Steven Bencarz Response: Is Meditation Dangerous?

So Stephen Ben-Kars recently made this video about the dangers of meditation and a friend of mine sent it to me and they were kind of asking me what my thoughts on it are. So pretty controversial video, it's talking about the dark side of meditation and it talks about a lot of research that's been done that shows that it's not this this really great healthy thing. He's very very negative about it and you know it's kind of easy for me to dismiss that video because the truth is I do kind of have some concerns about meditation believe it or not. I've talked about it in the past a little bit but I think it's not talked about enough. Now it's not necessarily the same sort of issues that Stephen Ben-Kars has about it. I would come at it slightly differently when talking about, I wouldn't even say the dark side of meditation, but problems with meditation. There are problems with it. What are my problems? Where will I start with this? There is an issue with it and I've drawn some practical experiences in my life from talking to people who have been practicing meditation for a long time. Some of these people have been practicing meditation for years. Some of them have run classes in meditation. So people who are very very experienced meditators and some of them have told me that they are completely unhappy with their lives and they've been doing it for years and years. Now I have to say generally they are happy with meditation. They're not critical of meditation but they also admit that they're not happy. So why is that an issue? It's kind of an issue because it is, as Stephen Ben-Kars talks about in his video, meditation has become this huge huge industry. It's a 1.2 billion dollar industry. 40% of Americans meditate and this is kind of where the problem is with this. When something has that much money involved in it, marketers get involved and marketers have a job to sell courses, to sell classes, promote teachers etc. To do that we all know marketers don't always exactly paint a realistic picture of what's going on. Marketing of course is important. People have to market their businesses. I have nothing against that but when it's this big of industry there's going to be a lot of competition and every teacher and every course has to say why it's the best one and people start to make claims about what meditation is and what it can do. So if you're going to try and sell a course in meditation you're going to say that this is the best thing you can do in your life. You're going to have peace of mind, you're not going to have any more problems, your stress is all going to disappear, you're going to feel better, you're going to be healthier. Sun, moon and stars is what you're going to be promised. Now that's where the problem lies. Meditation is good and it has a very very useful application and I'm going to talk about what that is. But it is not, let me repeat this, it is not a cure-all for every issue that a person might have. Certainly not for every person or type of person. As I talked about I've met many people like this and you know I kind of experienced this myself. Like I earlier in my life I meditated a lot and found it useful but it wasn't bringing me all the way there. You know there were still things I had to do which I'll talk about now. Let's say you, let's take an example okay, let me give you an example. Let's say there is a woman and she had a terrible childhood. Her father was verbally abusive to her, emotionally distant. She grew up not getting any attention from him other than negative attention. Grows up, tries to get into a relationship, gets into a relationship and now her partner is acting emotionally distant. At this point maybe she hears about, she's deeply unhappy still, feels rejected, wants love desperately in her life and now she finds out that there's this meditation class near her. She enrolls in it, starts to meditate. She hears how amazing it is and it's going to fix all the problems in her life and she meditates and she feels better for a while but after a while she starts to feel that emptiness returning again. And now she's even worse off than before because she's comparing herself to the people in her meditation class. They're all having these great benefits or so they're telling her and now she's saying well there's something wrong with me, I can't even meditate, I'm not good enough and that's the issue. Where is meditation useful? Meditation is useful when you are so stressed out and you're worried, you've got anxiety. Basically your nervous system is telling you it's on like red alert all the time. Meditation is good for calming the nervous system so it is good for stress. It will slow us down, bring us back into the present as they say, bring us back into the breath, into the body. As a primer, in order for us to be able to be contemplative about our life, to start to look at the issues in our life, maybe talk about the issues in a more calm way with a professional maybe, about the things that are really bothering us. So meditation is a great tool to calm and relax the nervous system and bring us to a place where we're more open to seeing things differently or discussing things openly. It is like a means to an end, it's not the end itself. Meditation by itself is not where it's at, it's just a part, it can be a part of that and there's a lot of other ways that you can relax and calm yourself down, take care of yourself, good self-care plans and strategies. Those things will do the exact same thing. So I do like meditation but it is not this cure-all thing that it's been marketed to be by a lot of people and if anyone tells you it is, I would invite you, okay, just to be skeptical and if you think it will be, then try that, don't take my word for it and don't let me put you off this either. Go out there and find out what works for you. If meditation is the thing that's going to really really help you, go and find that out but go in with an open mind about it. Maybe you should do for everything in your life anyway. So I kind of agree with Stephen in that it's not what it's kind of made out to be, meditation. I wouldn't say it's bad necessarily, I think it's pretty dodgy the way it's been marketed but I'm not taking anything away from you here because I'm trying to empower you. If you start to meditate as a way to get to a resting place where you're ready to start to be contemplative about your life, that's awesome. That's really cool because now you can really start to look at the things that you're projecting onto other people or the limiting beliefs you have about yourself. That's not meditation. It's kind of like you bring a meditative state to that contemplation. You're meditating on those issues in your life. That's kind of a part of meditation. It's a slow process where you feel things rather than thinking about things intellectually. So in that sense meditation is important too. When you're actually contemplating on these things or talking about these issues or looking at the limiting belief, you're doing it slowly and mindfully. So that's important. So I hope that helps. That's my feedback on it for Stephen Benkire's video. If you're meditating and getting benefit out of it, fantastic. Even if you're new to it or maybe you've never tried it before, definitely do try it. But realize it's really super helpful if it can bring you to a place where you become more open-minded and start to be ready to look at some of the issues in your life, the things that make you feel bad about life. Not to ignore them or not to try and hope that you can meditate them away and then ignore them. It's not about that. Meditation or self-awareness in general is about looking at the things that disturb us about life and about our limiting self-beliefs. So guys, feedback on that you can leave it below. I'd love to hear it. If you like this content you can like the video and subscribe for more of these videos. And you can find out more about me and the work I do at my website and thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.