Say you have benefited from a spiritual practice. Now you want to share this goodness with others — perhaps even make it your vocation, at least in part.

But, say you also want to avoid common errors that can undermine your good intentions. You want to steer clear of meditation malpractice, and reduce the chances that those you support will end up experiencing adverse effects, instead of (just) the good stuff.

If this is you, what can you do to help ensure that your actual impact reflects your best intentions?

I offer the following tips for teachers, drawing on my experience as an ordained spiritual leader, survivor of a meditation-based high control group, and as one who has been through the fire of bizarre suffering stemming from my meditation practice, and made my own way to stabilization and integration.
​

​Understand That You Are Treading on Sacred Ground

People explore contemplative practices for all sorts of reasons. Calming emotional turbulence. Following a vague spiritual longing. Seeking greater peace. Finding social support. Moving through grief. Improving focus. Gaining healthy detachment. Reaching for a connection to something greater. However well or poorly recognized, people turn to meditation to meet specific need(s).

Any person you work with as a teacher of spiritual practices may be vulnerable in some way. In addition to the specific goals they may have for their practice, they may carry childhood trauma with them, or more recent betrayals.

Into their experience of meditation — and their relationship with you — each person comes as a whole being, with their particular identities, their histories, their hurts, their hopes.

​The medical model can provide some useful insights for meditation pedagogy. And secular frameworks may be right for some people or some settings.

Yet, mindfulness and meditation engage with the whole person: body, heart, mind and spirit. Such practices, sooner or later, may raise existential questions inside practitioners. About who they are. What life is. How to make sense of their experiences. What is the point of this human be-ing.

The trust people place in you as a guide is precious and fragile. How will you earn that trust? How will you remain worthy of it over the course of a teaching relationship?

A good place to start is by remembering that you tread on sacred ground. Take it seriously. Pledge to first, do no harm. Consider how you will stay clear on these First Things of teaching.

              “Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.”
                                          ~ Howard Thurman

Empower Others

If your commitment is first and foremost to the well-being of the people you teach, then your baseline aim with every student — regardless of what brings them to you — is to empower them. There can be no lasting growth without this.

​Empowering people is the opposite of creating dependence. Empowered students learn to know themselves, to trust themselves, and to do what is right for themselves.

How does an empowering teacher behave? Consider these DOs and DON’Ts.

DOs:
1. DO coach and model listening to the teacher within

2. DO use open-ended language and check your hunches with others (favor dialogue as a communication method, including when trouble-shooting)

3. DO invite students to listen to their own bodies, feelings, and reasoning, and to share their observations

4. DO believe this personal testimony — real experience trumps theory

5. DO encourage adaptation of practices to meet individual needs and circumstances

6. DO offer resources and options that the student can consider

7. DO welcome criticism with an open heart and mind

8. DO respect the needs and goals that drive participants’ interest — there is no one right or best reason to do the practice(s)

9. DO be mindful of group dynamics such as people-pleasing and social contagion

10. DO take a balanced approach to recognizing the potential benefits — and drawbacks — of the method(s) you teach

DON’Ts:
1. DON’T assume that one size fits all

2. DON’T withhold important information about the group or practice

3. DON’T mold them in your own image, or that of anyone else

4. DON’T “correct” students when they use their own words instead of group jargon

5. DON’T reward “good” students with your attention and punish “difficult” students by withdrawing your time or regard
​
6. DON’T make individuals’ belonging in the practice group contingent upon conforming to rigid expectations

7. DON’T, under any circumstances, instill shame or use shame to generate compliance

8. DON’T discourage people from doing their own due diligence

9. DON’T reflexively just tell people to dig in and do the practice more — or assume they must be doing something wrong — when they encounter difficulties

10. DON’T treat meditation/mindfulness as a panacea

What would you add to your list of DOs and DON’Ts, based on your own experience as a practitioner and teacher?

Know Your Limits

No matter how long you have been teaching, you are a regular human. You do not have to be all-knowing; you do not have to be perfect; no one can be.

Learn about your own shadow side. There are many ways to do this.

If you journal, what shadow material comes up there? What insight have friends and family offered you about yourself? (If you haven’t asked, now’s your chance.) Working with a mental health professional is another way to zero in on your growing edges.

