Seems pretty useless to meditate much (aiming for real results) if one is very anxious or depressed. Sort of like running with mononucleosis.
I've spent months in a rut, and now that I'm slowly just feeling better in general, my baseline keeps improving with minimal effort.
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To be fair, I did actually have a very bad bout of mono not so long ago.
One downside of a culture convinced everything is personal and a "choice" is that it feels even worse when you're incapacitated.
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Calamity: "Oh fuck my health is fucked. Fuck."
Resolution: Make the best of things, relax as much as possible. Heal slowly.
Complication: "Shit I'm letting this person down, wow I'm not going anywhere with work, jeez I'm missing appointments. I suck what is wrong with me I-"
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When you really dig into it, it's really a very narcissistic frame of mind - but one that is socially enforced, by force if need be.
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For me it helps when anxious (“slow down, deep breaths, you’re okay”) but I can’t imagine it helping when depressed. In my (narrow, limited, personal) experience depression is a lockdown that needs to be broken with screaming and crying, triggered by appropriate stimuli
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While it’s totally valid that meditation doesn’t help everyone’s heavy anxiety or depression, I wanted to chime in that the idea of meditating for “real results” is often the biggest block for me. I try to approach meditation with no goal in mind and simply the intention to do it
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Having a goal in mind or expectation is just another thought, and meditation is cultivating a state of mind where you aren’t attached to your thoughts. I agree that in my heaviest times, meditation has the potential to overwhelm me with how much it reveals so its not always ideal
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I've had a similar experience over the past few months. Coming out of it now. Switched my practice to vipassana which has helped.
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Vipassana makes me feel like the entire world is turning into this:
uberviz.io/viz/loop/
Find I'm mostly defaulting to anything learned from Zen, lately.
Feels a lot less like the end of the world, but doesn't really lose any clarity AFAICT.
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I was having a conversation with this morning, and I expressed that - in a current state of lower mood, generally - I'm torn on mood regulation/meditaiton, I often express strong skepticism, but I also credit it with saving my life.
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primarily for the reason that (depending on technique, etc) it can shred through the chain of narratives which massively perpetuate and exacerbate mood stuff. eg: suicidal ideation goes from being a massive problem to no problem at all.
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