Dr. Willoughby Britton, who directs the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University, has practiced Mindfulness Meditation for more than twenty years and is one of its leading academic proponents. She has also been surprisingly honest about its often-terrifying effects. An article titled The Dark Night of the Soul, recounts one man’s Mindfulness nightmare as told to Britton. He explained, “I started having thoughts like, ‘Let me take you over,’ combined with confusion and tons of terror.” This was accompanied by “… a vision of death with a scythe and a hood, and the thought ‘Kill yourself’ over and over again.”
(Pam Frost – truthxchange) Since the 1970s, Mindfulness Meditation has been promoted as a therapeutic technique to treat PTSD, stress, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and pain. Used by Fortune 500 companies, medical clinics, hospitals, the military, and prisons, it has become a billion dollar-a-year industry. Attributed with the power to transform anxiety, negative thinking and behavior into peace, compassion, and lovingkindness, many public schools are adopting Mindfulness-based educational programs to help children self-regulate their behavior and cope with the pressures of life.
REDEFINING REALITY
Though Mindfulness has been given therapeutic and scientific status for application across the broad spectrum of psychological and physiological health and wellness needs, it is actually a Buddhist meditative technique that changes one’s perception of reality. By focusing meditative attention intensely on one’s breath while concentrating on nothing but the present moment, one enters an altered state of nondual consciousness[1] that becomes the new interpretive grid for living. The goal is to train the mind to move through every aspect of life with the intentional focus and consciousness of Mindfulness while suspending all interpretation and judgment of experiences and events. Perception of the past and the future dissolves into the nondual nothingness of the present moment.
Research
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