My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

> 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.

The world has changed, but I'm not so sure people have.

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.

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.

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.