I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity. Is the author’s experience common for other people?
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Not everyone should meditate
11–20 of 335 posts
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#12People who suffer from severe ADHD, meditation is nearly impossible.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#13Theres actually some evidence (or a least a lot of pubmed papers) that touch on how for certain at risk populations, meditation can increase the probability of an episode of psychosis! (so anyone who has any family history of schizophrenia or other things in the same space, really need to be careful of meditation and friends) see these google scholar results for more info: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=meditat…
I believe that ' family history of schizophrenia ' is not fully understood.. there is an interrelated system of health, genetics, aging, stress, nutrition and extreme experiences, which can go many ways.. I believe that 'schizophrenia' is real and serious, but that the factors involved in leading to it, and its treatments, are not fully understood..
with that said, I believe there is science evidence that marijuana and meditation, both can be triggering to an ill mental state.. along with other, stronger things of course.. common street methamphetamine can bring on illness rather quickly and is addictive.. serious personal injury like trauma can bring on illness rather quickly.. things like that..
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#14I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity. Is the author’s experience common for other people?
From personal experience and what I've read, there's a clear dose response relationship. If you meditate enough, especially if do a lot of insight (vipassana) meditation without doing much concentration (samatha) or Metta meditation, you will begin to deconstruct yourself. That's what it does. Often you will find a new, and better way to relate to your conscious experience, but sometimes you break things and they don't get fixed.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#15I would like to at least try to meditate but I am not calm person. Not at all. Even coffee and green tea kick my nervous system into overdrive, so 8 don't consume them.
What could possibly make meditation accessible to a person like me?
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#16I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity. Is the author’s experience common for other people?
It's common among people who meditate seriously. A significant fraction of the Tipitaka consists of documentation and interpretation of such experiences.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#17People who suffer from severe ADHD, meditation is nearly impossible.
Like programming, meditation is nearly impossible for everyone. At first.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#18I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity. Is the author’s experience common for other people?
https://www.dharmaoverground.org/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCT...
I don't think the author of the article has yet reached the Dark Night of the Soul.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#19I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity. Is the author’s experience common for other people?
It might not be common - I'm just urging people to do some self-reflection before jumping into a practice.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#20This is a great perspective. I know what the author means with it, too. I spent 5 years in daily meditation practice (twice a day for 20 minutes) and it completely altered my state of mind. I was a naturally introverted person when I started, though I believe that meditation really stepped it up a notch for me.
The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time.
I spoke to Buddhist monks in Himalayas, and I lived with Hinduist practitioners in Bali. I went quite far with my exploration of meditation, and perhaps that warrants a blog post of its own. But in terms of keeping up with it, in my case - the chickens came home to roost.
I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.
I started working less, started losing interest in certain things. I lost friendships that I later regretted. And I attribute it specifically to meditation because in that "peaceful state of mind" you can't help but laugh at the stupidity of this world. Why should you care if everything around you is designed to work against you. We live in a systematic world yet the system does not provide the means to be genuinely happy human.
Insights like this really dominated my life at the time, and it was very difficult to process it at all. So, at some point, I experienced a "collapse" of sorts and stopped.
At some point, when I catch up with the things I neglected - I would definitely like to return to the habit of daily practice. Meditation is an incredible tool (even if my own report says otherwise) to connect with this world on an entirely different wavelength.