When When-Buddhism-Goes-Bad Essays Go Bad
An annotated response to “When Buddhism Goes Bad: How My Mindfulness Practice Led Me To Meltdown,” a Substack post by Dan Lawton.
I see we’re still doing “Meditation™ is dangerous” instead of “culturally denuded brain hacking is dangerous.”
“The type of meditation I had been practicing was jhana, a deep state of absorption concentration said to be essential in the Buddha’s awakening.”
GREAT start. I’m sure this is going to go just fine.
“I had 13 days ahead of me to work, with the goal of experiencing highly refined states of awareness — and perhaps something beyond.”
Def helps to have goals. Nothing makes for a better med sesh than expectations about something you know nothing about other than that it rules.
k so then the guy has a gnarly night, the teachers have no fucking CLUE what to do with him, and he leaves the retreat. Astonishing development.
NOW, onto the mansplaination.
Sidebar: Have you noticed that the title flatly states that this is all Buddhism™’s fault?
“As meditation practices have exploded in popularity in the West, they have brought with them an array of adverse experiences far beyond the typically-billed benefits of lower stress, decreased anxiety and reduced pain.”
Aw, what happened to the Buddha’s awakening, dude??
“when these practices made their journey into Western culture, a sufficient understanding of the downsides of meditation was lost in transit.”
YOU DON’T SAY
“In fact, today mindfulness meditation is primarily used as an off-label treatment for mental health issues,”
hey i thought this was a “Jhana Meditation™” retreat
“a strange and tortuous journey for a technique that was for centuries practiced by Asian Buddhists for achieving liberation and therefore avoiding re-birth.”
holy mother of white-skinned blonde haired jesus h christ
“This rebranding, which has mostly whitewashed negative experiences of meditation and framed it as in alignment with Western mental health goals,”
are we still talking about Buddhism Gone Bad™ or nah
“According to a 2017 report by Marketdata Enterprises, the U.S. meditation market is predicted to grow to 2 billion dollars by 2022. I knew most of this previous to my disastrous retreat.”
Oh ok so you KNEW you were buying an off-the-shelf consumer good? Well caveat emptor!
“As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged… 4,000 hours… over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats.”
credential-haver has logged on
“I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned Western meditation teachers.”
EXTREMELY
“Prior to this retreat, I was an unabashed evangelist for mindfulness. I credit meditation with precipitating numerous positive changes in my life.”
wonder if this guy is going to have any agency at any point, or if it’s always going to be outsourced
“But 14 months ago, my meditation practice brought me to my knees.”
wonder what took so long
Now, let me stop shitting on this for a minute to say that this guy had legit PTSD from this experience, and it sounds awful. One of the more debilitating meditation-involved trauma accounts I’ve ever heard. Truly heartbreaking. Metta to him.
god in heaven, this post is long
“I remember clearly a senior teacher answering a student’s question of how much they should meditate. ‘Well, how happy do you want to be?’ he had quipped.”
sounds like a LOVELY scene, VERY healthy, no red flags whatsoever
I’m going to scroll through the obligatory “Dr. Willoughby Britton exists” section if u don’t mind
“But, at this point I was a decade into my intensive mindfulness meditation practice. I was too deep to get out.”
AGENCY, MOTHERFUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT?
Now the backstory on how his practice started.
“I drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships with women. My mind wandered uncontrollably.”
Mhmm…
“I was drifting into my mid-20s doing things that had felt defensible at 19, but didn’t feel OK any longer. I wanted a calmer, tranquil mind, so I found a Zen center and started dropping in for weekly meditation practice.”
Uh huh!!
“There was peace, space, and bliss. It was like a drug. And I immediately wanted more.”
AW MAN, COME ON
“In 2011, I sat my first meditation retreat in the Vipassana tradition of S.N Goenka.”
i guess “more” means “more religions”
ok, HERE’s a plot twist: homeboy had “a cannonball of grief, despair and horrific pain emerge from my gut, up into my chest and then out of my mouth” after which he “unleashed a blood-curdling scream” on his FIRST GOENKA RETREAT. who could’ve anticipated
He liked this one, though. In fact, he reports that afterward, “I felt like I had a superpower.”
oh my god, this is the worst paragraph yet
“I attended meditation retreats across the country, read voluminous books on Buddhism, and even moved from New Orleans to the San Francisco Bay Area to deepen my meditation practice.”
Shot:
“As the years went by, I became a full believer in much of Buddhist doctrine, especially the idea that all suffering is the product of craving or desire.”
Chaser:
“I was also impressed by the arguments made by many meditation teachers that meditation was a completely secular endeavor, which could be done without any connection to religion. It was essentially, they argued, exercise for the mind.”
FULL, EXTREME believer
fyi this article is half over, i am getting v bored
oh god i just snuck ahead and MCTB is coming (after getting back on drugs)
“The cover picture was the silhouette of a sitting meditator with hot-pink squiggly lines shooting out in all directions.”
cool bro
look, im not gonna do MCTB right now, that’s out of scope
“With this diagnosis in tow, the upshot of my current condition was clear to me. I was halfway to awakening. I had to make it there or I would continue to suffer. I no longer had a choice.”
GREAT, let’s give that book away for FREE on the internet, seems like a great companion
“‘What kind of fucking person could go through something like this and not warn other people!’ I yelled. … It was the first time in years I had dropped my Buddhist pretense and allowed myself to be truly angry.”
yeah right
I am going to skip the “what went wrong” section because it just repeatedly proves what is already clear, which is that this guy can’t even tell the difference between practice instructions, let alone understand meditation practices in any kind of context.
dude you REALLY need to stop accusing other people of “whitewashing”
“These days I rarely meditate, but the quality of mindfulness is a constant in my life. I use it when I need it, but I can turn it off and on. It’s a tool that I can access but doesn’t control me.”
heyyyyyyy happy ending
“A few months ago, I began dabbling with teaching mindfulness again, which may seem surprising. However, I believe that these practices, with the correct framework, dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving mental health.”
mmmmmnever mind
“I began meditating in search for a decrease in stress and anxiety. I got that, and then somehow became swept away in a new-age super religion without even knowing it.”
is THAT what you got swept away in?
“It’s this essay, the act of speaking out, of rendering my story in a public way, that I need to complete to put this chapter of life behind me. I can’t bear the idea of pushing these experiences under the rug… like so many other meditation teachers have done.”
our hero
“If you’re a meditation teacher or hold a powerful position in the mindfulness industry, perhaps take a moment to question what sort of legacy you want to leave.”
this sentence is everything
“Is it the fate of the Western mindfulness movement to follow this trend?”
👏YOU👏SAID👏THIS👏WAS👏ABOUT👏BUDDHISM👏
“At the core was the loss of my faith: a faith that had protected me, supported me, answered questions that felt unanswerable, empowered me in the innumerable ways that only faith can.”
I’m sorry, your what?
“There, entombed in the cobwebs of time, was a skeptic, a rebel, an explorer and a writer: a fierce collective primarily interested not in making the world easier or simpler, but in celebrating its insane vastness and complexity.”
… k
“It was something once surrendered as an offering. It is part of myself that I have now reclaimed.”
Whatever this means or is referring to, it is the last sentence of this article.
