In retrospect, in this provisional Sarno framework, it seems possible that the pain and unpleasantness of meditation was a subconscious reaction to really not wanting to meditate, subconsciously. Knowing myself, paying attention to something that I don’t want to pay attention to breeds a high level of resentment, and meditation is the purified and crystallized form of that. I’ll tentatively try meditating again and see if the tension returns, with this perspective.
That makes sense to me—both directing attention and looking at your sense of self often can feel like the ultimate Ugh Field. TMI does have some good guidance about building the skill of directed attention gently and consistently, but it’s mostly in the early sections of the book and most people overlook it and tend towards exerting effort.
I haven’t read it yet, but there’s a new edition of MCTB that just came out with a lot of additional material. TMI is probably enough instructions to work from, but it doesn’t provide as much meat around what you can expect to happen emotionally and phenomenologically.
I just wanted to note that MCTB-style insight meditation also draws quite heavily on the idea that we identify with muscle tension and that sometimes it feels like we’re using muscle tension to make ourselves do stuff, or that our inner conflicts can be present in opposing muscle tension. The specific technique that you mention doing sounds kind of similar to a cross between Goenka-style body scanning and Tara Brach’s RAIN technique (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-Identification).
I’d encourage both you and the other rationalists who’re digging into methods for breaking your sense of self into interacting sub-agents to really consider reading MCTB before you start continually applying these sorts of techniques to dissolve all your problems. Scott does a good job of highlighting Daniel Ingram’s cautions about how many easy meditation techniques can seem to solve all your problems up until they completely stop helping and you end up stuck in difficult mental states:
There’s really nothing special about the existing meditation techniques that leads to this. Any consistently-applied enough introspection technique can lead there, especially if you’re objectifying things as just thoughts, as sub-agents, or as muscle tension. I strongly suspect that the mental effects mentioned above are due to megadoses of the neurotransmitters underlying the Predictive Processing model. So I’d try to consider either limiting your use of methods like this or to acknowledge that heavy use might end up leading you to “meditate your way out” and read some discussions of what that might be like.