Yet, there are serious problems with the way meditation has spread. In a field that is newer — and which some governments, like mine in the freedom-of-religion U.S., are loathe to regulate — those who teach these practices are not systematically held accountable for doing so in responsible ways.
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Financial pressures, social dynamics, and ideological commitments can further obscure the truth about various practices. Programs with a veneer of secularity can be just as susceptible to these pressures as overtly religious ones.

The result? People who turn to meditation looking for peace or better health sometimes end up experiencing, instead, a variety of adverse effects. These can range from moderate physiological and psychological problems clear through to psychotic breaks.

Undesired effects tend to be interpreted by teachers as positive signs, or downplayed, when they are talked about openly at all. And there is often little real support when they occur — as they predictably will, for some portion of practitioners. (I have elsewhere described my own dark night, and my recovery process.)

On top of all this, some opportunities to learn and practice meditation operate as doorways into high control groups. Vulnerable people may be drawn into deeper levels of involvement, where the risk of coercion and harm increases. Such teachers or groups will always present themselves as there to serve YOU — even when they will actually cannibalize your time, energy, money, reverence and idealism for their own benefit.

What can be done? Here, I offer suggestions for seekers.

Know Thyself

Reflect on what you are looking for, and how you would know if you found it — ideally, before you check out a new group or program. You might journal or talk to a friend, using prompts such as these:

1. What needs are you seeking to meet? Write or speak of the ones that are most top of mind for you. Next, it may be helpful to go through a list, such as the needs list here from the nonviolent communications model. Identify any more subtle needs that might well lead you to respond to a group or program that speaks to those needs.

2. What sources of authority do you find credible? For some people, direct experience or scientific study might be most credible. For others, a particular scriptural source or lineage provides assurance. What role does the testimony of others play for you? Peers or role models? Other sources of authority you rely upon?

It may be helpful to rank trusted sources in order of importance to you. Likewise, you can explore how you will evaluate the validity of each kind of authority that you trust. For example, if a particular program or group is promoted through science, how can you discern the independence of the researchers, the quality of study design, and the rigor of the analysis?

3. Identify your internal red flags. How do concerns or gut feelings show up in your mind or body? When has this internal warning system proven reliable for you before — accurately telling you whether a person, group, or activity is problematic for you? If this is an area you want/need to strengthen, you can ask a friend, therapist or other trusted person to be your gut-check buddy.

​4. What do you believe to be the appropriate role of a teacher or leader? Explore this on paper, or with a friend. If you are later exposed to other ideas of how a teacher or leader should function in relation to you, you’ll have a baseline to return to for comparison. This doesn’t mean you can never change your mind. But you’ll be less likely to shift your understanding imperceptibly, without even realizing it, and without pondering the implications.

Thinking through these core questions early on in your engagement with a practice or group is akin to getting a vaccine — it primes your system to recognize what is foreign or dangerous to you, and be ready to respond swiftly and effectively if/when that happens.

Use Your Guardrails

As you get involved — or get more deeply involved — with a particular meditation group, practice or program, observe how it functions, and how it is (or isn’t) working for you.

Periodically reflect on what you witness, and how it fits with your inner compass:
Is this group/program meeting the needs you originally set out to meet? Has it made you aware of any other needs that you now realize you have? What keeps you coming back? (see needs list)

What sources of authority does the group/program draw upon in support of its approach? How does this square with those sources of authority that you find credible? Is there any gap between what is officially communicated vs. what is actually practiced? Are you reoriented toward particular sources of authority over time?

Is anything tripping your inner warning system? Keep a record of any such instances. Pay attention to any patterns. Do NOT dismiss your spidey sense.
Reflecting on these questions is like giving yourself a booster shot against groups or practices that would be unhealthy for you. It’s a good idea to do it annually, just like you might for the flu.

Do Some Digging

Ask teaching individuals or entities questions like these:

1 — What should I know before I take up this practice?

2 — What kind of training have you received to teach it?

3 — What adverse effects may arise as a result of this practice? (Are there side effects, beyond the results you are aiming for, that a practitioner might find concerning or that might negatively impact their daily functioning? What are they? How can I reduce the risk of that happening?)

4 — Are there any people who would be better suited to a different practice? If so, what are the criteria for determining that?

