A Beginner Goes All Out

From the article:

I'm deeply, heart-slammingly nervous, yet also elated. This is something I'd long wished to experience: a chance to unplug, de-stress, switch off. To halt, for a decent spell, the incessant babbling – my own and everyone else's. I'd had three children in three years: My life, morning, noon, and, goddammit, middle of the night, was overwhelmingly noisy. I was snared in the new-father vortex of fewer hours to work and more bills to pay. At my last doctor's visit, for the first time in my life, I registered alarmingly high blood pressure.

Ugh is right.

These types of articles don't do serious, long term meditators much good, IMHO. So here's yet another writer dude who decides that mediation is going to sure his medical issues, his noisy life with little kids and apparently his money troubles. It reminds me of watching, listening and talking to ABC's Dan Harris last summer at BG2012. It's all about the novelty and the story, the heroic bullshit they have to endure as a beginner, or the odd seeming people they encounter while dabbling in meditation. It's not clear to me that there's anything here for folks like us. These writers can do a lot of damage or a lot of good, but the stories all seem to trend toward the damage end of the spectrum because they emphasize the weirdness and the difficulty as opposed to the long term benefits of waking up, which I imagine they view with suspicion, like they do UFO believers and Scientology.

Sorry to be so negative but folks, but I suspect we're being stereotyped, maybe even used. Or maybe I'm jaundiced by my experience with journalists.

Anyway, after one Goenka retreat he's got his silence back

And so a pernicious myth is perpetuated -- meditation is like taking bad tasting medication! It sucks for a little while but it cures what ails ya. No need for a life-long inquiry into just what a human being is. Nope. Just take this pill (one retreat) and poof! Life is good again.

He had to go to India - the story would be nowhere near as cool if he went to the Goenka Center here in Illinois.

This story also plays to our errant western desire to avoid our problems, eliminate them with eastern magic. We here know that's nonsense. Meditation and real spiritual practice is about engagement, not avoidance.

In complete honesty, I was always intrigued by Goenka retreats, because of their price point! To me, they were a way to get 10 days of focused practice but I agree, not exactly the best forum for new meditators. One thing that has always turned me off was that the instruction was by cassette or now, apparently, CD. That sounded way too Jim Jones to me, and so it remained in the back of my mind as possibly interesting.