This is really the state of the art on the academic frontier of meditation-related work. It is hard, as a meditation-related difficulties specialist (from the suffering side mainly) to not dwell on the giant holes in the "safety net", i.e., the fact that is neither safe nor really a net, more like a few lifelines dangling near the abyss. But it is not nothing, and it is a giant leap ahead of the denial and blindness that has characterized both the sellers and buyers of meditation, much less the academics, who have too often tried to prove that five minutes of some little practice ups some arbitrary little quality that will make us better serfs or something. This is substantial study, and offers a broad array of points of engagement for further work in the same vein. God bless Dr. Britton and her colleagues, and the folks at Cheetah House, and everyone else working along these lines.

Did you send Analayo a copy?

What are we supposed to do when we get broken bones. Doesn't that flush the dharma right down the drain? At least we can still drink alcohol.

Aside from my annoyance with academic writing in general that made it a pain to read, this was a very nice and fair article.  Why do we need to make all the words so long?

One obvious issue is that the normative standards for psychology versus religious practices are different.  Psychology tends to value persons who express positive emotions and satisfaction with their life and can resiliently deal with all the conventional shit life throws at them, and who excel at the society's standards of success.  Mystics often act like crazy people.  So, with psychology's recent infatuation with meditation, some meditation practice in the deeper end of the pool tend to produce outcomes that stretch psychology's normative standards.  Practitioners and teachers tend to share some normative standards from both meditation and psychology and when these two are in conflict it hurts a lot and people are apt to behave, errr, unskillfully.    

I wish people would be more open that meditation is a dangerous game.  You're in there purposely tinkering with some really deep seated brain processes, and it doesn't always go well.  I don't think there's any guarantee that moving from the conventional mode of perception to a meditation facilitated mode of perception will go as planned, and you might just break your brain which negatively effects yourself and others.  I think starting from a model of harm avoidance as opposed to swing for the fences at enlightenment might be a good idea.  Like, can we talk about dosage?  Is it necessarily better to have THE MOST INTENSE A&P EVER!?  Let's borrow the methodological framework from medicine with the desired impact from meditation.  So say we want to intervene to produce the A&P and the practitioner and teacher both agree this is a good idea for whatever reason.  So then the intervention is to do fast noting in the abdomen at increasing rates of speed and increasing dosages (amount of time per day) such that the A&P happens.  The A&P is seen to be important because of its functional character of producing the next stages on the progress of insight, fine.  It seems like maybe the minimum dose of fast noting to produce the A&P in a reasonable timeframe is sufficient and even optimal.  It definitely seems like the ride might not be as bumpy and the practioner would be less likely to end up in a rough psychological place on 2hours/day of fast noting with some breaks as opposed to 12.  Of course in practice it would depend on the teacher and practioner and their needs.  The point being that moar isn't always better and I hope we'll be kind to our brains while still making steady progress.  

It seems reasonable to question the assumption that increased dosage of meditation leads linearly (or even positively) to better progress of insight outcomes.  Exercise is a decent analogy.  None of it is bad, increasing levels of it is good, and then in excess it becomes dangerous.  In other words, the exercise curve is non linear and the highest dosage ends of the curve lead to disaster -- while dosages at the very high end but not totally whacky end lead to excellence.  I don't think meditation and exercise are particularly alike, but I do think it's important to take the same attitude phenomenally in our own practice.  If continued mega high dosage starts to feel dangerous, maybe back off.  Being kind to ourselves just seems kind of underrated.