Comment by dorothy on Meditation course claims 65% enlightenment rate: my review · 2023-07-30T16:40:31.027Z · LW · GW

So, here is the promised review!

Tl;dr: I don't think I'm in fundamental well-being, but I do feel my life is significantly better than before the course. However, I find it hard to say whether this is because of the course, or just a coincidence.

• The main differences in my life
  • I'm more present when spending time with other people
  • and just feel like I'm "a better person" somehow, like more present, patient, caring, grounded, attentive, stable.
• Confounding factor: I've spent a lot of time in the last 3 months talking with my partner and taking special care that I'm being as present as possible.
  • I attribute most of the positive changes to that. I'm very unsure how much of a difference the course made.
• Some observations from the course:
  • Being allowed to scratch itches, stretch, move a bit, and sometimes lie down was helpful to make meditation a lot more feasible for me.
    • I think without that I would have found it really hard to get through an hour of meditation each day.
  • The breath focus exercise started out relatively "neutral"
    • I didn't feel like I got better at paying attention to my nose etc, which I'd hoped would be the case.
    • But it got harder over time.
      • At some point it felt like I just couldn't bring myself to care enough about feeling something on my skin/the breath, and got a bit miserable
  • The morning and evening positive psychology exercises started out easy, but didn't feel effective
    • But at some point they became negative. They felt like a chore and really effortful/annoying
  • I found beauty in many situations/sensory experiences in which I wouldn't have expected it. (e.g. things like street noise and dirty walls). That feels pretty nice, like looking at a nice flower and smelling it, just that I can now do it with dirty walls and not only with flowers.

Overall I think it was probably worth taking the course, but I'm not completely sure.

Comment by dorothy on Meditation course claims 65% enlightenment rate: my review · 2023-03-19T16:22:56.241Z · LW · GW

Thanks Kat for writing this! I'll give the finder's course a go in the next iteration starting in April. I'll follow your example, and I hereby precommit to write at least a few sentences of review about the course in the comments here, even if I end up quitting it.