My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

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.

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.

>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).

> 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.

> 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.