Casualities #3: Meditation diss #2*

 

There are so many tons of information, research and waxing orgasmic about this simple and dumb process that one should wonder if some ulterior motive or conspiracy or agenda is behind it. One quiets the mind, attending only to breathing in and out. Or a brain-sedating mantra is intoned – “Om” – over and over again. As to breath focus, I confess that I don’t know if the rule is to think or say aloud “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out” as in Dan Harris’s video, or to just mutely observe one’s respiration.

There is research stating that meditation is better for the brain than sleep. There are articles about its negative psychological effects. I’d say that meditation is worse than sleep because it is a distrac­tion from bodily feeling while sleep allows unconscious buried history and its feel­ings to be released in dreams. In sleep, one’s defenses are down. As Dr. Janov noted, we wake up to unconsciousness because our network of self-soothing defenses re-engages, blocking deeper access. We are constipated souls.

Meditation is just another agent of repression. It blocks off the body’s main existence: feeling. Does it eliminate stress and anxiety that are ingrained in the nervous system since child­hood? No – it merely pushes them under briefly.

And yet there must be something good enough about a little bit of quiet, separating oneself from the rat race, for it to be so rallied around, imagined to be a wide benefit, deserving of ticker-tape parades.

I am a quiet sort. I easily go to no-thought or “no-mind” often, between therapy ses­sions, walking the dog, sitting around at night. But for me there is always feeling or the allowance of it. Body history is always wel­come to emerge and breathe. My theory is that this is the most regulating to the sys­tem: full openness. If I live to 120, we’ll know I’m right.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/09/mindfulness-or-look-inside-theres-bunny.html.