This is a forefront issue that Buddhism tries to address, both modern pragmatic Buddhism and fundamentalist Buddhism. It's why right speech, right action, and morals is one of the first things they drill into you. Most pragmatic practitioners will refuse to teach you if you indicate that you have some mental problems or moral deficiencies that should be addressed by a professional first, as mindfulness may end up doing more harm than good. It's one of the flaws of teaching secular mindfulness, far from its Buddhist roots. I've experienced all these interpersonal deficits after meditating seriously 2 hours every day for 2 years straight. Just need to have the self-awareness to address them, despite the goal of no-self.
I saw a Dr. K video in another comment, and one of my favorite quotes he uses to describe meditation is that, "if you run for 5 miles a day, there will be changes to your body that will definitely happen".
There's a balance to be struck with anything. On the one hand, teaching meditation outside of the context of religion might increase the likelihood of the purpose of the practice being misunderstood. On the other hand, any religious practice runs the risk of breeding a sense of self righteousness in the practitioner. With meditation and mindfulness, I've seen both.
Also, I gotta say that language like "moral deficiencies" sounds incredibly broad without some examples. I think that speaks to the drawbacks of a religious context. I don't necessarily mean to direct these comments at you in particular (after all, I don't know what you meant by "moral deficiencies" without more info), but morality is a slippery topic and religion often seems to treat it like it isn't.
It's interesting that Western Christianity has pretty much the same underlying message - you simply can't reach salvation and union with God without starting from right morals. (This might be why Stoicism with its meditative and contemplative traditions, and a similar focus on divinely-inspired "right/moral action" was a key ally of early Christianity.) Islam of course has its own Sufi traditions, the Biblical prophets are said to wander in the desert etc. etc.
Mindfulness/meditation are tools to attain a level of awareness so that one can recognize what are the things holding one back from experiencing supreme peace and bliss. Without working on virtues like compassion, kindness, truthfulness, humility etc. these tools will only aggrevate one's selfish nature.
There are countless examples from ancient India where advanced meditators obtained divine boons due to their severe penance (by meditation on the divine), but ended up using the boon for expansion of their power/wealth at the cost of others, thereby becoming extremely selfish and a problem for the society to sustain properly.
Forefront? HA! My experience is diametrically opposite: prolong Buddhism practice often leads to ego-centric behaviors that are swept under the rug and not talked about.
I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my Zen Master who know how to tolerate, navigate, and leverage that BS for the greater good.
Samurai training is Buddhism training on steroids.
Regardless, my practice continue with a lot less time at the Temple, and I have relinquished my Center (the Center that I founded).
Are you sure that right things and morals have anything to do with Buddhism or meditation? For "serious meditators" - seriousness is one of the first things one drops when practices start working.
This would line up with a broader trend I've noticed and would be interested in reading more about: the use of pop psychology to justify antisocial behavior.
Ten years ago, telling a distressed friend you don't feel like hearing about their problems would be incredibly rude. Now you can find NYT articles explaining how to couch the same sentiment in more acceptable terms like, "I don't have the bandwidth to perform that kind of emotional labor right now."
Same thing here. Telling a person you wronged to "get over it" is unacceptable. Telling them that you've been working on letting go of negative feelings about the past and being more mindful of the present, and you hope they can do the same? Well if anyone has a problem with that, you don't need that kind of energy in your life!
I've noticed this as well. There's a really great, growing trend of people understanding abusive behaviors and setting boundaries, which I think is fantastic. People should always stand up for themselves! But too far and you become like you've described.
Sounds like they are not able to shoulder responsibility for errors made in the past. It's not hard to do usually - a heartfelt apology takes a few seconds and can turn a relationship completely around.
You'd probably enjoy reading Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism". It makes all sort of great points about yesterday's hippies' and pop culture personalities' ability to recycle their (frankly) egomaniacal tendencies, and analyzes what gave rise to those in the first place (material abundance, mass media, "youth culture", etc.).
10-20 minutes/day was enough to teach me how to be 'mindful' on demand and mitigated a lot of mild ADHD-type problems in my life (impatience, anger, finding queues unbearable, high sensitivity to noise etc.).
I spent a few months doing more, and it may not be related, but I became increasingly detached from the outside world, more self-absorbed and less motivated. Spent a lot of time just sitting and being content with nothing, which made me question why I should strive for -anything-. Always focused on improving myself, and the way I thought and felt, but it kept me stuck in my own head and not engaged with other people. There is a benefit in doing loving kindness and other forms of meditation that connect you with others.
