Christian monastics have written tomes about the dangers of spiritual delusion arising in the course of practice (prelest); Without getting into theological debate about core teachings between various religions, I'm quite sure the same is true for any serious spiritual/religious ascetic discipline; The tendency in our culture to divorce the practices from their philosophical underpinnings to make them more 'consumable' by the uninitiated as seems to have happened here is likely a big contributing factor in cases such as this one, and the article completely sidesteps the point by falling victim to the same thinking ..
In a similar vein I also find it quite ironic that the article attempts to reconcile 'meditation' as one monolithic topic that is either 'good' or 'bad' within scientific literature, while at the same time ignoring that 'scientific literature' itself has many studies of differing results from differing psychological treatment modalities, many of which could be viewed as 'meditative' in some casual sense (e.g. CBT, so called 'mindfulness meditation', schema therapy, etc)
I wasn't aware of this. Could you point us to some of these writings? Curious to read more about it.
(very dense theologically, and intended for actual practicing monks, fitting the topic, beware )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent
"18–26: Avoidance of the traps of asceticism (laziness, pride, mental stagnation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophthegmata_Patrum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia
"On the Signs of Grace and Delusion, Written for the Confessor Longinos: Ten Texts"
less familiar with western christian works, though i'm sure there are some.
Can you share what happened to them?
Also, you mentioned 3 week retreats. Can you share what changes (good or bad) you experienced during these long retreats?
Meditation is a blade with no hilt.
I _accidentally_ fell into a vipassana state of mind after the first time trying a particular religious chant, seriously, from out of the pains of boredom as a 20 year old.
At the time I lived nearby mountains, and after 'coming to', I saw them through the window. I cannot describe to you the overwhelming feeling of beauty and awe that crashed over me. It was as though this was the very first time I had ever seen mountains. I think the best description I can manage comes from 'Both Sides Now' by Joni Mitchell.
'I've looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down, and still somehow It's cloud illusions I recall I really don't know clouds at all'
The experience was so disorienting. As if I was seeing the mountains for what they were directly through my senses and not mediated by my knowledge of what mountains were like, linguistically.
It changed my entire life -- weeks later later I lost my job and fell into a 5 year extreme depression / anxiety spell in the attempt to reconcile my adolescent religious upbringing with the continued insight from that experience. Absolutely worthwhile, in hindsight, but it cost me near everything for it.
That very moment I was hit by a realisation that I still - years later - can't really put into the appropriate words. It felt like a veil suddenly lifted. The world exposed itself in all its complexity and aesthetic beauty. The integration and the interdependence of all things was suddenly visible to me without any mental filters. The abstractions were gone. The semiotics were gone. The dualism was gone.
It felt like I suddenly and violently woke up from a deep slumber.
There was this strong realisation that I was deeply embedded in the universe. The leaves blowing in the wind, the snail, the pebbles on the trail, the grass, the sky, the universe and myself in it were just one thing. I felt like I was suspended in the very "beingness" of it all.
Back then, I had no means to integrate this existential experience into everyday life. The giant question marks it raised stuck with me over the years. Intense meditation practise can create very powerful shifts in perception of reality. In hindsight, I believe that I was way too inexperienced to wield the powerful tool that is meditation. I stopped meditation practice for a few years after this experience. I felt that I ventured too far offshore. I suddenly realised how deep and unexplored the ocean that is perception are, once we swim out of the shallow water. Back then, I decided to quickly swim back to shore and stopped my meditation practice for a few years.
I've rekindled my meditation praxis with the same sangha a few years later. But I stayed vigilant to not venture too fast too far out into unexplored territories of perception.
Some are :) https://meditatewithtucker.com/about/ I'm not affiliated with Tucker, just been on retreats with him in the past. I'm sure there are other teachers out there with similar training.
- Someone noted downthread that meditation is dose-sensitive. This is is an incredibly useful observation. Most folks doing 30-60 mins of meditation a day are not at risk but doing an intensive weeks long retreat with 8-10hrs/day of cushion time is in a different risk bucket.
