Erlend K

I think that telling people that loneliness is "better" than hanging out with friends is a horrible and reckless advice. If people takes that seriously, it's a recipe for unhappiness. Many great philosophers (including Aristotle, Epicurus, The Buddha, William James etc.) have counted friendship as one of the most valuable things in life. And pretty much all modern psychologists agree that quality time with loved ones is one of the main factors of living a happy, fulfilling life. Temporary loneliness in order to focus 100 % on some personal/creative project can be very useful, but one shouldn't derive from this the conclusion that loneliness is somehow superior to spending time with friends. If you are unable to handle temporary loneliness this is a skill you might want to cultivate. It might be best to do it by small stepping. Learn to be comfortable spending 1-2 days alone, then move on to larger timeframes. If you are unable to learn how to spend 2 or 3 days alone, working on something that feels important to you, it might be an idea to find a therapist to get help looking for potential underlying reasons for this. THE NOBLE PERSON IS CHIEFLY CONCERNED WITH WISDOM AND FRIENDSHIP. -EPICURUS

Heavy amounts of meditation is known to increase the lenght of REM sleep, leading to much longer, often more vivid dreams. I know from my own experience, in normal life I barely dream, and when I do they are not very interesting, while on retreat I have insanely interesting dreams most night.

Well, before you replace an aspect of you lifestyle that makes you happy with one that makes you anxious and depressed you should probably have a stronger reason than "some stranger online said this is 'better'.."

You get anxiety, depression and a headache from spending 4 days by yourself? Wow, that socks. Have you always been like that? Maybe you are just naturally extremly extroverted and get mentaly and emotionaly drained by being alone the same way an extreme introvert would get from spending 4 straight days with a group of people. If you feel super good and happy being with your friends, why not keep hanging out with them? Why would you want lonelyness?

My band:

Thank you for posting this. I will check out the book.

When I was single I got really into online dating for a while. I think a lot of people have this narrow-minded prejedic against online dating that is completely irrational. As if there was something "low" or shameful about it. If you want to meet more people this is a superb way to do it tho. Using apps like Tinder you can date 2-3 women a week, and eventually meet someone you have great chemestry with. Unlike a setting like a nightclub, you can be alone in a quieter setting like a caffe, meet sober, have her full attention and avoid that awkward dynamic of you being the seller walking up to her trying to prove yourself or keep her interessted.

If listening to music makes mundane tasks more enjoyable, I don't see why not. If you want to be more constructive you can replace the music with an audiobook or podcast about something you want to learn about. Or, if you want to be really hardcore - retreat style - you can use mundane tasks as active meditations, trying to be mindful of all the sensations you experience.

Well, it means different things in different contemplative traditions. In buddhism, for instance, there are no such thing as a "true Self". The Self is simply a label the conceptual part of our minds puts on the sense of subjectivity that is present in every moment of experience. In highly concentrated meditative states this sense breaks down, and one is confronted with the fact that there are no Self at the core of the stream of conciousness, in the way one intuit there to be.

What method are you using? Generally a lot of weird sensations will turn up in meditation. They don't mean mutch. I think its best not to get to cought up in them as they will usually just distract you from the technique you are supposed to be using.

Performing planned random acts of kindness is very well documented to significantly boost happiness. Here is the report from one of many studies on the topic: http://sonjalyubomirsky.com/wp-content/themes/sonjalyubomirsky/papers/LSS2005.pdf "Study participants who performed five acts of kindness every week for six weeks saw a significant boost in happiness, but only if they performed their five acts in a single day rather than spread out over each week. This may be because many acts of kindness are small, so spreading them out might make them harder to remember and savor."

Its not about impacting the world becourse 'impacting the world is a good thing' /something you ought to do. Its more that if you find some cause that feels very important to you, then dedicating a lot of time and effort to that course tends to make your life feel a lot more meaningful. Psychological research on meaning has found that this tends to be the most powerful way of generating the sense that your life has meaning. It's fully possible to generate a sense of meaning from more private projects, like raising children, but this sense tends not to be as powerful as the one you get from feeling that you are dedicating yourself to something that feels bigger and more important than yourself. Hopefully you will at some point discover sutch a cause, but if you don't thats ok too.