Mindfulness and compassion are often talked of as "two wings of a bird" by dharma teachers - mindfulness doesn't automatically translate to compassion. This sutta makes the same point:
Maṇibhadda Sutta (SN 10:4)
On one occasion the Blessed One was staying among the Magadhans at the Jewel-stand Shrine, the haunt of the yakkha-spirit, Maṇibhadda [Auspicious Jewel].
Then Maṇibhadda the yakkha-spirit went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, recited this verse:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful.
The mindful one prospers happily—always.
The mindful one grows better each day
and is totally freed from animosity.”
The Buddha:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful.
The mindful one prospers happily always.
The mindful one grows better each day
but isn’t totally freed from animosity.
Whoever’s heart, all day, all night,
delights in harmlessness
with goodwill for all beings
My issue with this specific concept is that lots and lots of people are lazy and instead of doing compassionate things, they "feel compassion" as a generic emotion through the use of meditation.
I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in your mind as your practice. But you also have to actually do things to help, it's not enough to be nice about it.
The Buddhist temple I took some meditation classes at practiced feeling good things towards people. The Episcopalians next door ran a shelter. It's not hard to see which is further on the path towards enlightenment, and it's something that seems like it's very very often missing from Western teachings.
And completely absent from self-help books about the subject, which are 100% self-centered. Lesson 1 of compassion meditation should be volunteering at a food bank, not learning to forgive yourself for your flaws. These things should be learned together, not in isolation.
I think this is partially due to meditation being strongly associated in Western culture with New Thought [1] type movements. This diverse movement is the inspiration for most of the modern self-help ideology. As the quotes from William James in that article mention, the basis is "Mind-Cure", or the idea that thinking the right thoughts leads to physically healing the body.
Many people in Western culture get into those Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist) practices for the purpose of self enhancement. People will meditate to control anxiety, to improve focus or to increase performance in some aspect of their lives. Very often the goal is one of personal improvement, or managing some kind of idealized growth/flourishing of the individual.
Most people here would probably deride the outlandish New Age ideas that grew out of the original Christian Science underpinnings of New Thought. But I find the basic premises of new thought to be the spiritual zeitgeist of the current age.
I suspect the result shown here is part of the broader tendency for people to only adopt the parts of things that make them "feel better".
Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.
The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.
There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.
It's so typical of the rapid, results-oriented, outcome-focused world that we live in that McMindfulness has dashed into the forefront of popularity; oh look, I'll just ignore the last 2500 years of learning and sit on a cushion for 20 minutes a day for 6 months and, bang, I'm enlightened!
Meditation is not about meditation. It's not about your time that you're on the cushion. Any good teacher points this out again and again. Meditation is about life, it's about Metta, it's about understanding your place in the world. It isn't about progress, or happiness, or being calm. It isn't a fad, to be dropped for something different when that becomes the next popular thing on Instagram. It's deeper than that, more central, more vibrant, longer, simpler - but harder! This is a journey of a lifetime, not a happy pill.
The whole context is stacked full of nuance - which, to be fair, the article stresses time and time again. Set and setting are slap in the middle of this. IT DEPENDS, as it always does and always did. Some people aren't in the right place to take on a proper meditative practice; others are in it for the wrong reason. Others still are so goal-oriented that they'll never understand the path for what it is. Some will become more selfish. Others will become better people. This is life. This is meditation.
This is so subject to interpretation that it's almost meaningless. For example, consider the case of someone who takes up meditation and comes to the realization that they really hate their job. If they then quit their job and seek another position at the same or lower pay, are they being 'selfish'?
On the one hand, if they've bought into the notion that "we are all a family here" and that loyalty to their employer is like a familial obligation, and quitting their job is like abandoning an elderly relative on the street corner, then they may indeed be consumed by feelings of guilt and anxiety. Most observers would note that this is a false equivalency: the relationship between employer and employee is certainly not like that between parent and child.
One could likewise argue that quitting a job one hates is actually altruistic, as there are people who might like that job and if one's workplace is full of people who like what they're doing, it makes it a much more pleasant environment. Additionally, people who hate their jobs are known to take out their frustrations on family members, which is an unpleasant situation, so quitting a job one hates, even if it results in a somewhat lower standard of living, is not at all selfish - assuming one can find another job, and the end result is not poverty/homelessness.
