Vipassana or insight meditation is traditionally only part of meditation. Insight is important in order to keep your focus on what you're doing and why you're doing it. While meditating you're shedding greed, hatred and delusion. It is good to ponder on that. But the main goal of meditation is to create gaps between thoughts. This is done by observing the own mind.
Vipassana retreats have become popular. I did two of them, ten days each, years ago. All I remember is pain. All others remember is pain. Pain, however, is not very helpful in meditation. I can say this because I studied in Japan. Everything in Japan seems to be connected with pain: from Zen training to Shiatsu. Also the Body Weather Laboratory(Tanaka Min) training I did for years focused often on pain. Thus I have become a bit allergic to this approach. I suspect pain to be entirely unnecessary. A little bit of it can help disciplining the mind, but massive amounts of pain are silly. There is a danger to the cult of pain too; those that love power love this approach.
Vipassana retreats have become popular. I did two of them, ten days each, years ago. All I remember is pain. All others remember is pain. Pain, however, is not very helpful in meditation. I can say this because I studied in Japan. Everything in Japan seems to be connected with pain: from Zen training to Shiatsu. Also the Body Weather Laboratory(Tanaka Min) training I did for years focused often on pain. Thus I have become a bit allergic to this approach. I suspect pain to be entirely unnecessary. A little bit of it can help disciplining the mind, but massive amounts of pain are silly. There is a danger to the cult of pain too; those that love power love this approach.
Thus I am
against the modern Vipassana movement. It is simply not gentle enough. There’s
too much sitting going on. People get crippled by it. It's too easily misused by those who crave power over others.
No comments:
Post a Comment