snowymountains

Adding the King of Soul for completeness 🙃

Which is very interesting and maybe will never be solved as a question. From the ancient times you had people who preferred stoicism, which is more practical, others who preferred Plato.

The self in daobums is not used in a technical manner, rather in an everyday speaking manner. The field you are after to get an understanding of the "self" is, is called personality theories, sometimes also called personality structure theories. There's no correct one in an exact sense between the modern ones as each personality theory has it's strengths and weaknesses, they basically focus on different things. Btw behaviourists came up with some amazing results and methods without having a personality theory at all. I wouldn't try to map 1-1 two personality theories because a significant understanding of both theories is needed for this. For an intro to Jung's personality theory, Stein's book map of the soul is a good. All in all it is good to have an understanding of the cognitive model, object relations, the pct model and the Jungian one, they focus on different things. Cognitive psychology is also very interesting. Mapping concepts from one to another correctly is complex business though if someone wants to do it accurately. Real-life personalities are of course something more unique and complex than the boxes of personality theories, personality theories are approximations.

I don't have one because I consider the question a matter of semantics, so any definition is equally valid. Where it does make a difference is when reading an author and there it makes sense to read using the same definitions of the author.

While it may not be only its meditation component, nonetheless lacks the tools, knowledge and the framework for a topic as emotions surfacing, similarly to how it's not trauma therapy. I agree, this discussion makes no sense to continue.

The assumption is even bigger actually that the use of therapy is confined to something exclusively clinical as in e.g. trauma, which is simply untrue. Subclinical goals ( i.e. "I want to wake up more energised in the morning" ) are valid therapy goals. Something entirely benign as self discovery is a perfectly valid therapy goal and this includes understanding emotions that surface. Therapy is extremely effective at this. There's also the silent assumption there that because meditation brought a memory to awareness ( clearly unrelated to Maddie again ) it did something special, it didn't. Actually traumatic memories in specific are not "blocked by a defence mechanism", unlike what popular books on Amazon claim, including books by psychologists and therapists or older theories. Harvard Prof. McNally has actually proved this clinically and it is his work that is considered the golden standard on this topic. it's not hard to bring them to awareness either, it's more the case that because they're unpleasant, consciously for a moment, people choose not to pay attention and then hop the mind onto something else, so nothing is done about them. In meditation what happens is that because of the combination of relaxation and letting go they may become an object of focus more easily. Of course there are other ways to bring them to awareness, there's nothing magical about it. For the "broken" - again unrelated to Maddie - ( are they? Are they something fixed, are they a pathology? or are they simply people with many sides who also happen to now suffer from a psychopathology? ) therapy can help a lot. It's no guarantee just like medical doctors cannot "fix" all herniated discs cases, they can fix some, improve others and in some they can't. But therapy is the only tool.

It's the opposite, meditation practices do not have the tools needed to bring all processes to awareness, they have nearly nothing to understand them and make changes when desired. Of course to see this one needs to know the techniques and skills, otherwise they may think they are something meant to address only trauma. I am making these points, exactly because there are modalities and protocols which work infinitely better than meditative practices, or dancing, or tennis for questions like what is an emotion that resurfaced, what does it mean, what are the options. This doesn't mean meditation, dancing and tennis aren't good practices, they're just not capable of exploring questions like this, similarly to how therapy and counselling will not bring Jhanas, pirouettes and slalom.

Is magic more real than this 😉?

She's amazing!

Imo formulaic is good to learn the technique, one dedicates time and space for it is always good to keep a proportion formulaic in order not to "deskill" of sorts. I see them as having the same role drills have in sports, they have their place. Other than that absolutely, the "real" part can only be non-formulaic.

But it doesn't have the tools to do that, it's scope is more limited than that. All major modalities CBT, Schema, object relation psychodynamics (Bowlby), PCT & Existential, all are very excellent, these are also all evidence based. Others are good too but either due to being less structured like Gestalt are not evidence based, and other non-evidence based ones, like Jungian, or other neo-Freudian schools, all these are very good. (minor edit: probably more should be on this list, I just don't have any view for e.g. psychosynthesis or EMDR or Lacanian and others) There's no comparison between theraupetic techniques and insight meditation practices, therapy is infinitely more effective at anything it claims to do, there's just so much insight meditation does not even scratch the surface of. For trauma ( and clearly not referring to Maddie here ) only therapy is effective, teachers of non-dual traditions don't know anything about dealing with trauma, psychotherapists who specialise in trauma do. day to day, I aim to live unconditioned. They're very good for what they are, they're great practices for what they can do but not for what they can't do. Saying the limitations of a practice is not denigration and it's better to understand their limitations than claim they are complete, the later is lack of understanding of their scope and limitations.