Meditation would seem to be beneficial in any case. Some people don't even recognize that they hate their job as much as they do, and perhaps some internal reflection can suggest some changes that can be made to make the situation at least tolerable.
Incidentally, attempting to use things like guilt to motivate people to be obedient is a very unhealthy and Machiavellian tactic, and if 'mindfulness' helps people to break out of such situations, then the more the better.
I don't really understand or agree with their focus on guilt as a motivator. They claim that a reduction in feelings of guilt led to a reduction in sincerity of apology.
> The practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends
Personally, I would say a sincere apology would be motivated by a person's objective belief that they had done wrong, not by their desire to soothe their feelings of guilt. But the whole situation seems of dubious value, as the person is being requested to write an apology (vs. offering one of their own motivation), and to a person they feel most guilty towards. In other words, this study seems pre-constructed (intentionally or not) to produce these results...
100% agreed. Somehow this article manages to redefine mindfulness as just convincing yourself to feel no guilt for anything (“In general, mindfulness seems to calm uncomfortable feelings” is a direct quote from the article, and most subsequent conclusions are drawn from that statement). That’s not mindfulness, that’s just being a narcissist sociopath.
I've seen a similar effect in a subset of people that get super into psychedelics. In some cases, they seem to lead to a hyper inflated ego.
> Yet a growing body of research suggests that such stories may be surprisingly common, with one study from 2019 showing that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of “dissociation”.
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.
(And going back to psychedelics -- I have a similar complaint about people's attitudes around "bad trips". Psychonauts like to say "there's no such thing as a bad trip, only difficult ones", but I think that dangerously discounts how destabilizing trips can be sometimes.)
I've been reading Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and the author makes the same point about informed consent. It's widely known in various traditions meditation can mess you up. I think he quotes someone saying "better not to start if you're not going to finish" or you may end up in a bad place for a long time.
Mindfulness the same as wealth, beauty or general success can also be a tool to elevate yourself above others. Especially if your self-perception is that you are very mindful or very empathetic you might easily deduce that you do better than others and have to right their wrongs.
There is no golden rule and there are obvious exceptions, but if your empathy comes with a lot of animosity, you probably just deceived yourself.
The initial episode covers a story closer to a cult. But later this podcast reflects a lot of what you’ve mentioned anecdotally with respect to to modern psychedelic research.
> 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.
I spent a year in a meditation center, and the results vary a lot from person to person, because what somebody needs right now in life is different from everybody else.
Some people will need to become more discreet, while some people need to take more space, some people need to be less materialistic, while others need to accept to use material for their own comfort, some people need to play more, some need to work more.
Also, what you see is rarely the definitive result: it's usually only part of the ungoing correction, meaning you may be seeing a swing on the other side of the curve, a different kind of unbalance, and it would be easy to judge the meditant is not progressing.
However, progress in meditation is not an absolute, it is always to be understood in the context of each human. Some start from very far away on their path, and what your perceive as failure may be a great success for them.
As usual with things that are practiced inside yourself, there is no objective way of measuring progress. We don't have a wisdom metter. This is also why it's very hard to assess if somebody is practicing correctly, or if some teaching is off. Teachers have tools for this, but even that is fuzzy at best.
My personnal experience is that I used to be minimalist, and after years of meditation, now I buy more things. I used to attend to more social events, and now I'm declining regularly some of them. Now some around me could see that as a regression. But from my perspective, it's a way of taking more care of myself.
Be careful with the way you evaluate people, practicing or not. You are probably not having all the context.
It would seem that G.K. Chesterton had a sense of the implications of these overly inward looking practices:
"Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things."
I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.
One minor quip that other comments do not seem to address - is that supposed to be a bad thing?
I didn't notice what the article describes when I meditated (if anything I got nicer because my failure mode is being impatient/easily annoyed, and meditation helps with that), but one thing I did notice is that I really couldn't handle going to some meditation groups and any Buddhist ones, because of all the religious/compassionate fluff. To me meditation was always just form of great mental exercise. I thought it was just because of my atheism... but I guess it's also because I think the selfishness is a virtue, so trying to counteract it with some new age stuff never sat well with me.
Having lived in Boulder CO for several years, which is basically the Mecca of Americanized mindfulness, I can attest that this is true. The most ardent practitioners that I met were invariably self obsessed.
