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Anthony Quintiliani, Ph.D, LADC

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May 12, 2018 By Admin

Vipassana for Depression, Anxiety, Trauma, and Addictions

Vipassana for Depression, Anxiety, Trauma, and Addictions

The integration of Vipassana meditation with various forms of therapy has for many years been a standard of treatment worldwide and in Vermont, especially when impulse control and emotion regulations issues are included.  Buddhist Psychology offers clear explanations why this intervention may be helpful for so many suffering people. The four most common clinical conditions of depression, anxiety, trauma, and addictions are strongly and positively influenced by regular practice of this form of meditation. Below I have noted in a very basic manner how Vipassana’s effects may be explained via Buddhist Psychology and the dharma.

  1. Impermanence is a focal aspect of Buddhist Psychology, meditation practice, and dharma. This constant of change may be explained best as the rising and falling of all humanly perceived phenomena. Although arising and falling away in conscious awareness include all phenomena, some clarity is needed regarding use of it in clinical practice. Sense impressions, mental events, sensations/feelings/emotions, impulsive behavior, and compulsive cognitions all relate to the clinical conditions noted here. Therefore, any intervention that brings important insight may be useful.
  2. Humans suffer from habitual behaviors and reactions. It is best recognized in attachment to positive  sense objects or experiences and aversion to negative ones. Sensory impressions and mental events about them lead to active roles on the hedonic treadmill. When we use sensory information and experience awareness of something that we evaluate as pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant we behave according to samsara – we crave for more or desire aversion from such phenomena.  We may not at all realize that our attachment/desire to continue the pleasant – as well as the aversion to continue the unpleasant – is our major cause of unhappiness, pain, and suffering.  Likewise the lack off this awareness or insight has the same unpleasant effects – we suffer. We become stuck wanting  what we want but cannot always get, and hoping to avoid unpleasant experiences that may be unavoidable in human life. We tell ourselves only if I had…then I would be happy. General dissatisfaction, unfortunate as it is, is the human norm.
  3. The information and processes noted above do NOT include a separate, long-lasting, independently arising entity called the Self. We do need to recognize that I am NOT my depression, anxiety, trauma, or addictions. I am simply aware or conscious of the fact that “I” am experiencing or feeling depression, anxiety, trauma, or addictions. It is only in more advanced Buddhist practices that we work seriously on the “no-self” reality. There are significant consequences in over-identification with either pleasant or painful experiences.  Believing that it is “my self” that is trapped disempowers us in many important ways.  The Four Noble Truths and The Eight Fold Path can help us.
  4. In very unique ways Vipassana meditation can help us in all of the above.  Here are some skills recommended by S. N. Goenka (now deceased).  First, anchoring the breath by paying attention to the upper lip and the nostrils as you breathe in and out. In anapana sati we simply pay undivided attention to the feelings/sensations as we breathe in and out. Moment-to-moment bare attention is practiced for at least 30 minutes.  To be successful, you must practice letting go of thoughts, emotions, and memories of past suffering.  When they arise simply note that it/they have come up, and pay no attention to it/them – hold a non-evlautaive stance and stay with your breath. It will require significant practice before you can do this well.  Awareness may then be expanded to the throat and chest areas – just feeling sensations of awareness  as you breathe in and out. Second move into about 30 minutes of loving kindness meditation. Third, complete a body scan with attention only from head to toes and back again for about 30 minutes. Just pay attention to the awareness of sensations and feelings as you are guided slowly down and up the body. When distractions come, simply return attention back to the part of your body you are working with now.
  5. Vipassana (Pali for “seeing things as they actually are”) allows us to learn all there is to know in items 1-3 above, and how to benefit significantly from such understandings. Long-term Vipassana practice may eventually bring you to a more stable self-existence, fully focused on your state of meditative awareness without strong reactivity in life. At some point you will become aware of interoception, the ability to feel sensations in your body before they bloom into emotions and behaviors. In the clinical conditions noted, such a skills can be live-saving.

For more information refer to Follette, V. M. and Briere, J. et.al. (2015). Mindfulness-Oriented Interventions for Trauma…New York: Guilford Press, pp. 273-283, 329-342. See also Ariele and Manahemi (1997). Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (Film); and, www.prisondhamma.org.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton SanghaChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Addiction, Anxiety, Buddhism, Depression, Featured, Meditation, Mindful Awareness, Trauma, Vipassana Meditation Tagged With: ADDICTIONS, ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, TRAUMA, VIPASSANA

February 12, 2017 By Admin

Vipassana Meditation – On Impermanence

Vipassana Meditation:  Impermanence

Although standard vipassana meditation practice leading to insight about the true nature of reality does not recommend what I am about to do, I plan to do it anyway. This meditation center is all about innovation in practice and generalization regarding the benefits of meditation for both regular meditators and novices.  Below I will guide you through a longer meditation dealing with your perceptions and experiences with impermanence.  It is hoped that by being more direct in the guided practice, you may benefit prematurely. Although there is no substitute for regular daily meditation practice, especially when vipassana is concerned.   Let’s begin.  Do your best to remain on focus and deep.

