Please don't take this the wrong way, but to me, that sounds less like meditation and more like sitting with your eyes closed. If thoughts arise that cause feelings of fear, anger, shame, panic, etc… those thoughts and feelings can be noticed and observed (just like breathing or any other sensation). Once you do notice them, the experience is very different.
> Sometimes the best sanity-preservation mode is to ignore it until enough time has passed when we have the mental tools to face it.
I think Eugene Gendlin[1] put it best:
> What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
– "The Listening Manual" in Focusing (1978), p. 138.
I like the quote :), but I also believe there's value to postponing interacting with said truth. IMHO sometimes the best medicine is avoidance, at least until enough time has passed that the horror and truth can be acknowledged without causing one to lose their mind.
I don't recommend stuff like that to people, because in most cases it's presumptuous. I don't know what your mind is like, I don't know what's going to happen when you use any particular method, I don't have a wide experience with teaching meditation, I'm just some guy living my own life the best I can manage it...
There's a lot of the same effect as with people who recently started running, or recently started some particular diet, or whatever it may be... for some reason that thing fit into their ideas and lifestyle, and it coincided with a hockey stick point in their satisfaction, or something, and they feel the urge to recommend—for benevolent reasons, since they just want other people to get that satisfaction, too.
There's a difference because meditation, in the most taught forms, is very intimate, as you describe. Its "subject matter" is basically the entire life of the mind, emotions, thoughts, memories, everything, so unless your psyche is squeaky clean like Mr Flanders (who in that one episode of course turned out to have some heavily repressed traumas), meditation is not going to be a nice walk in the park.
Almost everybody who starts doing it finds that they for some reason can't do it as often or as much as they'd like to... it's often unclear why... but could it have to do with the fact that you're sitting down in utter silence and facing like everything at once? And it's kind of intense, and sometimes very painful?
Then there's also the whole "happiness" aspect of the hype & marketing, where everybody imagines that the ideal to aspire for is a happy, smiling, Thich Nhat Hanh type, or something, and all the rhetoric becomes infused with this naive optimism, everybody knows this caricature. So then if you sit down and you find that you actually feel very lonely, or very confused, or very anxious, very angry, very horny, or very whatever... then what? "Just breathe, let it all go..." Ugh!
Sorry, I'm just ranting. For me it's one of these situations when you're very interested in something but the way other people advocate it makes you just cringe.
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki...
Now, for me the experience was really good, actually, because it felt like a relief to let these feelings out. But I can definitely imagine more intense and complex feelings coming to the surface that don't lead to relief but would require professional help and guidance.
This is generally acknowledged by many meditation traditions especially ones which incorporate vipassana, but perhaps less so by the scientists who write papers about meditation. At some point in the practice all your "inner stuff" can come up: fear, confusion, uncertianty, memory of trauma, etc. Jung called it the "shadow", a popular spiritual teacher Eckart Tolle calls it the "pain-body", and in some Christian traditions they use them term "dark night of the soul". Psychologists may call it PTSD-like-symptoms.
Buddhists believe that one has to purge the mind-body of the three poisons as part of the process of awaking, and during this process it's normal for unsettling mental fabrications to arise.
Some practitioners in America feel like they did not sign up for a deep purge/cleanse of their dark inner content because the whole meditation affair was pitched to them as a form of gentle relaxation therapy. For many people however it can become almost a sort of all-encompassing, existential, ground shaking, transformative process which can sometimes feel like a burden when viewed from a lense where you only indicator of progress has to do with how socially well-adjusted you are in terms of finance, social signals, dating, etc.
Plus statistically speaking some percentage of the people who have their untamed mental processes come up are likely to be ensnared by these creepers in some way and perhaps spiral out of control or go off the deep end. However the meditation dharma-sword is an approprate instrument to hack your way through the mental jungle, and come out the other end which opens up to reveal a mountain. Whether you climb to the summit of your mountain, or just make a cave dwelling within is up to you, but at least you have an elevated perspective relative to the jungle of untamed body consciousness below.
Mind you they _will_ hurt you over time if you just push them away. You probably should get professional help first before trying to meditate.
Because sometimes it takes time to be able to face your demons.
Life doesn't stop when bad shit happens. You still have to go to the grocery store and do laundry. You still stub your toe on a curb. People still fart on the subway. Sometimes you can let life happen for awhile, let your body heal and your emotions level and your mind strengthen before diving into the reality of what happened. There's no timeframe for this. Days, weeks, months, years. Depends on the person.
How do you know that? (I'm not being facetious.)
I seem to recall there being reasonably solid[1] evidence that thinking about traumatic experiences can actually worsen anxiety and other PTSD symptoms. (Too lazy to look up references, and I don't have access to any paywalled journals anyway, so...) The evidence seems to point to just leaving things be may be better (well, less bad) than trying to "work through" the issues because it means that you'll be wallowing in the traumatic experience over and over.
[1] By psychology standards.
Similarly, I'm sure that some form of meditation is healthy for the vast majority of people, even if it's just five minutes of staring out your window and focusing on your breath, or at least not getting wrapped up in a thought. I know quite a few people (including myself pre-meditation) who run a constant internal monologue, and even that little bit can be hugely beneficial.
But fundamentally I do agree that going off to something as intense as a retreat is probably not a good idea for everyone. It's just not either/or, in my view.
That has been my experience. I've done meditation retreats and the like. I do find it slows down my mind, but can also surface things that frankly I'm perfectly happy to leave under the surface.
I also don't believe every trauma or internal struggle can be answered or managed, or should be at a given time. Sometimes the best sanity-preservation mode is to ignore it until enough time has passed when we have the mental tools to face it. Mindfulness and meditation both make it hard to bury stuff til you're ready to mentally dig it up. Perhaps day-to-day stress benefits most from it.
I think it's a great idea for some people and I can see the attraction. But I also get tired of people suggesting it to me.
Massage on the other hand...that's like miracle medicine.