In Hinduism, there's a four stage journey through life that's prescribed. You have these duties to discharge in each stage (such as marrying off your children) and until they are done, you are not supposed to be aiming for the goals of the next stage. I feel that's slightly less selfish than what buddhism prescribes.
Siddhartha himself left his wife and infant baby to seek a solution to his problems. I've never heard direct criticism of this act but there's a beautiful song called Yasodhara Vilaapam that talks about the sorrow and shock that his wife goes through after he vanishes without any notice or explanation. Selfishness is deeply baked into a philosophy that above all values personal enlightenment, no?
The entire concept of thinking in the article is kind of wrong.
If we ask again what is mindfulness technique and what is created for, we will arrive to answer that it is technique from Buddhism, meant to liberate us from world, and repeated cycle or rebirth and suffering. Regardless of what you believe pause there and ponder. Forget for a moment whether you believe in after life or not. If we think about the end goal "liberate from the suffering" liberate from world and minds game.
So, we took a tool which should liberate us from world to become more productive?
Isn't our usage premise wrong? Of course there will be side effects, if you "abandoning" everything that is world game and keeps you worried or money looking animal, why is so strange that there are side effects as selfishness?
First stage of going inward is removing everything around you, and by seeing true nature you stop caring. But by stop caring suddenly, you see that as explained in many scriptures 'good or bad do not exist' there is only constant change.
Imagine you are child and you are with other children playing in the court, they ask you to join and you refuse. You say "I do not want to be in the game", and they reply "Why not?! C'mon we need extra player, here, you can be on a good side", you reply "I do not care about game, sides, manipulations, or you, in fact in this moment I do not exist"... from your perspective this is valid, from other children perspective you are selfish.
Also question of quilt is inverted. Who expect guilt we as society, or the individual?
I've been meditating regularly for at least 10 years now. My own selfish tendencies have increased and decreased during that time, it doesn't seem related. I think meditating is rather selfish, it's doing something for yourself, and that's ok. I primarily meditate because it helps me focus. I think it helps me deal with stress and helps me sleep better. I don't attempt any particular pose as most of the cross legged stuff is painful and has caused injuries.
Whenever someone talks about mindfulness or stoicism, the name that pops to my head is Tim Ferris. Like a less crappier Joe Rogan with an actual brain maybe? I still listen to some of his podcast episodes because he gets guests who I want to learn about. But oh my god the narcissism! I get it the podcast is about success and how to succeed, but for the love of god try to take your head out of your own ass for a minute? I’ve listened to tens of hours if not hundreds and haven’t ever heard him talk about a single act of kindness or help he or his guests have ever done to strangers.
You know what he’ll bring up every day? Mindfulness or meditation or stoicism. Like buddy, if you can’t sleep it’s probably because you know you’re not a nice person deep down. No amount of meditation is gonna help that.
Vipassana is insight meditation, not mindfulness and not really appropriate for beginners. The closest equivalent to mindfulness would be concentration, or samadhi.
I don’t really get why this is evidence when it’s just asking an ethics question and having people “let their mind wander”. The context they mention is extremely important.
Practicing mindfulness is not just letting your mind wander. It’s practice, just like exercising or coding. You get better at it with time, not just a Homer Simpson moment of following your thoughts after being asked a question about being a decent human being.
The whole idea of mindfulness is to get to know yourself better and work on the not so great parts such as when your ego gets involved. If you practice it today and have found tremendous results, great! Also if you tried it and it didn’t help much, that’s okay too.
I’ll continue to do it because it’s what I believe separates good from great in my life and helps me accomplish more. I’m glad they mentioned this:
> “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.”
I never really got mindfulness. I mean, yes: Being somewhere and juat being there in the moment and recognizing it in all its detail and on purpose can be good. Just like it can be good to look out of the window when all you do all day is staring out of the window.
But I think a state of no thought, where things just flow in your absence is just as (if not more) important. Be it when you play music and stop thinking and just do. Or when the same happens in sports, coding, painting, walking whatever.
The thing about mindful people is (at least judging from the small sample size I know) that they like to be mindful about everything. And they don't look well or relaxed. Just like this behavior is yet another form of escapism.
Mindfulness, sure. But it is by far not the only state of mind that you should bw in.
