In recent posts, I’ve shared my experience with Kundalini Syndrome (as I initially learned to call it), relayed how I stabilized myself and integrated these experiences, and reviewed the adverse effects of meditation that scientists have begun to document and explore.

What Goes Unsaid

I’ve mentioned before the German government’s study of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which found widespread adverse effects. Similar observations have been made at the group’s headquarters in the U.S. For example, Anthony DeNaro, a law and economics professor and one-time legal counsel for Maharishi International University (affiliated with TM), provided a sworn affirmation in 1986 testifying to the bizarre and impairing effects of TM that he observed while working at the university.

He wrote “that many of his students were spaced-out, unfocused, zombie-like automatons who were incapable of critical thinking. The consequences of regular and intensive meditations were so damaging and disruptive to the nervous system that students could not complete assignments.”

Further, in his role at the university, he was included in internal deliberations of high-ranking TM officials, including the Maharishi himself. DeNaro

“witnessed a system of denial and avoidance, as well as outright lies and deception, to cover up or sanitize serious problems on campus. These included nervous breakdowns, episodes of dangerous and bizarre behavior, threats of and actual attempted suicide and homicidal ideation, psychotic episodes, crime, depression, and manic behavior that accompanied rounding (intensive group meditations).” [i]

Dan Lawton, whose story I shared previously, and who went on to work for a time with Cheetah House, underscores the widespread problem in meditation circles of important information that is too closely held by organizations and leaders. In an April 2022 podcast interview, Dan says:

“This is from Jack Kornfield’s 1979 doctoral thesis … Jack Kornfield, arguably the most famous and influential Buddhist teacher in the US right now. And he’s describing the normal experience that people will have on meditation retreat centers. He says, unusual experiences, visual or auditory aberrations, hallucinations, unusual somatic experiences, and so on are the norm among practiced meditation students. He describes things like heavy sadness, screaming mind trips, incredibly strong hate, violent crying, loss of body awareness, loss of perceptions of hands, body disappearing, the head detaching itself.

“You’re never going to see this when you go to Spirit Rock where Jack Kornfield teaches. Nobody’s ever going to talk about this. But what Jack is saying in 1979 is not that this is just something that occasionally happens. This is the norm. This is the normal progression of meditators. And it’s interesting because in ’79 he’s pushing back against the idea that this is pathology. He’s saying this is a normal part of the spiritual practice. Years later, this has been completely obfuscated and hidden in a lot of places.” [ii]

That certainly squares with my experience.

Bliss, or Obliviousness?

When I started meditating, I had no idea that those kinds of things (or other commonly occurring symptoms) could happen to me. I was a restless idealist, hungry for greater spiritual depth and a sense of purpose — that was the hook for me.

I was curious, open-minded, non-dogmatic. Based on my childhood experience of Christianity — not even a particularly rigid variety as that goes — I did not expect that tradition to meet me where I was. Spiritual practices with ties to Eastern traditions, or multi-spiritual / interfaith practices, or secular / science-backed practices were the ones most likely to appeal to me at that time in my life. I suspect this could be said for a significant portion of Westerners who end up taking up a meditation practice.

​My first impression of meditation came in college, when one of my favorite college professors was a meditator. I read glowing descriptions about the form he practiced (Transcendental Meditation) and how it could benefit a person. Besides, he was kind and cool. (I could not have known, then, how sadly his story would end.)

Almost a decade later, when I began to meditate myself, I learned about the method I took up by reading the meditation book given to me by a fellow traveler. A short book inspired by Gandhi, it gave directions for meditating in the appendix. So, while I was in India learning about Gandhian-style community development, I began meditating Gandhi’s way, using sacred writing as a focal point. The instructions provided for this method of meditation were brief and straightforward. There was no mention of adverse effects.

