The Shadow Side of Meditation and Mindfulness: Stress-relief, Self-realization... or Psychosis?7/16/2024 I have shared how I calmed the kundalini fire brought on by meditation, and how I began to get more insight into some of my strange experiences. As it turns out, I was lucky. My experience was relatively mild compared to what could have been. Four Stories 1 — Kimberley had a series of “other worlds” experiences, after which she became physically ill and exhausted. In this period of spiritual emergency, she was unable to work and lost her home. She moved in with family for a time. Although she eventually established an independent life again, including getting a new job and place to live, she remained unwell emotionally and physically. She ended up collapsing after a few weeks at the new job. (From In Case of Spiritual Emergency by Catherine G Lucas) 2 — Dan Lawton was “an unabashed evangelist for mindfulness” for over a decade. He’d had a regular meditation practice, including attending a dozen silent retreats, and for four years was a full-time teacher of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Dan had experienced a number of significant benefits from his practice. But then in the midst of a retreat in North Carolina, he “split apart,” experiencing a “hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia.” While the retreat leaders were kind and offered suggestions for altering his meditation practice, as he explained to them, “I couldn’t stop being mindful or aware of everything that was going on within my mind and body, and the awareness felt like it was choking me to death.” The effects of the retreat did not abate as he recuperated at his sister’s for a week, nor when he returned home. “In the months after the retreat,” Dan writes, “I suffered from symptoms diagnosed by a therapist as post-traumatic stress disorder. I frequently experienced involuntary convulsions and simple tasks like cooking a meal induced panic attacks. I was occasionally so overwhelmed by my bodily sensations that I was unable to speak, and sometimes had problems differentiating myself from my surroundings.” Dan had no history of trauma before the retreat, nor any psychotic episodes. Through a variety of means — including, crucially, stopping his meditation practice — he found his way back to stability in time. He still uses the tools of mindfulness. He also strongly advocates transparency about spiritual practices, including their negative effects. (Dan’s story, When Buddhism Goes Bad) 3 — Seeking a restorative experience, Megan Vogt went to a silent retreat at a vipassana meditation center in Delaware in 2017. A week in, the twenty-five-year-old was experiencing bliss. But soon after, her mental and emotional states began to unravel. As she left the meditation center with her family at the end of the ten day period, she was overcome with a compulsion to end her life. A week in the psych. unit of a hospital seemed to help stabilize her; her psychotic symptoms were receding. Her family kept a close eye on her when she returned home, and tried to connect her with psychiatrists for continued support. Megan resumed meditating. But things still weren’t right with her. Tragically, a few months after her intensive meditation experience, she was found dead in her truck, a suicide note left behind for her family. (David Kortava relays her story more fully in this 2021 piece in Harper’s.) 4 — Another young adult, David, told writer Tomas Rocha about a divine experience he had at a meditation retreat, describing the process initially as “the best thing that had ever happened” to him. He turned down a spot at law school while on this high. But over the ensuing months, the meaning drained out of life. Trips to Asia seeking guidance made no difference. Still trying to re-center himself, David went to a retreat at a nonsectarian Buddhist meditation center in Washington. It was a wild ride for him — including confusion, terror, and thoughts and feelings he did not want to experience but could not stop. Retreat leaders had only verbal reassurances to offer. For effective support, David wound up at Cheetah House, “a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices.” (Rocha’s 2014 piece in The Atlantic) Not Just Outliers But those are only anecdotes. Some might suggest they are the outliers, the exception to what usually happens. As researchers like to say, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a few people who meditated went on to have difficult experiences does not necessarily mean meditation caused those experiences. Such instances are easily dismissed by supposing that the individuals in question had latent psychological problems that happened to come to a head during/after their meditation experience. What about hard data? I was intrigued to learn of research on Transcendental Meditation (TM). I had some early exposure to TM, and that method of meditation is in some ways similar to the kind I practiced for years. The German government completed a research project on TM in Germany in 1980, spurred on by ex-meditators (and spouses and parents of meditators) reporting troubling symptoms to authorities that they believed originated with their TM practice. Per Aryeh Siegel, the German study is “the most thorough study of TM regarding the comprehensive study protocols used and the preparation of interviewers who conducted the study” (Transcendental Deception, 2018). As Siegel relays, “many meditators experienced severe mental disturbances, including disturbed sleep, anguish, problems with concentration, hallucinations, and feelings of isolation, depression, and over-sensitivity… [as well as] detrimental effects on decision-making… Whether they were ordinary meditators who had little contact with [the TM organization] or more committed, many of their complaints were similar.” The investigators wrote: “The mainly positive experiences in the earlier stages (pictures, feelings of happiness) are replaced in time — according to reports of the ex-meditators — by terrifying images and feelings of fear or anguish.” A majority of meditators (63%) noted physical complaints associated with meditating, including digestive issues, headaches, insomnia, and neck pain. Psychological problems were even more prevalent, occurring in 76% of cases.While a small number had pre-existing illnesses — which got worse after starting to meditate — most of the cases were new disorders or illnesses, with 43% of participants requiring psychiatric or medical treatment to address them. The most common issues were