New with QUESTIONS! :)
Kruise
New
So first off I want to say hello to everyone on the forums since I am new 
and a brief showing of my interest/discovery of Buddhism.
About a year ago I found Buddhism after watching a bunch of martial arts movies (cheesy I know) but when I did, the philosophy changed my persona in an instant! I visited a local temple and found it so peaceful, and for a while It was the most change I have ever had in my life for the positive.
After a long time straying from it I re kindled the flame,
I visited another temple where they have something called the four kings looking down and when I walked into the room I felt an anxious/guilt kind of feeling so that is what it took for me to get back to it.
Any way I have anxiety and thats one of the reasons I meditate but lately I read a few scary things like meditating can bring bad things and I was wondering if it does? Also can your "Third eye" open from just normal meditating because I do not want anything to do with that and thirdly do mantras or can they bring negative stuff? I'm sure its my anxiety acting up and making me over thing but I used the Om Mani Pame Hum and it felt positive but since reading those things about meditating might be evil, chakras opening are bad and stuff I have once again stopped meditating and my anxiety is back worse 
Thank for reading to this!
Comments
hi! welcome
I'll keep you safe with my magic mantras and third eye kung fu . . .
Only joking.
Anything that calms anxiety and many things do are good. OM MANI PEME HUM is a safe general purpose calming mantra.
Kung Fu often helps anxious people. :wave: .
Where exactly did you read that crap - sorry, information?
Forget about stuff like third eyes, and other associated new-agey style things. That's how rumours and false information spreads. Mantras are either deeply meaningful, effective and ground-shaking, or just a series of words, depending on what you have studied, and obviously, being new to Buddhism, you haven't had the opportunity to learn much yet. Don't worry about these for now. If you don't know what they mean, or their significance, you might just as well recite "Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall". No harm done.
Don't force anything. There isn't anything you 'MUST' or 'SHOULD' be doing.
Start simple. Just sit, however comfortably you want, relax, and just breathe. Be aware of your body's stillness, and notice your breathing. Don't change it, or attempt to breathe in any particularly artificial way. Just sit, back straight, eyes closed, and breathe.
You know when you're thinking about one thing? For example, when your appointment at the dentist is? Then you think about the fact that you're going out for a meal after....? You know that tiny little imperceptible silent gap, between the first thought, and the next one? Well, that's what you do in meditation. You widen that gap. leave a gradually bigger and bigger space between the thoughts.
Meditation isn't about 'not' thinking. meditation is about observing the Mind, and letting go of the utter mess in our heads. Calming the thoughts, not becoming attached to them, and snowballing them from one thought to the next.
Welcome. Relax. There IS no pressure. Believe me. The pace you walk at, is the pace you walk at.
That just helped me a lot!
thank you very much. And I always wanted to do kungfu, I should start doing that to :P
There is so much to Buddhism, that when you first encounter it, you risk being overwhelmed by your own enthusiasm. You want it all, and you want it now! But Buddhism, for all its complex avenues, is really very simple (which doesn't always mean 'easy', ok?) The Buddha advised us that his main aim was to teach 'Suffering' and the Transcendence of 'Suffering'. (Suffering is in itself, a difficult word to accept or digest, which is why this translation of the word 'Dukkha' has come under scrutiny and some criticism.) 'Suffering' is very negative in its connotation, so what the Buddha goes on to explain, in the 4 Noble Truths, precisely what he means by that.
If you want easy, friendly, digestible initial reading, Look up the "Awakening" trilogy by Lama Surya Das. He is a Tibetan Buddhist lama, but originally born to a Jewish American family - so there's plenty of wry humour in his books. There is a huge amount to follow, but he's an easy-going writer to start with...
There is nothing in any Buddhist teaching anywhere that says meditation might be evil. You generally only hear that from people who completely misunderstand Buddhism and meditation. It's quite safe to ignore that advice.
Simple breathing in and out meditation is a popular practice. No one has ever "become evil" by breathing in and out! In fact, to assert that it might be evil, is really quite ridiculous. Everyone breathes in and out everyday regardless!
I have to echo that you can ignore all that stuff out there about how meditation is dangerous, should only be done under the guidance of a certified teacher, etc. Meditation has never hurt anyone. After all, all you're doing is sitting down and doing nothing for a while. What could be more harmless than that? If you're trying to make it through a long Zazen session you might feel like you're going to die of boredom, but you don't.
A few people with deep issues have trouble with meditation, because without activity to keep the mind distracted, all that crap bubbles up and you start noticing how messed up you are. But even then it's not like meditation caused someone to flip out and run naked down the street yelling about the evil bananas out to get them. Not unless they combine meditation with bad acid.
Aaauuuggghhhh!
I have met many people who have come for meditation instruction after claiming to have been damaged by earlier forays into a meditative practice. As much as most forms of meditation are self paced and benign, there are also some meditative exceptions as well as people just not ready to try them.
Meditation can be dangerous if it is a directed investigative form of practice that unearths things within the psyche of an unstable meditator that they are unable to address. Yes, such practices should be only done under the auspices of a qualified teacher, but just how does a beginner judge if they are qualified or not.