5 — What kind of training do you have to support people who do experience adverse effects?

6 — Who would you turn to for support if you realized you were out of your depth in a particular situation?

7 — What systems of accountability are in place in this tradition or for this practice?

There should be real answers to these questions.
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​​In addition to the substance of the answers, pay attention to how the questions are received. Does the teacher or organizational representative respond with warmth and thoughtfulness? Do they become irritated or flustered? Do they deflect, or blow you off?

Does the person seem aware of their own limits? Do they exhibit humility — are they able to say, “I don’t know, but I have some ideas of where I would go to find out”?

You can also do some digging online. Web sites like Charity Navigator provide some organizational accountability metrics — you can see how your group scores on things like the independence of its governing board, and reviews or audits of its financial statements.

Your favorite search engine is also your friend in research. See if anything noteworthy turns up when you combine the name of the organization, teacher, or meditation method with words like scandal, abuse, suicide, and misconduct. One bad review shouldn’t necessarily taint the whole enterprise, but if serious allegations arise — and especially if there’s a pattern — pay attention.

Gauge Group Health on Key Criteria

Go slowly, and watch for where the group or program falls in terms of its degree of health or risk. Along with whatever else seems noteworthy to you, following are some things to watch for. (A group could fall anywhere on the spectrum between each set of poles.)

Encourages OR discourages awareness of your own feelings, use of your own critical thinking, and trust in your own direct experience and judgment. This can be subtle. My old group instructed that “strong emotions create a false self” (from retreat notes), with the founder consistently teaching that you are not the body, you are not the mind, but the timeless Self within.

The metaphysics of being not (just) body or mind appealed to me at the time, but I see now how such teaching could be used on a practical level to encourage people to ignore what their own bodies and emotions tell them. Similarly, the idea that “every movement in the mind is insecurity,” also taught at that retreat, could easily be applied in ways that stifle legitimate questions and doubts.

Promotes reasonable goals VERSUS sky-high aspirations. Sometimes a group will emphasize practical benefits at first, but eventually shift the focus to much loftier — perhaps impossible — goals. Illumination, nirvana, perfect peace that never leaves you, the end of sorrow, the cessation of suffering.
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​Mere mortals may get exhilarating glimpses of these, with or without a spiritual practice. But if someone coaxes you to believe that you must keep going until (and that you have failed unless) you abide in spiritual perfection — well, they are setting a trap for you that isn’t about what’s best for you. It’s about keeping you dependent on them.
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Points to ponder VERSUS indoctrination. Are participants free to adopt only some of the teachings offered or practices taught, or must it all go together as a package? It’s helpful to be familiar with subtle forms of persuasion, social pressure, and positive or negative reinforcement that controlling groups use to guide people toward the correct behaviors, and by extension, the correct beliefs. (Here’s a brief primer on invisible levers of influence, and how cognitive dissonance usually gets resolved.)

Supports development of community in ways that affirm the whole person, VERSUS supports relationships only on the basis of the shared practice/doctrine/etc. — and conditional upon adhering to group culture. “Love-bombing” is a classic red flag for high control groups, but I think it can be hard to distinguish healthy from unhealthy groups based solely on the behaviors that welcome and affirm people. Almost all human social groups, including sound ones, will try to give participants a positive sense of community and caring as they get involved. (Why would one return otherwise?)

The trick with a controlling group is that positive attention is especially strong for newer people, and attention may become more scarce depending on whether the teacher/group is getting what they want from you, and has hope of getting more. If you waver in your compliance with the group’s belief system, spiritual practices, inside language and so on — or they discover you have little time, money, leadership to give to the group — a problematic group will get stingier with its attention to you. They may become cooler when you do connect.

One clue as to the group’s real relational bent is how the group speaks of people who have come and gone from their orbit. Do they trust that each person will find the right path for them — meaning, people who left simply discerned for themselves that this wasn’t the best fit for them? Or do group representatives indicate, however blatantly or subtly, that anyone who left THIS path is to be pitied (bless their hearts)?

Some groups actively shun ex-members, and speak ill of them to current members. Others barely speak of such people at all, as if they didn’t exist. My old meditation group literally air-brushed former ashram members out of photos after the first big exodus. Interesting choice, eh?