When I read the same teacher’s book that gave a fuller treatment of meditation, the program was presented as one with a great variety of benefits. According to the book, meditation could help me discover my calling, love more fully, concentrate better, manage stress, overcome anger, live in the present, prevent depression, and “release deep reserves of energy.” (That latter phrase takes on a whole new meaning after my wild kundalini ride!)

Only two of the over two hundred pages of this meditation handbook address dangers in meditation. The writer acknowledges that strong emotions (positive or negative) may arise, that some people may experience unusual inward stimuli, like bright lights, and that those who descend deep into consciousness may have tantalizing experiences, or disorienting ones.

That’s it. No mention of headaches, startling energy sensations, involuntary movements, dissociation, panic, impaired concentration, feeling disembodied, depression, psychosis or any of the dozens of other potentially distressing or impairing symptoms that are absolutely known to occur.

The main guidance offered was to just keep bringing my attention back to the focal point of my meditation; it would be my guide rope as I scaled the mountain of consciousness. In case of fear arising, having a picture of a saint or inspiring person on hand might help too, I read.

Going Deeper

What about the retreat experience? I don’t remember any communication that would prompt people to self-select out of retreats based on risk factors for adverse effects, or put leaders in a position to recognize people better served by other practices. Nor were there any acknowledgment statements or waivers that let you know that there was any risk of experiencing adverse effects.

Instead, as I went deeper into the practice and community, I got these messages: [iii]

• “if meditation feels difficult, that could be a sign of progress (!)”
• The path requires training the mind, training the senses, training the will, training one’s desires; implicitly, outcomes are in your control (with caveat that advancement takes patience and grace)
• Consult established meditators at the ashram for personalized guidance if issues or questions come up in your practice
• This teacher’s method of meditation was deliberately designed to be gentle and gradual. Keeping meditation to 30 minutes was also intentional.
• Adding a second 30-min period of meditation in the evening will move you more swiftly toward your spiritual desires.
• “No matter what, get your meditation in”
• Keep the duration of meditation sessions to the amount prescribed by [center] mentors, no more and no less”
• The takeaways communicated included these:· Interpret any “difficulty” in meditation (whatever that might mean) as positive.
• Know that you can get what you want from the practice — it’s on you.
• The retreat leaders have the necessary knowledge to guide you. First and foremost, you should listen to them. (Don’t make decisions independently based on your own experience).
• Implicit also is that other meditation teachers and forms of meditation — ones that are not so carefully graduated and contained — may create problems you’d prefer to avoid. But not this practice. It was designed to be safe.

Underlying Problems

As it turns out, the problems I encountered were not unique to my meditation group. My experience illustrates some of the ways that numerous teachers / programs fall short of offering transparent information and skilled guidance:

1. Lack of informed consent about potential adverse effects. Not on the web site of my group, nor in the books, nor at the retreats, nor in the periodicals was I meaningfully informed of potential adverse effects. Neither before I started meditating — as it should have been — nor after my practice was well established.

​Alas, this seems to be a common pattern among teachers and retreat centers. Ex-TM teacher Aryeh Siegel remembers that adverse effects were not brought up in introductory lectures on the method — even though the organization is clearly aware that things like pain and disconcerting things occur, as teachers are taught how to respond when those concerns are raised. [iv]
​
If you are a meditator or have gone on retreats, did you hear any of this? And if so, at what point in your involvement?

2. Lack of screening. Unless it was done strictly one-to-one, on the basis of what meditators shared privately with mentors, there was no screening done in my group. That level of connection did not occur until one was pretty embedded with the group. Certainly at the outset, upon registering for my first retreat, there was no systematic gathering of information by which they might assess individual risk.

I haven’t come across any examples of meditation programs that actively screen participants — not in the health / mental health fields, much less in meditation centers. (I mean, you’d have to acknowledge adverse effects before it would make sense to screen people for risk…)

Willoughby Britton, the clinical psychologist researching effects of meditation, noted that

“no one has been asking if there are any potential difficulties or adverse effects, and whether there are some practices that may be better or worse-suited [for] some people over others… [even though] the main delivery system for Buddhist meditation in America is actually medicine and science, not Buddhism.”  [v]

Not that screening could remove all risk. Most of the meditators interviewed for the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study had no pre-existing psychiatric conditions, yet almost all of them experienced adverse effects.

