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- Chris Marti
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Why?
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- Chris Marti
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Why?
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- Chris Marti
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Here's Judson Brewer, a neuroscientist who famously studies brains during meditation using fMRI machines. He's created a commercial venture, I assume to capitalize on what he learned:
www.unwindinganxiety.com/
Modern science + Ancient practices
Recent research has uncovered incredible insights on how the brain functions — and what can create patterns of anxiety and panic. Research has also discovered the pathways that make the traditional practice of mindfulness so effective, and how to apply it specifically to the modern epidemic of anxiety. Initial data from the Unwinding Anxiety program shows a 48% reduction in anxiety after just 28 modules.
I'm not sure what to think of this. He seemed at first to be genuinely interested in the relationship between awakening and brain function. This reminds me more of the MBSR stuff that's now popular. I can see programs being rolled out for specific things like smoking and vaping, overeating, gambling, and so forth. This program costs $210 a year, or $30 a month. You can get a 28-day free trial.
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I'm glad people are getting help but I've realized that I personally can have nothing to do with meditation as medicine and generally need to stay as far away from it as possible. It basically has nothing to do with me and so I should probably just mind my own business and focus on my practice.
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Oops, I'm going down that judgmental trail again. I can't help myself.
What if the anxiety some of the app users are feeling is samvega, for which the real cure is spiritual? Will the app "fix" it? And if so, how? What will the end result of that be?
This line of conversation is making me feel a sort of dread and horror. Maybe I need the app!!!
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Chris Marti wrote: Yeah, I agree, It's sad to see meditation, a spiritual activity, used as some kind of commercial cure-all. That's what bothers me about MBSR, too. Brewer's program sounds like MBSR on steroids. It's another trail marker on the path to commercializing everything. It's what we Americans like to do. Take other people's stuff, make money from it.
only 30 bucks/month!
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It seems initially easy to lump this in with all the rest, but when I look at the specifics it gets harder for me and I find myself feeling conflicted. The tech here is specifically designed with a limited, narrow, scope, and doesn't seem to be advertising as a cure-all. He's not claiming unreasonable results. I've read some of Judson's research papers before and his research is legitimate. He's build up some expertise in narrowly focused areas.
Here are some questions that occurred to me as I thought about this. (Full disclosure--I seem to want to defend this, but I'm really not sure why)
Is there something specific about Judson's app that's objectionable, or the content, or the presentation? So is it the marketing that's offensive? Or, if this is medicine, who gets to decide who can use it? If it's meditation, who gets to regulate that? Or is it that he's mixing money and dharma? Is it really dharma? How can you tell? Where do you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable?
Has anyone here either signed up for the app, or for the free 5-day course on anxiety? I signed up for the free 5-day and have listened to two of the 15 minute segments. So far, he's talked about differences between stress and anxiety and did a short 10-second exercise to notice where in your body you feel fear and anxiety. It's hard to call it meditation, but any meditator with any experience at all would feel at home with it.
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I developed an app that blocks commercialized dharma from appearing on your operating sWhich
Which operating system - the one I'm typing into or the one in my head?
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Or have sliding scales appropriate to a student's income level? Or "open their books" to explain exactly why they need the money they need? Shouldn't enlightened people be better at training themselves to work hard & spend less? I'm not saying that awakening makes one automatically harder working & more frugal; I'm saying it makes one's mental & physical patterns more malleable, more trainable. Why aren't the people who are teaching awakening or techniques related to the path to awakening (such as mindfulness to relieve anxiety)(who are presumably awakened) making the ethical decision to train themselves to be harder working & more frugal & thinking in complex, subtle ways such that they don't have to commercialize? A simple solution or hard line stance isn't the right answer -- but the right answer also is not to just dismiss this whole discussion & optimize profit.
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You say that you consider using mindfulness to relieve anxiety as being related to the path to awakening and that's very interesting to me because I don't really see the connection. Care to elaborate?
Edit: To be clear, anxiety has never really been one of my personal issues. With the exception of a few years with a PTSD-related fear of heights, for the most part when fear shows up in my life it's usually trying to tell me something and I'm grateful for it. So I may be ignorant of something important here.
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Chris Marti wrote: Andy, Judd Brewer "sold" his research to a lot of meditators (his subjects) as academic, motivated by curiosity. This just feels "bait and switch-y" to me, so I'm just disappointed in what's come from it if this app is "it.". I was hoping for something deeper and more meaningful to the spiritual community. It's a visceral, emotional reaction I'm having. I'll get over it pretty quickly.
Thanks for the context, Chris.
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Andromeda wrote: Noah, there's a lot in your post.
You say that you consider using mindfulness to relieve anxiety as being related to the path to awakening and that's very interesting to me because I don't really see the connection. Care to elaborate?
Edit: To be clear, anxiety has never really been one of my personal issues. With the exception of a few years with a PTSD-related fear of heights, for the most part when fear shows up in my life it's usually trying to tell me something and I'm grateful for it. So I may be ignorant of something important here.
I recently had some insights into how dissatisfaction presents in my every experience. (On a side note, that part of the experience is now in my face all the time, and I can't see how I didn't notice it before, it's so freakin' obvious.) I found that I experience that dissatisfaction as turning into anxiety at some point, with the downstream thoughts centering around, "There's something wrong here and now. Whatever is going on in this moment, it's not quite right. There's got to be something else that's better, but that something else never seems to come."
For me, then, the relationship between anxiety and awakening is that anxiety is a downstream effect of wanting to change the experience of this present moment, and awakening is "grokking", as Noah puts it, that there's no need to change how that presents.
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Noah wrote: I have a relatively traditional Buddhist view of awakening. In my understanding & experience, anxiety arises from kinks in the chain of dependent origination such as dualistic perception, early psychodynamic wounds & disproportional mental-emotional-behavioral reactionary patterns. So rather than fundamental awakening just being about an intuitive grokking of the way things are without needing to change them, I think it is about both surrender & action - hand in hand. That is likely different than the stance of others on here.
Okay. I don't necessarily disagree with that. But the methods I've chosen to work with that have been spiritual and more about getting to the root of things. This type of anxiety to me hasn't been a bad thing to be "relieved" but a helpful red flag for where work needs to be done. I guess that's just not something I would ever consider outsourcing to an app geared toward conventional mental health since the goals to me are quite different.
I aim for excellence in spiritual practice but when it comes to conventional mental health I am perfectly content to merely toe the line enough so that my neighbors don't get out the pitchforks.
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