I’ve done 5 10 day long retreats and just eye-balling how many people were still there at the end, I’d say at least 95% managed to stay till the end.
I also know two people with ADHD who say they struggle a lot with discipline, yet they both managed to meditate 6+ hours everyday on said retreats.
My only data is personal anecdotes like this.
No it’s NOT simulated danger! The danger of permanently and seriously reprogramming yourself in a bad way during bad trips is real. It does sometimes happen. It’s not guaranteed that psychedelics change you to the better. If bad trips were only extremely unpleasant and maybe very destabilizing for a few weeks or months, I wouldn’t be afraid of bad trips. But this is not how it is.
Well, obviously the idea is to only sleep-deprive yourself right AFTER (and only IF) the bad has already happened. So instead of going to sleep after being completely sober again after the trip, you would take some uppers instead and keep yourself awake for as long as possible
Yeah, I agree that this is one (I feel a little bit too harsh) way to put it. But I feel that in a certain important sense it still is a bet.
Also, saying I “charge” 3+ months of people’s time seems a bit missleading, like saying a restaurant charges their customers’ time when they eat at that restaurant.
Anyway, I see lots of down votes, so apparently quite a few people are annoyed by my way of putting it!?
It’s all about creating the right conditions! For example, almost everyone can meditate 5+ hours a day in a silent meditation retreat centre. Yet very few can do it outside such a setting.
What’s a better term for “brute-forcing happiness” program?
Yes. I agree. Yet, there is this:
I’ve spent the last 3 years averaging around 3 hours of meditation a day. I’ve had many months with 6+ hours meditation a day. I had times when the boundary between formal practice in daily life was indeed very thin—in other words, it was relatively easy/automatic to be mindful more or less 24⁄7.
Yet, in these rare times when I did not meditate at all for, say, 2 weeks (mostly because of health issues), I very quickly lose that ability to automatically be mindful throughout the day. I would guess that if I stopped meditating for a year and would not bother trying to be mindful throughout the day, my “mindfulness throughout the day” level would go back to basically zero.
But the question remains: Did these new traits persist even years after these people have stopped meditating or reduced their meditation to less than 30 minutes a day?
Fascinating! Really cool stuff! Thanks for sharing.
Okay, I concede! Amassing many hours of just meditation on and off retreats over many years is definitely not “useless”. Some effects definitely persist! That is actually also my experience with 5000+ hours of meditation and many retreats. I guess my key point is that those changes are overrated—especially given how much effort they take, and that in general there are far more effective ways to reach very similar goals! But there are some important exceptions to this. If you for example do manage to get enlightened and stabilize that state, that’s just absolutely amazing, and no amount of ordinary therapeutic progress will ever get you the kind of beauty and certain mental superpowers that come with that.
I’ve read that in multiple sources, e.g. the book “The Gut Health Protocol”. The general recommendation is to not eat 4 hours before going to sleep.
Eating at night/before sleep is supposedly not good for your microbiome, so I’m unsure whether this is a good solution.
These are all excellent questions! Unfortunately, I don’t have definite answers. I’ve read somewhere that the idea is to tax the working memory as much as possible such that you can just barely hold an emotional felt sense at the same time as well.
I’d be very interested if someone does some more reading and research on this!
What I personally do: The more intensive the felt sense feels, the harder I focus on the EMDR “distractions”, and vice-versa.
I’ve started doing self-administered EMDR about 6 months ago, and I’ve been using it very regularly since then, maybe 4 times a week. About half of the time that I do it it feels like it does “something”, and maybe every 1 in 10 times it feels like a bigger breakthrough. I’ve noticed big changes in my behaviour and emotional life over the last 6 months. However, I’ve been combining a lot of therapeutic stuff, not just EMDR.
Here is what I’ve written down in my H.E.A.L summary re. positive experiences. Maybe helpful for some:
A positive experience could be anything that feels pleasant, it is useful, and that you want to cultivate in your mind.
Some examples:
feeling good about yourself
being proud of something you’ve achieved
feelings of being liked, loved, loving, grateful
feeling safe, calm, relaxed, joyful
getting a hug, compliment, etc.
A positive experience could be:
intellectual understandings, Intentions, Skills, Moods, Abilities, Attitudes, Feelings
The key is to get something like a Felt Sense, some emotion, some feeling in your body, etc, so you can move beyond just some intellectual understanding towards an implicit emotional understanding in the following steps.
You can look for good facts in:
Your immediate situation
Current or recent events
Ongoing stable conditions
Yourself
The past
The future
The lives of others
The good in bad situations
Your imagination (things that have not yet happened or even things that will never happen)
Produce Good Facts: e.g. be kind and caring to others; share about good facts with others.