I’m not a clinical psychologist, and every time I try to read beyond the first screen of this article on my phone I get some weird ad about Google giving away p

I’m not a clinical psychologist, and every time I try to read beyond the first screen of this article on my phone I get some weird ad about Google giving away phones... My own experience with meditation, guided and encouraged by my therapist when I did seek professional help, does match what the title of the article says at a minimum. But here’s the rub: I went to him to try to figure out and resolve the mental state I’d gotten into! Very deliberate mindful meditation helped me observe the thoughts-below-the-thoughts from a somewhat neutral perspective (sometimes called “observing the river”). What I saw was profoundly uncomfortable! Some of the thoughts underlying my behaviour were just my current headspace (other companies had commercialized work similar to my grad school research while I was still researching it), and some of it was negative thought patterns I’d adopted in my early teens in response to some stressors. I worked through those and came to peace with them. It wasn’t a pretty couple of months, but I’m a dramatically different and better person because of it. There should probably be a giant disclaimer and some intake interviews for these 10-day retreats. If you’re going and expecting that it’s just going to be a nice opportunity to chill... you’re probably not going to be ready to actually inspect the shit that comes out of your brain when you give it a chance. And... the people who snap at these retreats likely would have benefitted from professional help anyway; spending time alone with their thoughts in that setting just brought that fact to the surface.