I hope this article helps a lot of people.
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).
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Lots of good discussion in this thread on how meditation can lead to problems, particularly intensive sessions like retreats, but I think it's important to highlight this paragraph from the article.
If we accepted that meditation can induce alterered states of consciousness, like various medications can also do, it seems dangerous to wantonly start mixing such things without rhyme or reason. Dissociation seems almost inevitable.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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>
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why villainize the "white American", portraying them as "knowing better"? Yes, the mischaracterization of Buddhism is disrespectful, but it comes from ignorance, not malice.
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.
"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 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]
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The brain as an organ analogy doesn't also reflect the self-reflective, self-influencing, learning side of it well.
Except it’s not an analogy… it’s literally an organ.
Software happens to run on top of it… and when there are bugs in on, we call those functional diseases. But understand that the physical organ and system underlies all if it.
If your cpu or memory are broken.. no software or software fixes can fix that.
And I’m not suggesting that the complexity of the neural network isn’t important to mental health. It is. But it’s based in physical and chemical processes.
Your immune system for instance is a complex system with emergent properties. You could say it “understands” or is aware when the body is being attacked. But at each individual level, it’s a process of chemical physical reactions.
It’s fine to work at the level of the “self”, but if we assume it stands apart or is fundamentally different than the brain itself, that’s when we get into trouble.
Buddhist philosophy can encapsulate accumulated folk knowledge of how the mind works, which can be incredibly insightful. However there’s danger in assuming it explains everything.
It’s truly a singularly unique and poorly understood organ which also is the only known organ trying to understand itself - which is my point. Saying ‘it’s just an organ’ dismisses and minimizes all the important parts.
And the brain, just like many processors CAN and does work around damaged memory, and can and does work around damaged processors/bugs (depending on the nature and severity of them of course). Phineas Gage being one of the clearest recent examples, but there are many more.
Minimizing what is going on to saying ‘it’s all chemical processes’ is really missing the point - it would be like saying a modern CPU is ‘just moving electrons around’. It’s reductio ad absurdum.
I haven’t personally run across a Buddhist philosophy claiming knowledge of the way the brain works. I have run across Buddhist philosophy claiming to know how the universe works, which seemed pretty silly to me. I’ve also run across Buddhist philosophy aiming to provide tools to help people better understand and connect with it and themselves better, which I personally have found helpful.
I pretty much agree with all of this. Buddhism like most things isn’t easily defined as a single set of beliefs for everyone. Lots of Buddhist partake in scientific research in the functioning of the brain. Others, some like the meditation retreat types, focus on pseudoscience and mythology to sell tickets.
Phineas Gage as well as the practice of labotomy definitely shows that the hardware is extremely important. Phineas as well as most lobotomy victims spent the rest of their life as fundamentally different people with enormously different personalities after the damage to their brain. Phineas became extremely volatile and had problems with executive functioning.
> that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life — effects sufficiently profound that friends saw him (for a time at least) as "no longer Gage"
— from Wikipedia
However your point about healing is well taken. Howard Dully who had a lobotomy performed at the age of 12 has managed to recover to a significant degree as his brain has “re-wired” around the damaged areas. It’s believed his young age allowed for the significant recovery.
All that said, my main point which I feel like you’d agree with is that even if the software and hardware of the mind works around and heals itself, it’s not a metaphysical or supernatural process. Understanding the underlying hardware and chemical process, as well as the emergent processes that allows that healing and work-arounds ultimately leads to greater understanding.
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 (śūnyatā) 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.
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.
My teacher was disdainful of the sutras. He would quote from them from time-to-time; but his view was that there is no sutra with a living, breathing lineage. He said there waas no way to check that your understanding of a sutra was correct. He favoured relying on more "modern" texts (i.e. mediaeval!) for which there was a living lineage - at least one living teacher, who could trace his training back to the author of that text.
Trungpa said that the teachings were like bread; they should be consumed fresh and warm.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
The author wasn't ignorant: "I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject."
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.
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.
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.
I found many problems with this article.
The author of this article seems to assume that Cheetah house has all the answers!!! (Perhaps this article is an ad for that place.)
Regarding his statement “symptoms diagnosed by a therapist” – does the author know how psychiatry comes up with ‘diagnosis’ of so called “mental disorders” using checklists? I can cite many academic articles, but maybe just have a look at the following article:
Psychiatric Drugs Increase Suicide. CAMPP’s Film “Prescripticide” Exposes the Harms By Dr. Chuck Ruby.
The author of the article discussed here also does not seem to understand Buddhism, although he says he has read many books. For example, it is best to leave Jhana practices (i.e., deep concentration practices) to monks because developing them needs a great deal of commitment and an incredible amount of patience. Also, these Jhana practices are not needed for full enlightenment [See the sutta reference AN 4.170: In Tandem].
Considering his following statement at the end, I am hoping that the author will understand things better with time:
"A few months ago, I began dabbling with teaching mindfulness again, which may seem surprising. However, I believe that these practices, with the correct framework, dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving mental health."
Mindfulness has helped me beyond words - I think it has saved my life. I am so very grateful to have found it.
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.
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.
> In fact, today mindfulness meditation is primarily used as an off-label treatment for mental health issues
I think this perhaps goes too far; MBSR is pretty well documented and is not “off label” — I’m fairly sure there are FDA approved apps for mindfulness therapy for example. If you are meditating 30 mins a day and it’s helping your symptoms, I don’t think this report should be justification for you to stop.