​Do you know your enneagram type? This can be helpful for understanding your own motivations, insecurities and blind spots.

Do you know your Myers-Briggs type? It reflects cognitive functions favored by different people for processing information, making decisions, and connecting with people. What strengths and challenges are common for people with your preferences?

These are just some of the resources that may support you in knowing yourself and functioning at your best with others.

Hone your practice of self-differentiation. This means being firmly grounded in your own values and personhood, so that others’ anxious or insecure behavior will not influence you (as much). When you are differentiated, you are able to stay connected to other people without absorbing their thoughts and feelings — or needing them to share yours.

Relatedly, be aware that projection can occur with anyone, including students. And to the extent that others relate to you as an authority figure (even unconsciously), transference might pop up too. You don’t have to be and do everything people want from you. And you need not take responsibility for that which is not yours — in fact, you shouldn’t.

The upshot? You can’t control how other people behave, including how they interpret what you say or do. But you can improve your own self-understanding and your own functioning within the relationship. You can effectively stay connected to others, while remaining grounded in your own beliefs and values, and respecting other people’s.

Get Trained on Safety & Support

You should be familiar with adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness, ways to reduce the chances of them occurring, and how to respond supportively when you or your students do experience them.

Doing so will not undercut your effort to bring the benefits of meditation to others; on the contrary, it will help maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.

Are you getting rigorous, unbiased information about these topics through the program or tradition with which you are associated? If not, you should take it upon yourself to find external resources. (You can also encourage your program to beef up their training for the future.)

This may all sound a bit abstract. So let me share one concrete, useful thing that researchers have come to understand: many of the same mechanisms that account for the benefits people receive also account for some of the problems that can occur. As it turns out, the inverted U-shaped curve that scientists encounter regularly applies to meditation and mindfulness programs as well.
Researcher Willoughby Britton puts it this way:

“everything has an optimal level beyond which you … start to get trade-offs or negative effects… That’s true of any physiological process or psychological process… so [mindfulness] is just like everything else” in that way. [i]

Some examples: [ii]

• Concentration practices improve executive functioning and downregulate emotions — helping bring you back from strong emotion to a steadier state. However, if you “overtrain your cortical limbic system” you may end up with neither negative emotions, nor positive ones. I recall one heartbreaking example I heard, of a parent who no longer felt love for their child as a result of this dynamic; they were just going through the motions of parenting.
• Contemplative practices can help one achieve equanimity, able to accept feelings as they are, or see thoughts as passing weather systems. This may feel better than getting hooked by thoughts or feelings that are unpleasant. But if you have “learned to systematically disregard emotions and thoughts” that provides “fertile ground for gaslighting.”
• Training your attention can be calming, as mental clutter falls away. However, if you overdo it, it can lead to panic. If you keep going, “eventually your system can only get so aroused before you either end up in the emergency room, because you haven’t gotten sleep for a week” or your body shuts down and you dissociate.
• Detachment from emotions can help you get a healthy distance. But pushed too far, the practice may lead to a person no longer feeling like they are in their body. They might feel like they are far away from everyone and everything, isolated and separate.

If you get sound training, and adapt your practices accordingly, you should be able to avoid making common mistakes that increase the risk of harm to students of meditation and mindfulness.

Cheetah House is a non-profit, science-based organization offering training on a variety of topics relating to safety and support. They also provide professional consultation to teachers and teaching organizations focused on meditation and mindfulness. There are lots of free resources on their web site too.
Know of other good resources? Please share details in the comments.

Embrace the Best of Professionalization

The role of teaching contemplative practices in medical, secular, or non-church contexts is a relatively new one in countries like the United States. Anyone can throw up a shingle (or a web site) and declare themselves a meditation teacher.

This contrasts sharply with more established fields of service. Longstanding religious traditions, at their best, provide significant infrastructure to support the effectiveness of religious communities and those that serve them. Similarly, governments regulate fields like law, medicine, counseling, education, and social work.

