Forum: Dharma Overground Discussion Forum

this thread follows off from the tangential conversation that was started in the 'long term practice at mbmc thread' when gavesini brought up the case of a female western meditator who became mentally imbalanced there and was asked to leave. tracy, who was also there at the time, pointed out that this woman's deterioration was gradual and suggested that people at a meditation centre may have been able to prevent this had they been more willing. daniel replied that retreats aren't for crazy people and i wrote about how so many crazy people manage to end up on them anyway. tracy questioned how one can be one is not already crazy and will not just go crazier from retreat, and daniel replied while the distinction is not perfectly black and white, in his experience a person who is classically insane is really different from a dark night yogi being neurotic.

i'd like to hit pause here and go back to tracy's statement about how she thinks the crazy woman could have received more help and not ended up having lost it so bad had the folks at mbmc been more willing, because i think that's probably true, but i also think it's also unrealistic to think they would do that because that's just not the culture of the centre or the land to take care of practitioner's mental and emotional health issues (that's what people's families are for).

i think dan makes a good point by stressing how the difference between a classically mentally ill person and someone who's having a hard time on retreat is broad, but doing that and only that leaves out the very real effect traumatic experiences can have on a person's overall mental health. i mean to say that i think not-mentally ill people can actually become mentally ill, long-term, by being on retreat too much and going about it the wrong way.. and being left to do so by the authorities (which, i'm guessing, may have been tracy's concern too).

"i mean to say that i think not-mentally ill people can actually become mentally ill, long-term, by being on retreat too much and going about it the wrong way.. and being left to do so by the authorities (which, i'm guessing, may have been tracy's concern too)."

What happens on retreat that could make sane people slip into insanity?

neuroses, man, a heavy whopping dose of them unabated by most of the normal activities that people use to prevent themselves from getting too deep into that end of things, to the point where they become the shaping influences of life. as far as distractions from paying attention non-stop go, both passive indulgences and pleasurable mind-balancing activities fueled by the drive toward further authenticity are prohibited on retreat, and a person who is too neurotic (but not insane) to begin with to practice properly will feel the dull blade of his mind grind into itself with nowhere else to go. someone who finds pleasure in sitting around all day, or someone whose thing is going for lots of walks, will probably be okay, but what if you're someone who likes playing guitar, or dancing, or being merry and expressive? chances are if you insist on staying on retreat for too long, you won't be that person anymore. if you sit there, day after day, churning in neurotic content, fumbling with stories (good stories bad stories stories of the buddha whatever), not awakening further insight, you're gonna end up a loopy caricature of yourself because the only thing you'll have developed in that time spent is those neurotic tendencies writing over the mind again and again, and not all the 'healthy' habits (or even just purely preventative habits) that keep those neuroses at bay.. and that probably goes ten times for someone like this who's managed to get into dark night territory.

on a personal note, there's a lotta people i've met in asia, both orientals and westerners, who appear to have pre-emptively abandoned useful psychological and social conditioning in order to adhere to a monastic ideal they don't really know what to do with. despite having seen this, i still ended up becoming one to some extent, and it was surprisingly easy to do. fortunately i've been working to change that lately, and it's been working. but its also startlingly clear to me that without a fortunate support network of deeply caring and wise individuals i can call friends, that might not have happened and i would have kept spiralling that way until the re-conditioning and de-socialising inherent in retreat time (particularly poorly spent retreat time) prevented me from ever making a return to the social norms and circumstances that can, to some extent, provide everyday temporary comfort and happiness. i don't know if this is in accord with, or contradicts, modern psychiatric viewpoints or not - but i dont actually care because i think i'm right about it - but i think that while the gap between many neuroses and what can be rightly called psychoses is wide, there is actually no line (and far fewer barriers keeping us simply neurotic than usually assumed). all those dsm-iv folks.. i don't think you can just blame genes.

