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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)

#131
I have quite a lot of experience with meditation. I've done thousands of hours, including more than ten retreats that involved sitting for as many as 18 hours per day.

I've also done many healing modalities, including somatic experiencing.

From my perspective, we have taken "Buddhism" and "meditation" and we have done what us Westerners almost always do: we boil it down into "stuff that does stuff" and "everything else".

We are so intensely and impatiently interested in "doing stuff".

So, we have taken a tradition/religion that has existed for thousands of years, includes many practices and parts, and we have pulled out the part that "does stuff", and we call that mindfulness.

But, if you really look at the tradition itself, particularly in non-Zen forms of Buddhism, what you often see is what are called "preliminary practices". Used to, if the Westerner goes east in search of meditation instruction, he or she has to get special permission to skip the preliminary practices.

And what our preliminary practices? In the West we call that therapy.

So, this really important thing, that one must do therapy and what they would call in the East "purification" before one is ready to start meditating has been tossed aside because it doesn't yield immediate results like a few days of mindfulness.

In addition, the traditions are almost totally unaware of our understanding of trauma and the best they can do is use the language of "demons".

So, I'm aware of "mindful-based stress reduction", but I'm not intimately familiar with it. It doesn't make sense to me why someone would use mindfulness to reduce stress or in place of a therapeutic or trauma modality.

I mean, sometimes it is way more comfortable to not be aware of things than to be aware of things. And, in my experience, becoming aware of oneself is just a bunch of not fun realizations, including realizations like "I'm a people pleaser" or "I always sabotage relationships in a similar way".

These realizations are not fun because just seeing the truth or the pattern doesn't change it, so you sit and watch yourself doing the same shit over and over and not quite having the power to change it... That requires much deeper meditation and awareness.

At any point in this process, one can become too aware and too burdened with one's issues, and that can result in all kinds of stuff including breakdown and psychosis.

At the end of the day, meditation and mindfulness and all the rest is basically just the matrix movie... Don't take the red pill unless you really want the red pill because sleepwalking through life unaware of one's issues and happily eating the steak that isn't there is sometimes more pleasant.

Meditation is for those who want the truth, regardless of whether it feels good or not. For everyone else, there's therapy.

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

#132
post #27

What he experienced is actually expected, deeper states of meditation bring out even harder experiences. Meditation is marketed in the west as some sort of a relaxation pill, designed to cure anxiety and other mental ailments. It's actually not. Meditation is a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you.

Sounds as conveniently unfalsifibale as any more patent pseudoscience.

Meditation is empirically associated with some degree of danger in some subset of the population:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-b...

Doesn't sound unfalsifiable to me.

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

#133
post #114

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…

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…

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” We need the mundane earthly activities to balance any inward quests.

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

#134
Being mindful can open scary doors for sure... but something about the article gives me the vibes of depersonalization opesode of sort. Perhaps the effect of Marijuana + Mindfulness + Other stuff?

I say that because a while back I started using CBD oil (yes, I bought into awesome benefits in listicles!) AND it triggered the worst 3 weeks of my life ever! Endless stream of panic attacks, paranonia and Depersonalization-Derealization [1].

I'm never touching CBD again!

[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization-derealizatio...

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

#135
post #114

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…

There are often first-hand comments about the dangers of mindfulness practice here on HN. But when the commenters describe their practices they are so extreme that it was almost inevitable that they had negative effects.

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

#136

I’m an autistic person and it sounds like in some way this person achieved exactly the point of certain forms of meditation like this which is to open up awareness. And I think as many autistic folks will tell you, being very aware is extremely difficult and is mentally and physically taxing. If you aren’t prepared for it I could indeed see it being extremely disturbing. Being exposed to all your inner workings and t…

Was going to post this. There are reasons we have brains with selective attention instead of constant mindfulness, and a whole spectrum of disorders that arises when that sort of a filter breaks down. (I am lucky. I don’t have it bad.) Unfiltered mindfulness of this sort sounds like basically the same thing.

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

#137

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

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

#138

All of the real meditation traditions around the world - including the ones inside of Christianity - spend decades training highly skilled teachers to help people 1) avoid problems like this, and 2) clean up problems like this when they do happen. And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamb…

Exactly!

The same thing plays out with psychedelics. Many cultures have thousands of years of passed down knowledge with a community of elders to guide people through a trip. In the west we think we can replicate the same thing, sitting at home with a friend who has no clue what they are doing when things go bad.

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

#139

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.

Sure, and people lie on surveys used in studies too. Only some percentage lie like this though.

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

#140
post #133

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…

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” We need the mundane earthly activities to balance any inward quests.

totally agree.
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