- Second, there were many objections to using meditation as a singular monolithic phenomenon vs. distinguishing between the varieties of meditative experiences. I have struggled with this in the past too. For the sake of this discussion let's define meditation as a purposeful focus on an object of meditation with the goal of single pointed absorption.
This definition is incomplete and inaccurate in measures. However I do think it encompasses a fair variety of meditative experiences. The object might be the breath, the flow of thoughts, mantras (prayer), visualizations or an analytical meditation. I include conscious breath work in this category - pranayama, wimhof - since you are consciously moving the breath/attention to create a heightened psychological state. Yogic/Vedic/Buddhist meditation practices - even Zazen - all ascribe to the state of one-pointed absorption, nay, union of the object and subject (shamatha/shiney).
- More importantly for us all meditations - Vipassana, Mantra-based and Yogic - can create breaks as evidenced by experiences related else where in the thread. For the sake of this discussion we can transcend the varieties and just lump them as meditation.
- Based on many conversations, I believe that meditation first amplifies the psychological makeup. If someone's mind has nervous tendencies or a tendency to mania then meditation will amplify it and bring it out. The analog of Crossfit and related intense regimens are useful here. Crossfit done without consideration for the body's deficiencies (e.g. lack of mobility in certain joints) - will lead to injury centered on the where the deficiencies lie. So if I have bad shoulder mobility, doing overhead cleans will probably cause a tear in my rotator cuff. Intense meditation has to be tailored to the individual and just like intense workout regimens, there has to be concurrent rehab of deficient areas. I unfortunately am not qualified to speak more about this.
- Benefits of Meditation: There is a notion that meditation is beneficial and can cure things that ail us. I think this is a very mistaken idea bought about by commercialization and packaging of meditation. I break down benefits from meditative practice especially retreat into the following components but would appreciate hearing more on this:
-- Greater focus. Focusing on the breath or another object greatly helps sharpen our ability to focus. This has obvious benefits in daily life rife with distractions. Greater focus also manifests as "mindfulness" or just awareness. A person who is mindful, as a result of meditation, is perceived in an interaction as present and focused. AFAIK, the world mindfulness does not occur anywhere in the Buddhist teachings and is a artefact of translation ;)
-- Dopamine fasting - Removing all stimuli for a few days in retreat and simple sustenance amplifies the senses and rewinds the hedonic adaptation treadmill. Upon exiting retreat, this leads to feelings of euphoria on encountering everyday stimuli like food or a cup of tea or a flower.
- Meditative absorption - Single pointed absorption in an object is a flow state and can be very pleasurable. Watching a sports event or a great movie is a flow experience where you forget the distinction between object and subject. Meditation makes this experience reachable on a daily/weekly basis to a accomplished meditator.
- Finally, behavior change from meditative realizations. This is function of the framework of meditation - Vipassana, Yogic, Mantra, etc. For example, if I can realize that my states of mind are transient by experience than perhaps I will be more detached from them which might give me a superpower of acting far more rationally in the face of my own fleeting passions.
In summary, meditation in an established tradition can be bring transformation, but approach it cautiously. A meditation retreat will not cure you and meditation is a journey like exercise and has to be repeated, ideally daily, to keep the benefits. The benefits might lie on the other side of a long journey.
Meditation in all traditions is a means to an end - the end being realization or one-pointedness. Meditation in the modern context is stripped from its goal and made an end in itself. Meditation on its own, sans realizations, will not heal or solve any of our problems but can offer transitory benefits.
How can people do that if HN doesn't have DMs and you don't have any information listed on your profile?
Proper meditation is a very powerful journey inside and has the power to uncover a lot of trauma or bad experiences masked or buried by other coping mechanisms. It can be said that purification is the process of uncovering these traumas and/or problems and solving them definitively, removing all secondary effects in the process, hence making person more free.
As OP said, the mechanisms are overly complex and extremely powerful. It's both not understood by modern science and very underrated by "woo woo" people.
Coming to your point, these breaks are caused by being faced with these traumas unprepared or without someone to support you. If you're advanced enough, you can face them yourself and solve them. If you're not and somehow face them, a more experienced practitioner can help you to collect yourself and face them at a later time. These experiences push you to the boundaries or out of your comfort zone, for sure.