Has a balanced approach toward ego, encouraging healthy humility, along with self-acceptance and self-love VERSUS cultivating self-abnegation, and a humility that may be either performative, or so sincerely extreme as to undermine self-worth and well-being. Other points from my group’s retreats illustrate this one: “humiliation helps dissolve ego”; “if you are agitated, a samskara is involved” (samskara = a well-established way of thinking/being, generally pointing to patterns like anger, fear, and greed, which the group regards as negative; the root of all samskaras was said to be ego).

Actually, humiliation is NEVER constructive. Humiliation is a form of social-psychological violence. And one can be agitated for very good reasons, that need to be recognized and acted upon — such as being mistreated by a person or group.

Permeability VERSUS purity and policing boundaries. A healthy group/teacher/program acknowledges that there are many sources of wisdom in the world, and that it does not have a monopoly on spiritual treasure. It does not try to control whether or how people engage with other practices or other inspirational materials.

At the other extreme, a cultish group will guide people toward exclusive loyalty to its particular teacher / teachings. It will concern itself much with maintaining the purity of its own programs. It may not even trust its own leaders to lead, without falling back on the words or example of its founder(s).

To what degree does a group or program function as an open system, interconnected with a wider web of wisdom, vs. a closed system, that has all the answers unto itself — and even sees the outside as a distraction or a threat?

Light and limber VERSUS tight and rigid. A healthy organization may be serious about its mindfulness mission, but it will also create a community in which joy, laughter, and authentic connection can flourish. Spirituality need not be the enemy of fun!
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If you realize that you are overly constrained by the group — or by the norms you have internalized, and which you especially know to follow when together — that’s a red flag. One way this might show up is by feeling more free, more able to breathe deep and be spontaneously yourself, when you leave a retreat or sangha session and return to your own safe space.

It can also be telling to compare long-timers with newer folks. And not just the ones that the organization selects to represent the program to newcomers in retreats and workshops — those are likely to be polished people who can smile and chat winningly over meals or down time.

Instead, if you have the chance to get to know people who have been involved for years, and who are *not* presenters or teachers, their demeanor may tell you more about the heart of the organization. It’s a bad sign when people become more colorless and zombie-like the longer they are involved, or the closer to the inner circle they get.
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Transparency and truthfulness VERSUS opaqueness and deception. Is the practice secular or religious? (Personally, when it comes to claims that mindfulness programs are secular vs. patently or latently Buddhist, I consider a dose of skepticism healthy. More in The Accidental Buddhist.) Is the program genuinely inter-spiritual, or are all traditions filtered through the worldview of the founder’s tradition?

Is the group honest and forthcoming about the founder’s past, and the organization’s? Are they aware and up front about the risks of adverse effects associated with the practices they teach? What about priorities, finances, and decision-making structures? (If you haven’t already checked them out online, it doesn’t take long.)

This one can be tricky to suss out, because you only know what is shown to you, or what you can readily find. If it turns out that a teacher or group has omitted significant, problematic information from its story, that’s a big red flag. A healthy group can learn from its trials and tribulations, and share openly how it has grown as a result. Unless it is focused on perfection, and lifts up teacher(s) as examples of such, it will not need to cover up a one-off past lapse of its founder(s).

A classic culty behavior is not only to gloss over or suppress troubling information, but to tell followers that ignoring concerns is actually in their own best (spiritual) interests. Think about that, though. Can the truth ever be against a participant’s long-term, deepest interests? Certainly, investigating the truth could be threatening to a group — which would be telling.
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​Real-world accountability VERSUS internal ethics alone. Another dimension of open vs. closed systems is structures of accountability.
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Consider well-regulated fields like education, law, medicine, counseling and social work. These are open systems with healthy boundaries. Each has structures that provide such essential safeguards as credentialing processes, codes of conduct, continuing education, training specifically in ethics and boundaries, mentoring and peer support, bodies charged with intervening when a professional goes off the rails, and perhaps even resources to support those harmed.

Such structures and processes benefit professionals and their institutions, as well as those they serve. They are win-win.

Religious denominations may fulfill similar functions for clergy, other religious professionals, lay leaders and congregations. I have watched my own tradition — among the most radical to grow out of the Protestant Reformation — develop clearer boundary expectations for professionals, and more/better institutional support for misconduct victims, just over the past couple of decades.

