Can Meditation Be Bad For You?

Considering my experiences with the Vipassana meditation retreat in Cambodia, I found a lot to relate to in this article from The Humanist:

Can Meditation Be Bad for You?

It refers to Goenke's meditation retreats specifically. As somebody with occasional anxiety problems, I knew I was taking a risk when I clicked the box saying that I was of fit mind when I signed up for the course. The risk was there because I was a complete novice with meditation. Still, I was surprised at how intense the experience of silence for a week and 15 hours of meditation a day can be. I talked to other people after the course was complete. At least two of the five foreigners had had terrifying hallucinations and panic attacks (and at least one Cambodian lady had a panic attack during the retreat).  One was on anxiety medication.

The great advantage of a weeklong retreat in silence with no reading materials or music or eye contact is that it forces you to work really hard at meditation. With that amount of time, any random person can see what meditation is about, what actually doing it feels like. Before the retreat I had read the occasional book on meditation and been bored at my friend's yoga classes once or twice and gone to one or two hour-long sessions and tried to meditate on my own for a total of maybe 15 hours in my life, and I never really felt anything at all. In Cambodia, it took me two full days of complete silence to start to get it.

But I would hazard to say that a week is too long. With such an extent of sensory deprivation, the potential harm for a novice on these retreats is not worth the benefit.


Another thing: The New Scientist's list of uncracked codes! 

Multilingualism in Nepalese Education

I just now got around to reading an article that well summarizes multilingualism and education policies in Nepal:

"Multilingualism In/And Nepalese Education" by Shailaja Jha

From the article:

"[T]he forces of globalization, prevailing myths about the power of English (as if it is a magical potion that will create jobs and opportunities and intellectual progress on its own) make it very difficult for societies to develop educational systems based on their understanding of multilingualism. Due to the globalization of English, parents and teachers are attracted towards giving education to the students in English medium right from the very beginning. They wrongly believe that students will be able to better succeed in the competitive world if they have English proficiency. In reality, it is knowledge and skills that students most need. A lot of research regarding multilingualism shows that supporting children’s first language will enhance the acquisition of the second and third language. Similarly, there is a link between multilingualism and creativity. Multilingualism broadens access to information and offers alternative ways of organizing thoughts. But unfortunately, these realities get lost in the maze of myths about the magic of English."

At the Language Development Center my time was spent organizing the numerous reports indicating that multilingual education was clearly more beneficial for early childhood development and general education. Every linguist I met supported multilingual education at least in theory.

At the school where I was teaching in Nepal I was told that the government test scores had risen every year since the school had switched to become an English Medium school. They were in competition with private schools, who do indeed seem to tout English as a magical potion for success. I got the impression that proponents of multilingual education were seen as elite academics removed from the realities of the education system. Some people I met privately expressed the idea that encouraging "jungle languages" would impede progress and the development of the country and even that it would foment ethnic conflict.

For my job in Texas I interview German-Americans who are the last speakers of the Texas-German dialect. Many regret that they did not pass their native language on to their children. Most of them made a conscious effort to raise their children largely or entirely in English because of the belief that it would make them more successful. They themselves usually spoke German exclusively up until they attended grade school, at which point they were educated entirely in English and were penalized for speaking German at all.