I am sitting in a circle in a grey, corporate room with 10 housing association employees – administrators, security guards, cleaners – eyes darting about nervously. We are asked to eat a sandwich in silence. To think about every taste and texture, every chewing motion and bite. Far from being relaxed, I feel excruciatingly uncomfortable and begin to wonder if my jaw is malfunctioning. I’m here to write about a new mindfulness initiative, and since I’ve never to my knowledge had any mental health issues and usually thrive under stress, I anticipate a straightforward, if awkward, experience.
Then comes the meditation. We’re told to close our eyes and think about our bodies in relation to the chair, the floor, the room: how each limb touches the arms, the back, the legs of the seat, while breathing slowly. But there’s one small catch: I can’t breathe. No matter how fast, slow, deep or shallow my breaths are, it feels as though my lungs are sealed. My instincts tell me to run, but I can’t move my arms or legs. I feel a rising panic and worry that I might pass out, my mind racing. Then we’re told to open our eyes and the feeling dissipates. I look around. No one else appears to have felt they were facing imminent death. What just happened?
For days afterwards, I feel on edge. I have a permanent tension headache and I jump at the slightest unexpected noise. The fact that something seemingly benign, positive and hugely popular had such a profound effect has taken me by surprise.
I have the theory my false memories came from too much meditation, they started when I was meditating. I stopped. Returned to it in class, my symptoms got worse.
I meditated as a teenager and my symptoms got worse. I’d be afraid to try it again, although I do use this device to calm my thoughts from time to time.
Mindfulness has become a popular fad. It is watered down Buddhism. Buddhism is not for everyone, although it looks like people are beginning to think it is. This is something you have to do by yourself, when you are alone, in a quiet place, with the proper instructions. You can’t become mindful in one sitting either. Some people take 40 or 50 years to become mindful. This is a very serious thing for people following Buddhism. It is not meant to be watered down. It is not for everyone. You can go on a retreat and practice meditation with other people, but you are being led by a master, not just by anyone. The mind can do funny things to the body if the mind is thinking something harmful.
Im having a difficult time following these therapies.
Meditation made me worse, I dont have the patience restarting CBT - I do practice some DBT Relaxation techniques, like deep breathing, Guided Imagery, etc…
I like talking to my therapist, she gives me some good practical advice - guidance.
I don’t meditate. I can’t meditate. It’s sort of like the Devil/idle hands thing, except with my brain. For me, mindfulness is an extension of the basic tricks I learned in 12 Step programs (ongoing self-inventory). I’ll have a running conversation with myself all day long…
“I really want a bag of chips.”
“You’re overweight. Do you want to be more overweight?”
“I want the chips.”
“Maybe you haven’t been drinking enough. Have you had water lately.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Have some water.”
“Okay.”
“Still hungry?”
“Actually, not so much.”
These self-conversations really help with impulse eating, impulse purchases, when I’m mad at someone, etc.
“Why are you so upset with this person.”
“Because he’s a @#$%.”
“Are you sure it’s not because of ________?”
“Uh, well…”
“Right. Now would be a good time to stop digging that hole.”
“Got it.”
All meditation has ever done for me is fill my head with junk. Mindfulness based conversations help me sort the junk into my head into the right piles and to clear out the junk I don’t need. That’s my take on it.
The Vipassana retreats near me won’t accept people with serious mental illness. I don’t know exactly how they define that, but anyway, their reasoning is that intensive meditation can bring up very disturbing memories and thoughts, and they don’t have anyone trained to help someone through that.
Mindfulness is something that I’ve practiced accidentally for almost 20 years. When I’m conscientious about it, it’s incredibly helpful for me in dealing with a lot of the things she talks about - psychotic depression, anxiety, possible PTSD.
But I came to it knowing about those things. To come into it ignorant of them and bring them to the surface that way, you’d definitely need help navigating it.
I am not even sure what mindfulness is. A lot of the descriptors seem quite abstract and vague to me. Do you have to discipline yourself to get into the zone or is it a process that just happens naturally? Either way I don’t think it would work for me. Too much crap in my head to get past.
I think like a lot of these things (a) It works for some people (b) like CBT it is massively overhyped.
If it works for you-then good . You’ve probably got a more receptive mind than me.
For me, mindfullness exercises always made me feel more on edge, pretty much the exact way the author described. I do other forms of meditation and that helps. I also use Tetris therapy, which is actually a real, documented thing.
