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]

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!