However, even among many long-established traditions, prevention and accountability remain growing edges when it comes to misconduct by those in positions of authority. Surely every Catholic, Southern Baptist, and news-consuming American knows this by now.

Traditions that are hierarchical in their structure and culture may carry a particularly high risk of papering over problems, as the good old boys’ network lingers on. People in non-denominational churches are at higher risk still — there is not even the pretense of protective practices. Also at higher risk are those in cultures that place a high value on charisma and on traditional, alpha-male models of leadership.

It strikes me that many meditation retreat centers may be in a similar position to charismatic, nondenominational churches. The meditation center I once worked for certainly was (and still is, it appears). However egalitarian their messaging or philosophy, a group that lionizes certain teacher(s), evangelizes their meditation program, and lacks any higher or external authority beyond the center and its leader(s), is ripe for misconduct — and for cover-ups in the name of protecting the mission.

​The counter-argument would be that a true teacher — perhaps an illumined person — has all the moral compass that is needed inside, or from God. But a long string of guru scandals tells me that spiritual teachers of meditation and yoga are no more immune to the corruptions of power than have been the countless priests and pastors who have been exposed as wrongdoers in this century.

If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s time for meditation centers and groups to come together and develop the type of infrastructure that religious denominations at their best have provided. (If that *has* happened, I’d love to hear about it!)

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.

I will write separately for teachers or teaching organizations, with suggestions for those that want to maximize potential benefits, and reduce the risk of potential harms, that are associated with meditation and mindfulness practices. The question of external regulation deserves attention too.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
How Was Meditation Mainstreamed? … The Accidental Buddhist

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

Eventually I would come to know it as Kundalini Syndrome — language I had to go out and find for myself. What I almost didn’t notice at first became as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth, and equally solitary.

It started with my head tipping back, imperceptibly, during meditation. This was ~2003ish. I would notice it sometimes when I came out of meditation in my darkened room at home. The topic came up in a retreat workshop — I don’t remember now whether I asked about it, or whether one of the leaders observed it during our group meditation sessions.

In any case, I was encouraged to see this as a positive sign — not something to be concerned about, so long as I did not allow myself to be distracted. No particular framework was shared for understanding why this would happen or what it would mean. At the time, I took that as consistent with the organization’s general attitude of downplaying woo-woo stuff in order to focus on the positive, practical benefits of meditation.

There was also a period, around the same time as I recall, when violent images would frequently arise in my mind during meditation. I wasn’t sure what to make of it — it felt troubling. As I’d been instructed, I just continued to bring my mind back to my meditation focal point whenever it was interrupted by such imagery.
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​My sense of what was happening was that my mind was cleansing itself of all the negative imagery I had taken in over the years through television and movies. A kind of vomiting up and out from consciousness, not pleasant in the moment — but better afterwards.

Again, I don’t recall being offered any particular lens for interpreting this experience. The founder of the meditation center had long taught to take good care of your mind, with healthy recreation and mental inputs, just as one should offer sound nutrition to the body. Eventually it stopped happening. Okay, I thought; the purging is complete.

The head-tipping continued, though. I had been meditating for several years by this time, and completed an intensive six-month program at the meditation center. Not long after I made the decision to move across the country to work for them — but before I had made the move — I also happened to go in for a massage. My massage therapist suggested I might benefit from a session with her fiancé, who practiced reiki and other forms of energy medicine.

Curious, I decided to give it a try. While the body worker was doing something called “energy dowsing,” my head and neck began to move around. It was strange, though not unpleasant. It felt vaguely therapeutic. I wondered what this was all about.

I asked him what he was doing with these movements, only to be told that he was not moving me — my body was doing that on its own. I didn’t know what to make of this; I felt like the receiver of the movement, not like its initiator, similar to receiving a massage. I was not consciously choosing to move my head around. Ummmm… okay?

The body worker encouraged me not to be freaked out by this. “It’s a good thing,” was the message. “You have spiritual energy rising. Trust your body and its knowing.”

