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My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

danlawton.substack.com

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Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#111

Post by yakubin »

denton-scratch wrote: post #77

I have been told that Trungpa said "they always run". The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats. The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness…

Mindfulness is the new agile. Every criticism is deflected with “you’re not doing it right”.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#112

Post by nicolas_t »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #34
ghoastl wrote: post #9

My most intense mindfulness experience was on a two-week silent retreat, in the woods, isolated from all of humanity. At the beginning, I met only the creatures of the forest and heard only the whispers of the trees. By the sixth day I was hallucinating gold and purple snakes slithering out of my belly onto the ground around me. By the eighth day I had visions of a cloud island vista with animals the world had never…

[flagged]

There's a rather big difference between hiking and meditating. Solitary hikers in general hike, they don't spend their time trying to lose their sense of self.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#113

Post by dayvid »

Doing intensive meditation retreats is a Navy Seal hell-week for your mind. If people took that into consideration, they would be better prepared for the results.

It's much better to start with a simple meditation practice or go on a shorter retreat (1-3 days), build up a base and periodically dip your feet in deep waters. There are too many people in the west who treat it like an extreme sport and get burned out in the process.

It reminded me of when Tim Ferris decided to go on a 10-day meditation retreat after a multi-day fast and almost had a full mental breakdown.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#114

Post by cutler »

I can't help thinking that most of these examples of negative side effects are related to intensives rather than meditation/mindfulness itself. There's a world of difference between 20 minutes a day and 10 days in a retreat looking inward. Maybe it's just better for you in short bursts, not long marathons. I once experienced negative effects after joining a Buddhist meditation group while at university. Every time I faced anything which provoked anxiety, such as preparation for my final exams, I would turn to meditation assuming it would help me get things done but it had the opposite effect of avoiding what I needed to face. I ended-up spending longer and longer periods meditating but I felt I was getting weaker both physically and neurologically. Eventually, during the end-of-term holiday break, I consulted a doctor who gave me tranquillisers for a few weeks and I left the Buddhist group when I returned to university but it took a while to get back to normal.

These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#115

Post by beepbooptheory »

jtbayly wrote: post #109
Karunamon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything as subjective as one's own mindset interpreted by oneself is incompatible with the scientific method in the first place. It's not the right tool for the job because it is impossible to objectively measure the results. That does not make those results any less real.

Doesn't that make it basically impossible for research to be done on many medicines, including pain medications?

Maybe not impossible, but if it was easy or if the gp didn't have a point, wouldn't we have figured out what fibromyalgia is by now? Also maybe we would have given more scrutiny to the widespread marketing and distribution of oxycotin in the U.S., at least enough to prevent the disaster it caused?

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#116

Post by oska »

denton-scratch wrote: post #77

I have been told that Trungpa said "they always run". The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats. The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness…

> The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench.

I found quite a few signs of egotism in the writer, so I'm not surprised that he experienced a great wrench in confronting his sense of selfhood. And then lashes out at the teachings and practices he had previously rushed to embrace.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#117

Post by fluoridation »

Frummy wrote: post #90
fluoridation wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile. Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your ca…

So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this:…

You're confusing the words "true" and "real". It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the orbit is also real. That 2+2=4 is true, but it's not real. The electrochemical activity in your brain is real, and the fact that it causes your subjective experience is true. Your subjective experience is true to you (you're experiencing the things you're experiencing), but it's unknown to me. It is also of unknown realness, i.e. of unknown correlation with reality. You can see things that are not real and not see things that are real, or feel things for no reason (e.g. intense fear not because there's something frightening, but because there's a drug in your body).

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#118

Post by beepbooptheory »

fluoridation wrote: post #80
Karunamon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything as subjective as one's own mindset interpreted by oneself is incompatible with the scientific method in the first place. It's not the right tool for the job because it is impossible to objectively measure the results. That does not make those results any less real.

"Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile. Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your ca…

Accidental Wittgenstein :)

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#119

Post by wirrbel »

andai wrote: post #70

> Once we have crossed the Arising and Passing Away (and if we don’t suddenly die or get severe brain damage due to some unfortunate life circumstances), we shall enter insight stages five through ten regardless of whether we want to. It doesn’t matter if we practice from this point on; once we cross the A&P, we are in the Dark Night to some degree and become what is sometimes called a “Dark Night yogi”, or simply “d…

It should be noted that Daniel Ingram is following the Mahasi sayadaw method and is a bit from of a fringe Buddhist subculture promoting (if I am not confusing things „dry insight“ meditation).

Maybe the cultivation of the non-dry aspects is actually helpful.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#120

Post by vanderZwan »

bpodgursky wrote: post #103
vanderZwan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, how exactly? What's unfalsifiable about self-reflection leading to painful confrontations, or those confrontations being provocative in ways that can manifest differently depending on the person? To name just one superficial aspect of mindfulness. Are you claiming that sports exercises are unfalsifiable? Because the principle is the same, except that we're talking about the mind instead of physical fitness.

Just to be blunt about it, people lie about the state of their mind all the time. People make stuff up for attention, to fit in, or just for fun.

So? That might make it hard for you and me to figure these things out in daily life, but psychology as field of science has been trying to study the mind rigorously for at least a century by now, and it's not exactly naive about this problem.
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