  1. Seattle into your cushion or chair, and complete a few long, deep, calm breaths. Begin to pay attention to the actual impermanence in the breath, itself. In some ways the breath is like a metaphor for life, which arises at birth, lives on for a number or years, then falls into death. Meditate on this!
  2. Focus attention on the experienced reality that all things of materiality arise dependently, then stand for a while, finally falling into non-existence. This is change. This it it! This is the meditative experience here and now. Do your best to adjust to this rather harsh reality. Meditate on this!
  3. Likewise, now pays close attention to the reality that all mental phenomena follow the same exact path: arising, standing, and falling away. Even your immediate experience, as well as the perception of it, follow the same rules: arising, standing, and falling away. Meditate on this!
  4. The clear reality of impermanence, especially as we experience it directly, tends to reduce our dependency on attachments to sense-pleasures. Contemplate this, here now! Your dependence on sense-door pleasures for joy are a form of attachment, desire, craving. But it all falls away. Meditate on this!
  5. All experiences are impermanent. Focus deeply on the reality that most suffering we experience comes with the awareness that we cannot hold onto/keep experiences that result in joy and happiness. It is a good thing that human desire to be happy, but it comes at a cost. These experiences simply arise, stand and fall away. Thus, our very effort to become happy is, itself, a source of ultimate suffering (which is also impermanent). Meditate on this!
  6. Samsaric conditioning – that is chasing after/clinging to any sense-door pleasure we hope will produce joy and satisfaction is, itself, the source of suffering. Meditate on this!
  7. Likewise, all experienced suffering from all causes and conditions result in displeasure and dissatisfaction. It too is impermanent; that said, we hope in vain to avoid it. Meditate on this!
  8. Contemplate deeply the reality that your own displeasure, indeed dissatisfaction, is directly related to the human inability to produce outcomes desired and therefore attached to. This is one reason why Buddhist psychology offers an alternative: regular, long-term meditation practice that uncovers and helps us to experience these realities. Meditate on this!
  9. Recognize that formal Buddhist meditation practice requires that you follow certain Buddhist precepts, which encompass wholesomeness, kindness, compassion, ultimate reality, etc. These are good ways to live a life. Meditate on this!
  10. Now go into very deep meditation on the reality of impermanence; see what it brings up for you. Be with it! Realize there is no space, no difference, between the object of observation and the observer.  Meditate on this!
  11. Prepare to end this meditation. Notice the feelings in your feet and legs as you prepare to stand up.

For more information refer to Catherine, S. (2011). Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 389-431.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Activities, ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Benefits of Meditation, Featured, Impermanence, Meditation, Practices, Vipassana Meditation Tagged With: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, IMPERMANENCE, MEDITATION, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, VIPASSANA

January 14, 2017 By Admin

Vipassana Meditation – Final Journey – The Insights

Insights – Vipassana Mediation

There will be future, more advanced vipassana meditations posted on the site. For now, however, we will end this series with a final post about the insights often experienced via vipassana meditation. We learn via experience about impermanence, suffering and its causes, no-self, emptiness and
many other things – or, perhaps, better stated as no-things. If we are fortunate we experience less
grasping for sense-door pleasures, some disenchantment with all aspects of materiality, and greater dispassion about our mental states. A huge insight is the understanding that we can detach from the five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, volitional actions, and even consciousness. Join me now as we go into another vipassana-like meditation on the ways humans experience love-hate, pleasure-displeasure, joy-suffering, and boring neutrality. Here we will focus on thoughts, emotions, senses, and relationships – the stuff of life. Let’s begin.