​Wherever people are vulnerable and need to know if they can trust a provider to put their needs first, resources like these prove valuable:

• Training systems that equip people to take on a professional role — degree programs, apprenticeship models, credentialing processes
• Mentoring relationships and networks of peers
• Codes of Conduct and systems of accountability
• Continuing education, including training and support for professional ethics and healthy boundaries, as well as keeping up with new needs and evolving knowledge in the field

Look for these kinds of professional resources for meditation teachers, and make the most of them. If they don’t exist yet, support their creation. Everyone will be better off.

Make No Idols

Want to avoid inadvertently slipping into insularity, rigidness, and aggrandizement of a particular practice or person? If you abide by the DOs and DON’Ts above, that will take you a long way toward that goal.

Alas, it is all too human for a group or program to start out healthy, and slowly slide into cultish-ness over time. In a more decentralized arena like the mindfulness movement, this might seem less likely than in a religious context, or one with a clear leader and hierarchical structure.

But mindfulness groups are far from immune to cultic dynamics. As mindfulness practitioner and researcher Willoughby Britton observes, “often the systems are set up to not allow people to do whatever they want; there is a right goal, there’s a right way to do things, certainly no allowance for criticizing the system.” [iii]

Beware of treating meditation and mindfulness as the solution to every problem. Watch out for too-high goals like perfect peace or unending detachment. Don’t put anyone, or anything, on a pedestal.

Absolutely welcome the benefits that spiritual practices can offer, and celebrate when they happen. But never put practices above people and their real experiences and needs.

In sum:

• understand that you are treading on sacred ground
• empower others
• know your limits
• get trained on safety and support
• embrace professionalization
• make no idols

So long as what you are doing helps people to gain deeper trust in themselves — rather than making them dependent on a person, program, or ideology outside of them — you will be sharing the treasures of meditation with them in good faith.
​

​For more about how groups behave when they become unhealthy, check out What Is A High Control Group?

Did I miss something important in this article? Please chime in to share your perspective or resource in the comments.

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.

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

Endnotes

[i] From March 2022 interviews of Willoughby Britton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: Invisible Virtue Part 2: The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness.
[ii] Ibid. All references in this post are to those two podcast episodes.
[iii] Ibid.

Adverse effects of spiritual practices were well-known within the religious contexts in which those practices originated. Yet as meditation and mindfulness moved from monastics to the masses, this essential information has been increasingly withheld.

Why?

I believe it has everything to do with attempting to separate the practice from its religious roots, to sell it to a secular public.

You Can Take Meditation Out of the Religion, But…… can you take the religion out of meditation? If you present it in a lay-friendly, pseudo-secular, science-sounding way?

I don’t think so. Not entirely.

The Buddhist monk in colonial Burma who first started teaching meditation to laypeople wasn’t trying to take the religion out of it. Quite the contrary. Amid all the Christian missionaries running around, he was trying to keep his people Buddhist.

My old meditation group presented its method as universal and inter-spiritual, suitable for a person of any religious background, or none. That was a good part of the draw for me, along with the promised practical benefits of the spiritual practices.

But when it came right down to it, the program was rooted in a universalized form of Hinduism. Other traditions of East and West were incorporated in and interpreted through the Hindu lens of the founder. It’s no coincidence that the loaded language of that group (a high-control group, I finally realized) was heavy on Sanskrit.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), acknowledges his aim to remove the religious clothing — if not the actual religious worldview behind it — from mindfulness meditation.

He believes that mindfulness ultimately does not belong to Buddhism, but speaks to “universal qualities of being human.” He was also well aware that science, not spirituality, was the key to getting mindfulness accepted into the medical model and secular settings. [i]

“Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism”..? [ii]

Kabat-Zinn intentionally developed and described mindfulness practices in ways that would downplay its Buddhist origins, so as not to undermine “our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care.” He pitched his program to medical colleagues as a way to offer “relatively intensive training in Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism (as I liked to put it), and yoga.”
​

Yet, his efforts were inspired by a vision he had at a meditation retreat, at the Insight Meditation Society. He realized that his “karmic assignment” or personal dharma was to “share the essence of meditation and yoga practices as I had been learning and practicing them .., with those who would never come to” a religious retreat center.
​
His ultimate goal? To relieve the suffering of individuals, to foster awakening, and even to help bring about a spiritual Renaissance that would enable the whole planet to flourish.