Btw within a meditation-only framework the answer is to observe the emotion and related body-mind activities instead of continuing practice onto something else - that's sometimes the downside with group sessions, that the group schedule ( eg move onto a bodily exercise ) may be not what's best for a practitioner at a given moment. The above still won't uncover the message nor how to act on it.

The practice is working as intended but that's also the boundary of the practice. Next steps are to uncover why the emotion surfaces, what message this emotion conveys, then decide what to do about it, and that's a different type of work altogether. Meditation practices in general are great to increase awareness ( among the other benefits they bring ), what they lack is a coherent framework on what to do with that newly gained awareness. I'd say, though I have no relationship with vajrayana, that life is the path by definition. Everything else, including meditation, therapy, philosophy are drills to enact changes in life.

But isn't this ignoring the "truth"(TM) 😁?

Well, depends on how you define them, it's not like any surgeon ever removed a spirit or a soul, they're not bodily after all and therefore entirely subject to definition. Often spirit is defined to be divine perceived to be eternal while the soul more about our psychology. But other people refer to the soul as something eternal. So it depends on which dictionary someone had when they were 8 😁.

It was meant to be "forgive them father" but some divine synchrinicity must had interfered with my phone's spell checker 😁

If you get really emotional, observe the bodily sensations and the emotion, observe what thoughts come to mind then and if they come before or after the feelings & emotions. After you've gathered this information, the question is how to interpret the info your nervous system is giving you and what to do about it. You probably already know what I believe is the best environment to explore these questions😊 perhaps there are options at a reasonable cost and within reasonable distance from where you live.

Forgive the father, for they know not what they do 😁

He didn't, he worked on black body radiation which was an important step, a prerequisite. The first model of quantum mechanics was by Bohr and Bohr only.

Yes but they also rely on the existence of past lives to account for differences in level of talent/skill ( eg if there's no self in thoughts, why did only Bohr envision quantum mechanics). These are not explained away by insight and they put them under the carpet via past lives. The task at hand is actually to bring the talents of the organism into consciousness and align the self/ego with these. Doing otherwise will damage the person and at a very minimum they'll experience existential anxiety.

Transcending the ego needs a definition, eg why isn't empathy transcending the ego? Empathy doesn't mean that someone doesn't have a self or ego ( the terminology becomes a bit of salad because each theory of personality structure uses a different term for this and have slightly different definitions )

This is common. Many of these meditation practices are actually great ( some are dangerous ) and it's great to have a spiritual practice and spiritual goals. Entering Jhanas is not a therapeutic goal nor is experiencing the various stages of insight ( first levels make therapy more effective though ) nor are spiritual experiences ( though it's important not to confuse these with symptoms and psychoeducation can help a lot here ). All these are out of scope for therapy and it's wonderful to work on these things. Imo the line is crossed for techniques on so-called negative emotions, interpreting and acting on bodily sensations, behavioural adjustments, cognitive restructurings etc, therapy/counselling is the right place for these. And when someone faces a crisis, again, therapy/counselling. Each to their own. Psychoeducation is also very important, the problem with statements like "without an ego one sees the truth" is that this statement ignores that the only known condition under which there is no organised ego ( in the psychodynamic sense ) is ... psychosis, so likely unknowingly these statements are actually horrible advice. So ego-psychology too is better explored in therapy/counselling.

Because the gazelle is not a Buddhist 😂

Depends on the type of therapy. Eg in CBT yes. In general, directional interventions are done only if the client is aware and consents. In PCT the goal is not set by the client ( nor the therapist), it is to align the self with the organism but there the therapist is non-directional and does no interventions. So in a sense the goals are set by the client's organism ( but the client may not be consciously aware of them till the therapy moves on ). So here the "truth"(TM) is actually something very personal to each client and determined exclusively by their organism. In psychoanalysis eg as in neo Freudian free association or even Jungian, the goal is preset into a form of self discovery, the client becomes consciously aware of more and more. Any interventions, again, need the consent of the client