Therapeutic Meditation

It's ironic that as a generic mindfulness meditation becomes more popular as a therapeutic tool, with a reputation as harmless, so many of us are experiencing Vipassana as a wild ride fraught with difficulty. What do folks think might be a better practice for therapeutic, in-the-moment benefit. Is Metta universally beneficial? Is there a traditional practice that those of us in helping professions, who might be unqualified to teach real mindfulness practice, can recommend safely and relevantly as an adjunct for people struggling with anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc.? Or is the notion that meditation can be used in a healing context just misguided?

I think mediation as a ADJUNCT can be very effective, if used under the guidance of qualified teachers and others trained in such things. Meditation is not a REPLACEMENT for treatments administered by doctors, therapists and other mental and physical health professionals, like medications and therapies of various kinds.

This is something that interests me, because I hear and read so much about how people's lives have been improved by meditation, how they sleep better, concentrate better, have lower stress, and are easier to get along with by sitting and meditating every day. It's not just modest daily practice, either; I read about a woman who was a high-powered magazine editor; she's retired now to practice more "mindfulness meditation," attending retreats as well as doing daily practice. She said she'd go to a retreat, feel better for awhile afterward, but then be back on the treadmill again, and didn't want to do that any more.

The one understanding I've gotten out of my own practice, however, is that it's not a self-improvement project, like eating more vegetables and exercising every day. So I'm having trouble reconciling the claims of the Jon Kabat-Zinn approach with what I've been experiencing here.

Yes, Laurel, what we do here is talk about truly transformative practices that have "permanent" effects on us. So what we do is powerful, and thus sometimes disruptive. Disruption can be both good and bad, depending, but it's always good to know going into our kind of practice that this is the truth of what we do. Daniel Ingram does a good job of explaining this in MCTB.

This would also mean that i should not teach Mahamudra Noting to friends as just a nice way to connect, feel good and be more mindful in everyday life? Can we distinguish transformative practices and mindfulness practices, such that we have something nice to share with friends who would like to experience a little bit of what meditation can do? And is most of what we do here something that should come with a warning label "This is a transformative psychospiritual practice. It has the potential to change you permanently, and may cause unpleasant experiences while this is happening"?

I'm really not sure. That's why i ask

edited: forgot something

@villum - there is going to be some element of the individual's "fate" in this. Some people have a tendency to spiritual seeking, perhaps not even recognized. Some people have really deep experiences spontaneously, without a practice or from the same simple practices that don't do anything for other people. Whether that's to do with biology or life history or what, I can't know. But what serves as relaxing meditation for one person for a while may suddenly start opening doors to wisdom. For another person even a short introduction to practice may open these doors. For others, it may not happen "by accident" or through dabbling, but only with intention and intensive practice.

It is my observation that clinical meditation techniques have either a pure shamatha flavor if they're taught as relaxation practices, or they're a combination of mostly shamatha and just enough vipassana to get to the first two insight stages, if taught as a part of psychotherapy (as in DBT or MBCT). People who learn meditation from therapists or nurses simply don't learn how to get into the A&P, much less past it. This is because "feel-good" meditation is practiced at lower levels of intensity and for shorter periods of time.

I don't expect people doing 15 minutes of casual stress-relief meditation a day would encounter severe Dark Night problems like we sometimes do from our intensive hours of strong mindfulness and concentration. In the same vein, I don't expect someone who carries heavy groceries from the car into the kitchen a few times a week to get the same kinds of injuries that may affect serious bodybuilders. They simply aren't doing the activity at the same level of intensity.

Yes, there are horror stories of people who had no idea what meditation could do, and they accidentally stumbled into dark nights that also happened to be unusually severe or protracted. One reason such stories are sensational is their rarity.

If we were betting on where casual meditators go on the insight maps, my money is that they rarely make it past the first vipassana jhana, if they even get there in the first place.

That said, I really DO wish that more mental health professionals knew about this rare possibility -- it's not really "informed consent" if you aren't fully informed!

I find concentration practice; kasina practice, as well as direct mode, and metta practice to all be healing / therapeutic in their own *immediate* way.

In the long run I personally feel all these practices are healing in very deep ways, sometimes we have to face our issues in order to release and heal them. :]

metta!

Justin

I got into meditation by taking an MBSR class, and it did help a lot. I only ran into trouble by applying noting technique aggressively. They don't teach you to apply it that consistently in MBSR, so usually you just hang out in the first two nanas, which is a peaceful place to be, relatively speaking.