Thereafter, when I got into a zone in meditation, my head wasn’t just gently tilting back — it was moving around in all sorts of ways. It was hard to keep my mind on the intended focus of meditation with all this movement. But it felt unkind to suppress it. So, I got up from my meditation chair and let my body do what it wanted. Now it was not just my head/neck, but my whole body moving in and out of various positions, holding certain limbs or muscles taut, swiveling, sounds, emotions sometimes… I went with it, and my breath became deep, coordinating itself to the movements.

​Perhaps, I thought, like the troubling imagery that had come up for a while during meditation, this was a phase that would pass. I felt lighter after I stopped a session. A bit tired, but good. I think it was when I followed up with the body worker to share these bizarre (to me) occurrences that I first heard the phrase “spontaneous movement.” It’s all good, was again the message. Just go with it.

I let the spontaneous movement become part of my life. When I had time and felt the urge, I would go to a quiet room and just allow the energy to do what it wanted. It was like having a flip I could switch — if I told my body it was okay, it would start to go. When it had run its course — or more often, when I just needed to do other things — I flipped that inner switch back to “off” and my body quieted down. How long would this last?

I got through giving notice at my job, selling my house, packing my stuff, saying goodbye to my friends, moving across the country, settling into a new apartment, and starting my new job at the meditation center. Some weeks after the spontaneous movements started, it was still going.
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I talked to my designated “mentor” at the center — I’ll call him Brad — about these and other unusual experiences, which I attributed to the energy released through meditation. What should I do?

Apparently this issue was beyond the long-term meditators at the ashram. And the original teacher at the meditation center was deceased. So Brad referred me to a yoga expert in Berkeley, someone with Himalayan lineage that the center trusted.

In advance of my first visit with him — much like preparing for a doctor’s appointment — I wrote up as complete a description of all my symptoms as I could remember, and sent it to him. (Perhaps I was also giving him a chance to say — um no, you need a psychiatrist or a neurologist, not a yoga specialist. But he took it in stride and scheduled the appointment.)

Here’s what I wrote to him in September of 2005:

It started with neck pain which I attributed to a poor ergonomic situation in my workplace. Seeking relief, I went to a massage therapist I’d been to before and she did something new she’d been learning called “quantum touch,” where she chased the pain around with her hands. It does not involve massage-type touch. I could feel that it was definitely doing something though. She spoke of it more in terms of energy and chakras rather than just something muscular. She referred me to a healer that I ended up going to 3 times over the course of my last month in [Indiana] (July) before moving out to [California].

He also did quantum touch, and Reiki, and something called dowsing. Now my first session with this guy, Chris, ended with the dowsing and my head and neck were kind of rolling around and stretching. He wasn’t actually touching me but I thought it was his doing but not really, he said this was just how my body was responding to the energy thing he was doing, in its own way. This was maybe the last third of what became a 2-hour session.

After that I started having these movements occur at other times spontaneously-first in the state toward falling asleep, and then in meditation it wanted to start going, and then anytime I said the mantram very much [outside of meditation], and then under just about any mundane circumstances, it was like if I just mentally released the brake the movements would go. It was focused on the neck just at first. It will go for a short period of time (5 minutes) or a long period of time (several hours on some occasions until I got too tired), just however long I let it. Chris consulted his teacher and said this was something called “spontaneous movement” and a good thing, releasing energy blockages and maybe tied to emotional stuff too. I am a pretty practically oriented person … but feeling is believing. Stuff has just been happening.

It escalated from my neck to my whole body, rotating movements and yoga-like alignment movements and poses, kicks and flicks of my limbs, and just strange things, breathing things. I have felt things releasing some (muscles?) but also there is pain, especially in my neck but other places too. And some emotions, groans and laughter if I’ve let it go for a while at home, crying at times (some has definitely been grief and release from an old relationship). Anytime I mantram or give it permission it’ll just GO and I’m not doing anything, I just get out of the way and my body is doing these unpredictable movements. Neck especially (“throat chakra”). Chris had pronounced me unblocked at my last session in [Indiana] …

I had consulted Brad because I was concerned about how this was affecting my meditation practice (sometimes it is hard to disallow the movements during meditation, that feels unkind to my body) and I thought he might have advice. Brad thought this sounded like what can happen with Rolfing and similar modalities and that rang true to me from what he described. It feels like layers of muscles or something are getting loosened through these movements and sometimes I end up kneading specific tender spots too and there have been vocalizations and sharp outbreaths and emotions released as well.