I'm a fan & practitioner of NVC, mindfulness, careful work life balance, etc for being able to treat startups as a marathon vs sprint... But I've observed people overuse & abuse these tools to rationalize prioritizing self over peers in ways that come at the direct expense of the same exact things of their colleagues. It can add up over time in a way that breeds resentment, distrust, non-collaboration, etc. Generally, risks a toxicity that taxes everyone more than the individual brings to the team. What one person needs is different from their peers, so requires some sort of empathic give-and-take, and for someone not as good at paying attention, help doing so.
In a team of high-functioning folks, a tricky line to walk! (And if people have recs here, am curious!)
[+] [-] jackdawed|3 years ago|reply
I saw a Dr. K video in another comment, and one of my favorite quotes he uses to describe meditation is that, "if you run for 5 miles a day, there will be changes to your body that will definitely happen".
More here:
- https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...
- https://eudoxos.github.io/cfitness/html/index.html
- https://themindfulgeek.com/ plus a talk he gave at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xxsA9Bn-4
[+] [-] davesque|3 years ago|reply
Also, I gotta say that language like "moral deficiencies" sounds incredibly broad without some examples. I think that speaks to the drawbacks of a religious context. I don't necessarily mean to direct these comments at you in particular (after all, I don't know what you meant by "moral deficiencies" without more info), but morality is a slippery topic and religion often seems to treat it like it isn't.
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jmfldn|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/JOcoynQCmZ0
Highly recommend his channel by the way.
[+] [-] StopDarkPattern|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TriNetra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SMAAART|3 years ago|reply
I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my Zen Master who know how to tolerate, navigate, and leverage that BS for the greater good.
Samurai training is Buddhism training on steroids.
Regardless, my practice continue with a lot less time at the Temple, and I have relinquished my Center (the Center that I founded).
[+] [-] mapcars|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
Always thought it was faddish.
[+] [-] 2-718-281-828|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Adraghast|3 years ago|reply
Ten years ago, telling a distressed friend you don't feel like hearing about their problems would be incredibly rude. Now you can find NYT articles explaining how to couch the same sentiment in more acceptable terms like, "I don't have the bandwidth to perform that kind of emotional labor right now."
Same thing here. Telling a person you wronged to "get over it" is unacceptable. Telling them that you've been working on letting go of negative feelings about the past and being more mindful of the present, and you hope they can do the same? Well if anyone has a problem with that, you don't need that kind of energy in your life!
[+] [-] and0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manmal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syl_sau|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rjh29|3 years ago|reply
I spent a few months doing more, and it may not be related, but I became increasingly detached from the outside world, more self-absorbed and less motivated. Spent a lot of time just sitting and being content with nothing, which made me question why I should strive for -anything-. Always focused on improving myself, and the way I thought and felt, but it kept me stuck in my own head and not engaged with other people. There is a benefit in doing loving kindness and other forms of meditation that connect you with others.
[+] [-] lukasb|3 years ago|reply
Maṇibhadda Sutta (SN 10:4)
On one occasion the Blessed One was staying among the Magadhans at the Jewel-stand Shrine, the haunt of the yakkha-spirit, Maṇibhadda [Auspicious Jewel].
Then Maṇibhadda the yakkha-spirit went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, recited this verse:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful. The mindful one prospers happily—always. The mindful one grows better each day and is totally freed from animosity.”
The Buddha:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful. The mindful one prospers happily always. The mindful one grows better each day
but isn’t totally freed from animosity. Whoever’s heart, all day, all night, delights in harmlessness with goodwill for all beings
has no animosity with anyone at all.
[+] [-] neltnerb|3 years ago|reply
I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in your mind as your practice. But you also have to actually do things to help, it's not enough to be nice about it.
The Buddhist temple I took some meditation classes at practiced feeling good things towards people. The Episcopalians next door ran a shelter. It's not hard to see which is further on the path towards enlightenment, and it's something that seems like it's very very often missing from Western teachings.
And completely absent from self-help books about the subject, which are 100% self-centered. Lesson 1 of compassion meditation should be volunteering at a food bank, not learning to forgive yourself for your flaws. These things should be learned together, not in isolation.
[+] [-] reggieband|3 years ago|reply
Many people in Western culture get into those Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist) practices for the purpose of self enhancement. People will meditate to control anxiety, to improve focus or to increase performance in some aspect of their lives. Very often the goal is one of personal improvement, or managing some kind of idealized growth/flourishing of the individual.
