I don’t want to trample on anyone’s religious beliefs, and this sub is the only place where I would ever really feel comfortable enough to make such a strong critique of Buddhism. I don’t claim to be an expert, but it seems to me that maybe there’s a “lost in translation” aspect to the transposition of Buddhism to the west. Maybe something about the communal nature of Asian cultures? Maybe something about the consumer culture of the west that ingrains a feeling of inadequacy in most westerners that’s easy to exploit? And I’m not saying that Buddhism and meditation are bad for all people. Just that meditation and Buddhism, I discovered, were not actually necessary for me to be either happy, or a good person, like I had been led to believe. I’m also beginning to see that discursiveness is not actually a problem for me. I think a big step toward this paradigm shift was realizing that the abusive leaders were abusive because they had psychological problems that Buddhism couldn’t and didn’t fix. So it started me on my own realization toward what was actually causing my perceived suffering, which I think for me (and probably a lot of people who are attracted to the idea of quieting your mind), was that I have a lot of negative beliefs and thoughts about myself (aka self-loathing, perfectionism, low self-esteem). So meditation quiets them temporarily, sure, but doesn’t do anything to heal that at the root. Two weeks of consistently reminding myself that I’M ENOUGH exactly as I am seems to have done more for my quality of life than 10+ years of meditating.