Here is a list of documented effects of doing metta meditation, and links to the scientific papers showing these effects: http://www.emmaseppala.com/18-science-based-reasons-try-loving-kindness-meditation-today/

The problem here is that the submind that is judging is an entirely different submind than the one setting the intention not to judge. Even if the intention setting submind makes the decision not to judge, the judging sub mind will not automatically obey. Therefore you can't use willpower to force yourself not to judge, you have to train you mind. Metta/ Loving Kindness Meditation is proven to both decrease self-judgement and increase empathy and compassion. This combo should make you less judgemental of other people. This is a great 25 min guided metta meditation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmmPRYagq3s Some kind of CBT would probably also work.

I'm not sure what you mean about this. Can you elaborate? Basically the idea about non-self is that we phenomenological have this sense of a "Self" inside our stream of consciousness. This is what Rick Hanson calls the "Unified owner of experience and agent of action". This "Self" have certain phenomenological characteristics. the "Self" feels like it is what we at the core most fundamentally are, and that it is coherent, indivisible, stable (It's the same "Self" today as there were 10 years ago), the observer of the stream of consciousness, independent of whats being observed, and the actor making decisions/setting intentions etc. What mystics/contemplatives have discovered is that during highly concentrated mind states this sens of Self breaks down into a set of vibrations, just like all other body and mind phenomena does. With continued practice this sense of "Self" can be weakened and eventually disappear completely (or in some traditions like certain Zen-schools, suddenly disappear). Awareness still remains, and the streams of body sense information and mind information keeps streaming through it. These are real, but the concepts "Awareness", "itching", "thought" etc are empty in the technical sense. It's like when Alan Watts tried to answer what "the real world" is: He said something like "The real world is neither 'spiritual' nor 'material'. The real world is just.. *claps his hands*". The direct, phenomenological experience of that clap is reality, while the concept "clapping" is empty.

Rising Appalachia- Medicine Wise men say that rushing is violence and so is your silence when its rooted in compliance To stand firm in loving defiance, make art your alliance give voice to the fire Move people to the beat of the wind Gather yourself and begin to dance the song until it ends We are winners, champions of the light forming in numbers and might keep the truth close in sight… Medicine Woman, Medicine Man walking with grace, I know your face, and I trust your hands Medicine Woman, Medicine Man walking with grace, I know your face, and I trust your hands Find your teachers in the voice of the forests unplug you cant ignore this wisdom of the voiceless Remedies are bountiful and surround us from the garden to the farthest prayers made of star dust Find your healing in the music that calls you the voice that enthralls you what do you belong to Eyes out theres the setting of the sun give thanks to each and everyone the lesson is the… Medicine Woman, Medicine Man walking with grace I know your face, and I trust your hand Medicine Woman, Medicine Man walking with grace, I know your face, and I trust your hand Poem: I believe in bending backwards and extending in my tracks trip back until the lesson is in action and your yard is feeding stop stark the disbelieving cause the garden holds the shards the medicine is in the seeds when We hold tight to our right to protect and we know our might is 10-fold in connection our elders hold them bright lights we protect them the medicine is evident the wolf, the hawk, the bear clan We hold tight to our right to protect and we know our might is 10-fold in connection our elders hold them bright lights we protect them the medicine is evident the wolf, the hawk, the bear clan… Medicine Woman, Medicine Man walking with grace, I know your face, and I trust your hands Medicine Woman, Medicine Man walking with grace, I know your face, and I trust your hands

My favorite meditation teachers are Culadasa and Shinzen Young. When it comes to teachings about enlightenment I find Daniel Ingram unrivaled. His book "Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha" is the most practical, pragmatic and honest no-bullshit description of the path to enlightenment I have ever encountered, and it pretty much lay the foundation for the whole 'Pragmatic Dharma' movement.

If this is your goal psychodynamic therapy might be your best bet. Other than that it depends on what kinds of retraining you want to do. Both Loving Kindness Meditation and Mindful Self-Compassion are very well documented to retrain your minds automatic emotional responses in a way that leads to increased well being. I like Rick Hansons books "Hardwiring Happiness" and "Buddhas Brain". He has an online course as well. I'm not sure if his methods are as effective as Loving Kindness Meditation and Mindful Self-Compassion tho.

