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(Thread) Here's an excellent @TheSideViewCo article on how secular mindfulness meditation in the West evolved out of Buddhist meditation traditions: "Deconstructing Mindfulness: Embracing a Complex Simplicity." @bodhidave3 also discusses the states of absorption called the jhānas
This piece by @BradWarner, who describes Buddhism as "a meditation system with 2,500 years of research and development across multiple cultures and eras," complements the first one well: "Mindfulness Meditation is Buddhist Meditation" hardcorezen.info/mindfulness-me…
For more on the jhanas, which haven't taught widely in the West, check out this @tricyclemag interview with meditation teacher Leigh Brasington: "A Mind Pure, Concentrated, and Bright" tricycle.org/magazine/mind-…
Great piece by Jason Snyder @cognazor: "The primary goal of meditation is to temporarily suspend the sense that there is a self riding around in the head who is somehow separate from the rest of the body and the world. Why would somebody want to do this?"
Another great piece (again at @TheSideViewCo,) this one by Sam Mickey @doctormickey: "Practice Is not a Life Hack: People say that practice is something you do with your body, but that's backwards. Your body is something you do with your practice."
Also, here's a piece by Ron Purser (@MindfulCrank) and David R. Loy which was mentioned in the first article in this thread ("Deconstructing Mindfulness"): "Beyond McMindfulness" huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/bey…
I included most of the articles in this thread in a MetaFilter post, if anyone wants to check it out over there: metafilter.com/178864/A-brief…
8/ This is a good article by Olga Khazan @olgakhazan on the growth of Buddhism and secular meditation in the West: "Why So Many Americans Are Turning to Buddhism: The ancient Eastern religion is helping Westerners with very modern mental-health problems." theatlantic.com/health/archive…
9/ Here's a related thread on meditation and neuroscience:
10/ This insightful thread by Sam Byers @byers90 regarding Jack Dorsey's vipassana retreat in Burma is very interesting and worth checking out if you saw @jack's thread. Here are the thread and the unroll (via @stevesilberman): threadreaderapp.com/thread/1071733…
11/ I joined Twitter a week after Jack described his experience, so I missed it and the reaction to it until now. Here's the thread and the unroll: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1071575…
12/ One of the best accounts that I've read of a first-time retreat in this style of teaching vipassana dhamma.org/en/, which has been popularized in the West by S.N. Goenka, is this one by @wonderhussy (NSFW: nudity) wonderhussy.com/navel-gazing-i…
13/ This retreat style is very intense (I've done a few) but it's not the only way meditation is taught. My first 10-day retreat was at Wat Suan Mokkh in Southern Thailand. suanmokkh-idh.org They have retreats every month tailored for Westerners. The retreat I attended...
14/ ... alternated between sitting and walking meditation. jackkornfield.com/walking-medita… This style is generally a more practical introduction than 10 straight days of sitting for most newbies, imo. Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Nor Cal also teaches this way: spiritrock.org/residential-re…
15/ This is a great piece by Zen teacher Brad Warner @BradWarner on the potential pitfalls in learning meditation: "Buddhists on the Funny Farm:... The current craze for mindfulness has encouraged a lot of people to get into the meditation game without any real qualifications..."
16/ "... Meditation is not a trivial matter. Sure. The initial stages of practice generally produce feelings of well-being and calm mixed with crushing boredom. But if you go into it more deeply, you’re going to start discovering stuff that will challenge your core beliefs ..."
17/ "... and understandings about who you are, what the world you’re living in is, and what you ought to do about that. If you don’t have the proper grounding when that stuff starts coming up, you might end up going a little koo-koo." hardcorezen.info/buddhists-on-t…
18/ You may have noticed that 3 of the pieces upthread are from @TheSideViewCo. It's a great resource with many excellent articles pertaining to what Adam Robbert @AE_Robbert calls “contemplative philosophy.” For more on what that means, see this thread:
19/ Neuroscientists @amishijha & Cliff Saron discuss how much more complex the brain is than how it's sometimes portrayed in mindfulness literature, which can reduce it to a mind-hack: "The Magnificent, Mysterious, Wild, Connected and Interconnected Brain" mindful.org/the-magnificen…
20/ And now for a comedic interlude: "The Koan- A Short Story" by Nikolai Halay @Nikolai_Halay thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2010/10/koan.h…
@threadreaderapp unroll please.
