Meditation, Solved
Meditation has been sold to us as a magic pill for so long that the backlash is almost as overblown as the hype. I spent years deep in Buddhist practice, went on retreats, meditated daily — and then slowly discovered that half the gurus evangelizing it were alcoholics, abusers, or running Rolls-Royce-funded cults. Here’s what the more careful research actually shows: there are three things meditation does reliably well, and they’re probably not what you’ve been promised. More importantly, almost everything you’ve been told about how to do it is wrong — starting with the idea that the goal is to quiet your mind. If your brain turns into a chaotic mess the moment you close your eyes, that’s not a failure. That’s the whole point.
Episode Notes
Referenced in This Episode
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- Chogyam Trungpa
- Alan Watts
- Adi Da
- Osho
- Jon Kabat-Zinn
- Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
- Walking Meditation
- A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind – Shoukei Matsumoto
- Bodh Gaya
- Monkey Mind
- Transcendentalism
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- New Thought
- Self-Help – Samuel Smiles
- As a Man Thinketh – James Allen
- Dale Carnegie
- The Power of Positive Thinking – Norman Vincent Peale
- Sigmund Freud
- Ken Wilber
- Waking Up
- 10% Happier – Dan Harris
