101–110 of 600 posts
4000 hours of meditation practice is a lot. I'm doing guided meditation(with Headspace) for 20 min each day and right now on 10 day streak and feeling good so far.
> 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…
> but then you're a tourist to the whole thing There is a "householder" tradition in Tibetan Buddhism: you can be an advanced practitioner and teacher, while running a family and a farm. The classic example is Marpa. Marpa was no tourist.
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.
> 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…
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 root…
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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.
And if one does, one may end up with mental health problems.
> 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…
Alan Watts used to say "When you've received the message, hang up the phone."
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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 thi…
(To be fair, some of my friends still cite that night as a distinctly positive life-altering experience)
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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 kno…
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.
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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 b…
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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.
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.
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>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 no…