Meditation and the Unconscious

Vipassana is insight meditation, which is generally contrasted with mindfulness (known as 'samatha'). "Mindfulness" is generally thought of as a prerequisite to insight, though an especially committed vipassana practitioner might well develop both concurrently. (The aforementioned 'insight' is of course meant as insight into the three core features of phenomenology, viz. the impermanence of subjective states, the all-pervading dissatisfaction of 'craving' and 'clinging' and the lack of a true 'self'.)

Towards the end of the article, they touch on this:

> The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it.

The general idea is to develop a sort of recursive awareness. In your case, it seems like there was a problematic situation that you were struggling with, and that once you became aware of shifts of perspective as a tool for actionable-ness, you attempted to do the "opposite" of struggling (accepting uncontrollable things as inevitable). But now your awareness extends to being able to see that neither of those options are necessarily the two polar extremes of the spectrum of choices you have.

One aspect that kinda rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mindfulness is this idea that things can just magically fall into place. I think it downplays the difference between being aware of something and the effort it takes to do something about it. I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.

>e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning

I'd be curious how this view is justified.

>I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations

I've never heard of this being part of mindfulness, unless said unacceptable situations were entirely beyond your control.

glad to see this here and I would expand on it bc I think it's so important.

For a long time, I, too, thought accepting Something Bad meant forcing oneself to appreciate it somehow, to reframe it as actually good, or to lie to oneself or even to "approve" of it. Just to re-iterate: those would all be unproductive, or Wrong Action, or just "bad."

Instead, accepting means allowing one's self to acknowledge something happened without it driving thought to somewhere else. E.g. I was assaulted by a neighbor recently... true story... I was very traumatized for a few weeks and unable to process it well. As I slowly gathered myself up, I began to accept it. It doesn't mean I approve of it or welcome it or anything like that. I still hate the motherfucker and I'm disturbed that justice will never come for him, except hopefully he will fuck over the wrong person who is unlike me a scary person, and he'll get what he has coming.

But you see how I digressed there, moving out of the present and away from the fact, moving toward a fantasy? That part is not acceptance, either. For me, acceptance is simply being able to sit still and say, "yes, my neighbor injured me for life."

And to sit. and wait. and abide. and feel those urges to get mad and perhaps to get mad, but not to lose focus. When we get mad and lose focus, our minds confuse the negative feelings with our surroundings. I need to train my mind to connect the anger with what he did - not my current, comfy surroundings with a 43" 4k monitor and cool can of cranberry lime seltzer.

We do this because magic happens. when we simply sit with it, our mind begins to actually process it. It's an organic version of a mechanistic process that you don't have to consciously run, but you can almost consciously obbserve. I like to imagine a fleet of trucks in a warehouse. They are carrying the heavy load of the trauma or upset in them and they need to bring it to the right departments in the brain to chop it up, water it down, separate it, dissolve, and re-fabricate it into something new. This is an automatic process our minds have apparently evolved. And it's free!

But it requires some squirminess, some patience, some willingness to temporarily feel discomfort while sitting here, feeling the pain in my lower back, coming to terms with it. not appreciating it, but become capable of sitting with it.

So I urge GP to circle back and consider this way of accepting, rather than someone telling you you should appreciate or thank the pain or some kind of bullshit like that. This doesn't correct or justify and evil. All this does is remove my own excess reaction to it so I can bring myself to peace by not flipping out when I inevitably recall it.

Please accept my compassion for whatever your circumstances were and consider the advice of the late Thich Nhat Hanh to sit still and take it in. Let the delivery tracks in your mind do their processing and you will feel it settle and your mind will allow you to function better again.

I've always found it interesting that many meditation techniques involve "emptying the mind" or "clearing the mind" of thought.

While practicing concentration on a single point of focus definitely seems useful for strengthening the mind, I'm not sure that practicing a state of being completely devoid of thought is necessarily healthy. I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously, or meditate on focus in a high distraction environment.

I wonder if there are meditation styles that embrace this?