Quite noble. Also pretty darn religious. Specifically, Buddhist.

Mindfulness has many meanings. It’s used as a catch-all term, understood by Kabat-Zinn to be explicitly tied to “a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddadharma.” Mindfulness can be used “as a place-holder for the entire dharma,… [carrying] multiple meanings and traditions simultaneously.” Early papers on MBSR recognized its roots in Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism, as well as “yogic traditions” like Vedanta, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ramana Maharshi.

“Mindfulness is the view, the path, and the fruit all in one,” Kabat-Zinn writes. He lifts up the need for advocates like himself to embody loyalty and vision “in furthering the work of the dharma in the world in an ever-widening circle of settings and circumstances, including business, leadership, education, etc.”

In other words, it’s not enough to have integrated an essentially spiritual practice with “important historical, philosophical, and cultural nuances” (which are made invisible) into mainstream medicine — champions of mindfulness want to penetrate all other major social institutions, too.

While Kabat-Zinn’s most immediate hope in his clinic teaching MBSR has been to ease the suffering of people in pain, he notes that what people learn in the clinic can take hold in their lives. Indeed, for many, formal meditation becomes “an ongoing feature of one’s daily life, often for years and decades after the initial experience of MBSR.” He’s pleased when clinic participants learning MBSR exclaim, “This isn’t stress reduction. This is my whole life.”
​

Kabat-Zinn knows that in the freedom-of-religion U.S., Buddhism must be extracted from mindfulness — at least in its language and presentation — in a setting that serves the general public.
​
But he still believes that the teachers of mindfulness in such settings should have their own fervent practice. They should sit long meditation retreats at centers (“a laboratory requirement” for teacher training), study with teachers from (usually) Buddhist traditions with well-defined lineages, and be firmly rooted in what sounds to me like Buddhist cosmology or theology.

In turn, these teachers in secular settings will be capable of offering “direct transmission” to the people they teach in any group course. The student group in such a class, he suggests, is functionally a sangha.

Such teachers, Kabat-Zinn writes, should not rely explicitly on Buddhist frameworks or vocabulary in teaching. Instead, they should cite scientific evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness, draw from direct experience with the practice, and help students accumulate and learn from their own direct experience.

In sum, Kabat-Zinn stresses the importance of “embodying and drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts, and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are important to know to one degree or another as part of one’s own development.”

Sounds to me like a well-intentioned, humanitarian, culturally astute, and deeply religious endeavor. Sounds like stealth evangelism, 21st-century U.S. Western Buddhist style.
​

​~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thought experiment: How would decision-makers and end-users respond if a movement grew to take Christian contemplative practices, deeply rooted in Christian theology and culture, into secular settings? Would heart-centered prayer (or whatever was chosen, and however it was renamed) be threaded throughout American institutions and culture within a few decades? Would the same sorts of people who have championed Buddhist-style meditation regard quietly Christian practices as equally appropriate?

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

Buddhism and yoga seem to get a pass among many Westerners who are otherwise indifferent or averse to religious influence. Most Americans are familiar with Christian culture; whatever their own relationship (or lack of relationship) to Christianity, Abrahamic religion forms the basis of many people’s ideas of what religion is. Just because Buddhism — at least, as presented to Westerners — avoids god-talk, and offers a different diagnosis of and solution to the human predicament than Judeo-Christian faiths, does not mean that its worldview and practices are not religious.

What happens when a person turns to (quietly Buddhist-rooted) mindfulness practices for purely practical reasons? If one just wants to manage anxiety, develop the skill of detachment, or improve patience, can they keep it at that?

The Accidental Buddhist (or Hindu)

Let’s return to Dan Lawton, a young mindfulness teacher whose spiritual crisis I described in a piece on the adverse effects of meditation.

A “firm secularist” when he attended his first 10-day meditation intensive as a young man, Lawton did a breathing practice and an attending-to-your-bodily-feelings practice as a part of the retreat. It got intense. A lot of suffering came up; he remembers letting out a blood-curdling scream. He kept going through it, and got to the other side.