“Adverse effects routinely occur,” Britton observed, “even under optimal conditions, with healthy people meditating correctly under supervision.”  [vi]

3. Lack of skilled support for people who do experience adverse effects. As I described in Is This Normal?, I was referred to someone outside the ashram community for support. Even though I faithfully followed his recommendations, I didn’t see any substantial change in my kundalini symptoms. And although I later learned that some of my peers had at times been told by mentors to stop meditating for a period, no one ever told me this. They absolutely should have!

Aryeh Siegel relays that Transcendental Meditation teachers were trained in a checking procedure, which they used systematically to guide meditators in correct practice.

“Major sections of the process were designed to deal with the meditator’s reporting any of a wide variety of experiences that could be deemed distressing,” writes Siegel. “Shaking and body movements, as well as overpowering thoughts, while rare, are common enough even during the first few meditations that an entire section of TM’s checking procedure is devoted to these severe symptoms.”

Siegel was taught to downplay anything disconcerting meditators might bring up from their experience. “Something good is happening” was the party line. (Sounds familiar to me.)  [vii]

Alas, Siegel notes, this rote approach often did little to help. “If a person was having problems, the proper intervention was to use the checking notes to enable them to have a correct experience of meditation. Period.” In the most severe cases, the teacher could ask the meditator if they had seen a doctor. That was all the supposed meditation expert had to offer.

Willoughby Britton not only studies mindfulness and meditation, she is a trained mindfulness teacher herself. Britton recalls, “I was taught how to respond to almost anything [in the same way], which is, well, how are you relating to this?” Though Britton wasn’t taught this one herself, pointing to the meditator’s ego as the source of any problems is a response troubled meditators coming to Cheetah House frequently got from their teachers. Is it any wonder people suffering from adverse effects turn somewhere else for help?  [viii]

4. Promoting practices that increase risk. Longer periods of meditation, longer retreats, and longer tenure as a meditator all seem to correlate with a higher likelihood of adverse effects. While my group avoided the pitfalls of excess meditation periods and drawn-out retreats, many retreat centers and teachers do not. I’m not a Buddhist meditator, but numerous consecutive hours meditating and long retreat periods appear to be common in many of these settings.

My group promoted something else that I believe also increases risk: a devotional approach. It doesn’t matter whether the devotion is to a particular divine/symbolic figure (e.g., Jesus, Krishna, the Divine Mother), or to one’s teacher — the latter certainly turned out to be a theme in my group, once you got close. Following the way of bhakti (devotion / heart-centered), as opposed to jnana (knowledge / mind), or karma (service / action), was lifted up in my group as the fastest and surest way to progress.

“For those who set their hearts on me and worship me with unfailing devotion and faith, the Way of Love leads sure and swift to me.” (so says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita)

Even if one does not have a particular object of devotion, I believe a zealous attitude about one’s practice and spiritual path may increase the risk of adverse effects.

A related multiplier of risk, in my mind, is surrender of agency to the object of one’s devotion, or to one’s practice generally.

“Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender in love, because there follows immediate peace.” (Bhagavad Gita)

By surrender of agency, I mean abandonment of one’s own observations, direct experience, judgment, and critical thinking. In a culty situation, you are likely to be guided toward surrender to your teacher or the organization generally, whether straightforwardly or in subtle ways. (I described a surprise one I experienced here.)

I never meditated for long consecutive periods; I stuck to 30 minute sessions. But I was very earnest. After a while, to my surprise, I also discovered a vein of devotion. And I was a long-term meditator. For me, even without any prior psychological risk factors, these things tipped me over into adverse effects.