fatigue (63%), anxiety (52%), depression (45%), nervousness (39%), and regression (39%). (Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018) To me this suggests that if a person took up TM for stress relief or emotional support, the cure is liable to be worse than the disease. Yikes! Dark Nights in Mainstream Meditation But TM is only one form of meditation, and not among the most prevalent forms practiced in the West. Plus, it is arguably quite culty. (Patrick Ryan says as much here, or check out Aryeh Siegel’s aforementioned, thoroughly researched book to assess from fuller information.) Mindfulness is all over pop culture these days. It’s not just a thing at Buddhist retreat centers or sanghas anymore — ‘secular’ versions are widely promoted in mainstream health and mental health fields, and the language of mindfulness has filtered into everyday lingo. The meditation and mindfulness revolution could not have gone on this long if it had the same sort of shadow side as TM… could it? Fortunately, the question of adverse effects is starting to get some attention among researchers. Clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton is a pioneer in this area, investigating the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other emotional disturbances. Although they look at all kinds of effects, she and her team at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory have become particularly known for their work on adverse effects — likely because attending to undesired effects has been relatively uncommon among researchers. Britton was herself an avid meditator, leading her to choose a meditation-related topic for her PhD dissertation. She studied the effects of a meditation practice on sleep quality. At that time, it was commonly believed that meditation improved sleep quality. But what Britton found when gathering data in the sleep lab was that people who meditated more than thirty minutes per day slept worse — with less total sleep and lower sleep quality. In fact, the more they meditated, the worse their sleep. As an evangelist for meditation, Britton was flummoxed. For years she opted not to publish her data. In 2010 — a few years after a meditation teacher told her at a retreat, “everyone knows that if you go and meditate, and you meditate enough… you stop sleeping” — Britton decided to share her data publicly. (as relayed in Kortava piece) From there, she started talking more to the people who ran retreats, curious about what else she didn’t know about potential adverse effects of meditation. She heard horror stories at every center, with common threads being impairments in cognitive functioning and psychotic breaks — either short-term or long-lasting. Britton and her colleagues at the lab are best known for their groundbreaking study, called The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (originally the Dark Night project). They surveyed the range of meditation-related effects described by Buddhist practitioners in the West. Their aim was to learn about how these effects impact practitioners’ lives, and to gain insight into the causes, prevention, and integration of experiences that might include unexpected, challenging, difficult, distressing, or functionally impairing effects. Subjects consisted of meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan traditions of Buddhism. People whose challenging experiences could be accounted for by other causes were excluded, as were those with mixed practice histories beyond the three forms of Buddhism named above. Since the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was designed to shed light on the adverse effects that other research may not ask about, and that are often under-reported by practitioners, people with no adverse effects were also excluded. (Notably, only 4 of 73 meditators who initially completed interviews were free of adverse effects to report — this means that 95% of the people in the original pool of meditators and teachers HAD experienced adverse effects.) The final sample size was 60 people. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLUS ONE in 2017. (One lay-friendly article summarizing findings is here.) A key deliverable is a taxonomy of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning. Researchers identified seven domains, each including up to 15 symptoms, with a total of 59 symptoms attributable to meditation. Some examples within each domain:
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):
It’s worth reiterating that 95% of the initial interviewees (not the final subject pool) had experienced adverse effects from meditation. Things That Make You Go Hmmmm… So, adverse experiences are not just rare results of meditation when practiced in extreme ways or by particularly vulnerable people. Challenging experiences are well-known in traditions with a long history of contemplative practices, where such effects are an expected part of the spiritual journey. Even casual users of meditation apps have been showing up at Cheetah House programs needing crisis support. (Dan Lawton met a number of people who suffered after using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.) And while more study is needed, adverse effects are now increasingly documented not only anecdotally, but through well-designed research. (That includes the “weird energy stuff” I described from my own experience in previous posts… the researchers call them Energy-Like Somatic Experiences and they were reported by over half of people interviewed.) That leaves the question, why is there so much talk about the potential benefits of meditation and other spiritual practices — and so little acknowledgment of the predictable, potentially problematic effects that many people will experience? Given that adverse effects are common among serious or long-term meditators, why don’t we hear more about them — and before we are in deep? Why don’t meditation programs come with a list of possible side effects and contraindications, similar to prescription medications, so people can make informed choices? In the next installment in this series, I explore further five common problems in the ways meditation is often taught. Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up. Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇 Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini … Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance … Surprises, Blinders and Lies … What I Found Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.
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