After sleeping on it, I think you just don’t believe me overall that this works, but this:

> What if you’re trading ability-to-make-high-level-choices slack for motivation-now?

would be bad-faith if it stood alone. Like, if you’re really not alive enough, you don’t have any ability to make high level choices anyways. So that’s a real tradeoff you should make in the other direction if you have experience in doing what you want and are doing well emotionally. But it isn’t a real tradeoff for most people, it’s a way of using Ziz-words to make it sound like there is a tradeoff for them.

> e.g. mantras, self-motivation

Yes, fuck the types of meditation you mentioned. The type of meditation is important. I’m suggesting mindfulness/vipassana.

The specific types of social pressure at these retreats are: assistant instructors will scout the area and your room to find you if you skip a sit, the instructors will call a meeting with you and talk harshly if you declare an intention to leave, and they pressure you to go to the lectures which are pure DRM. The first two of those keep people from leaving because “ow processing emotions is too hard”. You may find it creepy, though it’s a different thing from “hey friend you are bad if you don’t do meditation” (ineffective).

As for the second thing, yes, I have not seen any DRM-free or DRM-sparse meditation advice. These retreats are DRM’ed and I’m trusting emotionally fucked up people to ignore everything they say (which is an easier task than practicing yourself).

>sustained painful struggle

The way you said it feels like a way of doing it wrong, yes. I don’t really fucking know on this, as I don’t have perfect introspection on what happens when I meditate. I suspect if you try a bunch of ways of working through emotions, so long as you come back to your breath when you remember to, you’ll figure out approaches that work for you.

Meditation as sustained painful struggle when you don’t wanna (e.g. mantras, self-motivation like “i’ll never get [social-]better unless i do this”, outright social pressure) creeps me out. The energy to face that pain has to come from somewhere. What if you’re trading ability-to-make-high-level-choices slack for motivation-now?

It’s also creepy how lots of meditation advice purports to be a simple objective procedure such that not too much DRM could slip in but the DRM or trajectory (wireheady or otherwise) is obviously actually determined via the frame under which meditation was undertaken in the first place.

An outside view: if your energy hasn’t yielded something awesome, that’s because it’s being consumed.

(This is a strong criticism of myself, too. It’s rad that you actually read shit I say even when it is a better criticism of me than of you in social reality).

For me, the biggest problem with “do what you want”, or “act from core”, or whatever, was that it wasn’t obvious how to fucking do this. Like, what are the steps? How do I break this down into something I can do? What if I feel every bit of my suffering as the screech and grit of an unwilling rusted gear scraping against another that will not turn? How do I break this down into something I can do, then? This process looked very different for me from how you picked up your tech, and it may look similar for others who are similarly depressed.

Let’s break this process into parts. First, let’s discuss what can be done when you’re depressed or anxious. Second, some considerations on retreats and DRM. Third, we’ll discuss how to use the newfound willpower you’ll have afterwards.

– – –

If you have anxiety or depression, or if your thoughts wander in the same circles over and over again where you fantasize about how to get others to like you or fix the past, you’re unlikely to have the energy to start meditating. You certainly won’t have the ability to sit still long enough to figure out how to do what you want.

This can be solved by doing a ton of mindfulness (same as vipassana, especially anapana) meditation. You can’t just do bits here and there–you accumulate unprocessed emotions (“sankaras”, lol) over time, so you’ll need to process them more quickly than they come in. Do a whole bunch at once, like 100 hours over 10-14 days.

I’d recommend going to a retreat, as this is likely to net you enough progress to be self-sustaining afterwards, if you continue practicing. The two best ways to do this are, go to one of the vipassana retreats in the tradition of Goenka (dhamma.org), which are all over the place, or visit a buddhist monastery of the thai forest tradition for a couple weeks. There are other monasteries you could meditate at, but these two will have you do the right kind of meditation and not distract you with as much bullshit. Failing this, find a rural Theravadan monastery; those are closer to what you want than Mahayana or Vajrayana monasteries. Any of these options will be free and provide housing and food for free, any that don’t are (in practice) scams.

If you don’t do this at a retreat or monastery, you will have trouble seeing things through, and want to quit before you’ve done a full 100 hours of cushion time over 10-14 days. Especially if you’re really depressed. If you want to practice meditation before going, that will help. Here are the instructions:

> “Keep the attention in either the area below the nostrils and above the upper lip–or the area just inside the entrance of your nostrils. Remain aware of any sensation, or lack of sensation, in the time both during and between breaths. Do not think about your breath on an intellectual level, or think ‘in’ and ‘out’ as you breathe; focus only on the sensations in your nostrils. Your breathing should be natural, not intentionally changed.

