I started going through this process myself about a year ago, and during this time, have had many conversations with others with ties to the same organization. I share some ideas here in case any of them are helpful to others. But first, a couple of caveats.

Caveat 1: I’m not a psychologist or a social worker. I do have some life experience and professional background that informs what I’ll share, and have been kinda obsessed with learning about exposed gurus, high control groups, recovery and the like over the past year.

However, I’m still in the midst of my own processing. And I don’t pretend that my understanding or ideas will serve everyone else who might find themselves in a similar position. (See disclaimer.)

I invite you to add any of your own insights or suggestions in the comments, if you are so moved.

Caveat 2: Each person’s process — and pace — may be different.

Absorbing and adjusting to stunning new information about a significant figure in one’s spiritual life is not a one-and-done event. It is an ongoing process.
It may stretch over months, or years — just as the process of integrating the practices, community, and zeitgeist of your group into your life and being was likely a long, gradual process.

That said, following are a series of principles I offer for your consideration. In practice, all of these realms intertwine; adapting is an iterative and holistic process, not a linear one made up of discrete steps.

Befriend Your Feelings

The new information about the leader / teacher, and its implications, are likely to generate a great variety of feelings in you. Emotions are a normal, healthy, human response to our experiences.

No feeling is bad. And no feeling is final.
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​Whether you prefer talking aloud to others, or writing in a journal, putting words to your feelings can help you recognize and accept what you are going through. It may also help your loved ones to understand how big of a deal the new revelations are.
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My previous post, All the Feels, is an example of naming feelings (mine). That post includes a handful of feeling wheels. You may find one or more of these feeling wheels useful as tools for exploring your own emotions.

Another one I like, the Emotion-Sensation wheel, helps make connections between what is happening in your brain and what is happening in your body. If you find it easier to notice your physical symptoms than to zero in on your thoughts and feelings, this wheel may be helpful.

Having trouble accepting all of your feelings as okay? In the first couple of years after I left my job at the ashram and moved back to my previous life, a book that helped me a great deal was Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Brach had been through a betrayal by a spiritual teacher earlier in her life. Hmmm.) She has some guided meditations online that promote this kind of radical acceptance of oneself and one’s feelings.

Seek Support

If you have a long or deep association with the fallen teacher / group / practice, you will need support to work through this upending of your inner world.

A friend or partner who is a good, nonjudgmental listener may be helpful. While you are feeling tender, this is probably not the best time to bring in that pal who was skeptical of your spiritual group all along; “I told you so” vibes may only add to your feeling of vulnerability. Who from your life do you trust as a caring witness?

There’s nothing quite like talking with other peers who share the same spiritual practice and affiliation. They can “get it” like no one else can. (Not that everyone will have identical reactions.) If you have a local or online practice group, can you connect with those folks, either altogether, or 1:1? Or perhaps you know people from retreats that you could reach out to.

A therapist can also be an indispensable partner in your processing. My therapist has gotten an earful from me over the past year. She is a consummate listener; she doesn’t even have to say much for me to feel seen and validated.
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My therapist has also seen how my involvement with this group/practice, and the wrenching new revelations, fits in with the rest of my life history and post-traumatic growth.

It may help your therapist help you if they are familiar with betrayal trauma.

Better still if they know something about high control groups. Most therapists have not received education on such groups as part of their training. This article from Shelly Rosen, likening experiences with such groups/leaders to natural disasters, can be shared with your mental health provider. Mine found it helpful.

To the extent that other people associated with my old group have formed a strong attachment to the founder/teacher, they may experience some degree of betrayal trauma in relation to the teacher proving unworthy of the trust they’ve given him.

Separately, they may experience betrayal by the institution. The meditation center has, so far, remained in adamant denial of any possible misdeed by the founder, despite multiple credible allegations. The organization’s failure to act with integrity, when confronted about his misconduct, constitutes an additional betrayal.