5. Pointing fingers (evading responsibility). When I shared my “adverse effects” with mentors in my group, it was implied that this experience was caused by the energy worker, and not directly related to meditation. (I had mentioned that when the spontaneous movements first started up, it was during a session with an energy worker.)
​
However, the partner of the meditation center’s founder, who led the center after his death, acknowledged to me that she’d been hearing similar reports from people around the globe following their methods. It came off in an “aw shucks, what a surprise!” way, which strikes me now as false naivete.

The founder surely knew about these “side effects” of meditation that are so common among long-term meditators. Though he did not have a lineage per se (unless you count the supposedly spontaneously illumined grandparent), he had studied up from texts and teachers down the ages in his culture, where the kundalini phenomenon is well known.

​I assume this was why he so carefully designed his program to be gradual and gentle — to reduce the risk of weird stuff. His students would not have been warning retreat-goers not to seek or glom onto strange experiences if they were completely ignorant of them. Yet, the people I was supposed to turn to either acted bewildered, or pointed the finger elsewhere, before passing me onto someone else for support.

Apparently this is not an uncommon occurrence among meditation teachers and centers. As a mindfulness teacher, Britton was taught a limited repertoire of responses to problems.

“All of them,” she says, “are ways of preserving the pristine category of the practice… they all go back to the same source, which is the problem is you [the meditator] — such as you have resistance.”
​

​Britton sees a parallel with rape culture, in the way meditation teachers — and even doctors and therapists — turn meditation problems back on the meditator.

"There’s so much of the victim blaming culture that is woven into all of this,” she observes. “Which of course then just shuts people down. [And] the dangers of whatever practice it is — they’re going to go under reported.” [ix]

These are common ways many meditation teachers respond when students report difficult experiences: reiterating the basic instructions (implying the student has gotten off course in their technique), chalking it up to ego, using thought-terminating phrases (“Why do you think you’re responding that way?”), or asking if the meditator has seen a doctor (implying they have an independent medical or mental health problem).

What’s less likely to happen? Suggesting the practice needs to be adapted to the individual. Or stopped for a while. Or that perhaps it’s not the right practice for them at all, and here are some alternatives they might consider to help them meet their objectives. (Does this ever happen?)

That’s what a helping professional would do if we were talking about medication, or stress management in general, or any number of other things. Why is it different with meditation?

Oblivious Experts

By the way, Britton and her colleagues at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, though the best known, are not the only researchers to have documented adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. In 2020, a Scandinavian psychiatric journal published a meta-analysis of meditation’s adverse effects, based on the research literature then available.

Difficulties like anxiety, depression and cognitive impairments were common, registering in 65% of studies. (I don’t know whether the studies asked proactively about adverse effects, or whether they relied on subjects taking the initiative to self-report them.) The piece echoed what Britton has long said: not only that such effects are common, but that they can occur whether or not someone has prior mental health history. [x]

Is the obliviousness of “experts” around adverse effects of meditation just random? I don’t think so.

In my next piece in this series, I describe how we got here — to the point where meditation is mainstream, but nobody knows the trouble it brings — or at least, few people talk about it openly.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The End of Silence ... All the Feels ... Moving On from Your Spiritual Teacher
​
Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i]  Anthony DeNaro as quoted in Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018 (originally from TranceNet online)
[ii] From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice; that was part 2 of Rachel Bernstein’s interview with Dan Lawton on her IndcotriNation podcast; part 1 was on The Messy World of Mindfulness
[iii]  All quotes and paraphrasing in section are taken from my retreat notes, ca. 2002–2003
[iv] Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018
 [v]  As quoted in Tomas Rocha’s 2014 piece for The Atlantic on “The Dark Knight of the Soul”
[vi]  As quoted in David Kortava’s 2021 piece for Harper's Magazine on “Lost in Thought”
[vii]  Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018
[viii]  From Invisible Virtue, a 2022 episode of the IndoctriNation podcast in which host Rachel Bernstein interviews Britton; that was part 1 of their conversation — part 2 on The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness is also eye-opening
[ix]  Ibid.
[x] “Lost in Thought” by David Kortava, Harper's Magazine, 2021

I have shared how I calmed the kundalini fire brought on by meditation, and how I began to get more insight into some of my strange experiences.

