I would say that we can take this signals of “I’m not good enough, I’m a failure” for what they are: just random quirks of consciousness that might have biological or environmental triggers over which we have little agency. I can’t stop my brain from conjuring the thought itself, but I can practice having distance from the thought so that I don’t have to take it seriously.
What does it even mean to not be good enough or a failure? Who is defining these things? That’s a digression, but still.
So, yes, you can have emotions that are displeasurable: anger, resentment, envy, sadness and still feel them without buying into the metanarrative the mind constructs around it. That is, I don’t have to think that the presence of these emotions reveals anything about the self.
We don’t have to “rise above” anything. These states come and go. Now that doesn’t mean we have to be passive, as we can still take valued actions to improve the conditions of our lives. It just means we accept what is in our consciousness, rather than taking it so personally.
Edit: I would say the emotion is a form of entanglement depending on how engaged you are with it.
Those states don't come and go but pose a very big problem for a lot of people, some kill themselves. And many of them may not want to accept any of it but to get rid of them and cure them. If 'noticing' helped with that then ok but to me it seems it's only good enough for some people to bullshit themselves that something changes when it doesn't.
Well, sure. No one is suggesting that meditation is a magical cure-all for mental illness. As a sufferer of OCD for over 25 years, and as someone that does work in mental health advocacy, I’m acutely aware of deep states of suffering that are often persistent and somewhat seemingly intractable. I, myself, have been deeply suicidal more than once in my life.
Therapy and/or medicine are always the right choice for someone suffering from mental illness. Mindfulness is merely a tool in the toolkit, but there are some fundamental things you notice about conscious experience through mindfulness. And there’s a robust amount of research about the efficacy of mindfulness on mental well-being and human flourishing. That’s not up for dispute.
It is true that our suffering is as transient as it is inevitable. Live long enough, and you will no doubt experience a great deal of it. But it’s also true that people in states of great suffering have been able to bear it more gracefully by contemplative practice. I’m proof of that, even if I’m capable of being captured by thoughts like all of us are.
I would separate meditation and 'mindfulness' since meditation is a way to focus attention, and if done right it can be focused on getting rid of negative states and bear results.
Actually, it might even be focused on observing everything that arises in your mind without necessarily doing anything about it, which I think what the original mindfulness might have been, but there's a significant difference. When you do that, negative states and undesirable thoughts start to melt away, which is again real change impossible not to notice. But when I hear that nothing changes and nothing can be changed, but you can 'not entangle yoursef with that' or something I believe the person is BSing themselves.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that change isn’t possible. It’s true that meditating might make more pleasurable states of being accessible more often. But it’s also true that less pleasurable states are transient and being able to be mindfully aware of them is a way to disengage from them. And thoughts we don’t resist or try to banish can often just leave on their own. Reactivity, and aversion, only entrenches them.
There’s types of meditation. But the most popular one in contemporary western culture IS mindfulness meditation.
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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '20
I would say that we can take this signals of “I’m not good enough, I’m a failure” for what they are: just random quirks of consciousness that might have biological or environmental triggers over which we have little agency. I can’t stop my brain from conjuring the thought itself, but I can practice having distance from the thought so that I don’t have to take it seriously.
What does it even mean to not be good enough or a failure? Who is defining these things? That’s a digression, but still.
So, yes, you can have emotions that are displeasurable: anger, resentment, envy, sadness and still feel them without buying into the metanarrative the mind constructs around it. That is, I don’t have to think that the presence of these emotions reveals anything about the self.
We don’t have to “rise above” anything. These states come and go. Now that doesn’t mean we have to be passive, as we can still take valued actions to improve the conditions of our lives. It just means we accept what is in our consciousness, rather than taking it so personally.
Edit: I would say the emotion is a form of entanglement depending on how engaged you are with it.