It’s being aware of where you are, what you’re feeling, what is happening right now. I have a tendency to alternately suppress or dwell on negative thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness for me helps me acknowledge what I’m feeling or thinking or experiencing, put it proper perspective, and let it go.
But I can’t imagine that it’s one size fits all. It definitely isn’t a fad where I live, and I have a hard time seeing my workplace making it mandatory. It’s still seen as somewhat Gwenyth-y around here.
If metacognition breaks down to understanding your understanding of things, I would say that mindfulness is more a case of being aware of what you are aware about (or feeling about). MetaAwareness, as it were. It’s a great way to check yourself and say, “hey, I’m anxious, why am I anxious?” I sort of learned how to do that in 12 Step programs in a basic form and then bumped into the formal concept in therapy. Fantastic way to identify and correct bad habits and what we in AA refer to as stinkin’ thinkin’.
Dang it, we should have had an @notmoses eruption by this point. Where are you, man? (You have failed us!)
Ok I read the article and I think th problem is the people who are facilitators aren’t always trained to fix things when it goes wrong.
When I joined a mindfulness group the facilitator used to go through with us all how it went and was available afterwards to fix anything that went wrong.
I think when people say it’s ‘hardcore’ I think how a monk would do mindfulness is, but mindful breathing is just a component and I’ve not had any problems with it.
I agree. Which is unfortunate, because it’s nothing more than learning to use one’s eyes, ears, taste, smell, touch and “gut feelings” (in the enteric nervous system). There’s nothing “woo woo” about the stuff at all.
Same here. They warn people off if they have serious psych problems. And if they spot an attendee who demonstrates such problems, they return his or her tuition and advise them to leave.
It should be pointed out however that vipassana retreats are way beyond the psychotherapeutic use of mindfulness meditation. I have seen people with psych disorders go to these retreats, somehow manage to stay, and be harmed by them. They misunderstand the directions and go too far into rather than out of their minds.
But those with whom I have come in contact seem to respond positively to explanations of the problems encountered by thinking that MM is the diametric opposite of what it actually is. They can be deprogrammed from their own misinterpretations pretty quickly in most cases.
In my (considerable; like over 40 years) experience with mindfulness meditation and Buddhism, I would have to say that there is “mindfulness” and there is mindfulness, much as there is “Buddhism” and Buddhism. The kind of mindfulness I have learned to practice is the opposite of “watered down Buddhism,” I would have to say. Because for me, strict, formalized, “church” Buddhism (say, a la Thich Naht Hanh) is so belabored with all kinds of needless and even counterproductive baloney that it gets in its own way.
My favorite Buddhists are Sogyal Rinpoche, his student Chogyam Trungpa, and Trungpa’s student Pema Chodron. They have all strained out the ■■■■■■■■ and gotten down to the essence. I also think Daniel Goleman, Stephen Levine, Tara Brach, Arthur Deikman and Charles Tart have all done a fine job of separating the chicken ■■■■ from the chicken salad.
Others are on this forum are welcome to their opinions. But when they are ill-informed, they may have to expect that others will comment upon those opinions.
I must admit I know ■■■■ about the intracacies of different meditation techniques, but think of them all having to do with modifying one’s attention one way or the other. I read before that some are recommended and some are discouraged for schizophrenics.
In phenomenological psychopathology, some mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia, are charecterized by the notion of hyperreflexity, in short, excessive self-observation. Within that approach, such is taken to render intelligible some of the symptoms most of us are all too familiar with. (such is, btw, not necessarily to posit an hypothesis that competes with any causal account of them).
Pyschiatrist T. Fuchs explains it as follows:
Mental illnesses represent disorders or holdups in conducting one’s life directed at the world and into the future. As such, they are con-nected with increased self-observation and self-evaluation, with a nar-rowing of attention to one’s own person, to the defi cits or symptoms experienced, and finally, with the backward turn of thinking to what has already been done or has happened. These phenomena can be summed up in the concept of hyperreflexivity .
The disorder of enaction is manifested also in a dissolution of the hab-its, gestalt units, and implicit couplings on which the body’s intention-ality is based. Comprehensive intentional arcs of perception and action are dissolved, so that single elements appear disturbingly in the fore-ground. I have called these phenomena the explication of the implicit or pathological explication .
Hyperreflexivity and explication condition and reinforce one another reciprocally. What was taken for granted up to now becomes question-able, the familiar becomes alienated, but the brooding self-reflection triggered by this contributes additionally to this disorder. Vicious circles of self-observation and self-alienation arise from this.
