| | As an Emergency Medicine physician, I deal with severe mental illness all the time, the real deal, not just whiny Western meditators, and it is a whole different animal. Thus, I don't think that more fluffy psychologized issue-processing emotionally based practice is necessarily going to have much if any affect on those with deep underlying cracks in their reality processing. True, if a place like IMS can recognize the signs of someone sailing out into dangerous territory (as Tarin and Tracy are saying), then this could be of real benefit so that they could be quickly gotten to some place that had the capabilities to deal with that, which, as I said above, is generally a mental health facility, not a retreat center of any kind.
I have pushed my practice pretty hard as people go, and have gotten into a large number of volatile and unusual mind states, had all sorts of strange experiences, crazy visions, heard crazy things, had serious perception distortions, very powerful and odd raptures of all sorts, and yet none of this to me constituted mental illness, as the core processing part of things was still able to keep a lid on it, notice what was going on, keep interacting in relatively normal ways with external reality, and it all passed rapidly enough (usually seconds to minutes, rarely hours, never days). If you go on retreat and are feeling like you really are going crazy and it is lasting for days, then stop practicing and get help. In an ideal world, every center, culture and country would be perfectly equipped to handle these things, but clearly this is not the case, so if you have schizophrenia or previous episodes of psychosis that was not some temporary meditation experience, bad bipolar disorder (the real deal), or some other major mental illness, then MBMC and any other major intensive retreat center is probably not for you, though you could always ask someone like Jack Kornfield, who is way more of an expert in this territory than I am. |