Facing Your Demons

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12 years 7 months ago #3342 by Chris Marti
This article popped up and hit me right in the chin:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/health/07lives.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp

You may not be able to read it as it's behind the pay firewall at the NY Times, but here's a few relevant items:

"In recent years, researchers have begun talking about mental health care in the same way addiction specialists speak of recovery — the lifelong journey of self-treatment and discipline that guides substance abuse programs. The idea remains controversial: managing a severe mental illness is more complicated than simply avoiding certain behaviors. The journey has more mazes, fewer road signs.

Yet people like Joe Holt are traveling it and succeeding. Most rely on some medical help, but each has had to build core skills from the ground up, through trial and repeated error. Now more and more of them are risking exposure to tell their stories publicly.


The ability to catch one’s own mind straying from reality is no small gift; perhaps half the people with schizophrenia have no such self-awareness, researchers say. Still, it would take years for Mr. Holt to master himself."

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12 years 7 months ago #3343 by Chris Marti
Replied by Chris Marti on topic Facing Your Demons
<Sometimes the formatting capabilities provided on this site are just inadequate and very frustrating....>

Anyway, this article reminded me of the struggles of my daughter (depression/addiction) and those have always made me think that our way, meditation, is potentially a foundation for simple life and coping skills that could be taught to everyone at some point, like we teach gym in high school (but better). The programs my daughter has been in have steps or other processes that tend to look a lot like a meditation practice when you examine them closely.

So... what do you think?

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12 years 7 months ago #3344 by Eran
Replied by Eran on topic Facing Your Demons
Yep. Completely agree. Mindfulness I'd a basic life skill that should be a part of our culture just like reading. Not just basic mindfulness either but tr couragous mindfulness that can face the most difficult experiences and see them for what they are. It is the basis for pretty much every practice te forms healthy patters and dissolves unhealthy ones. If you want to take it further, I'd say include stream entry as a part of any 3-4 year college experience and make it a normal thing to have done.

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12 years 7 months ago #3345 by Jake St. Onge
Replied by Jake St. Onge on topic Facing Your Demons
I think this is very important. You might like looking into Dan Seigel M.D.'s work, Chris, if you haven't already. I've mentioned it here before on several threads. There is a great series of podcasts available on the Upaya site with Dan and Roshi Joan Halifax and a group of clinical workers in various mental health fields where Dan presents his "mindsight" work. His stuff is based on his own and others' brain research as well as his clinical psychotherapy practice.

He predicts a coming era of "brain based psychotherapy" which is cool, as he presents it, since it avoids the superficial materialist view of many brain scientists and he's very big on "mind" (i.e., experience) as the "brain's way of changing itself"-- neuroplasticity as mediated by attentional habits, in other words, rather than relying on only pharmaceutical interventions for example.

His research led him naturally to discover meditation/brain research (outcomes of long term mindfulness practice mirror outcomes from healthy childhood relationships or if they were lacking, later succesful psychotherapy) and eventually he began meditating himself. He's particularly interesting to me as his perspective is coming out of a concrete mental health orientation, working in the trenches with "ordinary" people with various levels of mental-emotional-somatic disturbance from mild to severe, brain damaged and experientially traumatized, individuals couples and families. On a thread about Clinical Mindfulness on another forum, the issue was raised about potential disturbances arising DUE to meditation-- the famous dark night, and the effects it could have on pre-existing mental health conditions. What I like about Seigel's work is that it is extremely nuanced and grounded phenomenologically and neuroscientifically, and he seems powerfully on top of the issues raised on that other thread and similar discussions in the Prag Dharma community, utilizing attentional work to help improve quality of life for many people in his clinical practice.

Another major theme of his, which is thoroughly discussed in that podcast series, is directly related to what you mention in your second post above Chris--- the participants in the seminar were kicking around the phrase 'mental floss' or something equally silly, I can't remember, but the idea was a set of simple attentional exercises which would contribute to holistic well-being based on Seigel's comprehensive research and successful clinical work. They are very similar to the four foundations of mindfulness and promote brain integration (between major brain/nervous regions throughout the head and full body, senses, immune system, etc), relational integration (between people), and experiential integration (integrating thinking, feeling, perceptions, and other facets of conscious experience). The idea is to disseminate these basic but comprehensively effective exercises into the mainstream culture, especially education, beginning as early as kids display the capacity to understand and implement instructions, and even earlier in that the way adults relate to children has direct effects on how their young brains are wired, and hence on the degree of brain/mind/relational integration kids start life with-- potentially inoculating them against many forms of psychological disturbance which seem to be growing in prevalence in our culture.

edited to add: simultaneous post to yours, Eran, and you pretty much said what I said but a lot simpler :-) hahaha!

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12 years 7 months ago #3346 by Eran
Replied by Eran on topic Facing Your Demons
This reminds me of the work done by Mindful Schools here in the bay area. They go into schools and have a series of short mindfulness lessons for the kids. They also train teachers and adults. The programs includes mindfulness of breath, mindfulness of body, loving kindness and more. They've been seeing great results with this program and are now in the process of quantifying that through tests and studies.

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12 years 7 months ago #3347 by Ona Kiser
Replied by Ona Kiser on topic Facing Your Demons


Yep. Completely agree. Mindfulness I'd a basic life skill that should be a part of our culture just like reading. Not just basic mindfulness either but tr couragous mindfulness that can face the most difficult experiences and see them for what they are. It is the basis for pretty much every practice te forms healthy patters and dissolves unhealthy ones. If you want to take it further, I'd say include stream entry as a part of any 3-4 year college experience and make it a normal thing to have done.

