> Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn’t take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life. My girlfriend was not happy. I wasn’t happy. Something had to change.

> That speck in time represented a constant battle I had waged over the prior decade with anger and other negative emotions. I drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships with women. My mind wandered uncontrollably.

> I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA

> Yet, somewhere six or seven years into my practice, whatever progress I was making petered out. I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation and began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Looking back, it was also during this time period that I had my first dissociative experiences, in which elements of my sense of self became separated in a way that impaired my ability to function.

Perhaps he has some unresolved deep-seated emotional processes that have not been mastered, seeking a silver-bullet "cure", whether it be meditation, drugs, or alcohol. He would need to take responsibility over these "low-level" pains & train his psyche, body, & soul to handle this feedback mechanism in a holistic way, seeing these pains with his conscious mind, instead of disassociating his consciousness from them. Blaming meditation, drugs, alcohol are blaming the symptoms of a deeper issue. People recoil after touching a hot surface for good reason.

Note that dissociation is the conscious psyche's firewall against trauma.

> I was halfway to awakening.

Building consciousness is a continuous journey, not a waypoint where you can be halfway toward, since there is no end.

> Before her death, Vogt sent two emails to the retreat center about her challenges, at one point writing that she thought her distress was “a sign that I need to give up my life for a more pure one.”

She probably needs a better framework to view her life. This is where upbringing & social conditioning come into play.

> In sifting through a patchwork of spiritual, psychological and biological frameworks, I have had to mix and match and to trust less in the words of experts and more in my intuition. It’s been, like much in life, an inside job.

People desire a simple silver bullet to solve all of their problems. Life is complex & the map is not the territory, so it can be disadvantageous to be too dependent & only focus on the map.

> If you’re a meditation teacher or hold a powerful position in the mindfulness industry, perhaps take a moment to question what sort of legacy you want to leave. Transparency, honesty and humility are often the core values of religion, but are typically abandoned the moment a sacred idea is critiqued.

> Is it the fate of the Western mindfulness movement to follow this trend? Is there some wiggle room around the idea that more awareness is always better? Is there potential for a pause in our desperate attempt to prove that we’ve found a magic bullet for all our ills?

He acknowledges the "magic bullet" singular tool to solve all problems mindset as being problematic.

> My faith did not crumble gradually — but collapsed like a Jenga game, leaving me to pick through the ruins and to wonder, with tremulous apprehension, if anything was salvageable.

This sounds like the Shamanic Journey, where the soul is cut to pieces to be reassembled. Kindof like refactoring code.