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Not everyone should meditate

joshcsimmons.com

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Re: Not everyone should meditate

#301

Post by nerdponx »

subpixel wrote: post #49
skilled wrote: post #20

This 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 y…

> I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life. Respectfully this is not an outcome that you can lay at the feet of meditation. It’s like blaming the catechism for the years you spent cut off from the world in a Benedictine monastery. Meditation is an input, it is not the program.

Pretty much every "meditation was bad for me" story seems to play out like this. The author basically abused meditation in the way that someone might abuse drugs.

Some people clearly are susceptible to being caught up in this kind of behavior. So I think the point in TFA: "meditation can have risks for some people" is valid. But that "some people" seems to be a fairly specific personality type, and most people could probably benefit from some mind-calming body-centering breathing exercises every day.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#302

Post by nerdponx »

subpixel wrote: post #79
avindroth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a common enough effect that it should be noted. Many spiritual people end up being detached from the world, for better or worse.

Detachment is a tenet of Buddhism, not an effect of meditation.

There are plenty of ways to meditate without adhering to Buddist belief and practice.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#303

Post by nerdponx »

hnfong wrote: post #292
joeberon wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 minutes twice a day for 5 years is not at all extreme

Absolutely, and this is the fallacy with tautological arguments like "You should not overdo anything". The real question is how much is considered "overdoing", and then the argument falls back to a common-sense fallacy (until it doesn't work)...

From the article, it sounds like the author was spending more than just 40 minutes a day on their spiritual pursuits. They also didn't describe their actual practice.

This thread seems to be full of people trying to debunk meditation as some kind of dangerous dark art.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#304

Post by nerdponx »

brigandish wrote: post #199
redisman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting that everyone who has had a bad experience seems to have really tuned their practice up to 11. Silent retreats etc. seem to show up in these stories a lot

I'm always amazed at how many people are experiencing meditation for the first time who do this. It must be like suddenly being arrested and stuck in solitary among lifers. On a related note, I've enjoyed my time so much staying at temples that the idea of being stuck in solitary for a long stretch is like a weird ambition! If you see my name in the news for a crime you'll know why…

My anecdotal experience is that this is a personality type. "Some is good, more is better" is just not a valid way to approach things, neither in quantity nor in intensity.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#305

Post by cromd »

bamboozled wrote: post #188
cromd wrote: post #107

For me, meditation started a fundamental shift in how I think about free will, and oddly nobody I've mentioned it to in real life has felt this. I used to feel very in-control of my own mind, but after intentionally sitting and monitoring for thoughts, labeling those thoughts, etc, I became sensitive to how thoughts can really come out of nowhere. You can't predict what you will think next. That strikes a little deep…

From my own practice and what I've read / been taught, it's wrong to be labeling the thoughts, your either simply paying attention to raw experience or you're not. Once you start telling yourself it's good (or bad), you're not longer just an observer you're a participant. By wrong I don't mean to say you're doing anything wrong, but it's not in the spirit of objective mindful meditation. From my own practice, it's he…

It's something like what burrows is saying. I don't know if I'm implementing it as intended, but I first heard of "labeling" when reading The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. It seemed silly/trivial at first, but I later started just trying to categorize my thoughts. I found that there were actually surprisingly few buckets that my idle thoughts fell into.

I'd say that when I'm meditating, 90% of my out-of-the-blue thoughts fall into categories like:

- A: seeking out little acquisitions (life/work hacks, low hanging fruit, new tech skills I could tackle today to improve my life) - B: chores I need to do and social debts - C: money, and whether I have enough - D: what will the future be like? - E: food, sex, safety - F: "this is nice, I'm not thinking of much"

I don't feel like these are good or bad thoughts, since they all have their time and place. But I do expect/hope that as the session progresses, more and more time is spent in state F.