For anyone who had much of a relationship with the teacher (live or spiritual-psychological), and with the community that has offered programs and built relationships in his name, such betrayals are substantial. You need and deserve support as you deal with them.

What About My Practice?

This is an area for ongoing discernment for each person. There’s no one right answer.

(That is, assuming that the practices one has carried on are harmless at worst. Sometimes the devil is in the details of how one implements a particular discipline — and that can be tweaked, if desired.)

I found myself leery of meditation and other practices associated with my group, after I learned about the serious allegations against its founder (summarized in previous post).

Ironically, the disorientation the new information prompted in me led me to want the steadying power of my old practices. But after sitting down to meditate several times without being able to actually get the peace I craved — my mind would just spin around on the new learnings, feelings, and questions I had — I realized I couldn’t force it.

Anyway, there are many other things I can do to regulate my emotions and my nervous system — which I did instead. Walking in nature, taking it all in with my senses, is my favorite of all self-regulating activities. Good for body, mind and spirit. And working on myself with massage balls, doing self-myofascial release on a yoga mat, has become a go-to as well.
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At later points, I have come back to meditation and other practices. More when it welled up instinctively in me, reaching for a familiar tool, than when I made a conscious choice to do it.
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For me it has been important to choose any practice for my own reasons, and to do it on my own terms — including how, how long, and how often I meditate. When I do them, I am motivated by the benefits I directly experience in doing my old group’s method of meditation, or other practices.

But I think it’s equally legit to choose to forego any of the practices indefinitely, while doing the emotional, cognitive, and spiritual work brought up by the new knowledge of the teacher and group. One can always pick back up with a practice later.

One person mentioned to me that yoga and pouring himself into music have been his go-to activities lately, instead of meditation. He has recognized what will best meet his needs for centering and emotional processing right now. The old method of meditation is too fraught to be that thing for him right now — and perhaps he’ll never choose it again.

I know some people affiliated with my old group who have chosen to stick with their spiritual practices. The only thing they have changed is to stop reading the teacher’s writings or listening to his recorded talks; they favor original sources for inspirational material (e.g., reading the Upanishads or the Dhammapada), rather than commentaries or other teachings by the meditation center’s founder. They still largely follow the program of spiritual practices he outlined; but they no longer consider him their spiritual teacher.

Others have pursued new spiritual practices, finding that the long-used methods had ceased to help them meet their goals, even before they learned about the teacher’s past transgressions. That new knowledge has helped them feel freer now to try something else.

All of these choices and more are available to a person who is integrating new information about the founder/group, and reassessing their relationship to all of it.

You might even make one choice now, and a different choice later. What feels right for you?

Making Sense of It

I remember when I left my job at the ashram and moved back “home” years ago. I had a LOT to process from my journey with the group.

But I wondered if this was self-indulgent somehow. Was I just navel-gazing if I spent time writing or talking about those experiences? I even confessed to one of my fellow meditator YAs, who had left after I did, “at times I wondered if this was a rather narcissistic exercise … the hours I spent on it.”
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​My best friend — who had been through A LOT of therapy herself, and was better for it — said something very wise to me. It helped me then, and it has come back to me many times since. “It’s important to make sense of your experience,” she observed.
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And indeed, that was exactly what prompted me to reflect and chew on my California year. I needed to understand what I had been through. I needed to find words for what I’d felt. And I wanted explanations for why the community had behaved the way it did. I didn’t want confusion to be my final feeling.
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I had written a five-page email explaining my experience, after my last day of work. This was after a friend from my cohort of young adult meditators, who was considering making a cross-country move to be closer, asked me why I was leaving. Was there anything he should know? he wondered. I’m so glad I wrote to him, instinctively, while it was fresh.

A year and a half later, when I was safely re-established in my old city, returned to my old career and my long-time friends, choir and church community — and having the sense of groundedness, again at last, that having bought a house can bring — I was ready for a deeper dive.

At that time (16 years ago to the day as I type this), I wrote a “letter” to the then-head of the meditation center; I’ll call her Katarina. One of the reasons I wrote, as I told her, was that “I believe naming these things will help me to integrate my experiences and continue to grow spiritually.”

