Mindfulness should focus first on observing and not judging/labeling things as good/bad. That just leads to more misery!!
The instructors should certainly realize that mindfulness and it’s experiences are very subjective and each individual has different experiences. One must be careful not to compare two students and say one is a better example of mindfulness than the other.
Reduced implicit learning is not in fact a "bad" thing, although we may quickly assume so at first glance. I suppose if you read the title of this post and thought "wait what? They're saying mindfulness is bad?" then that would be an example of where your implicitly acquired knowledge failed to some extent.
In fact, a common cause of disturbance within people is that they are too affected by implicit "I did this and that happened" learnings and not of the true intent/meaning behind actions and reactions.
From my own practice and what I've read / been taught, it's wrong to be labeling the thoughts, your either simply paying attention to raw experience or you're not. Once you start telling yourself it's good (or bad), you're not longer just an observer you're a participant.
By wrong I don't mean to say you're doing anything wrong, but it's not in the spirit of objective mindful meditation.
From my own practice, it's help me to accept the good and bad times, or what I'd usually think of good and bad, as more of a movie and put the bad times in a little more perspective.
Thank you for this - I kept feeling I had hit a wall in my mindfulness meditation, and it's good to be reminded that it's the effort that's the goal, not the end result. :)
This is not said enough, but mindfulness practice is also not for everyone. If you're feeling a lot of negative emotions do not persist and persevere past it
There are often first-hand comments about the dangers of mindfulness practice here on HN. But when the commenters describe their practices they are so extreme that it was almost inevitable that they had negative effects.
Please don't "you're doing it wrong" with mindfulness. Mindfulness has become almost a religion for some people who want it to be more than a pragmatic tool with various consumption styles.
The whole thing has been oversold in the same way that cannabis, etc. were. It's just a thing, utterly detached from artificial spiritual goals, and we should let people use it how they want.
Good insight. Seems to me people who doubt the usefulness of mindfulness are looking too close. It's obvious, the hard part is staying in that DUH moment, we are built to over-think :)
Mindfulness is something that should be practiced.
It's perspective that helps me. After all nothing really matters that much at all....
We are all just passing through.
Maybe I got a little too Zen there... But hey keep busy being happy, move away from negative influences
True, it's not a great example-- I honestly think the author has missed the point of the exercise. "We might be down for thirty minutes" is not actually that bad of a thing, as you point out; he's just practicing avoidance, which is not the path to happiness.
However, Buddhist mindfulness really does predict that the only way to be happy is to contemplate, and accept, your most secret and horrific fears. Try, "No matter how hard I work, what I make will eventually fail and be replaced." Or maybe "Everyone and everything I love will die and be utterly forgotten in a few hundred years."
This is, in fact, practicing happiness. It seems absurd, but if you can't be happy and productive while accepting these thoughts, you weren't ever really happy; just in denial.
"With its promises of assisting everyone with anything and everything, the mistake of the mindfulness movement is to present its impersonal mode of awareness as a superior or universally useful one"
It's difficult for me to imagine a person that would not benefit from taking a break from the non-stop stream of thoughts and the overidentification that comes with it.
Two of the points in the article are at cross purposes.
The author mentions doing Mindful Practice but later says to be Problem Oriented. The first one implies a background thread making judgments that is constantly running in the back of your mind. The second needs you to ignore everything but the problem at hand.
I’d go with the latter, esp if you’re new to the job. Let judgments accrue over time rather than go looking for them in the middle of a task at hand.
It's not the mindfulness itself, but they definitely get it wrong. Your advice to them is really great and it could be taken as the most universal meditation advice ever: "If it's stressful, you're doing it wrong".
As the Buddha said, "there's no such thing as noble suffering".
Funny how nobody addresses the main point, only that my 1-sentence executive summary is not accurate :-)
Main point is: if you start doing mindfulness exercises, you will eventually get into insight territory, and without a cushion of compassion this can mess you up.
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