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The framing of this article is strange. It presents encountered emotions arrived at through meditation in a clinical setting, as if people may not expect underl
by vwcx 9y ago
The framing of this article is strange. It presents encountered emotions arrived at through meditation in a clinical setting, as if people may not expect underlying anxiety about their lives to emerge.
If anything, this speaks to the human propensity (both good and bad) to endure despite the stacking existential odds of the modern social order.
In other words, life is tough, it has always been tough, and there are many unpleasant aspects of all of our lives, even when one's life is seemingly chugging along just fine. Counter to the argument of the article, many who meditate are keenly aware of this full emotional spectrum -- it's the people who are jumping on the bandwagon that are surprised that mindfulness isn't all Lululemon peace and love, or something that will enhance your focus in pursuit of your next capitalist adventure.
- mercer 9y agoA while ago here on HN I compared meditation to debugging, a bit like setting breakpoints. Recently, a Promise-filled chunk of a code started throwing errors when I switched to Bluebird (instead of node's native Promises). I spent a good few hours figuring out what went wrong. Going back to native Promises, my code worked fine, but with Bluebird I got weird errors and stack traces. I eventually figured it out, and it turned out the error wasn't mission critical but would've probably caused problems down the line. So finding it was worth it, even if the debugging, in a way, caused the program to blow up in my face. Perhaps it's a bit like that. I believe regular meditation is unlikely to cause problems, but I am careful about, say, going to a week-long vipassana retreat because of various (thankfully not too terrible) mental health issues (and the same applies to hallucinogenic substances, among other things).