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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)

#211

Post by fluoridation »

enugu wrote: post #181
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…

As someone noticed, you are trying to say something similar the private language argument of Wittgenstein. But notice that this isn’t really private to a person. How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed…

However, I question whether there's actually a shared context when it comes to meditation. Unlike for external phenomena like gravity and QM, there's a lot of ambiguity related to communicating internal processes. For example, basic emotions like happiness and fear are easily communicated because they show up on the face. Two people can agree that the emotion that causes them to make the same face is the same one, and so can agree to call the emotion by a word. But are we sure the same is true for things that don't work like this? If someone says "do this and you'll feel like that" and I do and I don't feel that, what am I to understand? Is it that I did it wrong, that I did it right and my brain just works differently, or that the speaker and I are failing to understand each other? Did the speaker misuse a word? Did I mistakenly think a word meant something other than what was intended? Particularly when it comes to subjective feelings there's going to be a lot of metaphors involved, which never help for unambiguous communication.

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

#212

Post by marhee »

> ...and began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Looking back, it was also during this time period that I had my first dissociative experiences, in which elements of my sense of self became separated in a way that impaired my ability to function.

This was a couple of years before the "meltdown". While meditation surely may have induced mental health issues, the drugs and alcohol probably didn't help.

What stands out is that he had mental health issues and some point that grew worse, sadly. It temporally correlated with meditation but that doesn't mean it was predominantly caused by it.

The meditation may have triggered things, sure, but my guess is he likely would have had a meltdown also if he went all-in on some other activity for 10 years.

After all, with multiple years (4, 6?) between the first dissociative symptoms and the break down, you could also argue that the mediation may even slowed or alleviated the effects of the mental disorder until some threshold was hit.

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

#213

Post by haswell »

kfajdsl wrote: post #198
haswell wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * the «from nowhere» really just might be the unconscious brain* The trouble is that once you start to consider the nature of the unconscious brain, such consideration leads to the same conclusion. If the unconscious brain somehow has “control”, from where does it derive this control? Unless you then accept some kind of metaphysical explanation, it’s centerlessness all the way down.

Is being centerless really such a bad thing? Then again, I really haven't experienced the concept at a fundamental, spiritual level, only intellectually; I don't really meditate. Maybe there's something deep in our wiring (probably in our unconscious mind, which really pulls most of the strings) that has difficulty grappling with the loss of the idea of "self".

I don’t believe it’s a bad thing at all, it just is.

And glimpsing centerlessness for yourself sounds disconcerting, but instead seems paradoxically comforting when it happens.

For me personally, it brought with it a deep sense of peace and wonder about my existence and coexistence with a world full of similarly centerless beings.

To your point about wiring, I think absolutely yes. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, many aspects of conscious experience ensure we stay alive and procreate, but are not necessarily pleasant and seem to be increasingly incompatible with modern life.

Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” explores this at length and is a really interesting read. It’s not a book about religious truth, but one that maps a modern understanding of evolutionary psychology onto the insights of Buddhist philosophy and how such philosophy can be incredibly helpful when dealing with the implications of living in a body that did not evolve to survive the conditions to which it is currently subject.

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

#214

Post by detourdog »

dijit wrote: post #153
manuelmoreale wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe secular young professionals all share some trait that can be associated with sense of superiority? And it’s not really about mindfulness or meditation?

study controls for that.

I didn't go back to read check but my memory is that it was around 531 participants. So with that sample size who know how small the control group is. In any case it certainly is dominating more of my life than I'm comfortable with right now.

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

#215

Post by jossclimb »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #161
jossclimb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect there will be higher cases of psychosis happening on intense retreats, but as anecdotal as this, I had it happen to me (albeit not as extreme as OP) after meditating for much shorter periods (approx 10 minutes up to an hour). I really did not see it coming. For some context, I don't know of any deep seated trauma that I have and I liked to think of myself as someone robust mentally. I experienced a deep real…

Interestingly you describe the shattering of your delusion as the return of your ego - I think it is the opposite. I think you invited an inflated ego into your life through your meditation : "I should become a guru and help humanity" <-- that is ego speaking. The shattering of this idea is is not ego but humility, to my way of thinking.

I was more humouring the situation there and adding some color, but for sure, the ego is incredibly powerful and deep seated. I firmly believe what I had initially was profound, and was hijacked by the ego (and this is a very common happening to anyone on a spiritual journey of some sort).

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

#217

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…

btw. Daniel Ingram refers to himself as an Aharat/aharant and it is kind of a no-no in buddhism to talk about your own "awakening-status". That's a serious red-flag.

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

#218

Post by louison11 »

2devnull wrote: post #207

I’m inclined to think this stuff is more correlation than causation. Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shro…

Nobody is mentally well to begin with. Suffering is universal. You simply get people who are ready to deal with their suffering and seek help through appropriate practices, and people who are in denial and convince themselves they're fine. There are a lot of very wise, sane, stable people who meditate a lot more than 30 minutes a day.

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

#219

Post by sixo »

2devnull wrote: post #207

I’m inclined to think this stuff is more correlation than causation. Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shro…

That meditation reliably causes these crisis events (so much that it's an acknowledged "stage" of the process; the "dark night of the soul" term comes from the Roman Catholic contemplative tradition which maybe doesn't refer to the same thing but has a similar role in the process) is pretty much THE criteria to establish causation; that it only happens to a portion of meditators additionally rules out "the kind of person who would meditate is going to have this happen anyway".

Meditating IS weird but, historically, not nearly as weird as a-spirituality, which is the state of the "normal person" in your comment.

And, of course the drive to meditate reflects some difference relative to the general population, but "symptoms of deeper issues" implies buy-in to a kind of the therapeutic/mental-health framework of "if you're unable to exist within the range of 'normal' all the time, you have a disease" and, well, it seems pretty reasonable to be discontent with your life—either your life or your feelings needs to change, and emotional searching is kind of the obvious way to address that.

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

#220

Post by denton-scratch »

wirrbel wrote: post #137
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…

Realisation of no self (anatta) would be canonically fit into vipssana meditation whereas mindfulness (sati) is something done for concentration practice

I did a lot of mindfulness sitting practice. We were specifically directed not to attempt concentration. There's more than one kind of mindfulness, and more than one kind of vipassana. I was mainly taught vipassana as something that arises naturally from shamatha; but I've been on courses where it was taught as a systematic exploration of the skhandas, to convince yourself that there is no self in the five skhandas.

I've also been to McMindfulness groups, where they blended shamatha-type mindfulness with guided vipassana meditation. It makes no sense to me, to teach vipassana divorced from the no-self doctrine, and all the abhidharma ideas about the skhandas and the different kinds of consciousness.

Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).

I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?

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