>When Buddhism Goes Bad - How My Mindfulness Practice Led Me To Meltdown
Well, meditation and buddhism are supposed to be a way of life, not a stress reliever or a passtime. You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side (or merely try to half-follow some general tenets in your everyday totally non-bhudist life).
Or rather you can, and thousands do, and there are fancy retreats and the like, but then you're a tourist to the whole thing, and what you do has little to do with the original spirit and what makes it work - which is all about context (even if there's a plethora of second rate, several times removed from the culture, snakeoil books in the shelves selling this exact approach).
Leonard Cohen spending 5 years on the monastery got it far more right.
>I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators.
Aka, some random guys who've read some books, perhaps studied under another random guy in the same line of work, opened their own retreat (or work in one), and play the role of buddhist luminaries for lucrative western audiences....
>As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats. I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned Western meditation teachers.
In other words, they've made a mess of different practices, cultures, approaches, etc., mixing and matching, and always separating it from its context, from the culture they live in, from the environment, and from lifestyle commitments (aside from "medidation" itself).
So to your mind this can all be neatly dismissed as "doing it wrong"?
The guy in the article was a teacher himself, not someone just casually dabbling, and mentions that the people studying the negative effects are encountering trainers and teachers more often than casual meditators.
Those are a dime a dozen. It's a scam industry, not very different from most martial arts schools or "holistic medicine", or things you can find in Sedona, AZ...
You might find one rooted in the tradition/culture (and living it) practicioner in 1000, if you're lucky, but not in "mindfulness retreats" and corporate seminars.
So one in a thousand practitioners might be doing it right, maybe.
In which case the article is spot on correct - the western mindfulness/buddhism stuff is mostly potentially dangerous and, as promoted, can lead to all sorts of harmful effects which are often brushed under the carpet.
He was teaching "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction", which isn't really a thing. If anything, it's an example of the very commercialised kind of mindfulness teaching that he's railing against.
If you visit the website mbsrtraining.com, the second link on the main menu is "Buy MBSR". Looks like the course materials cost just under $200. You also need to buy videos, attend retreats, co-facilitate retreats, and have supervision, as well as doing a lot of private meditation, if you want to be an accredited teacher. Sounds like a significant investment of time and money.
I can't find out from the website what licence these teaching materials are distributed under; that's a bit shifty, because I bet you're not allowed to reproduce them or distribute them.
Anyway, I wouldn't make that investment, just to sort myself out; I'd expect a return on investment. You get that by gathering paying students.
There is a "householder" tradition in Tibetan Buddhism: you can be an advanced practitioner and teacher, while running a family and a farm. The classic example is Marpa. Marpa was no tourist.
The rat race is no "family and farm" style environment, though, and the modern culture, workplace, lifestyle, and even personal mindset, of laymen doing this on the side in the west is so remote to the culture of those householders as to be alien (and totally counter and detrimental to those traditions).
As for Marpa, he is not exactly a good example for a "householder" even of that era, as he was heavily involved, and worked/sacrificed enormously for his practice. So, yes, he was no tourist. But modern dabblers are.
> You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side
Well, you can, actually. Many people do, and they're not fakes (or "tourists"). It's not easy, and Eastern teachers aren't best-positioned to help Westerners with the difficulties.
There are Western teachers who have been trying to develop ways of teaching Buddhism to Westerners that address the problems. I believe Trungpa was the best of these teachers (he obviously wasn't a Westerner, but he understood Westerners better than any other Tibetan teacher, I think).
I studied under a Western student of Trungpa. I think my teacher was too afraid of letting-go of the ethnic and cultural baggage; all of his teachers were Tibetan masters, and I think perhaps he felt diminished for not being a real Tibetan.
So I don't think the Western teachers have nailed it yet. I'm sure some Western teacher will eventually figure-out a teaching programme that works fairly reliably for Westerners.
But they won't be able to "de-fang" Buddhist practice; it's intrinsically dangerous.
Well, meditation and buddhism are supposed to be a way of life, not a stress reliever or a passtime. You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side (or merely try to half-follow some general tenets in your everyday totally non-bhudist life).
Or rather you can, and thousands do, and there are fancy retreats and the like, but then you're a tourist to the whole thing, and what you do has little to do with the original spirit and what makes it work - which is all about context (even if there's a plethora of second rate, several times removed from the culture, snakeoil books in the shelves selling this exact approach).
Leonard Cohen spending 5 years on the monastery got it far more right.
>I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators.
Aka, some random guys who've read some books, perhaps studied under another random guy in the same line of work, opened their own retreat (or work in one), and play the role of buddhist luminaries for lucrative western audiences....
>As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats. I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned Western meditation teachers.
In other words, they've made a mess of different practices, cultures, approaches, etc., mixing and matching, and always separating it from its context, from the culture they live in, from the environment, and from lifestyle commitments (aside from "medidation" itself).