Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

danlawton.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 600 posts

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#91

Post by nabla9 »

mapcars wrote: post #65
addicted wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is key. Meditation is not a substitute for therapy or professional mental health of any sort.

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.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#92

Post by shmageggy »

cyberpunk wrote: post #87
shmageggy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, essentially.

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.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#93

Post by m12k »

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.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#94

Post by nabla9 »

mapcars wrote: post #55
nabla9 wrote: post #26

(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 pe…

>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."

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#95

Post by lm28469 »

thinkingemote wrote: post #80
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your conclusion. I'd go a step further and state there is no such thing as a bad trip. There are just situations where loss go of control can result in the surfacing of things that are unresolved... and unpleasant. No one has a bad trip without the latter. Another reason why psychedelics should come with clear warning labels that describe bad outcomes for specific situations.

A bad trip can tell people unthruths or falsehoods that they then believe. That is objectively bad. In other words, a bad trip can manifest pathologies where none existed before.

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.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#96

Post by qwerty456127 »

nix23 wrote: post #43
qwerty456127 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> give your brain a task and focus just on that

Not really. It is important to maintain conscious. When you simply "focus on just that" you may then just wake up once the task is complete and find out you've went through it automatically like if it was a [non-lucid] dream.

As about meditating while sleeping - I have not explored this part enough. Renowned Dzogchen teachers Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche have books on this subject. A Zen teacher quoted by Alan Watts also said "when you are hungry - eat, when you are tired - sleep" and explained that ordinary people don't actually follow this as they think about countless things while eating and see countless dreams while sleeping. If we go slightly farther than secular mindfulness dares to go and consider the Buddhist religious goal of after-death liberation, they say "dream yoga is not an essential part of practice, but how do you expect to stay conscious in death if you can't even stay conscious in sleeping"?

As for me, I consider unmindfullness a voluntary death, throwing parts of the life time you have been given (by the G-d, or figuratively - whatever you prefer to believe, this doesn't change the matter) away. You only live and actually own/use your time when mindful. When you are not it just disappears. AFAIK even Immanuel Kant believed something like this.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#97

Post by denton-scratch »

simiones wrote: post #50
qwerty456127 wrote: post #3

> 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? What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?

> 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".

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#98

Post by Nursie »

m12k wrote: post #93

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 th…

> Done wrong, it can be gambling with your sanity

I think the point of the article is that it's not clear what 'wrong' is, and it's certainly not made clear that there are potential serious negative mental health consequences.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#99

Post by coldtea »

Nursie wrote: post #56
coldtea wrote: post #25

> 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 retrea…

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.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#100

Post by denton-scratch »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #52
simiones wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you tell a real Buddhist teacher from a fake one? What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?

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”.

> 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.

Post reply on HN