--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <fintlewoodle...@...> wrote:
Interesting article. From her description of herself I think she is a great candidate for meditation. Her impulsiveness needs a little dissociation to allow her time to reflect a bit before going off. The kind of person who I believe does not benefit is already a bit checked out and dissociated. (I am in this group.) I was a fantastic meditator in that I had great "experiences" and loved it, could do it for hours. But more dissociation is not the way for me to function at my best. That doesn't mean that short doses are out of the question but a little goes a long way for me. Some people get themselves good and dissociated from meditation but become hypersensitive to the environment and become pissy. When I was a teacher I was to sensitive for my own good. I couldn't just hunker down in a Vietnamese soup kitchen and ignore people smoking and enjoy my lunch. I still hate smoke but now I can choose to STFU about it. The teaching around meditation encourages a perfectionist standard which in Rational Emotive Therapy can result in a low frustration tolerance. I used to see that a lot in the movement. So for me meditation is not a cure all for humanity. And we don't really know much about its long term effects. But for some people I can see how it would be life changing to not react impulsively through the mental shift brought about through meditation. And I suspect the benefits are not necessarily cumulative, you might get most of what you are going to get quickly. But once they get hooked on the idea that meditating makes them grow in "enlightenment" and they will know everything about life as Maharishis claimed, then that perspective makes me want to go shout at a bus! > > > > > A rather irritating Guardian journalist goes in search of inner > peace..... > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/08/tanya-gold-meditation > <http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/08/tanya-gold-meditatio\ > n> > > From my own experience I'll say that TM does not prevent anger, there > are no shortage of stroppy, short fused people in the TMO. The only > reason I don't count myself among there number is that I retain a bit of > self awareness and can hold it back until I've rationalised whether > someone deserves a good kicking or not. > > In fact it was one of the great surprises to me that TM made me very > angry indeed and quite a lot of the time, last thing I expected given > the literature. Shame I was never asked to be in a study about it's > effects, might have swayed the figures a bit. > > So what causes anger in meditators? Is it unstressing or an imbalance > somewhere or the release of repressed urges and the revealing of my > "true" self? Or am I just a miserable git who wants to destroy the > world? > > Maybe TM is unsuitable for some people and we'd be better off doing a > different, less fraught, type. >