“And then I spent the next three months in uninterrupted bliss,” Lawton told Rachel Bernstein. “And so this was the experience that really made me convert. And I didn’t have a context and I didn’t understand that experience at all.” [iii]
Lawton explains that that experience

“reorganized my entire reality. And it essentially made me reliant upon Buddhist ideas, because there was no other framework that I had at that point to explain what happened to me.” [emphasis mine]
​

​Over a decade of practicing mindfulness, and teaching it for several years too, Lawton reaped “extraordinary benefits.”

Gradually, he absorbed much Buddhist doctrine. The idea that craving or desire is the source of all suffering particularly made sense to him.

“I was also impressed,” Lawton writes, “by the arguments made by many meditation teachers that meditation was a completely secular endeavor, which could be done without any connection to religion. It was essentially, they argued, exercise for the mind.” [iv] [emphasis mine]

Then, a decade or more after his first experience, at another meditation retreat, Dan experienced a deep crisis. The distinction between himself and the world dissolved, and he “was basically unable to turn the mindfulness off,” which was debilitating and distressing. He was later diagnosed with PTSD, stemming directly from his spiritual practice.

Lawton reflects on how this experience affected him:

“It led to a deep re-examination of my own involvement with American Buddhism, with the mindfulness movement in the context of wellness…. [and] a deep examination of many of the other actors in this movement… their various motivations, different power structures that were there, the history, a lot of the confusion.

“I sometimes say that I’m not sure what was more unsettling to me, the symptoms that I experienced in the aftermath of this retreat, or the fact that I started to realize that I had been part of an organized religion, which I had never really comprehended during the time that I was in it. It was kind of like the floor fell out from under me in some ways.” [v] [emphasis mine]

Lawton felt betrayed by the practices that had previously served him so well. And he felt betrayed by the community of teachers who had talked up the positives of meditation, treated negative experiences (when mentioned at all) as normal parts of spiritual progression, never offered guardrails, nor indicated that meditation could do real harm — and had only “keep plugging” platitudes to offer when adverse effects rocked his world. [vi]

Intention vs. Impact

I assume that people who have helped popularize mindfulness, in both Buddhist and secular contexts, have done so with a desire to help other people. I doubt anyone set out to cause suffering.

Yet, what has happened has been a kind of lying by omission on the part of authorities —those who treat spiritual practices as if they can be severed from their religious roots, who downplay adverse effects if they acknowledge them at all, and who more often than not advise doubling down on a practice, even when it is not serving someone well — or blame the meditator for difficulties that are predictable.

Indeed, it appears many of the people who become teachers of meditation and mindfulness are not themselves well-trained to understand adverse effects, or to know how to support people who experience them. Is it any wonder they are unprepared to help?

Whatever the original reasons for softening the religious basis of contemplative practices —to benefit a public skittish of organized religion, to make meditation acceptable in neutral settings like hospitals and schools, or simply as a result of looking through the saffron-colored glasses of a true believer — the outcome is the same. Some people end up seeing their suffering INCREASE, in ways they never bargained for.
​

​Unless we change how we talk about, teach, and practice powerful disciplines like meditation, stories like Dan’s (and mine) will keep happening. Meditation advocates need to get real with themselves and others about the full spectrum of possibilities in these practices.

It won’t be easy. Next time I’ll explore some of the forces stacked against the meditation teacher or organization that aspires to transparency and skillful support.

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

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Power and Control in Groups … Into the Culti-verse ... Calming the Kundalini Fire

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

Endnotes

[i] “Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, №1, May 2011. Available for free download at Research Gate, among other online options.
[ii] Ibid. All quotes and paraphrasing in the section “Buddhist Meditation without the Buddhism” are from Kabat-Zinn’s 2011 article.
[iii] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice.
[iv] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.
[v] From April 2022 interviews of Dan Lawton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: The Messy World of Mindfulness Part 2: From Buddhist Practice to Malpractice. Except where otherwise indicated, the source of material in the section The Accidental Buddhist is this podcast conversation.
[vi] “When Buddhism Goes Bad” by Dan Lawton. July 2021 on Substack.

