Uses and misuses of mindfulness meditation

[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.)

Comments

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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!