My “letter” to Katarina turned into an almost 60-page missive. There are sections on my path to that community, on what I experienced in the year I spent working there, on the “inscrutable ashram” (yep yep, inscrutable, though I did my best as an applied sociologist to make a case study of it), and on my “stabilization and realignment” (how I made my way forward after leaving).

If the depth of my processing and the length of my writing were a good indication (and I believe they were), my friend had been quite right — it was important for me to make sense of my experiences!

​I started that tome with stating the things about which I felt gratitude — what I had learned from that community that I would carry forward with me.
That felt kind of compulsory, as I recall. Partly, in order to be heard in the ashram’s culture of conspicuous humility and bubbling gratitude; if I didn’t demonstrate appreciation first, she might not be open to what I had to say next.
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Partly, it was simply that those values and behaviors were still so internalized in me that it was second nature for me to start with an extensive write-up expressing my gratitude. Otherwise, I would have felt myself to be selfishly unappreciative.

Those dynamics aside, I suspect something like the gratitude list IS an important piece for many people in a time of integration or reassessment. It’s a cognitive and emotional part of the process of sorting through the meaning of one’s experiences. No one wants to feel their time was simply wasted. (And it rarely is.)

If you are now in a similar period of taking stock, you might ask yourself — for what am I grateful? What do I choose to keep? What is of lasting value to me from this set of experiences?

I did put that “letter” to Katarina in the mail. I hoped that it might be helpful to the community she led, to understand what one person experienced there and why I ultimately left. Perhaps, I thought, it would help them make their community more effective in the future.

(You see how my pure, trusting heart survived my dark-year-of-the-soul there, intact?! Nothing changed, alas. From what others have shared, it seems the organization became only more rigid and unhealthy as the years rolled on. But I was still operating with a generous spirit and best-case thinking then — ever holding out hope for them.)

Katarina wasn’t capable of really hearing what I shared. I hadn’t asked for any response beyond acknowledgment that she had received it.

She did answer me, though. She suggested I must have misunderstood the support structures the community had created for its new YA employees. It wasn’t paternalism. Oh, no. If I had communicated more clearly, they would have helped me. She said she hoped that I might draw closer to the organization again some day.

I remember reading her response in bewilderment. Um, did you read what I so painstakingly wrote, Katarina? I mean, I was not unkind, but I described some really deep problems that I found not only confounding, but fundamentally unhealthy. For anyone, but certainly, for me. How could you think I would ever come back to that? Not happening.

So my heartfelt reflection did not appear to have been received in a constructive way by the organization. They couldn’t really hear it. (Hmm, feels familiar.)

But it had served its purpose as part of my own integration and moving forward. Indeed, it was important to make sense of my experience. And for me, writing has always been one of the most effective ways to do that.

I would go through later cycles of revisiting my experiences with that community, and seeing new layers of meaning in it. Particularly, when I was in theological school.

But until recently, I was missing a critical insight. The new information that has emerged about the founder has finally allowed me to understand more fully the nature of the organization. And that, in turn, has released me more fully to move forward in my own spirituality and vocation.

If you are in a similar time of reckoning, what kinds of activities, what modes of expression, help you to process emotionally, to sort things out cognitively, to integrate past experiences and allow your understanding to evolve?

Such activities might include talking, prose, or poetry… music, collage, or painting… or ___ [ your thing here ] ___ .

If your mind works in images, but you don’t like to make art yourself, you might try working with something like Soul Cards. The cards feature evocative imagery by artist Deborah Koff-Chapin.

I have both sets, and I find them a good way to listen for my deepest self / intuitive mind / image-oriented part of me. They come with a variety of suggestions for use. I choose one or a few that speak to me and live with them for a while. They have proved meaningful to others in small group spiritual direction. This might be a way to listen to your inner child or your inner teacher as you are processing your feelings around your old group, and discerning what is next for you.

