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Meditation and Physical Effects



pasha
1

My take-away from my 10-day Vipassana retreat is that their style of Vipassana body scan is meant to interrupt the pattern of "negative sensation" -> "reaction." By training yourself to observe "negative sensation" without judgement, you can basically short cut the process of "tension” at a fairly early stage. Another thing it can do is help you with the general "awareness of body" that may have been damaged by chronic pain. Vipassana and related meditation is trying to work at the more "root" causes of the postural and other issues rather than the more physical adjustments of other therapies.

Their idea is that being able to sense specific sensations without judging them, then you would be able to "intercept" a painful feeling *before* it transitions to either muscle tension or some other reaction you might not like in your life.

At the retreat, despite having lots of trouble with their sub-optimal diet, I did feel pretty relaxed towards the end. 10-day retreats are not for everyone, also many people’s experiences vary a lot and improvements, if any, are frequently not as physical as for me. For an at-home practice, the first 20 min – 1h of meditation per day give a lot of benefit with muscle relaxation and after that its effectiveness falls off and likely other methods become more important at least with regards to posture.

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2022/08/21