Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

> I've experienced all these interpersonal deficits after meditating seriously 2 hours every day for 2 years straight.

Wow! I haven't meditated before. That sounds like a lot of time.

Do you still meditate? What does it offer you? Has it offered you what you expected?

For many many years I was stuck inside my head. I had erected "walls" to protect myself and keep others out. Being afraid of coming off as weird, being worried about saying the wrong thing, afraid of being rejected, afraid of being assertive. So I would hide inside my head, keep to myself, and when people tried to get close to me (as in trying to be a close friend) I would instinctively push them away, in a sense, to keep my distance. When in social situations I would try to find any excuse to leave as quickly as possible because all I was thinking about was being worried about being awkward or weird or rejected.

At the same time, I became very distressed about being single and having very few friends.

I finally realized why I lacked friends and relationships, it was because I pushing people away. I also realized that the reason for this was because I was stuck inside my head, over analyzing everything, over thinking everything, making up problems in my head, being anxious, worried, and fearful about the past and the future.

So I found "mindfulness" as a way to escape my brain from the never ending loop of analyzing people and social situations, to stop trying to figure out people's hidden intentions, stop thinking about the past and the future. To live in the moment and let myself be me rather than hiding myself.

To me, mindfulness just means recognizing when my brain is a run-away train of thoughts and to not let it consume me. It's about getting outside of my head and into real life. For me, it's the difference of being safe but miserable or taking risks and potentially reaping rewards (friendships, relationships, new opportunities, etc.) The best way I can describe is the stereotypical/incorrect description of being an introvert vs being an extrovert.

what would you say are examples of harm done by dedicated meditation practiced by people with moral deficiencies?

For some value of selfish tendencies.

Tribal feudalists and nomadic spirits have been waging culture wars for a long time.

Contemporary British politics seem a bit selfish. Not sure the BBC should be taken too seriously as its government funders push austerity. Deflect! Project!

Tomorrow they’ll run articles about being more mindful for clicks anyway. Does anyone else get tired of this intentional emotional ping pong?

> The 25% number is pretty striking, if true. You see people recommending meditation without reservation, and discounting adverse effects as "exceptionally rare". Over the years I've begun to see more and more stories of people having deeply destabilizing experiences with meditation, and it concerns me how quickly people dismiss that possibility. There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen.

> There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". .

It's pretty much my experience.

Yes, when you meditate, sometime some things will have to be broken or removed to let place to something new. Those temporary states are disagreable, and from the outside can be experienced as "panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of dissociation".

Unfortunatly, if a building is in a bad shape, there is no way around destroying some part of it to rebuild. And this takes time. Meanwhile, there is a hole.

It's not specific to meditation. You will see that in psychotherapy as well.

That's why having meditation teachers is important, because they have to help you through this, make you understand what's happening, that like all the things, it's temporary, and to keep it up.

And you are right when you say:

> But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen

Because the experience vary a lot from person to person. There is no typical path. Some will not live that. Some will live a very mild or short sample of that.

Meditation is not science. You can't predict how long things will go, or how long they will take. You even can't be exactly sure somebody is practicing correctly, nor that something else is not interracting with it in a bad way. That's why serious centers take so many precautions with beginers, but it's not perfect. It can't be.

And it would be tempting (also quite logical) to think "what I'm doing doesn't work, I'm worse than I used to be".

Unfortunatly yes, the old saying of "it will get harder before it gets easier" apply here in my experience. It will apply several times during a life of meditation, in cycles. Although it's way easier once you are experienced: you just use meditation as a way to go through it. It's what it's for after all.

There is no alternative to trusting it will pass. Like with a chemothery, where some patients feel terrible for a long time before they feel better, while some patients never fully recover, and some even die.

I went through all those stages in 16 years of meditation. Panic attacks. Depression. Dissociation. It sucks. The experience of a lot of meditants is that the practice does replace them with a better life eventually. The increase in happiness is, on average over a decade, very real and positive if you practice correctly, and keep at it.

But it's hard. It's also not something you can plan for.

Plus it can worry people around you, and even yourself. Which is a good thing: it means one cares about you.

I would understand than somebody doesn't want to take the risk.

I would state it's worth it, as I feel it is. But who knows, could be survivor bias.