As it turns out, I was lucky. My experience was relatively mild compared to what could have been.

Four Stories

1 — Kimberley had a series of “other worlds” experiences, after which she became physically ill and exhausted. In this period of spiritual emergency, she was unable to work and lost her home. She moved in with family for a time. Although she eventually established an independent life again, including getting a new job and place to live, she remained unwell emotionally and physically. She ended up collapsing after a few weeks at the new job. (From In Case of Spiritual Emergency by Catherine G Lucas)

2 — Dan Lawton was “an unabashed evangelist for mindfulness” for over a decade. He’d had a regular meditation practice, including attending a dozen silent retreats, and for four years was a full-time teacher of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Dan had experienced a number of significant benefits from his practice.

But then in the midst of a retreat in North Carolina, he “split apart,” experiencing a “hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia.” While the retreat leaders were kind and offered suggestions for altering his meditation practice, as he explained to them, “I couldn’t stop being mindful or aware of everything that was going on within my mind and body, and the awareness felt like it was choking me to death.” The effects of the retreat did not abate as he recuperated at his sister’s for a week, nor when he returned home.

“In the months after the retreat,” Dan writes, “I suffered from symptoms diagnosed by a therapist as post-traumatic stress disorder. I frequently experienced involuntary convulsions and simple tasks like cooking a meal induced panic attacks. I was occasionally so overwhelmed by my bodily sensations that I was unable to speak, and sometimes had problems differentiating myself from my surroundings.”

​

​Dan had no history of trauma before the retreat, nor any psychotic episodes. Through a variety of means — including, crucially, stopping his meditation practice — he found his way back to stability in time. He still uses the tools of mindfulness. He also strongly advocates transparency about spiritual practices, including their negative effects. (Dan’s story, When Buddhism Goes Bad)

3 — Seeking a restorative experience, Megan Vogt went to a silent retreat at a vipassana meditation center in Delaware in 2017. A week in, the twenty-five-year-old was experiencing bliss. But soon after, her mental and emotional states began to unravel. As she left the meditation center with her family at the end of the ten day period, she was overcome with a compulsion to end her life. A week in the psych. unit of a hospital seemed to help stabilize her; her psychotic symptoms were receding.

Her family kept a close eye on her when she returned home, and tried to connect her with psychiatrists for continued support. Megan resumed meditating. But things still weren’t right with her. Tragically, a few months after her intensive meditation experience, she was found dead in her truck, a suicide note left behind for her family. (David Kortava relays her story more fully in this 2021 piece in Harper’s.)
​
4 — Another young adult, David, told writer Tomas Rocha about a divine experience he had at a meditation retreat, describing the process initially as “the best thing that had ever happened” to him. He turned down a spot at law school while on this high. But over the ensuing months, the meaning drained out of life.

​Trips to Asia seeking guidance made no difference. Still trying to re-center himself, David went to a retreat at a nonsectarian Buddhist meditation center in Washington. It was a wild ride for him — including confusion, terror, and thoughts and feelings he did not want to experience but could not stop. Retreat leaders had only verbal reassurances to offer. For effective support, David wound up at Cheetah House, “a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices.” (Rocha’s 2014 piece in The Atlantic)

Not Just Outliers

But those are only anecdotes. Some might suggest they are the outliers, the exception to what usually happens.

As researchers like to say, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a few people who meditated went on to have difficult experiences does not necessarily mean meditation caused those experiences. Such instances are easily dismissed by supposing that the individuals in question had latent psychological problems that happened to come to a head during/after their meditation experience. What about hard data?