> Being distracted for long periods is normal, working through tough emotions is normal, just return the attention to the sensation or lack of sensation in the area of focus when you remember to. The standard advice is that you need to practice 1 hour per day to make progress.”

Be sure you know how to recognize DRM before you go to any retreat.

– – –

It’s common for people to not want to go on retreats, even if they believe there will be benefits. You probably won’t be able to convince anyone in your friend group to do one, especially if they’re depressed, even if this is the one thing that will unfuck depression. If someone won’t go on a retreat, there’s probably no helping them, because decisions made long ago. The only thing that might work is letting them get into a better life position with fewer stressors, fewer people trying to persuade them of shit, fewer obligations, less monetary stress, etc, and then asking again.

The reason why I’m stressing doing a retreat so much, is that they hardcore pressure you to not leave. Yes, this breaks “do what you want”. Do it anyways. The easiest way for depression et al to fuck up emotional processing is by feeling “ow looking at these emotions hurts” every time you start trying to process them, which leads to flinching into never fucking processing them. This is what is happening when you run through the same thoughts over and over for years. And if you’re doing a mock-retreat at home and you keep crashing into “ow looking at these emotions hurts”, you’re going to stop meditating before you do enough meditation, whereas good retreats will pressure you to stay and make enough progress to ground yourself.

Quite a lot of people go on the retreats, but mostly they seem to get hacked by the aesthetic of whoever is planning them. People usually come out talking about compassion and the “five jewels” or whatever. If you start coming up with aesthetics about compassion, stop. The point of aesthetics is to impress people, and if you’re coming up with them, this is a sign you need to stop and process some shit around caring about what others think.

The Goenka retreats have a 90 minute lecture every evening, and I’ve confirmed that they kick you out as soon as you skip your second one. Monasteries (haven’t tried them yet) will typically ask you to do volunteer work and have chanting “meditations”, which I assume are annoying. This is where knowing about DRM comes in. The DRM in Goenka courses is really fucking obvious, and very easy to avoid if you know what DRM is and that you don’t want it. The DRM in Goenka courses is mostly confined to the evening lectures and course introduction.

Other than falling prey to DRM, the main roadblock in doing a retreat is worrying too much about if you’re meditating right. If you’re following the above instructions, you’re doing it right. If you end up in an emotion-laden thought-loop for two hours and can’t keep your attention on
your breath, that’s normal. Just make a conscious effort to direct your attention to your breath and the emotions will get processed in the background and eventually stop coming up.

– – –

Once you’ve done a retreat, keep meditating for 2+ hours a day afterwards. You can do a second retreat a month later or something, if you need that long (it’s okay to need a long time). You’re done with this stage when you don’t have any recurring thoughts that need emotional processing.

After you reach that point, you’re ready to start doing what you want in a serious way, by examining your habits and seeing where you’re doing it wrong. Which is already one topic of this blog. Not having unresolved emotions will boost your willpower and give you room to think, and doing what you want will give you another willpower boost. My personal experience is that new emotions come up and need to be processed on a regular basis, so to maintain your progress once you’re at this point, do an hour of mindfulness meditation a day. The positive effects of meditation will last longer if you’re doing what you want (though they still decay with time).

– – –

Here’s a few scattered thoughts:
-I’m willing to host meditation retreats for individuals I find worthwhile, or for groups.
-For me, meditation involves being consciously aware of what’s going on less than using the mental tech on this blog does. This is fine, and is great for beginners, as it’s easy for the desire to impress people and come up with cool models of the mind hijack your emotional processing session when you’re deliberately and consciously feeling through things.
-There are a few practical considerations on getting into Goenka retreats: first, you should lie and tell them you’re not hella depressed, so they’ll let you in. Second, don’t tell them you are on any prescriptions. Third, about a fourth of the instructors are transphobic, so you might get unlucky if you’re not going as a gender you can pass as (they don’t check ID). Fourth, and this goes for monasteries as well as Goenka retreats, you can sometimes find open spots a week in advance if you phone a few different centers, whereas according to their website they’ll ostensibly be booked a couple months out.
-Once you’re at this point, the subjective experience of “looking into the darkness” or whatever is just… kinda meh. Though, cooking nice food and having creature comforts is still nice despite the apparent ambivalence. If I spin it into an aesthetic, it kinda reminds me of Sans.
-You can maybe eventually reduce the 1 hour of meditation per day, but I’m still figuring out how. Yes, doing an hour a day is manually pushing against an equilibrium, but I choose that over becoming depressed again.