This is not MBSR. If you are going for Jhana, you are way off piste from the “mindfulness meditation” path. The authors retreat was full-day meditation for many days in a row.
This is the DMT of mind altering substances, where light mindfulness meditation could be compared to a glass of wine.
I do strongly agree with the authors point that the western conception of meditation omits the scary/mind-altering stuff that can happen when you go deep, and it’s important to have a full picture of the risks and benefits before you embark on that path. I just worry that this sort of article without appropriate caveats might make people unjustifiably scared of light meditation, which as far as I’ve seen doesn’t result in this kind of dramatic reaction and does have clear benefits.
I’d recommend “Mastering the core teachings of the Buddha” for a no-BS deep dive on what going deep looks like. Particularly the section on “the dark night of the soul”.
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.
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!"
> 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.
> 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?
> 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".
I am not a teacher. I have practiced irregular Soto sitting for many years. I do occasional and informal reading of Buddhist texts.
By inspection (eg. sitting, paying attention, etc!), I discovered that we both do and do not have an independent self, at the very same time. They form a non-dual—-each arises in the combination of both and are mixed together in a way that trying to fix the boundary between them is folly.
I believe it is a major error to practice with the objective or possibility of annihilating the self. The self is an observable phenomenon. To reject it is crazy, as crazy as rejecting non-self.
IMHO a major milestone in practice is to grasp deeply the reality of non-duals, and leave behind the attachment to a dualistic belief in the self. This is nothing like annihilation.
As I became less desperately invested in a simplistic sovereign concept of self, my “self” became more confident, natural and wild. It's not going anywhere!
"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.
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.
> 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?
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.
"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.
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.
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”.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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”.
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.
> 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.
“A teacher when one is required, no teacher when one is not required,“ or something like that. :) The Buddha is an existence proof of the possibility of direct independent observation and understanding.
Rarity is a matter of perception — at the time of the Teaching, the population of the world was a hundred times smaller. Oddity can be attested to, but what was once a rarity is now a minority statistic. As much as the population has multiplied, the number of pratyekabuddhas must have risen in tandem: to suggest otherwise would be to assign pratyekabuddhahood to external entities or mechanisms as something bestowed upon someone, but as it is, pratyekabuddhas arise independently — were that not the case, would they still be pratyekabuddhas?
Regarding anything as heretical is a religious view. Discard it and check yourself through experiential practice and logical exercise. There are many Buddhist/Bön 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
"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?
Buddha didn't teach rebirth. He didn't teach any metaphysics at all. Karma and rebirth were simply the sea in which The Buddha and his followers were swimming.
Having said that, it's hard to make sense of a lot of Buddhist teaching without karma and rebirth.
In the tradition that I followed, they said that experience was momentary (like, atomic); and the moments were separated by 'gaps'. Realisation was to be found in these gaps. In a way, that is like dying after every moment.
This was a tradition that venerated Padmasambhava, the composer of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; which highlights the opportunities for realisation in the gap between two lives.
Interestingly, these gaps also contain extreme terror, which you experience without the stabilising influence of a body. The TBOTD describes these terrors in a lot of detail.
The Dream Yoga is another way of exploring these gaps.
It was explained to me that the following are indispensable parts of Buddhist practice:
- Devotion
- Loving kindness
- Morality
- Generosity
I'm not saying that these kinds of things define religion; but there are few systems of thought that include these things, that don't also include supernatural beings.
It's hard to argue that Buddhism isn't a religion. It's certainly possible to construct something that's derived from Buddhism that isn't religious; but I don't think that's Buddhism.
/me not religious, nor Buddhist (any more), and now much more contented.
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
Every time I read something like this, the author turns out to be a regular drug user. I don’t necessarily have anything against that, but, having been sober my entire life, and having experimented heavily with natural hallucination methods such as lucidity, I seriously doubt that this level of intensity is possible. Aside from actual near-death experience (been there), it is extremely hard to hold onto even mild sensation without breaking lucidity. And if it takes drugs to get there, then don’t call it meditation, and don’t blame meditation for the side effects.
I’m not an expert, but, for the others like me, I think the best you may hope for in meditation is the ability to not be bothered by thoughts and distraction, the zen master being Grigori Perelman, who would not let a million dollar prize distract him from picking mushrooms.
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.
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.
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.
Hakuin, one of the most famous Japanese Zen master's, got "Zen Disease" when he was in his 20s and doing intense meditation. The symptoms sound very similar to what was in the article. He recommended a particular meditation as a cure. No clue about the efficacy of that, but this problem is clearly not unknown even among entirely orthodox practitioner's who presumably have qualified teachers.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like "走火入魔", a mental state mentioned in many Wuxia/Chinese-Kongfu-Fantasy novels when a rigorous 内功修炼(internal training/meditation)goes bad, which I thought was a myth.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
"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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
This "Buddhist meditation retreat" in a tiny cabin in the North Carolina mountains goes way beyond the practicing mindfulness the author describes it as.
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.
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?
I can't say anything about how to find a teacher in the west, but usually its good to be with a satsang (set of people who do the same practice with an aim for the truth) at least in that way they can be guided in the right direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> 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.
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].
> 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.
That's very interesting, and brings it much closer to a kind of pantheistic or even Vedanta-ish conception of god. But it's also simply not true for the how the vast majority of Catholic priests teach the religion.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Terrors; visions of blood; intense paranoia; and the certainty that the experience is never going to end. That's not the surfacing of unresolved 'stuff'. That's being poisoned.
In my youth, I took a lot of acid, and I loved it. but I never thought it should be legalised; it's dangerous stuff.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
