TL;DR

I eliminated my impostor syndrome and dramatically reduced my work-related anxiety. I did this in a way that I think can be replicated.
Different techniques work for different people. If you want to get the benefits of meditation, you should experiment widely, then drill down on the methods that work for you. Don’t just try the same technique for months or years and hope you’ll eventually “get it” or give up and say meditation doesn’t work for you. Explore then exploit.
Loving-kindness meditation is underrated and should be the main-course meditation for a lot of people.
This 55-minute video is the 80/20 of the course. If you like it, you will probably like the rest of the course.
I recommend the Finder’s Course for most people. If you follow the instructions, you will very likely become happier. If you prefer and are good at self-directed learning, you can do your own self-directed course and get similar benefits.

What makes the Finder’s Course different: methodology

Applying science to meditation isn’t unique to Jeffery Martin’s course. Fortunately for the world, there’s a whole movement around this. That being said, I haven’t heard of anything that seems more likely to figure out how to actually achieve enlightenment (or fundamental well-being (FWB) as he calls it, which I prefer).

Most science I know of is doing things like putting meditators in brain scans and seeing if anything is different from regular brains, or running RCTs to see if meditation makes you happier. This is foundational and important to do. However, it’s very black box thinking and doesn’t give you any gears-level understanding of how to achieve fundamental well-being.

Meditation classes usually teach a variety of different techniques. Which techniques are causing the change? Most studies focus on averages, which ignores the thing we’re most interested in - those outliers who don’t just start feeling less stressed but have eliminated suffering. Who are living in states of profound bliss and serenity. How does that show up on a psychological item asking “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?”?

The Finder’s Course on the other hand clearly followed a methodology that was truly trying to solve the problem. The way he did this was to find over 1,000 people saying that they had achieved fundamental well-being, and he went an...

Andy Nguyen

Andy Nguyen

Andy Nguyen

Andy Nguyen