firecat

Executive summary: It's a tool, and as with many tools, you can either create/repair nifty stuff with it, or you can injure yourself with it.

http://www.tricycle.com/blog/meditation-nation

This helps me understand why, although I love studying Buddhism and listening to dharma talks, I resist the meditation part -- I've done enough of it to sense that there might be a lot of pain to wade through if I do it a lot more. (Not recommending this behavior, just observing.)

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/830954.html

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From:

tylik

Thank you for this. (Ha, and I think I know folks who did a bunch of the active control studies.*)

I need to keep this one on hand for when the conversations about how everyone should meditate all the time come up. (And probably send it to S, one of the main instigators of such conversations.) Which always makes me a tad uncomfortable, because for any variety of reasons it's just not the right thing, at least at any given time, for an awful lot of people. I think. (And yet, I mostly don't go there, because it's all conjecture for me. I've had a sitting practice since I was about five. Sadly, seriously. There are good reasons for this, but darn, I don't go expecting this to be something I have in common with folks.)

I don't know that much about mindfulness meditation - or rather, I know Zen, and I know a fair bit about the derivation, but I don't know the details of what is taught. The bits about people having classic experiences often associated with Zen and having no idea what to do with them is all the facepalm in the world. Oh, dear gods. I mean, I can totally see that. It just sounds incredibly irresponsible on the part of the instructors.

And I'm really pro-meditation. But I'm pro-meditation in the same way I'm in favor of martial arts. It's hard work, it takes time, and it isn't always going to be pleasant... and you can splash around in the shallows to minimal effect, but if you really commit, it's going to change you. While I certainly have my quibbles, I really adore the Chan/Zen tradition, largely because it gives me a framework in which the ways in which I've experienced the world my whole life are no longer some freakish thing that sets me apart (and which I need to refrain from mentioning in company) but just a normal part of human experience.

From both my own experience, and my discussions with R at the Sleep and Meditation lab, I did think the comments on sleep were a bit of a gloss. I sit in the evenings, and it does help me sleep. (But then, I am somewhat inclined towards hypervigilance, and it cultivates a much calmer and less reactive sort of awareness.) And yeah, at sesshin I sleep about four hours a night (and get up at 3am and put in a hour of forms before the wake up bell. Sick, no?) From what I remember from the studies, people with an intensive meditative practice sleep differently - it's not clear that they sleep worse, or really what that means. In many ways they are more responsive to environmental stimuli (this is all from memory). But they also are often more rested. So the real story is that there is probably a story there we don't know.

* Seriously not my part of neurbiology, but another neurobiologist I know through RZC works at the Sleep and Meditation research group at UW Madison. And... it's possible that I might apply for a postdoc there, though I'm torn between the work being really cool, and not being sure I want to study my practice, even sort of.

From:

firecat

I really appreciate getting your thoughts on this.

The podcasts I listen to are based on mindfulness meditation for the most part, and there's a lot of talk about the meditation process itself. Is that different from Zen? Because if you listen to enough of the podcasts you start to realize that there are meditation states that might be very different from your ordinary consciousness.

As for sleep, meditation helps me sleep. The problem is that it helps me sleep at exactly the time I am trying to meditate. :)

From:

tylik

Mindfulness meditation, certainly in terms of its history, is a subset of Zen. The idea was that the Buddhist cultural context and all the bells and whistles (or at least bells, clappers, incense and gongs) was offputting and served as a barrier to a lot of people, and meant they couldn't benefit from zazen. And since none of that stuff is actually important, let's dump it in service of actually helping people.*

And honestly? That's great. I don't personally have a problem with most of the bells and whistles, at least in the contexts in which I deal with them, and neither group I'm affiliated with is hard core on the metaphysics. But I don't think they're innately important (and American Zen is still inventing itself) and if it helps people to make spaces where they don't have deal with them, cool beans.

But at least in some cases, the centuries of institutional knowledge gets lost, and I think that can be less than ideal. (Hey, I didn't need to have someone teaching me to sit, I just did. But boy howdy has it been helpful to get some framework for understanding my own experiences, especially as they relate to other people. Not to mention the heuristics of how to proceed.) And at least in some contexts, the emphasis shifts away from enlightenment - personal and universal - to therapeutics... and then you have to start asking questions about what kind of a therapeutic tool meditation really is. I mean, for many people there are many lovely therapeutic side effects to meditation. But if you really don't want to start on the rocky road to enlightenment, you want to work on your depression and maybe reduce your bloodpressure, it's a good idea to have an idea what this path possibly could bring you.

(I honestly only have the vaguest idea how common these problems are. I began sitting as a child because I needed to - I was drawn to it, but I suspect a lot of that is rooted in my own neurodivergence. The omnipresent thereness of the world was never going to be something I could ignore, so I had to learn how to deal with it. If indeed what's going on with me is low latent inhibition - it seems likely, but I've never been tested - then I can totally understand how for a subset of the population it is correlated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. And if I'm lucky in being bright enough to adapt well, I still needed to actively find that kind of balance.)

* There might be other streams feeding into the mindfulness movement as well.

From:

firecat

Most of my studies and the sangha I sometimes go to are based in Theravada. They welcome people who want to meditate for therapeutic reasons, but I think they're operating on the hope that some people will come for the therapy and end up staying for the enlightenment.

But at least in some cases, the centuries of institutional knowledge gets lost, and I think that can be less than ideal.

Agreed.

It's really cool that you found your own way to a practice that works for you.

From:

tylik

My knowledge of Theravada is pretty much exclusively academic. (As in, classes twenty years ago, and some reading more recently.)

Our group, too, is open to everyone - and sometimes people are coming to work on their blood pressure, or because their pagan tradition doesn't have a lot of support for meditation. I'm not sure how best to negotiate with tradition. Because there's so much good stuff in there. And there's so much that's toxic, or just not so useful. And I don't always trust myself to know the difference. (Or rather, I do, at any given moment, but that doesn't mean that a few years down the road I might end up deciding that there was a lot of wisdom in the thing I'd been dismissing.)

From:

firecat

Because there's so much good stuff in there. And there's so much that's toxic, or just not so useful. And I don't always trust myself to know the difference.

Yeah I know what you mean!