Fri, 17 Sep 2010
Therapeutic Meditation
I've been busy with my unpaid web work. You can see part of it over on Lama Phurbu Tashi's web site. It's his book, The Lamp of Reasoning and Scriptures, which argues that Buddhists should be vegetarians. It's not "official" yet, because Lama hasn't approved it yet. The other half isn't ready for public consumption yet, but it's close. It's my replacement for Blosxom, the software I'm using for this site. So I have some time to resume posting here.
I'm seeing more people who want to learn meditation in order to deal with psychological problems and I want to say what the limitations of that are. First, you need to understand the distinction between hygiene and therapy. Hygiene is what we do to keep ourselves healthy and therapy is what we do to to get healthy when we are sick. Meditation is hygiene, just like diet and exercise. So you should not expect meditation to cure illness, any more than changing your diet will. But it can help along side of medical treatment. See a doctor if you are sick, preferably noe who practices natural medicine.
The other side of the issue is that Jon Kabat Zinn has been teaching mindfulness meditation to sick people for about twenty years. So should meditation be taught in a purely secular fashion, apart from Buddhism? In my opinion, no. Meditation is not an end in itself, it was devised as one method to gain enlightenment. So while it can help people whose goal is different, I do not think it should be taught by people who have no experience or interest in enlightenment. To do that would be to lose sight of what meditation is for and I think maintaining that understanding is important.