I allowed the motions during the last two sessions with Chris and he said it looked like yoga moves, “spontaneous yoga.” I don’t know many yoga poses (I just have these two Rodney Yee tapes I got last year, on Brad’s recommendation to strengthen my back for meditation) but I did recognize Child’s Pose and there have been motions that seem dance-like as well. Other times it is much less graceful! Sometimes the motions have been rather painful at the time, sometimes I feel sore and tired after (not unlike after a deep massage where toxins have been released from muscle tissue?), there have been a few cycles including how it feels just today where it had flared up and been painful but then the same motions after a few days came to feel smoother, still intense but unknotted somehow.

Also by the time I was leaving [Indiana] a frequent modality was just this kind of crunching motion that feels like it’s on nodes around my neck and really under my skull from ear to ear in the back, and shoulder blades and at points all down my spine. And the back of the shoulder above the armpit, right shoulder mostly (I can’t help wondering about mouse hand, back to the work-station situation). It’s like my body is giving itself this internal massage that is working intensely on these spots, kneading them with whatever layers of muscle and tendon and bone are above the nodes.

Another symptom which I think is totally related is just a feeling of great pressure in my neck and head, that same place at the base of my skull in the back, and sometimes in my ears like my Eustachian tubes hurt and it hurts to put in earplugs for meditation, and sometimes on my crown, and even above and around my eyes at the worst. For several of my worst days in [Indiana] I felt like a pop bottle that had been shaken up but not released. Head-neckache and fiery pain that just made me want to cry. I also have had for about a year and a half this thing where my head tilts back in meditation and I feel like energy is moving up and out and that seems somehow related as well, although I had experienced that as positive if anything and not painful.

What else? The face and eyes have had movements that reminded me of Kathakali [dance] I saw in Kerala [India]. And the hands and fingers are really doing things sometimes, some of the same motions I recognize as recurring, like some kind of sign language to which I do not know the code (what does it mean). Also wailing. Wailing coming out of me sometimes.

The most dramatic perhaps was during the weeklong retreat I attended after I first got to CA. It was intense in the usual ways of [meditation center] retreats firing up one’s sadhana, plus personal stuff going on (a challenging unresolved relationship situation, entanglement), plus a kind man who was in our retreat died during the week and it just hit us all. Anyway one night after that driving home from the retreat house the wailing just surged out of me. This was not the first for that kind of thing (there has been breathing stuff and grunts) but the most dramatic.

Also once in the Penske truck on the way here [to California] (one of few times during that week I had any space at all from my parents who helped me move), along with the neck-crunching motions and loosening-breathing things, there were vocalizations that had intonations, like singing. I am actually a singer but this was the purest sound my body has ever produced and I wasn’t doing it, it was just coming through me. It was pretty brief.

Perhaps the other most dramatic thing that has happened besides that grief-filled wailing was earlier on-I think was the peak of excess energy if I had to pin it down… I had been really finding vigorous exercise quite necessary and felt that the energy was just taking over me when I went speedwalking, my body was propelled forward and I wasn’t doing it, and some of the swinging motions would go on and on if I let them, if I was in the woods where no one could see (right shoulder especially, this is still a hot spot).

Anyway sometimes in the evening I would find I just HAD to go out and exercise. This was even though I had done my 45-minutes power-walking in the morning with the hand weights and all. Once it was 11PM and found myself just pacing around my house and I had to go out and my body just ran at top speed, I couldn’t keep doing it for too long and ended up speedwalking but it was this tremendous burst of energy that had to GO, I could not hold it in
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It’s so surprising for stuff like this to happen to ME because I am a practically-oriented person in my sadhana, I have never been chasing after strange experiences, I would have been rather skeptical to hear someone else describe the things I am telling you. I never read about chakras. I was primarily analytical about religion and theology, and had a more materialistic view of the body, for a long time, until [founder of meditation center] brought me to the mystics. He won me over on the idealistic and practical qualities of sadhana, being an instrument of peace in the world, not seeking after unusual states during meditation or whatever. Anyway you’ve probably heard it all, but it’s just ironic if you knew me that this has happened to me.