Seeking Safely

For anyone who no longer considers an old group’s founder as their spiritual teacher, or the program as their (exclusive) program, the world is your oyster.

​It’s also a bit of a wild, wild West of teachers, groups and programs promising spiritual growth, personal development, healing and so on — with plenty of grifters and opportunists mixed in with sincere folks.

The internet has created new ways of connecting — YouTube, for example, is crowded with self-proclaimed teachers, coaches, channelers, and shamans. And there are still plenty of brick-and-mortar retreat centers out there too.

If you decide to explore new teachers / programs / groups, I encourage you to be intentional about seeking safely, to avoid having a problematic experience (again) in the future. Alas, it is not uncommon for a person to leave one group that turned out to have been manipulative or dishonest, only to end up in another one. As the proverb goes: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I shared some suggestions for safe seeking here. If you have additional suggestions, I welcome you to mention them in the comments.

What Are Local Groups Doing?

A lot of people with ties to my old meditation center participate(d) weekly in a local meditation group. Some even had retreats put on in their area periodically.

I’m aware of a number of local meditation groups that have grappled with the shocking allegations about the founder, and the organization’s non-response to it. Almost all of the ones I have heard about have eventually decided to disaffiliate from the organization, due to its failure to take credible allegations seriously and act accordingly.

Some of those groups are dissolving; individuals are making their own decisions about their meditation practices.

Other local meditation groups have decided to keep meeting, but change up what inspirational material they are working with together. They are taking the focus off of the old meditation teacher.

One group in New York has even created a new regional collaboration, and is offering their first retreat (online) this month. They aim to continue providing spiritual support and companionship to participants, just no longer focused on the old meditation center and its teacher.

Online study groups have a similar choice of whether to disband or simply change focus, drawing on materials beyond the old founder-teacher.

In the resources section that follows, I mention some books and other materials that may be of interest to either individuals or groups who are broadening their source material.

Resources

Looking for SPIRITUAL READING for yourself or a group? Here are some suggestions:

Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Spiritual Wholeness by Marsha Sinetar. I don’t remember how I came across this book. But I read it after I left my ashram job, as I was integrating what I’d experienced there and seeking my own path, with a greater sense of freedom and self-trust. I have re-read it several times. Part of why I put this title at the top of this list as that it encourages people to find their own way — there is no one-size-fits-all program for spiritual growth or living.

I also loved some autobiographical stuff I read: those of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork), Karen Armstrong (post-ashram, I read The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, she has two earlier ones also), and as I’ve mentioned already, Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, which draws from painful personal experience and held important messages for me in my recovery.

I had previously read Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, which a friend from my former local meditation group had recommended to me. (I think I ordered it from the foundation created by friends of Peace Pilgrim, https://www.peacepilgrim.org/ … probably also available used.)

All four of these have in common that they were by and about women. That felt especially important to me, for reasons I understand more fully now! The first three were also people who had flawed teachers and who found their own way forward.

A few other random thoughts:

• David Whyte’s writings, such as Consolations, might meet a group well. Consolations has short entries of a few pages on different terms. Whyte also writes poetry. To me he has a spiritual sensibility about him. I don’t remember a specific tradition.
• John O’Donohue is a Celtic Christian writer with books of both moving, lyrical prose and blessings or written meditations.
• Several books of Quaker writer Parker Palmer have spoken to me too, including Let Your Life Speak.
• Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters. Toward a healthy, mature spirituality.

Want to learn about HIGH CONTROL GROUPS, and inoculate yourself against future manipulation?

Many of my online pieces address this:

• High control group primer: Who Joins Cults — What Is A High Control Group — Leaving A High Control Group
• How cults keep their true nature hidden:  Hidden Levers & Dissolving Dissonance — Surprises, Blinders & Lies
• This 3-part series traces parallels between 1:1 abusive relationships and high control groups: Power & Control in Collectives — Reading Between the Power Moves — The Roots of Control
• Chronicling my experience in THAT group (other groups are likely to have parallels to this journey): What I Wanted — What I Found — What I Lost — My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong

Book suggestions:

• Take Back Your Life by Janja Lalich — best general introduction, accessible and practical, from a sociologist and cult survivor. (Interesting tidbit: rumor has it the original publisher of this book had ties to my same group, decades ago — and that was the motivation for publishing it.) This helped me start to identify controlling elements in my group’s modus operandus.