Most people here would probably deride the outlandish New Age ideas that grew out of the original Christian Science underpinnings of New Thought. But I find the basic premises of new thought to be the spiritual zeitgeist of the current age.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought
[+] [-] manachar|3 years ago|reply
Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.
The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.
There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmje|3 years ago|reply
Meditation is not about meditation. It's not about your time that you're on the cushion. Any good teacher points this out again and again. Meditation is about life, it's about Metta, it's about understanding your place in the world. It isn't about progress, or happiness, or being calm. It isn't a fad, to be dropped for something different when that becomes the next popular thing on Instagram. It's deeper than that, more central, more vibrant, longer, simpler - but harder! This is a journey of a lifetime, not a happy pill.
The whole context is stacked full of nuance - which, to be fair, the article stresses time and time again. Set and setting are slap in the middle of this. IT DEPENDS, as it always does and always did. Some people aren't in the right place to take on a proper meditative practice; others are in it for the wrong reason. Others still are so goal-oriented that they'll never understand the path for what it is. Some will become more selfish. Others will become better people. This is life. This is meditation.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
On the one hand, if they've bought into the notion that "we are all a family here" and that loyalty to their employer is like a familial obligation, and quitting their job is like abandoning an elderly relative on the street corner, then they may indeed be consumed by feelings of guilt and anxiety. Most observers would note that this is a false equivalency: the relationship between employer and employee is certainly not like that between parent and child.
One could likewise argue that quitting a job one hates is actually altruistic, as there are people who might like that job and if one's workplace is full of people who like what they're doing, it makes it a much more pleasant environment. Additionally, people who hate their jobs are known to take out their frustrations on family members, which is an unpleasant situation, so quitting a job one hates, even if it results in a somewhat lower standard of living, is not at all selfish - assuming one can find another job, and the end result is not poverty/homelessness.
Meditation would seem to be beneficial in any case. Some people don't even recognize that they hate their job as much as they do, and perhaps some internal reflection can suggest some changes that can be made to make the situation at least tolerable.
Incidentally, attempting to use things like guilt to motivate people to be obedient is a very unhealthy and Machiavellian tactic, and if 'mindfulness' helps people to break out of such situations, then the more the better.
[+] [-] mtrower|3 years ago|reply
> The practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends
Personally, I would say a sincere apology would be motivated by a person's objective belief that they had done wrong, not by their desire to soothe their feelings of guilt. But the whole situation seems of dubious value, as the person is being requested to write an apology (vs. offering one of their own motivation), and to a person they feel most guilty towards. In other words, this study seems pre-constructed (intentionally or not) to produce these results...
[+] [-] np-|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Trasmatta|3 years ago|reply
> Yet a growing body of research suggests that such stories may be surprisingly common, with one study from 2019 showing that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of “dissociation”.
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.
(And going back to psychedelics -- I have a similar complaint about people's attitudes around "bad trips". Psychonauts like to say "there's no such thing as a bad trip, only difficult ones", but I think that dangerously discounts how destabilizing trips can be sometimes.)
[+] [-] nprateem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potatoman22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
There is no golden rule and there are obvious exceptions, but if your empathy comes with a lot of animosity, you probably just deceived yourself.
[+] [-] jackpeterfletch|3 years ago|reply
The initial episode covers a story closer to a cult. But later this podcast reflects a lot of what you’ve mentioned anecdotally with respect to to modern psychedelic research.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|3 years ago|reply
Some people will need to become more discreet, while some people need to take more space, some people need to be less materialistic, while others need to accept to use material for their own comfort, some people need to play more, some need to work more.
Also, what you see is rarely the definitive result: it's usually only part of the ungoing correction, meaning you may be seeing a swing on the other side of the curve, a different kind of unbalance, and it would be easy to judge the meditant is not progressing.
However, progress in meditation is not an absolute, it is always to be understood in the context of each human. Some start from very far away on their path, and what your perceive as failure may be a great success for them.
As usual with things that are practiced inside yourself, there is no objective way of measuring progress. We don't have a wisdom metter. This is also why it's very hard to assess if somebody is practicing correctly, or if some teaching is off. Teachers have tools for this, but even that is fuzzy at best.
My personnal experience is that I used to be minimalist, and after years of meditation, now I buy more things. I used to attend to more social events, and now I'm declining regularly some of them. Now some around me could see that as a regression. But from my perspective, it's a way of taking more care of myself.