I think one benefit of these labels is that instead of trying to re-articulate what you're thinking every time, you just drop it into buckets A-F (or whatever your personal buckets are). Making that task lightweight keeps me from overanalyzing the thought, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying my thought landscape.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#306

Post by heyoni »

littlethrowaway wrote: post #129
heyoni wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit on day 5. My life started playing itself in my head on repeat and I started to focus on all the pain. I would imagine the universe dying and coming back to life where everything, especially some nasty events would reoccur ad infinitum. I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it. I had a panic attack, and then another and finally ta…

I'm sorry to hear that - and I hope you're doing fine now. I really didn't have any "bad" experience like that (mania is awesome fun ;)), of course, the downside was depression followed by years of medication. They make such a deal about it being a "bad idea to leave midway through" ... I'm glad your teacher said you should (although even then, they're really ejecting you in what must be a pretty vulnerable situation…

> mania is awesome fun ;)

That's what I was hoping for! just kidding. But no, for the most part I think I'm totally fine and I don't think vipassana caused anything new, I've always had intrusive thoughts and trouble focusing, but in general I'm fairly successful and lead a pretty normal life. Who knows what would have happened had I stayed, it's quite possible that things would have been much worse. I know I felt emotionally drained for a few weeks afterwards and almost numb.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#307

Post by nerdponx »

gleenn wrote: post #7

Author compares meditation to doing LSD, then states that doing LSD can be helpful but super hurtful to possibly schizophrenic people. Some part of me can't stop thinking that it's nuts to tell people to not sit quietly and try and clear your mind because it might trigger schizophrenia.

A lot of people here seem to be assuming that "meditation" has to be "intense Buddhist practices deliberately designed to destroy your sense of self."

Maybe that's the problem? People read about "meditation" and don't realize what they're getting into? I don't get it.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#308

Post by PoignardAzur »

agent008t wrote: post #242
hartator wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Meditation made a little “high” on life. Careless to the point of physical injuries. Stress via excess is obviously bad but it’s better guide in life than an utopia nirvana. Like if you look at a colony of beavers. Some are building a dam, others are collecting fruits, kids are playing in the river, some beavers are making love, … . And you have Dave. Dave just stay there 5 hours straight in some sort of yog…

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. One of the points about meditation is about being present, fully experiencing the present moment. By fully experiencing every present moment, you fully experience your life. The opposite would be living perpetually in the future or in the past; not living your life, but continuously preparing to start living it some day. In you…

Yeah, but is there any hard data supporting the idea that enlightened people (or people who meditate, or whatever) are more creative or do more interesting things with their time?

My vague understanding was that, given any objective measurement of psychological "success", enlightened people are statistically indistinguishable from un-enlightened people.

If they aren't, it certainly seems non-obvious to me. The world hasn't been taken over by a wave of super-mindful people who use their awareness of their own emotions to make the best decisions about everything.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#309

Post by heyoni »

argentinian wrote: post #142
heyoni wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit on day 5. My life started playing itself in my head on repeat and I started to focus on all the pain. I would imagine the universe dying and coming back to life where everything, especially some nasty events would reoccur ad infinitum. I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it. I had a panic attack, and then another and finally ta…

> I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it. Do you have some idea now about why that conviction seemed believable to you at that moment?

Honestly, it felt a lot like I was on psychedelics but without the visuals. I tried LSD once and mushrooms twice and there's this loop of thoughts and feelings that bubbles to the surface which felt very familiar during my meditation.

I honestly can't say what it is exactly but I do sometimes have intrusive thoughts which I learned recently is a form of OCD but only comes up in stressful situations, so maybe that was it?

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#310

Post by heyoni »

pasiaj wrote: post #240
argentinian wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it. Do you have some idea now about why that conviction seemed believable to you at that moment?

I had a similar experience that I might be able to explain logically. I was thinking about death, the exact moment of death, and thought about the last sensation felt by a dying person. I had a thought that the last affect you experience subjectively never goes away. That if you feel horrible at the moment of your death, subjectively that feeling never goes away. That idea and feeling shook me and made me think of he…

So some of that was definitely going through my head during the meditation. I kept thinking about someone I know who committed suicide and how desperate their last moments must have felt and coupled with the idea that they might live those moments over and over over-amplified everything.

It also made me wonder whether or not there are any efforts to create messages that could potentially persist an event like the universe contracting into another tight ball of energy followed by another big bang. The whole idea being that we could pass messages to future iterations of existence in the hopes that the world wouldn't play itself out exactly as it did before. That's some scifi stuff right there :)

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