Reddit Reddit reviews Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within

We found 3 Reddit comments about Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Personal Transformation Self-Help
Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within
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3 Reddit comments about Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within:

u/duffstoic · 13 pointsr/streamentry

>Does this sound like classic TMI stage 4 purifications? My equanimity is quite good on retreat and I don’t really have panic symptoms in daily life, rather some mild social anxiety.

Quite possibly. Or "existential anxiety" aka fear of (ego) death, which we are normally very good at avoiding in daily life through keeping busy and overstimulated.

>When I investigate chest sensations non-judgmentally they tend to swell and move, they always seem ready to burst upwards but there's little sense it's opening the heart area. Is this just the process of heart chakra opening?

Maybe, I don't know. Chakras are a weird concept IMO. I've definitely had bundles of sensations in many, but not all, of the standard chakra locations, on Goenka retreats mostly. And I don't know what to make of them in terms of meaning-making. Noticing sensations non-judgmentally is always a good idea though. :)

>Should I cultivate piti more to gladden my mind? I tend to get early stage piti moreso on the out breath.

I don't know about cultivating piti, but gladdening the mind never hurts. Definitely increasing your equanimity seems like it could be beneficial. Despite saying your equanimity is "quite good on retreat" you also say that the experience was "traumatizing," but my experience is that things are only "traumatizing" to my nervous system when I have insufficient equanimity. I went through a 2.5 hour dental procedure, awake, with lots of drilling and yanking of my teeth and copious amounts of blood and pain and it was not traumatizing at all because I had really good equanimity during that event, yet I've had minor disagreements with people that I could not shake for weeks or months because my equanimity was so low.

>Should I respect my trauma, or whatever ‘this’ is, and avoid longer retreats for now?

That's up to you. If you feel that is best, trust your own wisdom. Goenka retreats are particularly hard core, and there are also less intense options.

>Does this sound normal for someone with a history of anxiety and trauma?

Sounds like classic symptoms of panic attacks. See When Panic Attacks by Dr. David Burns, really good CBT approach to panic. I'd recommend working with that alongside meditation. Perhaps also practice some gratitude that you don't experience this in daily life too. :)

>Should I find a teacher, or should I find a therapist experienced in the intersection of trauma and vipassana?

Probably a good idea. I'm not a meditation teacher, but I do hypnosis and I have some ideas of things that might be useful. But find someone you resonate with.

>Is this classic dark night territory? Is increased metta meditation enough of an antidote to this? I struggle somewhat with generating metta but have a firm intention to persevere.

Metta is never a bad idea. :) I personally would recommend something like Core Transformation, which is in my opinion a kind of metta that also leads to change of specific issues.

>Is it normal to have such strong energetic phenomena and intense sensations of panic even though my thoughts are quite calm and I’m not spiralling into story/narrative worry?

Very normal...or is it? Dun dun dun, tune in next time to find out! Just kidding, yea the body can do really weird stuff, and there isn't always any content to it.

>It’s tough for me to have much metta or see too many fruits from the practice when I encounter such distracting/strong experiences from my chest area and I’m so aware of my heart.

Again, this is a classic symptom of panic attacks. I'd put it this way: meditating brings up panic attacks for you. You are able to sit through them with a fair degree of equanimity, but they keep happening. There are ways to work with this. You are not broken or weird, ok maybe a little weird but so is everybody interested in hard core meditation haha. I'm certainly pretty weird. And yes, be gentle and kind to yourself and don't push through like a madman necessarily, but also don't avoid meditation entirely out of fear of panic attacks (that's also a symptom of panic attacks, avoiding things that cause them, which makes them worse). Find a middle path.

u/sirwebber · 3 pointsr/TheMindIlluminated

Off topic from TMI, but I've been doing some of the exercises from "Core Transformation" and it might be helpful:

Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within https://www.amazon.com/dp/0911226338/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_jkLsDb81MDJ3G

u/kaj_sotala · 2 pointsr/TheMindIlluminated

So as the author of that article: I do hold that I've had reduced procrastination, and that a major part of it seems like it can be traced to meditation and mindfulness practices. That said, at least so far meditation alone hasn't felt like it could fix everything, though it's possible that it would be even more transformative if I was further along the path (I'm around TMI's Stage Five at the moment).

According to procrastination researcher Piers Steel, your motivation for some task is affected positively by your expectancy (how much you believe in your ability to pull it off) and the task's value (how rewarding the task is to do, and what you expect to get out of it). On the other hand, your motivation is reduced by the delay (how distant in time the rewards for doing the task are) and your impulsiveness (which covers both your personal impulsiveness and situational factors that might distract you). [See also](http://lesswrong.com/lw/9wr/my_algorithm_for_beating_procrastination/I feel that meditation has helped me reduce procrastination by decreasing impulsiveness and making my subconscious more aware of what the true value of doing different tasks is.

But my suspicion is that for people who have big problems with procrastination (including some of my past selves), their main problem is with some kind of internal conflict, with different parts of their mind having various deep emotional needs and conflicting ways of achieving them; which may manifest as conflicting evaluations of expectancy and value. TMI says that eventually, meditation will lead to a unification of mind where different parts of your mind become united behind a single goal, and others on this forum may comment on that. But my experience as a Stage 5-meditator is that this seems to be a pretty long process, and I'm not there yet. When it comes to procrastination reduction, what's been more useful for me has been to apply techniques that address internal conflicts more directly.

I described this in my recent post on self-concepts; apparently a big part of what was going on was that I had an unstable self-esteem and kept feeling bad about myself, and a part of my mind wanted to prove myself by being productive and accumulating positive evidence about myself. At the same time, the exact nature of my insecurity was such that no amount of additional evidence that I accumulated was going to fix it; the problem was with some particularly negative memories and ideas that I had about myself, which had to be dealt with first.

In terms of Steel's research, you might describe this as a part of my mind thinking that productivity would have a high value (since it would fix this gaping emotional hole in my mind), whereas another part kept sabotaging my efforts to be productive by assigning the plan of "feel better about yourself by being productive" a low expectancy (as it had correctly previously noticed that this wasn't useful for actually making myself feel better).

It's possible that sufficient practice with meditation could eventually have fixed this, by healing those emotional wounds through a different route; but the techniques that I used fixed the biggest problem much faster.

On the other hand, I do still stick with what I wrote in my original article as well: meditation and mindfulness has also continued to produce major gains in reducing procrastination. Notice that the article you were referring to was written several weeks after I had fixed my self-concept: mindfulness has made it much faster to really take advantage of all the changes that have been happening on their own after I fixed that emotional wound in my mind. And on the other hand as well, I believe that the improved introspective ability that comes from meditation, made it easier for me to be able to apply those techniques which did heal the emotional wound. Both meditation and the techniques for changing self-concepts, have worked better for me together than I expect either would have worked alone.

I described the self-concept tools I used a bit in my self-concept post, and they're described in much more detail in this book (yes I know, the cover doesn't exactly inspire confidence in its contents). You may also want to look at other techniques which aim at fixing internal conflicts directly, such as Gendlin's Focusing, aversion factoring, and Core Transformation. (Necessary caveat: while several of these techniques have been developed by e.g. psychotherapists, there hasn't been very much - and in several cases no -
rigorous scientific research on validating their usefulness. I'm suggesting them because they have been useful to me and other people that I know, but you should give such a recommendation the same skepticism as any other anecdotal evidence. I can't make any promises of whether they will work for you, or whether the cause of your procrastination even is what I think it might be.)

Good luck!