Launch HN: Chorus Meditation (YC W21) – Meditation for Non-Meditators

What we call Yoga in the west is mostly appropriation. The rest is misunderstanding because the concept does not fit in thinking western minds.

The best we get is what tae bo is to professional boxing.

Source: conversations and experiences with someone who had the fortune to study both in New Delhi yoga university and with a Yoga lineage in the Himalayas.

The official university still didn’t touch, or know, of essential elements of the practices. Whether intentionally hidden or forgotten, they are completely unheard of in the West.

In the west we have Yoga laptops for heavens sake.

Thank you so much for your feedback! We like to stay away from those aspects as it can be off putting for people who don't subscribe to a certain philosophy or theology. We, instead try to make more approachable for everyone where you don't need to believe in anything other than spreading kindness to yourself and others. We certainly pay homage to where the traditions come from when we talk about the practice, for example at the start of class, or in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUJhfjxvNDE&feature=youtu.be or in this blog post https://chorusmeditation.com/blog/founder-friday-mk-on-our-p...

First, thank you very much for taking my criticism so well. I did my best not to be harsh but I know I could have done better. I'm sorry.

Second, I'm gratified to learn that you're not teaching the more potent forms of breathwork. That makes me walk back a lot of what I said above. I apologize for jumping to that conclusion from a superficial reading of your page and what you said above.

> All of our teachers are trained by professionals, including trauma informed training from professionals at UCSF. We always make sure the customer is empowered to stay in a zone that feels comfortable to them. Additionally, when we breathe in this way we are doing similar things to the body as we do with cardio exercise, so it's generally totally safe and the physical sensations of the breath subside when you stop the pattern. Of course we are not doctors so we recommend, in the same way that any gym or physical exercise solution does, that you should consult your doctor before engaging in cardio vascular work.

Ah, well, shut my mouth. :) As you say, that doesn't sound any worse than e.g. those indoor climbing gyms, eh? (Why not put the grippy things on a big cylinder suspended over a ball pit and slowly rotate the cylinder? Much safer and more fun than climbing up and down, no?)

Still, there's a little bit of the "blind leading the blind" if you're teaching homemade techniques without a depth of experience (as in decades of experience.) There are good reasons why Guru and Lineage figure large in the structure of traditional methods of transmission, beyond just the economic obligations. (One invisible problem in the West is that we have almost no modern tradition to fit this sort of knowledge into our society. I.e. Venkataraman Iyer would have died homeless on the street somewhere if he had lived in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi )

To put it in concrete terms, are you going to know what to do if one of your students has some sort of abreaction[1] with your methods, as mild as they may be? I've seen a lot of weird stuff go down out there in the wild, among the bush psychologists and street shamans, and while it mostly turns out okay, I've had friends become shattered shambling homeless madmen.

Good luck and God bless. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abreaction

> a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses—a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

As Gurdjieff said, "there are many delicate parts in there, which cannot be gotten from any repair shop".

To be qualified as a Guru you should know how not to break your students, and how to fix them if they break or come to you already broken, to the extent that that is possible.

To teach people how to ignite themselves without a fire extinguisher handy is not wise?

I can't resist going further offtopic! Apologies to the thread.

> Before that he was a scientific genius, and then, almost from that moment, he seems to descend into madness

I'm not sure. With Reich, everyone picks the point at which they get off the train—almost no one is willing to ride all the way to the end with him. But people pick different points at which to bail.

For some it is when he broke with Freud around the libido theory (no one cares about that any more but it was a big deal at the time). For some it is when he went into radical politics. For some it is his advocacy for adolescent sexuality—there his views (though still radical) no longer seem nearly as extreme as they used to—but it is society that changed, not Reich. For a long time that was by far the biggest black mark against him in public.

For some, it is when he broke the taboo against touch in psychotherapy. That one's hard to appreciate now because in retrospect, it was a breakthrough, leading to all the somatic therapies that came later, including the trauma work that is currently fashionable.

For most people nowadays, the breaking point with Reich is when he claims to discover orgone energy—that's what splits him off from the current mainstream. In this view, Reich is a genius when he invents body-oriented psychotherapy and analyzes the psychology of fascism, but goes mad when he starts doing laboratory science and making grandiose claims in biology and physics.

Then there are some who stick with Reich through that, but when he starts manipulating weather with his cloudbuster (dramatized by Kate Bush! [1]), that's too much—that's when he becomes a nut. A few stick with him even past that, but when he starts going on about UFOs, they're out. There are even a few diehards who can handle Reich all the way through the UFOs but feel like he loses it when defending himself at trial. It's like a customer retention funnel!

My point is that "He was ok up to $X but went crazy at $Y" has always been the template of responses to Reich. How we fill in $X and $Y probably says more about us than it does about him. I hadn't heard the radiation theory before, though—that's an interesting one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw - with Donald Sutherland playing Reich!