​Out of the Cloister

The founder of my old group spoke poetically about taking meditation out of the cloister and bringing it into the community. Swami Vivekananda had done that, going from wandering sadhu and disciple of Ramakrishna — a monk — to becoming an ambassador of Hinduism to the West. Beginning with the 1893 Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago, and continuing over several years of lecturing on the continent, as well as in his writing, Vivekananda introduced the West to meditation.

He called it the science of mind. He also preached a message of tolerance and acceptance for the truth in all religions, making him the undisputed star of the 1893 interfaith conference — though representatives of other faiths, including Buddhism, also connected with Euro-American audiences then.

Even before that seminal gathering in 1893, interest in Eastern scriptures and practices had been sparked in a certain segment of society. A group of intellectuals got their hands on the earliest English translations of works like the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada in the mid-1800s.

Already predisposed toward universal ideals, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott and the rest came to be known as Transcendentalists. Despite the lack of teachers on hand to learn from directly, they started experimenting with putting these ideas into practice. Thoreau built a special bookcase for his “nest of Indian books” and took some of them with him to his cabin at Walden Pond — a venture inspired by the forest monks of India. [i]

​Most meditators in the U.S. today, of course, are “householders” — people practicing in the home and community, not in an isolated setting. And Buddhism has particularly made inroads among Americans of non-Asian descent, in no small part thanks to interest in meditation.

But the widespread teaching and learning of contemplative practices turns fifteen centuries of culture on its head.

Whether in Himalayan caves, monasteries in southeast Asia, or the Egyptian desert sought out by early Christian contemplatives, interior spiritual disciplines were traditionally taken up by people set apart from ordinary society — people who had left behind comfort, social station, and striving for material success.
​
Monks and nuns did not adopt ascetic practices to relieve stress, improve concentration, manage anxiety, or help one find one’s place in society. They did not practice mindfulness in order to appreciate the beauty in the everyday.
Instead, they were looking for union with God. Or they wanted to get off the wheel of karma and achieve an end to suffering. They were seeking spiritual perfection, however they understood it.

​Ascetics and their communities learned firsthand about the “adverse effects” of contemplative practices. They, of course, interpreted them within their respective religious frameworks. Meditation sickness, corruptions of insight, dark nights of the soul — whatever a particular tradition called it, they were well familiar with the sort of symptoms appearing in Cheetah House’s list of 59 adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness.

This is why, as researcher Willoughby Britton and colleagues have observed, records of these effects — along with religious interpretations — are littered throughout texts of various traditions: key branches of Buddhism as well as Christianity, Judaism, and Sufism. [ii] And of course, Hinduism, from which I gained the language of kundalini phenomenon to describe my own experience.

Into the Community

Let’s go back before the many strands of Eastern teaching were introduced directly by teachers in North America, in the 1900s. Before D.T. Suzuki and Zen Buddhism. Before Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and other bridges to Tibetan Buddhism. Before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and various and sundry other Hindu teachers. Before Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and other advocates of insight meditation. Before Thich Nhat Hanh and mindfulness. Not to mention various forms of yoga and martial arts.

Recall those New England Transcendentalists in search of literary and spiritual adventure in the 1800s. Not satisfied merely to stretch Protestant Christianity beyond the bounds of orthodoxy, these seekers — most of them moving in Unitarian circles, a few, like Emerson, even ordained — wanted “Contact! Contact!” and to know “Who are we? where are we?”[iii] They wanted direct experience of transcendence. They wanted mysticism.

​The “Boston Brahmins” were not the only householders in the 1800s drawn to Eastern contemplative traditions. Around the globe, in British-occupied Burma, Buddhist monks answered the efforts of Christian missionaries with their own mission to the masses: they took vipassana meditation out of the monastery and into the villages. The practice of meditation, once limited to ascetics, spread among the laity over the next seven decades. [iv]

Lost in Transmission

As meditation met a wider audience — and especially a Western audience — its religious roots were often softened.

Going Universal

​One cross-cultural strategy is to downplay the esoteric elements — those parts of a practice and the worldview in which it is based, that would not connect with a new audience — and favor universalistic language and framings, instead. I have the sense that Indian ambassadors of meditation, in particular, often followed in Vivekananda’s footsteps in this way. But the example of S.N. Goenka shows this has happened with Buddhists too.

