Links for Thursday
Podcast edition!
Some really great podcast episodes recently to highlight:
Dealing with Emotionally Immature People - Forrest Hanson, Dr. Lindsay Gibson. (Youtube, Spotify) - This may be valuable to folks who have intimate relationships with emotionally immature people, specifically parents. I’ve shared this with some people that benefitted from listening to this. The key idea is that as children we might learn that we can only receive parental support if we comport our personalities (e.g. tamping down on certain emotional reactions) into what Gibson calls a “role self.” As we age, that role self becomes a habitual pattern of relating that splits us off from contact with our own emotions and felt experience. There is a process of healing that involves connecting with those split off feelings, letting go of the fantasy that these parental relationships will be healed, and changing the locus of self identification. This kind of work is the “clean up” that can precede or follow from meditative insight, and can allow that insight to be more properly integrated into our whole being.
The Buddha and His World, Tides of History - Patrick Wyman (Apple, Spotify). This provided some really interesting historical context on the Buddha’s milieu that I wasn’t aware of. Specifically, he describes the urban and mercantile (capitalistic?) nature of northern India at that time, the rise of the merchant class, and the extreme religious ferment and competition between different world systems. The struggles around what it means to be a good person and the degree to which goodness involves withdrawal from the material world are all familiar problems of today, another time of religious entrepreneurship. Wyman does a great job of threading the needle between situating the Buddha’s thought and yet pointing out the ways in which it was singular for the time.
When Meditation Goes Wrong, Guru Viking - Dr. Willoughby Britton (Youtube, Spotify). So much to think about in this podcast with the founder of Cheetah House, a non-profit that helps people who have psychological issues arising out of meditation practice. Some highlights:
The sense of self is not a singular thing but has many phenomenological aspects.
Roughly 1 in 10 people report having a difficulty arising out of meditation practice that lasts 1 month or more - that’s a lot!
The part that really caught my attention was Dr. Britton’s discussion of hidden metaphysical assumptions that underlie every system of meditation (including secular ones) and the way they impact experience. It’s always struck me as true that there is no such thing as a secular system of meditation - there are only systems that hide or fail to articulate their underlying metaphysical assumptions.
Moreover, she says that there is no consensus among surveyed meditation teachers (even within the same school!) regarding whether to interpret a given difficult experience (e.g. fear) as irrelevant, a positive sign of progress, or a negative issue to be managed. Maybe this points to the highly personalized and relational requirements of a fruitful teacher/student relationship; there may not be a right general answer to this question, and it may be that it depends on the particulars of the person and the system.