From my limited experience, being on retreat is like putting your foot on the accelerator. You cover a lot of ground, but you can also careen off the road. The crashes are mitigated by your concentration, big impacts are quickly seen as empty... or they are not. None of us is a perfect practioner, so some of these crashes are seen as real, taken personally, and then a psychological armored. The problem is armor, is fear of something breaking through the armor, which leads to more armoring, etc. Eventually the armor becomes a house of cards, and when it falls down/away it can be destabilizing.

A really simple example from a retreat: one guy was doing yogic breathing rather than watching the breath... and a few people really were disturbed by this. The sound of it was driving them to distraction. Then they got angry, some got ear plugs, a bunch complained to the teacher... and the teacher said something very directly, all but point to the deep breather... and it didn't change the guy's behavior. People were ready to KILL the guy. It happened in the space of a day and half.

So imagine months and consider that all precipitated from an external person, sometimes we object to our internal experience. Things can arwy on retreat. That's why I'm sensitive to retreat centers having minimal requirements for longer retreats.

The hard thing about this subject -- for me -- is I feel a tension between blaming the victim and compassion.

Psychological problems often have a lot of egotism in them (in the pop culture sense). It can be very frustrating to see someone form neurosis and armoring and reaction-formation to prop up their ego. And it can be very annoying when they don't seek help on their own when what they are doing is obviously not working.

On the other hand, it's happening because that person's ego is weak and vunerable. And sometimes they are in a psychological "double-bind" situation where the cure they are using exacerbates the problem -- and they can't see it. So they _can't_ do the right thing.

So on one hand, people have to be responsible for themselves. On the other hand we all have blind spots and so it's good to keep in mind that we can catalytically help each other at times.

In general, my bias is toward the tough love side in the beginning, and the compassion side towards the end. I tend to see more examples in life when a group of people encourage someone to go beyond their limits, then when problems happen they bail out on that person.

I have no idea what happened on Tracy's retreat of course, but I think this is a good conversation. Probably more related to Sanga, when you think about it.

Hmm, re-reading I realized that someone could think that I was painting a bleak picture of retreats. Actually my very limited experience is that retreats are very sane and very good things to do.

I've been on some "self-development" courses that had a retreat-like structure, but kind of danced around the idea of seeing experiences arise and pass away. I found those to be very difficult to navigate because of the false-certainty it created about experiences/content and a psychological self.

In contrast, there is something very sane about creating a retreat context where there is freedom to see the ambiguity, chaoticness, and fleetingness of what is happening every moment of our lives. This freedom to see is a priceless thing and it is very hard to find that freedom in every day life.

What I'm saying is retreats can be time very well spent.

"... chances are if you insist on staying on retreat for too long, you won't be that person anymore. if you sit there, day after day, churning in neurotic content, fumbling with stories (good stories bad stories stories of the buddha whatever), not awakening further insight, you're gonna end up a loopy caricature of yourself because the only thing you'll have developed in that time spent is those neurotic tendencies writing over the mind again and again, and not all the 'healthy' habits (or even just purely preventative habits) that keep those neuroses at bay.. and that probably goes ten times for someone like this who's managed to get into dark night territory."

So... a retreat is the last place one should go when in the Dark Night? If you stay on retreat too long your presonality changes? But I'm not sure that's what you really meant. Is it?

cmarti,

What i'm saying is if someone finds themselves just sitting
there, not making clear progress, retreat after retreat, developing
butt-rot, going slightly nutty, or even broody, they should probably
try a different tactic, like following the instructions more precisely, or if the instructions really don't make sense, finding another teacher.

Yes, i think if you go on retreat too much your personality can and probably will change, to some - perhaps significant perhaps not -
extent, as personalities are malleable and experiences condition then.
Not that the changes are necessarily bad but i am not a
proponent of chronic retreat culture. I tend to agree with my most recent teacher who came in one day on my last retreat and said, 'it's a beautiful spring day out there man, what are you doing in here? Get it done so you can get out there.'

Prisoner - nice imagery! I want to try to use that in a dharma talk. I have been pondering if maybe the way we have designed our retreats aren't making things more difficult then they need to be - in regards to the topic of this thread. It isn't quite the same topic so I started another thread titled: 'What could Retreat 2.0 look like' to explore this a bit.