My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

Meditation was mildly helpful but it wasn’t really a practical solution for a working parent. You can’t hit pause on your life very often. SSRIs it is for now

In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible author) talks about people going insane from ill-advised meditation methods of suppressing body and mind.

It seems like these early 'mystical' offshoots around meditation-heavy religion typically don't typically involve or speak well of a lot of meditation, truthfully. Zen Master Bankei didn't want his monks to meditate at all.

The problem is that meditation is a cargo-cult. Early in the history of Dzogchen, they had trekcho, "cutting straight through", not a heavy emphasis on meditation. Early in the Zen tradition, they had precious few words to say anything well of meditation at all.

Zen Master Foyan wrote, maybe around 1200ish?:

> Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish!

As someone into this stuff, there is kind of something there--it's the advaita vedanta like realization that this is it, the eye never sees itself. It's hard to describe in a few words, and has nothing at all to do with vipassana or jhanas. Alternatively, I think it has to do with switching to the floodlight perception of the right hemisphere as the default resting state of the mind. The left hemisphere tends to over-dominate because it works on positive-feedback--the more it engages with something, the more it wants to engage. It gets overheated and starts to turn its tunnel vision into a primary aspect of ordinary awareness and places a really heavy overlay on direct experience. The right hemisphere does the more typical negative feedback/diminishing marginal utility thing most of the time.

I'm a big fan of direct-path teachings like Loch Kelly gives. I think heavy meditation, especially vipassana, is just a cargo-cult hazing.

I had struggled with panic disorder in the past, but CBT pretty much fixed it for me. This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety. It was so terrifying to think that a simple mental process could potentially trigger a breakdown (and like you, I had a family to take care of).

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I'm moving towards the view that these breakdowns are simple anxiety disorders that just happen to be triggered by meditation, in the same way that a panic attack triggered my anxiety disorder when I was young. I don't think there's anything particularly special or mystical about it - it's just our stupid brains activating the fear response, and it appears that the same methods for dealing with anxiety disorders work here.

I feel like in a way I was the control group for an experiment - can a fear of meditation provoke the same response as meditation itself?

samatha contains sati [mindfulness], samadhi [stable attention], piti [joy], passaddhi [tranquility], upekkha [equanimy]).

vipassana is insight (among others) into anicca [impermanence], sunnata [emptyness], dukkha [stress], paticcasamuppada [interdependence of phenomena], anatta [no-observable self],....

The meditative states of jhana (dhyana in sanskrit, chan in chinese, Zen in japanese although the meaning has changed while the term traveled further east) originate from samatha practice.

Overall most Theravāda traditions or traditions that take the pali canon as a source kind of use this metta, samatha/sati, vipassana classification and acknowledge jhanas as meditative states. However, the meditation practice in the theravāda tradition was revived in the 19th/20th century only, so there is in the theravāda tradition no continuous meditation teaching lineage, so people had to make sense of the Pali canon source texts, which aren't exactly a meditation manual as we expect it today and there are concurrent approaches.

I am just a casual meditator (like 2-3 times per week) but overall an avid reader so I have seen quite a few different takes on how metta, mindfulness and insight meditation relate, most aren't dismissing one of these practices entirely, but the order and emphasis on when to practice what differ greatly. "dry-insight" is a I think to be understood as a counterpoint to voices that stated that a buddhist needs to practice concentration first and potentially even reach the jhanas before practicing Vipassana. So concentration / sati is not entirely dismissed. The idea of "dry-insight" is, that fewer meditation hours practicing concentration may be enough to develop insights and it is thus also advertised as a "quicker way" to awakening.

Overall, when reading or listening to meditation teachers, I am cautious about claims to "speed", which makes me a bit reserved about the Mahasi noting method crowd.

What made sense to me was: Laypeople should practice Metta meditation in any case. Practicing Sati (mindfulness) and Samādhi (concentration) is like taking your brain to the gym & spa, it should also help you a lot in dealing with stressful emotions, if your meditation object are your senses (breath, feet in walking meditation, hands while washing dishes) this seems to be a rather well-grounded activity and not inherently dangerous (unless maybe you have a serious psychological condition).

Proficient enough in Sati (mindfulness) and Samādhi (concentration), the route could go to practicing samatha and vipassana. Now my assumption would be that if you directly overemphasize vipassana and your skills for concentration, tranquility and equanimity aren't sufficient to contain reactions when 'insight' hits you.

That being said, Vipassana covers a wide range of stuff. Like "Body Scans" as done in Mindfulness based Stress reduction (MBSR) are thought of IIRC as vipassana practices, and IMHO they could just as well be thought of as sati practice.