FWIW, as someone who’s into Buddhism quite a bit, on my interpretation of it something is going seriously wrong if it makes you feel detached and emotionless.
That’s not to deny that there are interpretations of it that would endorse that; I don’t have an interest in arguing over what the “true” interpretation of Buddhism is. But there are definitely also ones where “attachment” is interpreted in exactly the opposite way—where one is “attached” (to mental content) if one wants to control their emotions and avoid unpleasant ones.
On that interpretation, the goal is the same as yours—to be open to the full spectrum of emotion and let go of the need to suppress emotion, trusting that the mind will learn to act better as long as you just let it see all the relevant data implicit in the emotion.
(It’ll take me a while to answer any responses to this because, appropriately enough, I’m leaving for a 10-day meditation retreat today.)
I always appreciate your insights and opinions on this general topic.
At the time, I was following the instructions in The Mind Illuminated very closely. I will grant that this may have been user error/skill issue, but given that The Mind Illuminated is often put forth as a remarkably accessible and lucid map through the stages of vipassana, and given that I still went this badly wrong, you have to wonder if maybe the path itself is perhaps too dangerous to be worth it.
The outcome I reached may have been predictable, given that the ultimate reason I was meditating at the time was to get some relief from the the ongoing suffering of a chronic migraine condition. In that specific sense, I was seeking detachment.
In the end I am left wondering if I would have been better off if I had taken up mountain biking instead of meditation, given that it turned out that the path to integrating my emotions led through action more than reflection.
A somewhat unpopular thing to say is that vipassana (and theravada Buddhism more generally) often pushes people towards a “disconnect from reality to stop suffering” trap. Not all Buddhism is like this, but it’s unfortunately the flavor that is currently most popular in the West because it’s what people constructed secular mindfulness practices out of.
Meditation should not result in leaving anything out. Maybe you need to focus and overcome reactive distractions for a time, but eventually that type of practice becomes pathological.
I actually hope you try meditating again. I think the lesson to take away is not “meditation bad after a point” but “a specific type of meditation stops being helpful after you learn what it has to teach you”.
It sounds to me like you maybe should take up mountain biking. ⛰️🚲
Bicycling isn’t just great for your physical health. It’s also great for your mental health. I don’t know any avid bicyclists who are stressed and unhappy.
I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.
The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some mistake he made so he could prevent a reoccurrence, and he couldn’t find anything he could have done differently given that he was commuting to work on a bike.
For context, I do not ride a bike, there is nothing about my life that would tend to make me meet bicyclists, and not I am not especially friendly, so there is no unusually large number of bicyclists passing through my life who chat about their injuries.
So I’m not sure I agree that bicycling is great for your physical health. I could easily believe is is good for the health of people who don’t fall.
I always appreciate your insights and opinions on this general topic.
<3
Yeah I think there are various potential subtle traps that can be hard to catch on your own and where it’d be good to have a competent teacher checking in on you and giving you feedback. (The teacher on our retreat happened to just be talking about two possible failure modes with meditation: going “hazy”, which you described, and going “crazy”, which is the opposite where you get super emotional and reactive.)
Unfortunately it’s hard to know who the competent and trustworthy teachers are, especially since some of them would hold up a lack of feeling as something positive.
Shinzen Young’s Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words “spacey” and “racy” instead of “hazy” and “crazy”, but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven’t read it.
I had a related (and admittedly somewhat strange) experience to this. I had a dream in which I was given a koan and told to use it to seek enlightenment. When I woke up I wrote down the koan and decided to meditate on it. I gained some wisdom from it, but I also noticed that I was starting to feel empty. Not a peaceful one-ness kind of empty- just empty empty. I realized that if experienced anything like ego death in my present state, it would go very, very badly. It seems counterintuitive, but knew I had to find myself before I continued on the path- to find myself before I lost myself, if that makes any sense. It’s as if in order to reach transcendence, there had to be something worth transcending.
I generally don’t believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn’t accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.
There was no special connection to the truth in this koan. It was actually a little lame- just my brain pattern-matching. But pattern matching can do some odd things things. I won’t reach enlightenment with this koan- I’ve already followed it as far as it will go. It was “where is your voice located.” It’s a very “if a tree falls in the forest” type of koan, but I learned just a little from following it in its expected loop.
