Why meditation does NOT solve your problems, unless...

[Carl-Richard]

I wrote a MSc on using mindfulness (with music) to treat rumination (persistent, repetitive, self-focused, negative thoughts).

I had this belief before I started writing, and it was only strengthened, that 90% of cases where rumination is a serious issue have to be solved through changes in life choices or life situation. If you hate your job, quit your job. If you don't want to be in a relationship, change your relationship. That's actually where your rumination comes from. That's the root of the problem.

Of course your mind will tell you something is wrong if you're doing something wrong. That's its job. Using mindfulness techniques to distract you from the symptoms will only provide that; fleeting and moderate symptom relief. Which can be useful for eventually dealing with the root and getting to a place where your mind no longer has a reason to throw up two middle fingers, but you have to indeed deal with the root for that to become the case.

The only exception is when you use mindfulness to wildy transform your psychology, which means intense devotion and practice, meditating a minimum 1 hour a day with the goal of literally cracking your mind. Such intense devotion and practice will itself be such an expression of being integrated with your own wants and desires that rumination does not happen; what happens instead is intense obsession or even manic states (which is just the opposite side of rumination: rumination with positive instead of negative thinking just means obsessive, manic thinking).

If your actions are aligned with your desires and wants, obsession happens. If your actions are not aligned with your desires and wants, rumination happens. And your desires and wants can be highly complex, layered, flexible, as is the case when you're at higher stages of cognitive and spiritual development, but it is nevertheless the case that if you don't act in line with your desires and wants, you are at conflict with your very being, and that manifests as mental suffering.

I'll make sure to bring this understanding to where I'll be doing my work; that there is a difference between "clinical" meditation/mindfulness which is what you do for 5 minutes where you want to forget that your life sucks and you're too scared to do anything about it, vs "religious" meditation/mindfulness which is about essentially transcending your human mind and ceasing the identification with the very thing that thinks those thoughts (the personal self or ego).

That said, the study had positive results and we will be publishing it soon.

Edited 11 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[aurum]

5 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

That said, the study had positive results and we will be publishing it soon.

Nice work, congrats.

[Carl-Richard]

On 29.11.2025 at 11:05 PM, aurum said:

Nice work, congrats.

Thank you

[Daniel123]

On 29.11.2025 at 5:30 PM, Carl-Richard said:

That said, the study had positive results and we will be publishing it soon.

Very interesting, please keep us updated when the study is published, I would really like to read it.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Keep us posted, keen to have a look at this when it is published