How Was Meditation Mainstreamed? From the Monks to the Masses

Meditation teachers typically accentuate the positive and recast the negative. Researchers, until recently, have rarely asked about adverse effects. And meditators often hesitate to bring up their own difficult experiences. How did we get to this?

Image: GDJ / Pixabay

​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]

Image: Replica of Henry David Thoreau’s house Walden Pond State Reservation Concord MA Massachusetts

​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.
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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.

For Seven of Nine, beloved ex-Borg of Star Trek: Voyager, nothing could be more spiritual than the Omega particle; “Omega is infinitely complex, yet harmonious. . . . [It] represents perfection.” To each their own.

​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.

Illustrations of Emerson’s essay on “Nature,” including his transparent eyeball. “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” (Images: Christopher Pearse Cranch, public domain)

​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.

A Buddhist Wheel of Reincarnation, carved in stone. (Image: Laurent Bélanger / Wikimedia Commons)

​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.
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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.

Image: Meul / Wikimedia Commons

​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.

Image: AdinaVoicu / Pixabay

​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.