I was intrigued to learn of research on Transcendental Meditation (TM). I had some early exposure to TM, and that method of meditation is in some ways similar to the kind I practiced for years.

The German government completed a research project on TM in Germany in 1980, spurred on by ex-meditators (and spouses and parents of meditators) reporting troubling symptoms to authorities that they believed originated with their TM practice. Per Aryeh Siegel, the German study is “the most thorough study of TM regarding the comprehensive study protocols used and the preparation of interviewers who conducted the study” (Transcendental Deception, 2018).

As Siegel relays, “many meditators experienced severe mental disturbances, including disturbed sleep, anguish, problems with concentration, hallucinations, and feelings of isolation, depression, and over-sensitivity… [as well as] detrimental effects on decision-making… Whether they were ordinary meditators who had little contact with [the TM organization] or more committed, many of their complaints were similar.”

The investigators wrote: “The mainly positive experiences in the earlier stages (pictures, feelings of happiness) are replaced in time — according to reports of the ex-meditators — by terrifying images and feelings of fear or anguish.”

​A majority of meditators (63%) noted physical complaints associated with meditating, including digestive issues, headaches, insomnia, and neck pain. Psychological problems were even more prevalent, occurring in 76% of cases.While a small number had pre-existing illnesses — which got worse after starting to meditate — most of the cases were new disorders or illnesses, with 43% of participants requiring psychiatric or medical treatment to address them. The most common issues were fatigue (63%), anxiety (52%), depression (45%), nervousness (39%), and regression (39%). (Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018)

To me this suggests that if a person took up TM for stress relief or emotional support, the cure is liable to be worse than the disease. Yikes!

Dark Nights in Mainstream Meditation

But TM is only one form of meditation, and not among the most prevalent forms practiced in the West. Plus, it is arguably quite culty. (Patrick Ryan says as much here, or check out Aryeh Siegel’s aforementioned, thoroughly researched book to assess from fuller information.)

Mindfulness is all over pop culture these days. It’s not just a thing at Buddhist retreat centers or sanghas anymore — ‘secular’ versions are widely promoted in mainstream health and mental health fields, and the language of mindfulness has filtered into everyday lingo. The meditation and mindfulness revolution could not have gone on this long if it had the same sort of shadow side as TM… could it?

Fortunately, the question of adverse effects is starting to get some attention among researchers. Clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton is a pioneer in this area, investigating the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other emotional disturbances. Although they look at all kinds of effects, she and her team at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory have become particularly known for their work on adverse effects — likely because attending to undesired effects has been relatively uncommon among researchers.

Britton was herself an avid meditator, leading her to choose a meditation-related topic for her PhD dissertation. She studied the effects of a meditation practice on sleep quality. At that time, it was commonly believed that meditation improved sleep quality. But what Britton found when gathering data in the sleep lab was that people who meditated more than thirty minutes per day slept worse — with less total sleep and lower sleep quality. In fact, the more they meditated, the worse their sleep.

​As an evangelist for meditation, Britton was flummoxed. For years she opted not to publish her data. In 2010 — a few years after a meditation teacher told her at a retreat, “everyone knows that if you go and meditate, and you meditate enough… you stop sleeping” — Britton decided to share her data publicly. (as relayed in Kortava piece)
​
From there, she started talking more to the people who ran retreats, curious about what else she didn’t know about potential adverse effects of meditation. She heard horror stories at every center, with common threads being impairments in cognitive functioning and psychotic breaks — either short-term or long-lasting.

Britton and her colleagues at the lab are best known for their groundbreaking study, called The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (originally the Dark Night project). They surveyed the range of meditation-related effects described by Buddhist practitioners in the West. Their aim was to learn about how these effects impact practitioners’ lives, and to gain insight into the causes, prevention, and integration of experiences that might include unexpected, challenging, difficult, distressing, or functionally impairing effects.

