liquidcitrus | Mindfulness has been plucked out of context (Reply)

This is mostly Theravada.

As a practicing Buddhist (...still having trouble getting used to that phrasing), I've been asked about things like "why is meditation so unbelievably hard?" and "what do you think about the Marines teaching mindfulness to soldiers?" and "what is with alleged yoga teachers, who are supposed to practice equanimity, getting into gigantic arguments about whether a camera perspective is patentable?"

To me, these kinds of things seem to stem from meditation being removed from its sociocultural context/religion/belief/thing.

Mindfulness meditation was originally just for monks. It was not (generally) supposed to be used by people who still have to live in the world. (Though I wish to add the caveat that there are cases where it is genuinely useful for people who are not monks - for example, borderline personality disorder is significantly helped by mindfulness.) The ones that are actually designed for normal people to be able to practice, like yoga and loving-kindness, have been removed, and this lack of context is hurting the usefulness of meditation in general.

So, there are two levels of context-plucking I want to address here:

1: Yoga was supposed to be entry-level meditation

A lot of people have serious trouble with sitting meditation - whether due to bad teachers, ADHD, or being from the modern world where everything happens all the time. The practice of just staying in a place focusing on your breath and not moving even when it becomes uncomfortable is difficult. And people knew this in antiquity! That's why yoga originally existed - to be an on-ramp that makes meditation tangible. You can focus on doing something, and work your way gradually over to focusing on more and more specific things.

Now the thing is, you don't have to do literal yoga to get this sort of training. I was in swim team for many years, where I was taught to closely focus on the position of my body to perfect my technique and form. This achieved roughly the same effect. (Swimming, like yoga, also involved paying a lot of attention to when and how to breathe. You know, because my face would be underwater.) I've observed that most other solo sports can also do this if pursued for long enough.

2: Most people were supposed to practice a specific type of meditation called loving-kindness

There are several different kinds of meditation. Breath meditation is the one that you almost certainly know about. Meditating on mantras, or via yoga, is also well-known. And some people swear by meditation soundtracks like music or nature noises. But you can meditate on other things too - visual images like flickering candleflames, or specific feelings like love.

Loving-kindness meditation is a type of meditation focused on selfless love - the thing the Greeks called agape. There are instructions for precisely how to practice it elsewhere on the Internet, so I won't go into massive detail, but here's the gist of it: You take the feeling that someone close to you should be happy and free of suffering, and practice slowly extending it towards yourself, and towards larger and larger groups of people, and eventually the world. (This is a practice that can and will take years.)

Loving-kindness increases the happiness setpoint. It fosters empathy. It is actually possible to practice without cutting yourself off from improving yourself and the rest of the world. By all rights, loving-kindness ought to be the type of meditation that is taught to people at large. But it's not.

So, I leave you with a question:

It is very interesting that the type of meditation that teaches empathy was left out of Western imports.

Who did that? And why?