  1. Settle into your cushion or chair.  Allow your awareness to follow your breath: deep, slow, calm breathing. Be aware fully of the feelings/sensations in your body that arise and fall away with each in-breath and each out-breath.  Meditate on this!
  2. Now focus full concentration on the inner feelings of cognition – thoughts.  Focus, focus, focus on how you may have now learned that a thought is simply a thought.  Meditate on the awareness, the insight, that your thoughts are not so very important.  They simply sway or jump from pleasant to unpleasant based on your evaluated experiences. Vipassana should have taught you that unwholesome thoughts are unhelpful, and wholesome thoughts are helpful – but only as thoughts.  Try to let go of whatever you are thinking right now.  Just be in meditation, noticing without evaluating.  Meditate on this!
  3. Move now to affect and emotion. Though they are not the same thing, they are related. Our emotional experience tends to be the power of our life, causing either great good or great evil. Emotions are potent precursors to action, joy as well as misery. However, they are only inner body feelings that we desire or hope to avoid.  As feeling alone, they do not mean much in the ultimate reality of knowing.  Although wisdom traditions let us know that wholesome emotions can do great things for others, in the final analysis they are simply another form of form. Although some would disagree with this statement. Meditate on this!
  4. Now move to your own sense-doors, the very route that activates when you encounter pleasant or unpleasant experiences and stimuli or objects. All senses have past, present, and future orientations.  Now just focus your full concentration on being present, here now, only with your senses.  Do your best to let go of the reinforcement from valued sensory experiences and the fear from undesired sensory experiences. Just meditate on the nature of what your senses are doing right now, right here. Do not evaluate. Meditate on this!
  5. What about your spiritual self?  This is simply another manifestation of your no-self. However, spiritual experience can be very, very powerful in our lives.  What is the character of your spiritual experience here in vipassana meditation? Do not evaluate. Just become aware. Meditate on this!
  6. Lastly, meditate deeply on the relational aspects of your life. Next to self-cherishing and self-indulgence, positive relational realities yield powerful influences on us. Let go of thoughts and emotions about relationships!  Just focus on your own relationship now, here, with yourself.  Try not to evaluate or judge. Do this in deep meditation!
  7. Pull it all together now. As you meditate let go of it all – cognition, affect, sense-doors, relationships.  Just be here, now. Go deep into meditation.
  8. Prepare to end your meditation. Bring your awareness back to the room, and prepare to end this session.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Activities, ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Benefits of Meditation, Benefits of Mindfulness, Featured, Meditation, Meditation Activities, Vipassana Meditation Tagged With: ACTIVITIES, ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, MEDITATION, PRACTICE, VIPASSANA

December 28, 2016 By Admin

Vipassana Meditation – Journey 3 No-Self

Vipassana Meditation -No-Self   Journey 3

In this third vipassana meditation I will guide you on a meditation dealing with the experience of no-self.  No-self is a highly advanced experience in Buddhist meditation and wisdom practices, and it is, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood concept and experience. Along with impermanence, dependent origination, typical reality vs ultimate reality, and emptiness the experience and awareness of no-self is considered a highly desirable experience in advanced meditation practice. I offer one caution, however; if you are person suffering from mental health and/or substance use disorders and/or symptoms, the meditation on no-self may be too mindfulhappiness-anthony-quintilianidissociating to practice. It may be unhealthy for you to practice it. In my opinion, it may be better to let this meditation go.  Let us begin with our guided meditation.

  1.  Settle into your cushion or chair. Take a few full, deep, slow, calming breaths.  Notice the impermanence off your breath as it arises, stands for a few seconds, then falls away into non-existence. That specific breath will never come again. No-self experience also rests on the same impermanence principle as the rest of materiality.
  2. As you rest in meditation, contemplate your experience of your self. The self is a construct based on experience of life and its consciousness. The what or who that is doing the experiencing is the experiential basis of consciousness about your self – the experiencer. Since we humans have no other point of self-reference, we conclude that all our experiences – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the boring – are evidence of an enduring self within an experiential way of being and doing. I assume you agree so far with this explanation. Meditate on this!
  3. As you meditate deeper, contemplate on the possible reality that that “this self” represents an impersonal pattern of brain-mind processes that are based on causes and effects.  The awareness of the phenomena we experience is just another phenomenon. Such a view contradicts and disrupts the standard perception of self as I, Me, Mine, Ego, Self. Our entire worldly experience as a self is based partly on conditioning from pleasant, unpleasant and neutral experiences. Meditate on this!
  4. Now we shall take a deep dive! As you meditate even deeper, “play” with the possibility that your self is not a fixed, stable, independent entity. It is simply mind and body consciousness about experiences; it is simply neuron activation about an experience.  There is nothing to hold onto. Impermanence once again propels us forward and downward.  We have MIND plus EXPERIENCE plus impermanent MATERIALITY as the basis for all the foundations of the self.  Meditate on this!
  5. Meditating on the experience of no-self, the dissociative emptiness and boundlessness that such practice may bring; simply be with the “feeling” of the experience here now. Do your best not to flee from it (unless it is causing serious discomfort for you). If you have been able to reach an “experience” of no-self, simply be in the experience of it without judgments. Be part of the transformational experience you are now in.  The question is: if there is no-self, what/who is experiencing the transformation? Meditate on this!
  6. Now bring yourself, your mind and your body, back to presence in the meditation room. Contemplate where you have been and what you have been experiencing. Prepare to end the meditation.  Before standing take a few breaths and re-associate with feelings in your legs and feet.

For more information refer to Catherine, S. (2011). Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastery of Jhana and Vipassana. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 389-431. 

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By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Activities, Featured, Meditation, MIndfulness, Mindfulness Training, Vipassana Meditation Tagged With: JHANA, JOURNEY, MEDITATION, PRACTIVE, VIPASSANA

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