Be careful with the way you evaluate people, practicing or not. You are probably not having all the context.
[+] [-] nprateem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondeval|3 years ago|reply
"Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things."
[+] [-] neltnerb|3 years ago|reply
I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.
[+] [-] sershe|3 years ago|reply
I didn't notice what the article describes when I meditated (if anything I got nicer because my failure mode is being impatient/easily annoyed, and meditation helps with that), but one thing I did notice is that I really couldn't handle going to some meditation groups and any Buddhist ones, because of all the religious/compassionate fluff. To me meditation was always just form of great mental exercise. I thought it was just because of my atheism... but I guess it's also because I think the selfishness is a virtue, so trying to counteract it with some new age stuff never sat well with me.
[+] [-] danielvaughn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hzay|3 years ago|reply
Siddhartha himself left his wife and infant baby to seek a solution to his problems. I've never heard direct criticism of this act but there's a beautiful song called Yasodhara Vilaapam that talks about the sorrow and shock that his wife goes through after he vanishes without any notice or explanation. Selfishness is deeply baked into a philosophy that above all values personal enlightenment, no?
[+] [-] NiceWayToDoIT|3 years ago|reply
If we ask again what is mindfulness technique and what is created for, we will arrive to answer that it is technique from Buddhism, meant to liberate us from world, and repeated cycle or rebirth and suffering. Regardless of what you believe pause there and ponder. Forget for a moment whether you believe in after life or not. If we think about the end goal "liberate from the suffering" liberate from world and minds game.
So, we took a tool which should liberate us from world to become more productive?
Isn't our usage premise wrong? Of course there will be side effects, if you "abandoning" everything that is world game and keeps you worried or money looking animal, why is so strange that there are side effects as selfishness? First stage of going inward is removing everything around you, and by seeing true nature you stop caring. But by stop caring suddenly, you see that as explained in many scriptures 'good or bad do not exist' there is only constant change.
Imagine you are child and you are with other children playing in the court, they ask you to join and you refuse. You say "I do not want to be in the game", and they reply "Why not?! C'mon we need extra player, here, you can be on a good side", you reply "I do not care about game, sides, manipulations, or you, in fact in this moment I do not exist"... from your perspective this is valid, from other children perspective you are selfish.
Also question of quilt is inverted. Who expect guilt we as society, or the individual?
[+] [-] mpalczewski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
You know what he’ll bring up every day? Mindfulness or meditation or stoicism. Like buddy, if you can’t sleep it’s probably because you know you’re not a nice person deep down. No amount of meditation is gonna help that.
[+] [-] doelie_|3 years ago|reply
That's the advice I keep seeing.
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
Practicing mindfulness is not just letting your mind wander. It’s practice, just like exercising or coding. You get better at it with time, not just a Homer Simpson moment of following your thoughts after being asked a question about being a decent human being.
The whole idea of mindfulness is to get to know yourself better and work on the not so great parts such as when your ego gets involved. If you practice it today and have found tremendous results, great! Also if you tried it and it didn’t help much, that’s okay too.
I’ll continue to do it because it’s what I believe separates good from great in my life and helps me accomplish more. I’m glad they mentioned this:
> “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.”
[+] [-] atoav|3 years ago|reply
But I think a state of no thought, where things just flow in your absence is just as (if not more) important. Be it when you play music and stop thinking and just do. Or when the same happens in sports, coding, painting, walking whatever.
The thing about mindful people is (at least judging from the small sample size I know) that they like to be mindful about everything. And they don't look well or relaxed. Just like this behavior is yet another form of escapism.
Mindfulness, sure. But it is by far not the only state of mind that you should bw in.
[+] [-] lmeyerov|3 years ago|reply
I'm a fan & practitioner of NVC, mindfulness, careful work life balance, etc for being able to treat startups as a marathon vs sprint... But I've observed people overuse & abuse these tools to rationalize prioritizing self over peers in ways that come at the direct expense of the same exact things of their colleagues. It can add up over time in a way that breeds resentment, distrust, non-collaboration, etc. Generally, risks a toxicity that taxes everyone more than the individual brings to the team. What one person needs is different from their peers, so requires some sort of empathic give-and-take, and for someone not as good at paying attention, help doing so.
In a team of high-functioning folks, a tricky line to walk! (And if people have recs here, am curious!)
[+] [-] vmception|3 years ago|reply
"higher vibrations only"