471–480 of 600 posts
I can only say that, please do not practice any advanced kind of meditation without a guru/experienced teacher and don't do drugs or alcohol if you are meditating.
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The study was looking at guided meditation which consisted of 60% of it’s sample. So, suggesting a guide on it’s own doesn’t solve the issue.
Having better guides is exactly what will solve the issue though. Unless you're making some kind of inherent argument, where all meditation is inherently nebulous and impervious to methodological approaches. The guides may or may not be qualified. So the real problem is the lack systematization of it in meditation, more specifically a more reliable metric to judge "guides". As the extensive literature on meditation q…
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He was an instructor in "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" -- sorry, this is not a real thing. He's been teaching things he clearly does not understand, and his mind was blown by this. When I say "a teacher would tell you to come back to the moment" it's not quite as simple as I make it sound, the key thing is who the advice is coming from (read: an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan…
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?
In the midst of all of the "You're just doing Buddhism wrong!" comments, I would like to point out the PLOS One paper mentioned in the article, "The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ). " In one of the only prospective studies to use qualitative methods to deliberately as…
The problems that the OP experienced appear to be directly related to this dynamic (doing a 10 day retreat a mere two years into meditative experience, and characterizing his practice as gateway drugs), whereas several comments are pointing out the importance of the eightfold path (a system aptly named after eight pillars of conduct) as a prerequisite, or suggesting less "hardcore" east asian traditions.
On a more fundamental level, I'm actually surprised nobody brought up yet the basic fact that sitting on your ass for 12+ hours per day for days on end gets physically painful. Just google "vipassana back pain".
My takeaway would be: don't assume all meditation techniques are the same. Vipassana retreats in particular strike me as quite extreme commitments.
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
Basically, one day I was curious and I decided to try the concentrate-on-your-breath exercise to see if I could go for ~30 minutes of focus (using a timer) without my mind wandering or any conscious thoughts. It was unexpectedly really, really, hard. I had to try again and again probably for 5 hours but eventually got pretty close I think.
Afterwards that day, the physical world was amazing. You know how kids get excited about mundane stuff or firetrucks or dinosaurs or whatever? Everything was just intrinsically super stimulating and interesting, even just the interaction of light and shadows, etc. It was like life had some sort of "interesting" volume knob, and after eliminating the loud sounds the volume got turned up on things that were previously too quiet to hear. I'm pretty sure as a young kid I had experienced the world in this more intense way but forgot it was possible.
My hypothesis is that it was kind of the opposite of burnout or shell shock - that there's some sort of internal adaptation to the level of external or internal stimuli, and just like overly stimulating/stressful environments or thoughts are known to cause people to feel numb (burnout), maybe reaching an exceptionally calm mental state can cause someone to feel whatever the opposite of numb is.
The effect wore off the next day, and I didn't attempt it again because it was incredibly difficult and also time consuming. But it's left me curious about it. If enough practice would make it possible reach or maintain such a mental state with a less-than-herculean amount of effort, it seems like that would be a nice mental skill to have...
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> an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan I'm really hoping you were going for darkly ironic humour, if not, please reread your sentence I quoted and, I don't know, contemplate on it. Received transmission? From the Trisolarians perhaps?
Transmission refers to receiving chi, or a spark of energy from an advanced teacher. Perhaps less snark, and more curiosity would serve you on topics like this.
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> an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan I'm really hoping you were going for darkly ironic humour, if not, please reread your sentence I quoted and, I don't know, contemplate on it. Received transmission? From the Trisolarians perhaps?
Transmission refers to receiving chi, or a spark of energy from an advanced teacher. Perhaps less snark, and more curiosity would serve you on topics like this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the kind of inappropriate advice that the author is cautioning against. He was not just starting out, he had experienced teachers, and the horriffic panic-attack-like state he was not something that could have been addressed by "returning to the moment".
He was an instructor in "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" -- sorry, this is not a real thing. He's been teaching things he clearly does not understand, and his mind was blown by this. When I say "a teacher would tell you to come back to the moment" it's not quite as simple as I make it sound, the key thing is who the advice is coming from (read: an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan…
There's a wide range of experience being lumped under the terms "meditation" and "mindfulness" here. Alice finds a 5 minute walk after lunch improves her mood and suggests it to Bob. Bob mentions his brother was injured while walking a marathon. The ensuing conversation ends up not being very productive. For some, "mindfulness" means sitting for 5 minutes and observing the moment without goals, judgement, or expectat…
> In a 2019 Vice article, Davidson suggested that those who have meditation-related difficulties simply aren’t meditating correctly. > “I think that many of the people who are having difficulty and who are reporting that their problems are exacerbated by meditation are not meditating correctly, to put it simply and coarsely," he said, "Some might even say that they're not meditating. That they think they're meditatin…
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
I once had an intense, drug-like experience from meditation and even have a straightforward (if speculative) explanation for what went on. Basically, one day I was curious and I decided to try the concentrate-on-your-breath exercise to see if I could go for ~30 minutes of focus (using a timer) without my mind wandering or any conscious thoughts. It was unexpectedly really, really, hard. I had to try again and again p…
If anyone else has had a similar experience and could weigh in if they've found an extended course helpful that would be really appreciated.
I found it very, very difficult to get to no conscious thoughts for 30 minutes, so much so that I haven't tried it again, and I'm someone who's mind is I think usually pretty quiet (I don't have a running dialog or anything like that). But the results as far as I'm concerned were not negative at all, so if there's some practical benefit to pursuing that sort of technique further I'd strongly consider it.