A lot of people come into meditation/mindfulness with this preconceived notion that you sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and find your inner bliss. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. You sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and come face to face with the tornado of thoughts and emotions that is raging inside you. It's like running htop on your brain to find the runaway background processes that are consuming all your processing power.
It's what you do once you get to that place that matters. In the eastern tradition, you're supposed to observe the thoughts and feelings with non-judgment, accept them for what they are without "running along with them", then let them be as you return your focus to your breathing. IMO that's good advice - up to a point. I think actually solving some of the problems weighing on your mind should absolutely be part of your toolbox. (Stressed about work? Maybe talk to your boss about setting more humane goals). And finally, for the really big things you find, that can neither be solved nor accepted easily (the skeletons and/or demons), you're going to want to supplement meditation with something else. Maybe just reflection, where you take time to actually dig into it instead of trying to let it go. Maybe therapy where you get help to unpack it. Maybe even medication to help you be less anxious when you try to unpack it.
Whatever you do, don't scale up the duration of meditation if you find yourself dissociating. It's supposed to be intense, but not psychedelic. Start with short sessions (5-10 mins) and only increase the duration if you find that you're able to consistently return your focus to your breathing. If the thoughts and feelings take you for a ride that you can't get off, and you scale up the duration, then you're basically giving yourself a bad trip.
Done right, it can be a kind of conscious garbage collection to help ground you and train your awareness to return to the world at hand. Done wrong, it can be gambling with your sanity, removing avoidance as a coping mechanism without anything to replace it.
I blame a modern world that puts a tv-box of constant stimulus over our heads. Folks rarely have a moment to their own thoughts, and have zero experience dealing with them.
I grew up on a farm. I had many hours a day with my own thoughts. I grew up quite comfortable with long silences and stillness. No storm rages in my head when I'm alone - more like a little wind, and I can easily deal with it.
I remember getting to college and encountering people who turned the TV or radio on the instant they got home. It took me years to understand why anybody would do that.
I think the point of the article is that it's not clear what 'wrong' is, and it's certainly not made clear that there are potential serious negative mental health consequences.
Absolutely, I think it's important to not victim-blame or fall into that "just do it correctly and you'll be fine" trope that the author of the post describes. If you want to try meditation, always ease into it with shorts sessions, listen to your body and take note how you react to it along the way, and do not continue (or at least downscale it) if you find that your mind has a tendency to dissociate or otherwise freak out from it. And frankly, those 10 day silent retreats scare me - as someone who does short sessions once or twice a week, I probably feel the same way about them as someone who microdoses would feel about munching several fistfuls of shrooms.
I think part of the problem here is also the mysticism that this is steeped in. Hallucination, out-of-body-experiences, dissociation - none of these are ok, or signs that you're "transcending" or any bullshit like that. The "end goal" here isn't to dissolve your brain and merge it with the universe - in fact there is no end goal, just like there is no end goal for going to the gym (and it's absolutely possible to over-train there too, cf. rhabdomyolysis).
"I think actually solving some of the problems weighing on your mind should absolutely be part of your toolbox."
Yes, after meditation. I love your analogy of "garbage collection". For me, it's like flipping over playing cards, becoming interested in each card, and then remembering that I don't need to get fixated, and then discarding that card and returning to focus on my breathing, only to forget and flip over another card. Eventually, I spend less time flipping over cards and more time just sitting without judgement.
I am a lapsed meditator, and I will resolve to get back into it. Meditation helps me to remember who I am and what I really want.
Thank you for this. I stopped meditating for a while after I stopped judging things like my own happiness or lack of happiness. I find greater meaning in life by striving for happiness and solving problems rather than accepting things as they are without judgement.
I do appreciate meditating though to observe the background thoughts that are consuming energy as you mentioned. But I like my conviction and plan to keep it :)
TLDR, it's when some of the core associations in your brain start collapsing. E.g. you lose your sense of self, the world starts feeling unreal, your emotional responses to the world get out of whack. I think of it as semi-random rewiring of the connection between regions of your brain. Changing the layout of the connectivity of your brain is indeed a purpose of meditation, but always slowly over months and years. Doing so in a sudden, violent or random fashion most certainly isn't.
It's what you do once you get to that place that matters. In the eastern tradition, you're supposed to observe the thoughts and feelings with non-judgment, accept them for what they are without "running along with them", then let them be as you return your focus to your breathing. IMO that's good advice - up to a point. I think actually solving some of the problems weighing on your mind should absolutely be part of your toolbox. (Stressed about work? Maybe talk to your boss about setting more humane goals). And finally, for the really big things you find, that can neither be solved nor accepted easily (the skeletons and/or demons), you're going to want to supplement meditation with something else. Maybe just reflection, where you take time to actually dig into it instead of trying to let it go. Maybe therapy where you get help to unpack it. Maybe even medication to help you be less anxious when you try to unpack it.
Whatever you do, don't scale up the duration of meditation if you find yourself dissociating. It's supposed to be intense, but not psychedelic. Start with short sessions (5-10 mins) and only increase the duration if you find that you're able to consistently return your focus to your breathing. If the thoughts and feelings take you for a ride that you can't get off, and you scale up the duration, then you're basically giving yourself a bad trip.
Done right, it can be a kind of conscious garbage collection to help ground you and train your awareness to return to the world at hand. Done wrong, it can be gambling with your sanity, removing avoidance as a coping mechanism without anything to replace it.