Forgive my asking a somewhat rude question. I wouldn’t ask it except in the context of this sort of “how you learn” discussion. Was “The Mind Illuminated” valuable to you because the scientific material helped break down some kind of pre-existing emotional resistance to a subject which seemed hokey? Is it possible that you previously had trouble meditating because the whole thing seemed made up or poorly justified and a piece of you wasn’t willing to try until someone attached it to a science?
Also, how long have you been assessing (weeks, years, etc), and during your assessment phase, have you continued the practice you learned in that first week, or did you fully stop to assess?
Your questions aren’t addressed to me but they might as well have been because I went through the same process as wunan.
I started out using vague online instructions and then the app Headspace. There was no real sense of progress with either approach. Headspace makes no real effort to teach you the theory of what it’s trying to accomplish, and the session lengths are probably not long enough to make progress anyway.
In retrospect, Headspace is in some sense the exact wrong approach if your goal is meaningful progress in training your attention and coming to better understand your mind. It’s analogous to a music teacher instructing you to just sit down and play some notes, any notes, for twenty minutes. It would be amazing if you made progress that way.
Like wunan, I read TMI and started actually making progress. Changes could be observed in and out of meditation. I backed away from meditating for a period of time because I became uncomfortable with some of the changes to my cognition. Eventually I re-read The Mind Illuminated and understood that I had been doing some things wrong, fixed that problem and resumed meditating, and the practice has been nothing but positive since then.
I also took the step of consciously choosing, from the outset, not to advance beyond Stage 8 of the progression outlined in the book, unless I reach that stage and then it seems really compelling that I ought to proceed. Everything up to Stage 8 seems desirable, while the stages after 8 seem to include some self-modifications that I wouldn’t willingly choose, at least from where I’m sitting now.
It’s analogous to a music teacher instructing you to just sit down and play some notes, any notes, for twenty minutes. It would be amazing if you made progress that way.
This is exactly how it felt for me—I even remember thinking this exact same metaphor after practicing TMI and reflecting on the difference between it and my previous attempts.
Not identifying and properly responding to dullness. So, just meditating in persistent dullness. Also, not sleeping enough, thus the dullness. Fixed the sleep and then started addressing dullness properly when it came up.
Here’s one more person whose meditation practice was really helped by The Mind Illuminated. For me, what you describe was definitely not the case. Rather my problem was that previous meditation instructions had taken me to a stage whose challenge (subtle dullness, in TMI’s terms) I didn’t know how to overcome, and then I ended up doing the wrong things over and over, blocking my progress. TMI gave me concrete instructions for what I should be doing to overcome that challenge, I followed them, and have been getting much farther since.
No problem, I don’t think the question is rude. No, I didn’t view it as hokey. I was actually very enthusiastic about it right from the start, but never made any progress. TMI was valuable to me because it provided much more granular instructions.
I stopped to reassess about 2 months ago and have not been meditating in that time.
Forgive my asking a somewhat rude question. I wouldn’t ask it except in the context of this sort of “how you learn” discussion. Was “The Mind Illuminated” valuable to you because the scientific material helped break down some kind of pre-existing emotional resistance to a subject which seemed hokey? Is it possible that you previously had trouble meditating because the whole thing seemed made up or poorly justified and a piece of you wasn’t willing to try until someone attached it to a science?
Also, how long have you been assessing (weeks, years, etc), and during your assessment phase, have you continued the practice you learned in that first week, or did you fully stop to assess?
Your questions aren’t addressed to me but they might as well have been because I went through the same process as wunan.
I started out using vague online instructions and then the app Headspace. There was no real sense of progress with either approach. Headspace makes no real effort to teach you the theory of what it’s trying to accomplish, and the session lengths are probably not long enough to make progress anyway.
In retrospect, Headspace is in some sense the exact wrong approach if your goal is meaningful progress in training your attention and coming to better understand your mind. It’s analogous to a music teacher instructing you to just sit down and play some notes, any notes, for twenty minutes. It would be amazing if you made progress that way.
Like wunan, I read TMI and started actually making progress. Changes could be observed in and out of meditation. I backed away from meditating for a period of time because I became uncomfortable with some of the changes to my cognition. Eventually I re-read The Mind Illuminated and understood that I had been doing some things wrong, fixed that problem and resumed meditating, and the practice has been nothing but positive since then.
I also took the step of consciously choosing, from the outset, not to advance beyond Stage 8 of the progression outlined in the book, unless I reach that stage and then it seems really compelling that I ought to proceed. Everything up to Stage 8 seems desirable, while the stages after 8 seem to include some self-modifications that I wouldn’t willingly choose, at least from where I’m sitting now.
This is exactly how it felt for me—I even remember thinking this exact same metaphor after practicing TMI and reflecting on the difference between it and my previous attempts.
What were you doing wrong?
Not identifying and properly responding to dullness. So, just meditating in persistent dullness. Also, not sleeping enough, thus the dullness. Fixed the sleep and then started addressing dullness properly when it came up.
Here’s one more person whose meditation practice was really helped by The Mind Illuminated. For me, what you describe was definitely not the case. Rather my problem was that previous meditation instructions had taken me to a stage whose challenge (subtle dullness, in TMI’s terms) I didn’t know how to overcome, and then I ended up doing the wrong things over and over, blocking my progress. TMI gave me concrete instructions for what I should be doing to overcome that challenge, I followed them, and have been getting much farther since.
No problem, I don’t think the question is rude. No, I didn’t view it as hokey. I was actually very enthusiastic about it right from the start, but never made any progress. TMI was valuable to me because it provided much more granular instructions.
I stopped to reassess about 2 months ago and have not been meditating in that time.