• ​Walking Free from the Trauma of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse: A Workbook for Recovery and Growth by Gillie Jenkinson. By a psychotherapist in the UK who has specialized for decades in supporting people who’ve had these kinds of experiences. Can be used on one’s own, or in conjunction with therapy.

 

• The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad. It’s so good. And so very relevant to my old group. Topics include: authority, hierarchy, and power; the seductions of surrender; gurus and sexual manipulation; the traps of being a guru; healing crippled self-trust; oneness, enlightenment, and the mystical experience. Helped me understand why scandal, particularly sex scandals, are so commonplace among gurus, why the guru-student model is inherently fraught, and why rebuilding self-trust is the key to healing from such an environment. This could be a very potent conversation-starter for a group — IF members are open to major deconstruction.

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• When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura E. Anderson. Written from the perspective of a recovered Christian fundamentalist-turned-trauma-therapist. There’s a lot that carries over to Eastern or other spiritual settings too. She brings in the latest understandings about the nervous system and how trauma, including religious or spiritual trauma, affects us. Emotionally intelligent and accessibly written.

Podcasts — There are many podcasts out there on high control groups aka cults. The ones I have listened to the most are:
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• IndoctriNation, hosted by therapist Rachel Bernstein, who has focused on survivors of high control groups for 30-some years, and has seen it all. She is a superb listener to her guests and the most sensitive, supportive, informative host for listeners who have had their own brush with controlling groups. On YouTube or wherever you get audio podcasts.

 

• A Little Bit Culty, hosted by a pair of amiable actors who are survivors of the ‘human potential’ group and in-the-inner-circle sex cult NXIVM (sounds like Nexium). I haven’t liked every episode I’ve heard, but there’s a lot of good stuff — including good high control group 101 episodes in the first season or two, like interviews with Janja Lalich, Daniel Shaw, and Alexandra Stein. The two-part Eckhart Tolle interview in Season 5 on The Ego Trap was thought-provoking to me re: where the founder of my old group may have gone off the rails.

 

• Conspirituality, hosted by three journalist guys, including two-time cult survivor Matthew Remski. They cover New Age cults, wellness grifters, conspiracy spreaders, and other stuff at the intersection of cons and spirituality. This is where, on a bonus episode, I first heard the criminal allegations against the founder of my old meditation group. The podcast and their book of the same name trace how pseudoscience, New Age ideas, the wellness industry, and rightwing extremism converged during COVID — leading to widespread vaccine hesitancy — and are continuing to create strange bedfellows, and infiltrate U.S. politics.

 

• Speaking of Cults, hosted by ex-Scientologist Chris Shelton, is also good.

Lastly, SUPPORT GROUPS & WEBINARS for survivors of high control environments.

These may be most helpful for people who have been in deep (such as living or working at the ashram). Although one can be psychologically “in deep” even from a geographic distance. Some resources on my radar:

• The Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion, founded by Janja Lalich, a sociologist specializing in cults, and herself the survivor of a political high-control group.
• Rachel Bernstein is a therapist in L.A. who has focused largely on cult survivors for 3 decades. She has a Zoom-based support group for survivors of coercion that meets on Wednesdays.
• Another resource from Rachel is recorded webinars/videos that you can access for a modest fee. Living In Freedom
• Other resources listed for survivors via the International Cultic Studies Association: Support Groups — Counseling Resources — Articles & Books

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​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.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
The End of Silence … A Spiral Season … How I Was Primed

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

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.”

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​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.)
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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)
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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.

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Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini … Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance … Surprises, Blinders and Lies … What I Found

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