​Goenka was one of the first to teach meditation to people from another culture. The “religious lineaments and rituals” disappeared; “gone was the cosmology of hell realms and hungry ghosts and karma and rebirth. Gone was the promise of miraculous healing and mind-reading and flying that meditation was believed to enable. Gone, too,” writes David Kortava, “was the open acknowledgment of the sundry mental and physical tribulations that might surface in the course of a serious meditation practice.” [v]

Omwashing

Another common dynamic is to coast on the imperial logic of what Edward Said called Orientalism. The founder of my group epitomized this in his talks and books, emphasizing the timeless spiritual treasure of the East — in contrast to the West’s (Enlightenment) cultural strengths in science and logic. He would often speak of the spiritual heritage of the East as one that belongs to the whole world.
​
In other words, my one-time teacher, an Indian who came of age in colonized India, was saying, here, Westerners, help yourself to my culture, and don’t worry about misappropriation — not only can you trust me as a guide, but you have as much right to this treasure of the East as I do.

He had internalized Orientalist logic. While he was able to use it to become a self-styled guru, I can’t help but think there was some compensation going on inside him, as a colonized person labeled inferior by the colonizing culture. On the surface, the use of Orientalism combatted that message — he had something very valuable to offer, to fill the void left by Western materialism— although deep down, it could also reinforce the stereotypes, and the unequal positions.

​Writing about yoga and omwashing, Sheena Sood observes that

“‘Orientalism’ continues to find relevance and application to contemporary imaginings of the East. It conditions people who study and become immersed in Eastern culture to uncritically revere and accept ancient and mystical wisdom as objective truth.” [vi]

Sood notes that Orientalism also leads people to assume there is a pure origin story for Eastern practices, like yoga — or, I would add, meditation — and to focus on faithfulness to its origins rather than on “the ethics of how and for what purpose yoga is deployed to various populations.” For example, yoga and spirituality can be used “to divert attention away from the inherent structural violence” of social institutions like prisons, with the result that “these programs cooperate quite neatly with a racist, classist system.” [vii]

Speaking Science

Yet another strategy to make meditation palatable to contemporary Westerners is what we might call science-washing. If you can speak to those enduring Enlightenment values — draw upon the scientific method to show evidence for something’s beneficial effects, make a logical case, even a common-sense one — you can reach a wider audience.

Groups that research meditation fit the bill. That’s true whether they have their roots in an Eastern tradition, like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation, or whether they are Western scientists speaking their professional language of science, like Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Of course, a group need not be limited to one strategy. My group utilized all three of the above-mentioned methods of promoting its form of meditation. As a smaller group, it had fewer scientists to take up a research program than the legions of researchers studying some other forms. But the group made the most of every opportunity to preach the gospel of meditation.

Untethered

The end result? We have a lot of people teaching and practicing spiritual technologies, often with as much fervor as a religious convert — but often with an absence of awareness about the potential down sides of meditation, and lack of preparedness to respond effectively when things go south.

​Whether intended or not, I see this as a bait and switch situation: Come for the anxiety reduction, stay for the underlying worldview you may quietly absorb — and perhaps the meditation sickness, too.

There’s more to explore about the social, psychological, and economic dynamics at play. Stay tuned for upcoming post(s) where I’ll address evangelism, indoctrination, group belonging, funding pressures, demographics, identity, research bias, accountability and more.

Endnotes appear at the bottom of this post.

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Endnotes

[i] “The Asian Soul of Transcendentalism” by Todd Lewis and Kent Bicknell in Education About Asia, Volume 16:2 (Fall 2011): U.S., Asia, and the World: 1620–1914
[ii] “The Dark Knight of the Soul” by Tomas Rocha, in The Atlantic, 6–25–2014
[iii] The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
[iv] “Lost in Thought” by David Kortava, in Harper’s Magazine, April 2021
[v] Ibid.
[vi] “Introducing Omwashing” by Sheena Sood, in The Yoga Teacher’s Survival Guide, edited by Theo Wildcroft and Harriet McAtee, 2024
[vii] Ibid.