I though i read “my me me let me to a meltdown” . No, joke aside. Moderation is good. Not everything needs to be intense. Some people that have use drugs tend to arrive to meditation as a replacement of those intense experiences. No need to be famous, tell my story, and yes there are a lot of lunatics conducting retreats with no idea on what they are doing. And yes if you play with fire you tend to get burned. Also i find that meditation usually and gently can release some energy, but that does mean that your are smarter. I am just the same idiot with more energy :)
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
351–360 of 419 posts
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#352Earlier 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…
> I wasn't born Richard Alpert. I was just born as a human being and then I learned this whole business of who I am, whether I'm good or bad, achieving or not - all that's learned along the way. And you see all those learn things separate, so you start to have this dissociative experience, where all that can become is a point of awareness. I remember the first time this happened to me, I got a terrible panic, because…
But you are anoncoward42?
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an incredibly cynical take and possibly bordering on gatekeeping based on "spiritual" boundaries. Psychedelics can be fun, but in my experience they're fun if your mind is in the right place. They act as a conduit for more deeply connecting with the world around you. On the other hand, if you have work to do then those things have a chance to appear in your trip. That can be healthy, if you're ready to face so…
> That can be healthy, if you're ready to face something, or it can be incredibly terrifying. Yes, and there's no guarantee that your bad trip or encounter with these entities will resolve itself without major effort. That ought to be enough to be seriously concerned about whether it is in any way appropriate to endorse this as some sort of ordinary, routine practice for the uninitiated.
This can be easily said about spirituality as well. Anecdotally, I've met far more people with higher density narcissistic traits who cover their behavior with beliefs, enlightenment, and morality than I have of those with trippers. Unlike you, I don't think spirituality is a poison pill as a result. Instead I think of it as something that must be constantly measured, dosed, and negotiated with depending on the outcomes for a particular person. This is similar to how I think of psychedelics.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#354I 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…
> These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. If it works for you that's great. However, I would say approaching meditation from a "mind control" exercise such as "counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly" goes counter to its purpose and will hinder its full potential. If you're willing to experiment with other methods, try letting your mind wand…
User name checks out.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#355What OP describes sounds like the common bad trip with various psychedelics. Of course there are differences, but it's very easy to get yourself into a state of mind that you can't easily get out of for hours on end. Definitely not fun.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best book I've read on this topic is Chögyam Trungpa's "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" [1]. He's very clear in pointing out how ego tries to get involved in everything. It sounds like you may have had an experience, to some extent, of dwelling in the union of wisdom and emptiness or what some call dharmadhatu [2]. It's not a teaching I encountered until I started practicing Vajrayana, as Theravada teacher…
> ... the union of wisdom and emptiness ... Ah, the extent that some people will go through to avoid acknowledging God. It's like some people take stubborn pleasure in being purposely nihilistic and strenuously denying all that's good about the world. How this can be part of a supposedly spiritual practice, I just can't understand.
The original term behind "emptiness" is a lot richer than this english word. That's why many books leave those words as is, e.g. rig-pa.
"Emptiness" of your mind means something like a thin soap bubble around you. This bubble acts as a lens, it can enlarge arbitrary things, it can create stable patterns on its surface, and all that is useful, but it blocks whatever is outside the bubble. In its natural state it would be a perfect invisible sphere, letting you see outside: this union of clarity and emptiness creates wisdom. You are still going to use this bubble as a whiteboard for your thoughts, but you'll also know how to see thru it.
The concept of emptiness applies to material world in general: the western science calls it space-time, the idea that any thing can turn into any other thing, for both are fundamentally just motions of energy that has no natural shape. Buddhism tries to teach this basic idea in different terms.
For some reason that I don't quite understand, the founders of the three religions had fragmented the truth: buddhism teaches wisdom, christianity teaches love and islam teaches action - the three aspects of the spirit. Perhaps they thought that mixing everything into one bag would be too difficult to grasp, or maybe they hope it will make the peoples collaborate to assemble the pieces.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#357Innocent question by a non meditator.
Every couple months when it takes an hour or two to fall asleep, I get this otherworldly feeling; like a specific part of my body is growing unbelievably heavy, large and uncontrollable. It feels like this body part will end up crushing me, suffocating me, imploding, etc. It feels like it's happening to me, but I am not in my body. I start to feel emotions start to wash by me, it starts with curiosity, shifts to discomfort then quickly on to anxiety, fear, depression, terror, and once the last three in a horrifying mix.
It started when I was young, probably 10 or 12, and has slightly decreased over time. I'm closer to 25 now, and it's lost it's hold slightly. Two or three times it got me out of bed and pacing around grabbing things for fear of death or an unimaginable irrational fear of my swelling tounge. Currently I have a high level of control over it, I can choose whether I want to dive in or what level of emotion I want to experience.
Is this an accidental over application of meditation? Is it dementia at an extremely young age?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#358Intense meditation and self-introspection will dredge up long suppressed trauma you may not even be aware of. It may be beyond your ability to cope with its sudden release. Western appropriation of Eastern tradition can be fraught with peril.
"Yet, somewhere six or seven years into my practice, whatever progress I was making petered out. I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation 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."
Also, recreational drugs may introduce negative experiences in your meditation journey.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me. If you were tripping this is called ego death. In some circles, including mine, what you described after: > I started to think that I should be looking to help other peopl…
And this is exactly why "tripping" is heavily frowned upon by serious meditators and spiritual practitioners. Experiencing "ego death" (i.e. the three marks of existence) without having the previous spiritual grounding for it to help free you from attachment to the ego, is only a recipe for being even more deeply mired in craving and dukkha.
I'm finding it fascinating how much dogmatic religious junk is being thrown around in the comments here - discussing an article where one of the author's central points is that none of the dogmatic religious junk helped him.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#360Buddhism is all about reducing suffering. BUT, once a large group gets together in an organization, like with the big Zen Centers, they fall prey to the same organizational defenses. The organization becomes more important than the individuals, just like any corporation, it becomes a beast with its own survival instincts. Once this happens, you could argue that they are no longer representing Buddhism.
But this is pretty tough issue, or balance, because meditation does help people, so how do they get exposed if there is no organization? People have to get started somewhere, so some weekend meditation courses or sittings are good for an organization to 'organize' and get the word out.
The big mistake is people jumping right into these long week long silent retreats. Those are supposed to be for advanced meditators, not right off the couch. Like doing a 10K right from the couch, don't do a week long retreat from nothing.