"So, are we meant to be honest all of the time, as if we were children again? Surely the author can't possibly mean that a person should be honest all the time for them to live the most creative and fulfilling life possible for them." I'm pretty sure that is exactly the advice Blanton is giving - a really poor advice imo. I agree with him that most of us would benefit from opening up and saying what we think a bit more, but Blanton's attitude that honesty, the way he defines it, should trump any other value is not a good idea. Real life is too complex for "Always do X" maxims to be useful. IN real life situations the values of openness/honestly has to constantly be balanced against concern for others feelings, the health of your social/profession relationships, the effect on your career etc. True, some times frankness or constructive criticism can course conflict and hurt feelings in the short term, but be healthy in the long term - but to claim that this is true 100 % of the time seems clearly wrong. I think a more practical philosophy of honesty than "Radical Honesty" is the Buddhist concept of "Wise speech"/"Right speech".

"Happiness comes from being without needing anything" I think it is important to view happiness as a scale and not an either/or, or box to be checked off. We should try to live in a way where our happiness steadily increases over our lifespan. The highest happiness might comes from "being without needing anything", but I don't yet know how to achieve that in real life. I think certain subsystems of the mind will continually make up new criteria for contentment. Subjectively this is experienced as "once I archive X, or solve problem Y, I can finally be content". However once we reach that point the mind very quickly finds something else to worry about. Even if you achieve all your dreams and goals in life - have a fulfilling career, a great spouse and children, good friends, your dream home, good physical and emotional health and whatever else you view as important, these subsystems will keep coming up with new criteria for content. Perhaps it is possible to somehow turn off these subsystems, but I'm guessing that would be a very long term project. The two danger are 1: to tell your self that "I already reached the point where I'm just being happy. I don't need anything", while denying/suppressing your actual wishes and desires. 2: To set the criteria "Once I learn to be happy from being without needing anything, I can finally be content", and then delay happiness until some point you might never reach. "He has also said it comes from your top 10 values." I missed this one. Did he cite any sources for this claim, or is it just his own personal hypothesis? I have studies quite a bit of positive psychology and never heard of this hypothesis before, so I'm not sure how accurate this is.. The two largest studies ever on long term happiness are the The Grant and Gluek longitudinal studies and the Harvard longitudinal studies. The conclusion here is that most important contributions to our long term happiness is the quality of our social relationships in combination with healthy lifestyle including regular exercise. A practical (in a way very obvious, but easy to overlook if one over-philosophises), advice for how to live a happy life is Daniel Kahneman's advice from 'Thinking, Fast and Slow': "Spend as much time as possible doing things you love doing, together with people you enjoy being with".

I understand that checking yourself into a mental home might feel like a failure, but based on the way you are describing your situation it might be the best thing to do. Testing out some antidepressants would probably be a good idea too. Vipassana might not be the right form of meditation for you. Vipassana is not about conventional personal development or healing emotional wounds. It's ment to help you progress through a series of phenominological shifts called nanas/stages (usually defined as 16 distinct stages) eventually leading to cessation. Some of these nanas are very uncomfortable, and some can even temorarily mess with your mental health and life untill you progress past them. In theravada this is called the "dukkah nanas" = 'knowledge of/insight into suffering'. It is analogous to what christian mystics call the "Dark night of the soul". For someone suffering from mental issues this does not seem like a wise path at this point. If you want to keep meditating I can recomend mindful self-compassion (MSC) meditation wich is more aimed at self-development/healing. Here is a meta-study going through some of the documented effects of MSC: https://chrisgermer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Germer-Neff-JCP-2013-SC-ClinPracticefinal.pdf . Some of its main conclusions are and This is, however no substitute for therapy and medicine. To repost something I write in an other topic, about spiritual bypassing: "Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs as a means to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved traumas/wounds, and developmental needs, and legitimize this avoidance by imagining that the 'noble pursuit of spiritual growth' will someday solve all our everyday, worldly problems, making it unnecessary to ever deal directly with them. A lot of spiritual practitioners fall in the trap of trying to work out their psychological/emotional issues, only through spiritual practices, as if this was somehow superior to, or “higher” than, engaging in psychotherapy. Some even view psychotherapy as an inferior means of dealing with their stuff, and something they shouldn't do. They may feel superior to those who deal with their emotion issues in this conventional (and strongly empirically validated) way, rationalizing that dealing with their issues only through spiritual practice is "superior"/"nobler"/"higher", irespectable of the actual real-life effect it has. By focusing too much on your spiritual practice before you to a certain degree have your shit together, spiritual practices too easily become ego traps that dosn't lead to any form of freedom, but only reinforces the “I” that wants to be a "somebody who has attained enlightenment", since you are banking all of your happiness and social/emotional development on achieving this state, you unavoidably become attached to this outcome."