-eran


My first thought on this is to point out that teaching people to practice is one thing, requiring them to achieve any particular level of insight is another. Each person processes this stuff at their own speed, and despite the enthusiasm of hardcore/pragmatic dharma types, they are a self-selecting group of very motivated individuals. If you take a broader sampling of regular people and put them in a meditation program, the fact is most will learn to have a level of mindfulness, for sure, as that is merely a skill, but how deep they can go with that is between them and God, and not something that can be forced or required. Each has his own path to process in his own time, and that time may be months, years, decades or more than a lifetime. It can be easy to say "such and such changed my life, everyone should do the same!" Talk to any Jehovah's Witness, and they will be happy to tell you that, too. :D

My second thought was that when I started doing vipassana work in my meditation practice it dawned on me how I had done preliminary related work in therapy years before. That is, during several years of therapy I had learned to see how one thought triggers another thought and another thought, and how you can step back and look at the sequence of tumbling emotions and feelings and memories and trace it back and understand that what you are reacting to is not necessarily the thing that is really at the root of the emotional reaction. This was discovered without it being overtly taught, through a process of talk therapy with a focus on free association. It was nowhere near at the level of detail and attentiveness that mindfulness or vipassana applies. But it was a "gross" application of a related idea, and it was quite effective.

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12 years 7 months ago #3348 by Chris Marti
Replied by Chris Marti on topic Facing Your Demons
Here's a few thing I noticed most

- until my daughter was able to see that her mind was the source of all the pain and the depression inducing thoughts, she was helpless. H-e-l-p-l-e-s-s. Once she was taught to pay attention to the things that triggered the states to avoid then positive progress was made, albeit slowly.

- another big deal that I observed, and it is rife in the NY Times article, is that the person has to be willing to take responsibility for themselves. If that does't happen the all bets are off, and will be, until that does happen.

So I'm thinking that advocating just the teaching of this basic set of skills is worthwhile. Some will take it up, many will not. So what? And... I'm happy not to insist on any particular level of achievement in favor of just knowing it exists and can be used by anyone, especially with experienced help, if needed. It will speak to some people and that's worth all the effort, IMHO.

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12 years 7 months ago #3349 by Eran
Replied by Eran on topic Facing Your Demons
I don't know that you can require stream entry from anyone but you can give people the support, the conditions and the time to do the work that leads to this. Also, you can make that experience something normal that is achievable and doable which, imo, will also have a positive effect.

Edited to add: Chris, agreed. Just having the basic skills is great thing.

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12 years 7 months ago #3350 by Ona Kiser
Replied by Ona Kiser on topic Facing Your Demons



I don't know that you can require stream entry from anyone but you can give people the support, the conditions and the time to do the work that leads to this. Also, you can make that experience something normal that is achievable and doable which, imo, will also have a positive effect.



-eran


For sure, on that I would agree.

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12 years 7 months ago #3351 by Jake St. Onge
Replied by Jake St. Onge on topic Facing Your Demons



[...] the person has to be willing to take responsibility for themselves. If that does't happen the all bets are off, and will be, until that does happen.

-cmarti


My first thought on this is to point out that teaching people to
practice is one thing, requiring them to achieve any particular level of
insight is another. Each person processes this stuff at their own
speed, and despite the enthusiasm of hardcore/pragmatic dharma types,
they are a self-selecting group of very motivated individuals. If you
take a broader sampling of regular people and put them in a meditation
program, the fact is most will learn to have a level of mindfulness, for
sure, as that is merely a skill, but how deep they can go with that is
between them and God, and not something that can be forced or required.

-ona


Yeah, my sense is that intention is far more important than technique or quantity of time on the cushion. The actual motivation to practice--- whether practice is aimed primarily at "truth", "freedom", "peace", or whatever, is the key to the ripeness which precipitates lasting transformation. Merely having "enlightnement" (however you define that) as one goal among many doesn't seem to cut it for the deep shifts... there seems to need to be a truly profound intention or willingness which can sort of over-arch all other mundane purposes, at least for long enough to precipitate such a lasting shift in how we experience life.

And that's not something that can be feigned or induced, it's there or it's not. But having the technical skills can both make the shifts smoother if that deep intention is there, and make daily life more flowing and flexible even if that deep intention isn't there. Making these skills more widely available seems like good medicine in general, whatever each one decides to do with them at any given time.

With the caveat that perhaps it would be best if the folks spreading these techniques have some understanding of the awakening process which the techniques + the deep willingness may precipitate, since that process may well include some more or less rough patches for many practitioners--- sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better, so to speak, and sometimes the enthusiastic dissemination of insight techniques seems to gloss over this possibility, leaving some folks in dark night territory with little context or support.

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12 years 7 months ago #3352 by Chris Marti
Replied by Chris Marti on topic Facing Your Demons
Oh, absolutely this should be taught by someone with experience - I said that already ;-)

And yes, this almost always does get worse before it gets better so the nature of the path must be taught, too. Listen, no doubt we can come up with all manner of objections. I'm interested in how to make it work. I'd be willing to sink serious time and effort into it. Is anyone out there doing anything like this in public or private schools?

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12 years 7 months ago #3353 by Eran
Replied by Eran on topic Facing Your Demons
Chris, see my link above to Mindful Schools. They mostly work with public schools in the bay area but have taught their curriculum to people across the US and in europe.

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12 years 7 months ago #3354 by Chris Marti
Replied by Chris Marti on topic Facing Your Demons
Thanks, Eran. I joined the e-mail list at your link. Too bad they;re int eh Bay Area. Maybe I'll find something here in Chicago through Mindful Schools. I think I'll call them this week.

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