The most common cause of the meditatively walking wounded that I've seen is from
meditative practices where a newbys only starting option is by entering via a long intensive retreat.
It is completely irresponsible to broadly say that meditation is never dangerous, unless you can personally meet first with the applicant and hear what meditative practice they are considering..and with whom.
@Kruise
The four kings are mostly the cultural guardians of the seriousness that those in the temple wish you to take in practicing. Nothing that a good librarian doesn't mimic in their job.
I think if you hang out here for a while, you will have an easy access to a broad range of feedback as to your meditation concerns.
How about I qualify my answer by saying in my own experience of attending and sometimes teaching meditation groups and zazen sessions, I've never seen anyone damaged by meditation. Nor have I heard a Teacher say it could be dangerous. But, I did not explore the mystical side of Buddhism like Tibetan with its intense auto-hypnotic visualizations.
In what way is meditation supposed to damage a mind? It's simply not the same intense experience as, say, getting shot at on a battlefield. It's not the same as years of sensory deprivation like solitary confinement. It's sitting around in a safe, relatively comfortable environment and trying to focus on our immediate moment for a few minutes, whether by counting breaths or repeating mantras or whatever.
I think people who see danger in meditation are many times seeing correlation when none exists. But, I might be talking about a different meditative experience than some people have.
A few rare individuals have a bad reaction to meditation. However, for someone like yourself, who has anxiety, I'd recommend it. Meditation, if practiced with the correct breath technique, calms the nervous system, and turns off the stress hormones that cause anxiety. I think you have a lot to gain from it. Try it for a few weeks or months, then get back to us.
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My response here applies only to whether meditation is healthy for everyone and in no way applies to the OP whom I don't know.
All evangelists are deluded because their message is imbued with an inertia which does not account for the endless variables that any truth presents. An evangelist of meditation is no different.
We are pretty much all meditation practitioners here. We are because meditation's results have been proven for us. We either practice with meditative forms that are relatively benign or are in master/deciple relationships that allow for more robust forms.
To qualify meditation as safe for everyone is to think that the variables that allowed it to be safe for us, apply to everyone else. This is where meditative practitioners assume their skills are enough to council those who may need a different type of professional help at least to build a safe platform from which to practice.
There are a lot of folks out there who are hanging on to life by the tips of their fingers while being buffeted by the winds of their own demons. If they don't have enough of a safety margin to also allow for the exposure of what is buffeting them, then the consequences of **just saying that meditation works for everybody **is just too big to warrant that risk, right now.
and everything does change.
Teachers with credible lineages say that meditation is not for everyone, at all times.
Those teachers who don't pay attention to this truth can be often identified by the damaging wake they leave behind them.
Hi @Kruise. Welcome to NewBuddhist!
I too used to suffer quite badly from anxiety. My response was to distract myself with alcohol, television, radio, books, exercise and whatever else I could find (healthy or unhealthy).
About four years ago though I bit the bullet and decided to see a psychiatrist. Talking to someone and unloading a lot of the crap I was carrying around helped me enormously. By chance I also discovered Buddhism and meditation around this time and the two (therapy and meditation) just seemed to go hand in hand.
I stopped therapy after a year but have continued to meditate and follow the Buddhist path. I can honestly now say that my anxiety has gone and I no longer need the distractions I once craved.
We are all different so it might not work for you but I thought if shared my story it may give you some inspiration. Do you have access to a therapist? Can you afford it? I would recommend that if you can as well as meditation.
If you can get hold of some audio meditation cd's then that might be a good starting point for you.
Send me a personal message if you like.
Good luck!
Even my self promoting cushion agrees.
My sister still recovering from mental illness does not presently meditate and indeed more introspection would exasperate her condition. Not everyone is capable of meditating, it would be more like a repressive and self defeating teeth gritting suppression of a need to agitate oneself in mind and body.
However assuming you are not clinically anxious. Not a complete basket case like me :crazy: . there may be value in resuming your meditation without fear and negativity . . .
Some meditation IS dangerous. For example Tummo. There also is yoga with third eye and so forth, but it wasn't an original Buddhist contribution. I have schizoaffective disorder and I don't feel that meditation is dangerous, for me, but it depends how you practice. It's like yoga you shouldn't push more than your body can handle.
My teacher has a disclaimer at the beginning of her course that says the Buddhism she teaches is not a substitution for a therapist or psychiatrist. So if you have anxiety I recommend seeing one of those
Kundalini can be aroused without the neccessary support. No proof here, but I am not going out on too much of a limb imho.
I have a friend who developed Bipolar in her 30s and was raped at some point and has PTSD. She went to a retreat to iirc Joseph Goldstein,and they gave her a teddy bear and did metta meditation rather than on the breath, because (presumably) because she would benefit more from that practice.
Tonglen** is another widespread practice that can be detrimental unless you keep a light touch.
** tonglen is taking another persons suffering for yourself and sending your joy out to others. if it is too 'heavy' you can get depressed, but with a light touch it can lead to joy and equinimity (which you breath out to someone else!)
Thanks for all the help guys! I have meditated before and long ago was messing with that metaphysical crap. But Buddhist philosophy has had such a great positive impact on my life and so did about 5 minutes of meditation each day.