Subjects consisted of meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan traditions of Buddhism. People whose challenging experiences could be accounted for by other causes were excluded, as were those with mixed practice histories beyond the three forms of Buddhism named above. Since the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was designed to shed light on the adverse effects that other research may not ask about, and that are often under-reported by practitioners, people with no adverse effects were also excluded. (Notably, only 4 of 73 meditators who initially completed interviews were free of adverse effects to report — this means that 95% of the people in the original pool of meditators and teachers HAD experienced adverse effects.) The final sample size was 60 people.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLUS ONE in 2017. (One lay-friendly article summarizing findings is here.) A key deliverable is a taxonomy of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning. Researchers identified seven domains, each including up to 15 symptoms, with a total of 59 symptoms attributable to meditation.

​Some examples within each domain:

1. Affective: flattened emotions, irritability, depression, traumatic flashbacks, dramatic mood swings, fright, suicidality
2. Cognitive: poorer executive functioning (concentration and memory), heightened clarity, vivid imagery, disintegration of conceptual meaning structures
3. Somatic: fatigue, headaches and pressure, involuntary movements, pain, energy sensations, hotness or coldness
4. Perceptual: derealization (the world feels unreal or dreamlike), hallucinations, extreme sensitivity to sound or light
5. Sense of self: feeling disembodied, loss of sense of agency, altered perception of boundary between self and other
6. Conative: loss of ability to experience pleasure, loss of motivation, change of goals
7. Social: difficulty transitioning from intensive practice to normal daily life, increased sociality, impaired ability to work

For a complete list of symptoms in each domain, and narrative summaries, see Cheetah House’s Symptoms List.

Beyond Symptoms

Besides the development of the taxonomy, notable findings include (quotes directly from the study):

• “The vast majority (88%) of participants reported that challenging or difficult meditation experiences bled over into daily life or had an impact on their life beyond a meditation retreat or beyond a formal practice session.”
• “Each category was reported by an average of 20 practitioners and 5 experts, indicating high consistency across participants.”
• Whether people regarded the experience as positive and/or negative varied, depending in part on their frameworks of interpretation.
• “The associated level of distress and functional impairment [ranged] from minimal and transient to severe and lasting.”

• ​“In order to determine what variables affect the valence [positive or negative] and impact of a given experience, the study also identified 26 categories of influencing factors across 4 domains, including factors related to the practitioner, the practice, relationships, and health behaviors.”
• The results challenge “common causal attributions, such as the assumption that meditation-related difficulties only happen to individuals with a pre-existing condition (psychiatric or trauma history), who are on long or intensive retreats, who are poorly supervised, who are practicing incorrectly, or who have inadequate preparation. However, this is not to say that these and other factors do not play a role.”

It’s worth reiterating that 95% of the initial interviewees (not the final subject pool) had experienced adverse effects from meditation.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…

So, adverse experiences are not just rare results of meditation when practiced in extreme ways or by particularly vulnerable people.

Challenging experiences are well-known in traditions with a long history of contemplative practices, where such effects are an expected part of the spiritual journey. Even casual users of meditation apps have been showing up at Cheetah House programs needing crisis support. (Dan Lawton met a number of people who suffered after using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.)

And while more study is needed, adverse effects are now increasingly documented not only anecdotally, but through well-designed research. (That includes the “weird energy stuff” I described from my own experience in previous posts… the researchers call them Energy-Like Somatic Experiences and they were reported by over half of people interviewed.)

​That leaves the question, why is there so much talk about the potential benefits of meditation and other spiritual practices — and so little acknowledgment of the predictable, potentially problematic effects that many people will experience?

Given that adverse effects are common among serious or long-term meditators, why don’t we hear more about them — and before we are in deep? Why don’t meditation programs come with a list of possible side effects and contraindications, similar to prescription medications, so people can make informed choices?
​
In the next installment in this series, I explore further five common problems in the ways meditation is often taught.

​Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini … Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance … Surprises, Blinders and Lies … What I Found

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.