Congratulations for making this realization. Realizing that you are trying to escape having to deal with your stuff is the first step in doing something about it. For someone suffering from life long social phobia, no amount of meditation is likely to magically fix your social problems. As others have suggested, your best bet is finding a good therapist, possibly combined with the right psychiatric medicine. I would recommend Nardil, wich is considered the "Gold standard for social anxiety". It has the strongest documented effect against social anxiety of any psychiatric drug, and none of the zombie effect/emotional flattening of SSRI's. If your social anxiety is debilitating I would at least I recommend you to look it up. One of the biggest traps to be on guard for on the spiritual path is whats called "Spiritual bypassing" witch is, like you describe, a defense mechanism. Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs as a means to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved traumas/wounds, and developmental needs, and legitimize this avoidance by imagining that the 'noble pursuit of spiritual growth' will someday solve all our everyday, worldly problems, making it unnecessary to ever deal directly with them. A lot of spiritual practitioners fall in the trap of trying to work out their psychological/emotional issues, only through spiritual practices, as if this was somehow superior to, or “higher” than, engaging in psychotherapy. Some even view psychotherapy as an inferior means of dealing with their stuff, and something they shouldn't do. They may feel superior to those who deal with their emotion issues in this conventional (and strongly empirically validated) way, rationalizing that dealing with their issues only through spiritual practice is "superior"/"nobler"/"higher", irespectable of the actual real-life effect it has. By focusing too much on your spiritual practice before you to a certain degree have your shit together, spiritual practices too easily become ego traps that dosn't lead to any form of freedom, but only reinforces the “I” that wants to be a "somebody who has attained enlightenment", since you are banking all of your happiness and social/emotional development on achieving this state, you unavoidably become attached to this outcome. To quote Robert Augustus Masters: "Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many ways, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being. To truly outgrow spiritual bypassing—which in part means releasing spirituality (and everything else!) from the obligation to make us feel better or more secure or more whole—we must not only see it for what it is and cease engaging in it but also view it with genuine compassion, however fiery that might be or need to be. The spiritual bypasser in us needs not censure nor shaming but rather to be consciously and caringly included in our awareness without being allowed to run the show. Becoming intimate with our own capacity for spiritual bypassing allows us to keep it in healthy perspective."

Greater Good In Action: https://ggia.berkeley.edu/ This site is run by the psychology department of US Berkley and contains all the happiness boosters that have the most solid research behind it in showing reliable increases in reported subjective welbeing. I would also strongly recommend Greater Good's free edX course, witch is full of exercises proven to increase welbeing and explanations of the psychological mechanisms that make them effective. They have a new course starting this fall. Last years course had a major impact on my own happiness. For a more long-tem happiness planning: The Grant and Gluek longitudinal studies concluded that the single factor most contributing to our long term happiness is the quality of our social relationships. The Harvard longitudinal studies concluded that relationships in combination with health/being physically active were the most important. If you want to live a happy life the main thing to focus on is probably regular exercise combined with trying to constantly do small things to improve your relationships. I also love Daniel Kahneman's one-liner advice for how to live a happy life from the end of 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' it is something like "Organize you life in such a way that you can spend as much time as possible doing things you love together with people you like being with".

I guess it depends on how you define "Hope". To quote Kaufman: "Hope often gets a bad rap. For some, it conjures up images of a blissfully naïve chump pushing up against a wall with a big smile. That’s a shame. Cutting-edge science shows that hope, at least as defined by psychologists, matters a lot." There are research showing that being hopeful not only increases happiness but also encourage is to stay motivated and keep working towards our goals even in the face of challenges that would have discouraged us if we lacked hope. I recently did Martin Seligman's coursea course on positive psychology. He mentions a study that concluded that the propensity to feel hope was one of the top 3 mental characteristics most strongly associated with flourishing (the two others being the propensities to feel love and gratitude)