Thursday, July 2, 2015

Self help courses

In addition to things like meditation and life coaches (there seem to be an enormous number of these nowadays), I have come across several organizations that claim to be able to help one get over all sorts of problems in their life and lead more fulfilling lives.  I haven't tried any of them yet, but I'll use this post to list some of them and discuss my opinion on them.

I have only tried meditation and after a little over a decade of regular practice, I still struggle with the same issues that brought me to it--anxiety attacks and various, most likely stress-related, health issues.  Has it helped at all?  At the time I started, I was quite hopeless.  It gave me a lot of hope for a while, but the last few years have been particularly challenging and have made me question its efficacy.  I also know a number of meditators who face similar challenges and who give up meditating altogether.  But given that I was in that situation even before I started meditating, I know for sure that meditation by itself hasn't caused it or made it worse.

Back to the topic of this post, here's the list of several courses I have become aware of over the years.  My main concern with these, based on limited research on the 'net and from talking to a few folks that have participated in them, is that they tend to be cultish and often involve a lot of money and/or ongoing commitment to the program.  For these reasons, I have chosen not to participate in them.
Then there's also techniques such as the Law of Attraction popularized by the book and movie The Secret, and Abraham Hicks, and also teachers like Teal Swan.  A lot of information about these is available for free.

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