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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)

#281

Post by robocat »

zozbot234 wrote: post #235
janeerie wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years ago, I started a light meditation practice (10-20 minutes) and did it for about a month with good results. At that point, I read this article (on Hacker News) and spent the next two years terrified this would happen to me. 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 a…

> This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety. Perhaps you should think of your dread and anxiety as a symptom of craving. But if you think your family obligations get in the way, there's nothing wrong with avoiding deep insight practices for now. You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously tri…

> You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously triggering anything.

Our fears can dominate our reality, and you are tritely recommending a possibly harmful path without knowing anything about them . . . like recommending eating a peanut to someone who knows they have a dangerous allergic reaction to peanuts. In the context of the article, your advice is especially egregious.

Please tread carefully in the world, effortless advice can cause long term harm.

Sometimes it is good to listen to our fears, sometimes not. Hard to judge others across the vast distance of a few sentences.

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

#282

Post by astrange »

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.

That's very similar to the boddhisatva vow many Buddhists are required to take.

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

#283

Post by haswell »

Mistletoe wrote: post #201
cutler wrote: 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…

Haven’t we all looked inwardly too much already? I’d list that as a top reason for the general malaise I see around me. I’ve never really found looking inward that useful, looking outward and acting outward and thinking about others has to be a 100:1 ratio on returns vs looking inward.

What is too much, and why would such introspection be a bad thing if it consistently leads to improved mental states? But I think more importantly, “looking inward” is not really the primary focus, but a technique to help one realize what is (and is not) already there.

At one time I think I would have written a comment similar to yours, because I had not yet experienced the difference between the perspective-altering practice of “looking inward” through mindfulness and the lost-in-thought version, which looks a lot more like rumination and just experiencing the thought loop without perspective, which can be deeply painful.

These practices are full of paradox. This isn’t to say the practice is invalid, but to highlight the fact that such practice is not intuitive or obvious. Evolutionary psychology is helping us unpack the illusions that lead to such apparent paradox.

One such paradox being that looking inward through the practice of mindfulness is the thing that enables someone to look outward and actually see. Most people struggle to describe this in words, but it starts to emerge clearly with practice.

Put another way, the premise is that we are all so lost in thought by default that we don’t even realize we are thinking. To claim that we can see outward in this state is to remain unaware of the possibility space of what is available to see, and to remain controlled by thought. You’ll still “see”, but this seeing is distorted by evolutionary reward systems, and what you think you’re seeing is still suspect.

But seeing the truth about one’s own mind changes how one sees other people in deeply impactful ways.

For me personally, my internal anxiety and self talk was so dominant that it made some outward pursuits feel nearly impossible. Once my relationship with thoughts/feelings started to shift, it didn’t just help with the anxiety in the sense that it subsided, it fundamentally shifted my relationship with the concept of anxiety, and made it possible for me to examine it from a broader perspective instead of just experiencing and being swallowed by it.

You go from knowing that anxiety (etc.) is a feeling to experiencing that anxiety is a feeling, and one that appears alongside everything else in consciousness. The difference between these states is enormous.

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

#284

Post by astrange »

wirrbel wrote: post #261
denton-scratch wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea what Bhante Vimalaramsi is. I used the term as a synonym for sravakayana; I think I probably used it incorrectly, it should probably include a lot of mahayana practice (because mahayana sutras). Maybe it just means "practices that don't depend on revealed teachings". At any rate, "not tantrayana".

Ah, Bhante Vimalaramsi is an american monk originally from the theravada tradition who IIRC uses Sutrayana for his take on what the Pali canon says, as he deviates from the theravada interpretation of the text.

"Sutrayana" meaning "not Vajrayana" is typical for Tibetan Buddhism.

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

#285

Post by zozbot234 »

robocat wrote: post #281
zozbot234 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety. Perhaps you should think of your dread and anxiety as a symptom of craving. But if you think your family obligations get in the way, there's nothing wrong with avoiding deep insight practices for now. You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously tri…

> You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously triggering anything. Our fears can dominate our reality, and you are tritely recommending a possibly harmful path without knowing anything about them . . . like recommending eating a peanut to someone who knows they have a dangerous allergic reaction to peanuts. In the context of the article, your advice is…

Of course. There is a world of difference between understanding something on an intellectual level and engaging in serious insight practice. Unlike insight meditation itself, there isn't really any evidence that the path I suggested is "possibly harmful".

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

#286

Post by astrange »

starkd wrote: post #248
yakubin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mindfulness is the new agile. Every criticism is deflected with “you’re not doing it right”.

There is something very cultish about it. An indication of it being a cult is the tendency to get caught up in definitions of new words. It is easy to think that once you learn the vocabulary (like "vipassana", "sati", or whatever), you are have achieved something, when all you are doing is reciting new words but the thinking is done for you.

Well… it's literally a religion. And those are just foreign words.

McMindfulness (the stuff you'd get corporate trainings about) doesn't teach you any of those words, uses several different techniques at once, gives regular people little bits of the techniques used for monks to develop revulsion for all earthly things, etc.

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

#287

Post by astrange »

lr4444lr wrote: post #60
me551ah wrote: 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 a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you.

This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.

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

#288

Post by twobitshifter »

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…

You’re saying it’s a selection bias, but the author claims most people with these symptoms had no previous mental issues.

Further, meditating is marketed as addressing emotional issues and if it’s not doing that, it’s either a placebo or worse potentially harmful to the people most likely to try it.

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

#290

Post by astrange »

richiebful1 wrote: post #76
samastur wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then what? I'm genuinely curious as a loved one rejects therapy exactly because she already knows what causes of her depression are and does not see any use in debating them further as they only bring her down. I don't have experience or knowledge to explain how it would help her.

A good therapist doesn't just talk about root causes, imo. A good therapist talks about healthy coping mechanisms, and ways to get out of negative thought cycles

That has the problem that it's boring. Where do people who are overly well adjusted go to get traumatized again? (Like a secular Tantrayana.)
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