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My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

danlawton.substack.com

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Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#201

Post by denton-scratch »

pmoriarty wrote: post #166
denton-scratch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ot…

"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." This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism and mainstream "Western" psychology. If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal, others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already t…

In Western psychiatry, the loss of a sense of self is dissociation, and is a mark of psychosis (to diagnose psychosis, you'd need some other marks, especially delusions or hallucinations).

I was over-simplifying when I said "destroying the belief that you have an independent self" - the cause of suffering is attachment to the sense of an independent self. Attachment in general is seen as a cause of suffering, but attachment to the sense of self is the hardest attachment to get rid of.

The term "ego" is used in Western discourse about Buddhism, as a cipher for the attachment to the sense of self. That is not what is meant by "ego" in Freudian or Jungian psychiatry (basically, the focus of consciousness). I wish Western Buddhists would stop using that word.

Western psychiatry doesn't pretend to address anything like the state of nirvana. It's mainly concerned with curing pathological conditions. I don't think any reputable psychotherapy traditions propose to take you any further than a condition of being free of the most-obvious kinds of hang-ups (Jung and his followers might be exceptions - I'm not sure - Jung's views were very expansive).

The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#202

Post by dorchadas »

tralarpa wrote: post #114

> 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. These numbers are telling everything you need to know about the the state of meditation in the Western world... His teachers were probably not much better.

Yep, it's totally divorced from the teachings it developed in. No wonder there's issues.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#203

Post by _y5hn »

pmoriarty wrote: post #166
denton-scratch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ot…

"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." This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism and mainstream "Western" psychology. If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal, others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already t…

A lil' bit of both actually!

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#204

Post by Nursie »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #183
Nursie wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Being with Jesus" is a rather vague concept which. Different people may understand it differently. Which is why I said if someone tells me that "they live every moment of their lives through Jesus, and that without his love life can have no meaning." > What I am telling, however, is a simple difference between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and living in awake state. Do you not see how judgemental th…

I believe I get your point now, hopefully you will understand mine. Looking from the outside, from the practical (economical) point of view the value/meaning of a unit does not depend on whether it is conscious or not - it just does the same job. Somebody probably can replace me with a future version of GPT3 once and not even my mom will notice (as she lives in a different country and my job also is writing e-mails).…

I understand that's how you feel, that without meditation and mindfulness you do not feel fully awake and 'conscious', though I suspect what you mean by 'conscious' is different to what I might mean. I am glad you've found something that increases your enjoyment and appreciation of your life.

I enjoy and appreciate mine, too.

And hopefully we all learn pretty quickly that drinking too much can utterly ruin the next day....

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#205

Post by lamalic »

littlethrowaway wrote: post #61

Ha! I thought it might have been vipassana. My own experience of this (a 10 day silent retreat, not having done meditation before) was a full blown manic-psychotic experience (never having had any such thing before, nor in family history). If you're interested, I made some audio files [0] talking about what happened. I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven't done medita…

I've read quite a few blog and social media post of bipolar people not responding well to meditation. Neither have I. I actually thought I might have seen your post before.

People don't seem to accept either that 1. You're tired and have been willing to try a lot, 2. Even the mystical panacea doesn't help.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#206

Post by fzzzy »

hashkb wrote: post #178
pmoriarty wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I couldn't help but think about people having access to too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give you the most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it sort of becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip probability suddenly skyrockets." I'm not sure about that. Psychedelics can bring to the surface all sorts of unconscious traumas, repressed memories, and/or issues people have trouble dealing…

Trust the trajectory.

Fear is only illusion.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#207

Post by qwerty456127 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #166
denton-scratch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ot…

"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." This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism and mainstream "Western" psychology. If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal, others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already t…

I'd say one should judge by other symptoms: what emotions does the patient experience and how do they behave. If the patient is depressed, apathetic and/or persistently euphoric, walks naked in the middle of a city, ignores his chores or attacks people "because they are illusory and the hand isn't even mine so why not" that's an illness. If he behaves like an reasonable compassionate person and seems happy that's good - a reasonable degree of dissociation can actually make a person better, happier and more stable mentally.

Simplifying I'd conclude that this is not a binary but an spectral phenomenon: there are 2, both undesirable, poles of extremity and a harmonious middle. Naturally/culturally people are more inclined to self-association and a slight shift to the opposite generally is desirable. Dissociate from your mind but don't in a degree when you loose it.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#208

Post by denton-scratch »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #170
denton-scratch wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 excepti…

> 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 Yes. > in direct conflict with the traditional teaching that ALL phenomena without exception arise dependent on causes and conditions With all due respect, make it a priority to seek understanding of ”Buddha-nature”. Try the Koans.

Studying koans is not a very good way of gaining understanding of something like Buddha Nature; they're designed to create confusion. I wasn't in a Zen tradition, and I'm no longer a Buddhist; I appreciate your respect, but I'm not about to start trying to figure out koans. [Edit: aren't you supposed to have a master, when you're working with koans?]

Note that I'm not declaring Buddha Nature teachings to be heretical; in general, I think the really deep divisions between the various Buddhist philosophical positions were (are?) more political than anything else, and I've never considered them important.

I've studied both the Uttaratantra and the Uttaratantrashastra, under the direction of a western academic who specialized in the subject (and also happens to be an ordained Buddhist nun). I've also done meditation practices designed to deepen understanding of Yogacara-style thought. I think I have a reasonably good understanding of the subject, for a lazy, lay practitioner.

The accusation of heresy is because it's very easy to misinterpret Tathagatagarbha teachings as monism.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

#210

Post by ljm »

_y5hn wrote: post #185
ljm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't conflate mindfulness (or capital M mindfulness, you could say) with meditation either. Meditation has always been a deeply spiritual practice; Mindfulness attempts to turn it into a psychological, clinical one.

From the article: > "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. I was unsettled yet intrigued by Britton’s message. Some of the adverse experiences she had described were similar to challenges I had faced. But, at this point I was a decade into my intensive mindfulness meditation practice. I was too deep to get out. " There's…

Intensive meditation does seem to be oxymoronic, too.

Meditation will take you down many unknown paths: difficult paths, painful paths, joyful paths...

An intensive meditation sounds more like a doing, like hitting the gym hard on a 30 day diet plan, rather than a state of being meditative and progressively turning inwards. You can't intensively find your inner peace, as an intense thing isn't a peaceful thing.

To my mind, intensive meditation is still going to result in something that feeds the ego, rather than something that feeds the soul. You wouldn't call it intensive if it wasn't ego-driven.

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