The thing that worries me about these techniques is that they seem to be aimed at making a person satisfied with their environment but very focused on changing their mental and behavioral patterns. This runs counter to my general understanding that people's environments are generally easier to change and have much larger impacts on behavior than are generally recognized.

But it's one's mental and behavioral patterns that generally keep one from actually changing their environment. Many of our patterns are also homeostatic in nature: if the environment takes away one way to get the need met, we find another one. Such patterns are much more difficult to fix environmentally.

Paradoxically, being "satisfied" (i.e. neutral) to one's environment is more conducive to changing it. Stated more precisely, perceiving one's environment as non-threatening is vastly more conducive to changing it, than perceiving it as a threat. Our brains don't work nearly as well (or as creatively) when the environment is perceived to be threatening, relative to one's own resources.

(Btw, Buddhist meditations do include visualizing the loss of valuable things, such as one's own life. Also, the Zen Buddhist's mind is also going to be all over the place during meditation... the objective of the meditation is to see through these thoughts as false hopes and false fears distracting one from the objective neutrality of existence.)