If I give it permission, the motions and whatever else just come out of me, my body does things and it’s like I’m a third party, I just kind of let it happen in bewilderment and curiosity and eventually weariness. And laugh and look at [teacher’s] picture-what is this all about?! But I have taken folks at their word that I’m “working through” some issues that have gotten woven into my body somehow and are being released and that that’s good. I have a good inkling of what some issues and samskaras might be. But I just wonder how long this is going to last and it bothers me to be not having my evening meditation and to have these burning sensations in my body and this pressure in my head and need to keep accommodating this activity of the body.

Regular, vigorous exercise helps (I speed walk about 45 minutes each day-really power walk; and some occasional Rodney Yee yoga). Dropping evening meditation helps; or more accurately, doing evening meditation increases the pressure and energy and exacerbates it all. I think it helps to allow time and a private setting for the movements to happen. Sometimes mantram singing seems to be a good outlet (letting it get very buzzy like Tibetan monks or something), although other times the mantram seems to egg it on…

But I had the expectation that this was going to “run its course” before too long. I am through my big transitions (pretty much) now, I have let go of [my old city] and my life there, made peace with an older relationship break-up, gotten [other stuff resolved], and settled in here in my job at [the meditation center] and my new life and my intensified sadhana, and though there were quieter periods when I thought maybe it was about over, it keeps resurging.

I am getting the burning sensations in my neck and head and digestive system. I am finding the movements want to go at bedtime every night and in every morning meditation. I just wonder if there are things I can do that will facilitate the positive aspects of this, working through whatever inward stuff I need to work through and letting the energy be released through these body things. And I wonder if there are things I can do that will just help the experience meanwhile be more mellow, the energy be more mellow so it does not require a lot of management and so the need to allow motions and the head-neckaches and build-up of pressure does not interfere with my ability to concentrate at my work. I’d just like to be able to go about life like a normal person.

The yogi gave me some breathing exercises to do. I practiced them diligently for many months, especially on my regular walks. I could not tell if this made any difference in my symptoms; maybe it would’ve been worse without the special breathing?

Meanwhile, the spontaneous movements continued. I specifically remember having a couple more of those my-body-MUST-run experiences, when I left my apartment in the evening and just let my body GO in the dark, until I was spent.

Nothing much changed for the duration of my year working at the meditation center. I found some relief just in having someone I could speak plainly to about these experiences — something I implicitly knew I should not do with other meditators, per ashram culture. He seemed to know what I was talking about and feel confident we could handle it.

However, along with other unsettling experiences, I was still having the movements and the persistent energy-neck-headaches. I remember, after work, carpooling with a couple others from the meditation center, back to the nearby town where we newbies lived. I opted for the back seat, so my companions would not notice me squeezing out tears, the base of my skull feeling on fire, as the others chatted up front.

That spring, while perusing used books in the basement of a local bookstore, I came across a slim volume that immediately caught my eye. It had kundalini in the title — a word I’d heard in retreat workshops, which I knew was associated with spiritual energy — and likely with the strange energy experiences I had been having, though I’d had no such forewarning.
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Sure enough, the chapter on “signs of the arousal of the kundalini” included, among its long list of signs, all of the bizarre experiences I had been having with spontaneous movements (“certain people feel as if a spirit has taken control of their bodies because they can assume various yoga positions involuntarily”), big energy, electric sensations, positive emotions like joy and release, unusual sounds and more. (Kundalini: Discover the Secret Wealth of Energy in Your Body by Vikkar Tagor, 2003.)

​However, the author treated all of this as wholly positive. The only mention made of any potentially painful aspect of the process was that some people get awful headaches on the way to self-realization. This was attributed to new areas of the brain becoming active, beyond the 10–20 percent of utilization that the author said most people use. He likened that to labor pains, “since the yogi is now giving birth to spiritual awareness.”

I didn’t know whether the strange, sometimes painful things I continued to experience with kundalini would run their course on their own. But I had long since come to realize that the spiritual community I was in was not healthy for me — was not healthy, period. I was in the process of creating a way out.

Until I changed my circumstances, I did not expect these symptoms, including the painful ones, to resolve. After all, for a person on fire, what would be the point of dousing the flames on themselves — while still standing in the middle of the bonfire?

Next piece in this series: Calming the Kundalini Fire - How I Stabilized Myself.

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