FWIW, as someone who’s into Buddhism quite a bit, on my interpretation of it something is going seriously wrong if it makes you feel detached and emotionless.
That’s not to deny that there are interpretations of it that would endorse that; I don’t have an interest in arguing over what the “true” interpretation of Buddhism is. But there are definitely also ones where “attachment” is interpreted in exactly the opposite way—where one is “attached” (to mental content) if one wants to control their emotions and avoid unpleasant ones.
On that interpretation, the goal is the same as yours—to be open to the full spectrum of emotion and let go of the need to suppress emotion, trusting that the mind will learn to act better as long as you just let it see all the relevant data implicit in the emotion.
(It’ll take me a while to answer any responses to this because, appropriately enough, I’m leaving for a 10-day meditation retreat today.)
I always appreciate your insights and opinions on this general topic.
At the time, I was following the instructions in The Mind Illuminated very closely. I will grant that this may have been user error/skill issue, but given that The Mind Illuminated is often put forth as a remarkably accessible and lucid map through the stages of vipassana, and given that I still went this badly wrong, you have to wonder if maybe the path itself is perhaps too dangerous to be worth it.
The outcome I reached may have been predictable, given that the ultimate reason I was meditating at the time was to get some relief from the the ongoing suffering of a chronic migraine condition. In that specific sense, I was seeking detachment.
In the end I am left wondering if I would have been better off if I had taken up mountain biking instead of meditation, given that it turned out that the path to integrating my emotions led through action more than reflection.
A somewhat unpopular thing to say is that vipassana (and theravada Buddhism more generally) often pushes people towards a “disconnect from reality to stop suffering” trap. Not all Buddhism is like this, but it’s unfortunately the flavor that is currently most popular in the West because it’s what people constructed secular mindfulness practices out of.
Meditation should not result in leaving anything out. Maybe you need to focus and overcome reactive distractions for a time, but eventually that type of practice becomes pathological.
I actually hope you try meditating again. I think the lesson to take away is not “meditation bad after a point” but “a specific type of meditation stops being helpful after you learn what it has to teach you”.
It sounds to me like you maybe should take up mountain biking. ⛰️🚲
Bicycling isn’t just great for your physical health. It’s also great for your mental health. I don’t know any avid bicyclists who are stressed and unhappy.
I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.
The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some mistake he made so he could prevent a reoccurrence, and he couldn’t find anything he could have done differently given that he was commuting to work on a bike.
For context, I do not ride a bike, there is nothing about my life that would tend to make me meet bicyclists, and not I am not especially friendly, so there is no unusually large number of bicyclists passing through my life who chat about their injuries.
So I’m not sure I agree that bicycling is great for your physical health. I could easily believe is is good for the health of people who don’t fall.
FWIW there are a fair number of meditation people who anti-endorse TMI as a practice guide, see e.g. this twitter thread.
<3
Yeah I think there are various potential subtle traps that can be hard to catch on your own and where it’d be good to have a competent teacher checking in on you and giving you feedback. (The teacher on our retreat happened to just be talking about two possible failure modes with meditation: going “hazy”, which you described, and going “crazy”, which is the opposite where you get super emotional and reactive.)
Unfortunately it’s hard to know who the competent and trustworthy teachers are, especially since some of them would hold up a lack of feeling as something positive.
Shinzen Young’s Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words “spacey” and “racy” instead of “hazy” and “crazy”, but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven’t read it.
I had a related (and admittedly somewhat strange) experience to this. I had a dream in which I was given a koan and told to use it to seek enlightenment. When I woke up I wrote down the koan and decided to meditate on it. I gained some wisdom from it, but I also noticed that I was starting to feel empty. Not a peaceful one-ness kind of empty- just empty empty. I realized that if experienced anything like ego death in my present state, it would go very, very badly. It seems counterintuitive, but knew I had to find myself before I continued on the path- to find myself before I lost myself, if that makes any sense. It’s as if in order to reach transcendence, there had to be something worth transcending.
Would you be willing to share the koan?
I generally don’t believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn’t accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.
There was no special connection to the truth in this koan. It was actually a little lame- just my brain pattern-matching. But pattern matching can do some odd things things. I won’t reach enlightenment with this koan- I’ve already followed it as far as it will go. It was “where is your voice located.” It’s a very “if a tree falls in the forest” type of koan, but I learned just a little from following it in its expected loop.