There are a lot of people who think widely divergent things about meditation. The people who are looking in in terms of “enlightenment”, in my experience, make it sound harder and scarier. The people who are doing studies on meditation as a nice way to relax or be less anxious. Googling just “meditation” turns up scary enlightenment blog posts; googling “meditation and anxiety” or “studies on meditation” or any variation seems to turn up the less scary variants. Also, I promise, none of the recordings in my Dropbox folder are scary.
After reading Swimmer’s article, I was thinking about starting to meditate; but you’re making it feel very hard, complicated and dangerous now.
There are a lot of people who think widely divergent things about meditation. The people who are looking in in terms of “enlightenment”, in my experience, make it sound harder and scarier. The people who are doing studies on meditation as a nice way to relax or be less anxious. Googling just “meditation” turns up scary enlightenment blog posts; googling “meditation and anxiety” or “studies on meditation” or any variation seems to turn up the less scary variants. Also, I promise, none of the recordings in my Dropbox folder are scary.