The Dangers of Getting Puddled

A lot of the personal development work I did some years ago focused on becoming more 'heart centered' in order to get more 'connected' with my inner self. I did much of this work because I was a rather intense individual during high achievement phase of my life in my teens and early twenties, and felt out of balance.

 Self and spiritual development often feels very nice when you've come from a hard edged business, school or competitive sports environment, and are suffering what I call 'achievement burnout'.  In the The Avatar Course, a powerful and effective self development program that I was involved in for nearly a decade, we even used the term 'puddled' to describe how definitionless, soft and unattached people got when they detached from many of the concerns of everyday life.

The danger with these types of very pleasant states is that the more I practiced them, the less they  made me  willing to assert my willpower and determination.  You know there is a reason why monasteries often have to accept charity in order to survive. These monks do hours a day of deep meditation or religious contemplation. And it leaves them very compassionate, nice, kind to others, and very soft and goey. In other words, if you do hours of mindfullness meditation each day, it leaves people so puddled that they can barely pay the bills.

The problem with many existing meditation techniques is that they result in you being in some kind of 'puddled' state.

 You end up  Zoned Out, rather than In the Zone.

Keep this in mind when choosing what sort of meditation you learn, and what you are doing it for.