[leemoore]

I've found that intensive practice of meditation over the last 3 years including both a daily practice and going on more extended retreats has fundamentally shifted the way in which I perceive and engage with moment to moment experience which has in turn steadily raised my baseline level of happiness.

I fully understand this is subjective anecdotal data and that it's quite possible I'm fooling myself though I don't believe I am. I've heard similar reports from others who have engaged deeply with various contemplative practices.

[charlesju]

Do you fully subscribe to the notion of pure meditation, in that you should feel neither good nor bad? Once I understood what it meant to fully meditate; give up desires to love, build stuff I have a passion for, tackle challenging problems, I found that the proposed benefits of feeling not bad just didn't seem to weigh out.

[leemoore]

A notion of pure meditation doesn't have much meaning for me. It just sounds like someones attempt to take an extremely broad and varied set of useful practices and overly simplify in an effort to assert internally or externally that there is one right/best/pure/perfect way of doing something. I don't subscribe to that view. Like programming languages or frameworks or methodologies or any other set of maps and techniques they have their various levels of usefulness depending on person and circumstance.

Also, the idea of giving up desire, passion and things of this nature is often misunderstood. It is not necessary to give up ones humanity, emotions, loves or anything else. It's more about changing the way in which you perceive and engage with all experiences of life. It's not like I've stopped feeling bad. I feel bad plenty. It's more that feeling bad (and feeling good) is experienced in a very different way.