In these cases, anxiety and other emotions are tip of the iceberg. If you're anxious about meditation, you wouldn't be able to focus properly.
In Zen, the practitioner wouldn't search for a root cause since it's not obvious. So, you don't try to process what's happening real time. These root cause reveals itself later. Either by noticing real-life changes or enlightenment (completion of background processing).
Hope that helps. If you have further questions, I'll try to answer.
Interacting with hidden layers are considered advanced practice and I'm just entering these levels. To be able to cope with it you both have to be very experienced and very powerful. I still practice with my masters if I'm going to go that deep.
Also, tests of death and dissolution is not something you should experience alone. It can be because of many different reasons. Everybody's experiences are different, even when faced with the same thing. So you need to get familiar with yourself first, under supervision of a more experienced instructor.
My advice is not to mix meditation with substances and not try deeper practices without someone more experienced on the subject matter.
If you don't mind, could you mention what practices and substances are you referring to?
Every practice regimen has a bigger system in work so, mixing and matching can create havoc on your body.
Adding LSD and mushrooms on top of it is just lighting a big fire and calling storm on you.
I'm not against LSD, mushrooms or other practice systems, but never seen any positive outcome from these kinds of experiments.
Please, don't do it.
Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind has lots of stories of people having positive psychedelic therapy, which does require essentially a spiritual guide.
I personally changed a lot with the help of the practice I do. I've faced my phobias, solved a lot of self-confidence issues, found out what's wrong with me. I've also got therapy before starting Zen. While it helped me somehow, it failed to solve the underlying issue. Zen helped me to tackle the underlying issue and move forward.
To work with a good master, you don't need to always go to a monastery and, change your life temporarily. I left nothing behind. Still live in the city. Just go to see my master from time to time. Will continue when the pandemic ends.
I had an instructor in the city, who's also a student of the same master, but he passed away due to COVID-19.
Every tradition and way contains elements from each other, but these ways find the compatible combinations and way to build upon them. Also a master/student relationship helps to guide the student in the harder times. Internet doesn't provide the guidance and safeguards, unfortunately.
As an instructor, I keep track of my every student independently. Otherwise, there's no meaning doing what I do. They also call me when things go awry and we work through it together, and we both learn in the process.
Zen, Buddhism or anything is not the only way. There are many ways to do it.
I'm very curious on what was your main goal to achive?
Unfortunately that can't be proved. When reading the article I got the impression the woman might have unearthed such a thing. Maybe she had a hidden shame. Someone even asked about it, but she never told what it was. Maybe there wasn't anything to work through and meditation can cause problems. We can never know when the subject is dead. We also cant know if ideas are put in someone's head when they're in such a state.
My point is that to blame hidden trauma is cop out. Blaming the victim. Sure, it's the cause sometimes, but we dont know if it's always the case.
BTW, similar risks exist in psychotherapy, but they too will deny risks and blame patients with "(s)he had issues" when they die.
The first is hidden trauma.
The second is something that comes strings attached. You have to accept the Buddhist conceptual framework which says that the entire world is a fabrication.
During meditation you can experience this and, if you don't accept that you are more than just matter, then experiencing the fact that your body is empty of existence will mean that you are empty of existence. Which will be very frightening, as you can imagine.
Hidden trauma is not something like a faceless blob. It's something you remember, you know, however you didn't realize that it created a trauma with you. It's not something burning inside daily, distorting you daily. E.g.: You don't like a certain spice. That's OK, but why? Because somebody added it to your food excessively and your first encounter was very unpleasant. You put the event in the back burner, almost forgot about it, but its effects linger until this day. This is the hidden trauma. This can be something emotional about your past partners, something you botched up, etc. So when you re-remember it, it can be easy to work through or very hard. This difficulty is not related to the size of the event. You can go through events of great distress in a single breath and need to work on the loss of a sentimental item for years. This is where instructor comes in. Keeps you in balance, and guides through it.
The meditation I do doesn't judge anyone. There's no blame. It happened and it left a mark. Why? Doesn't matter. Who's wrong? Doesn't matter. There's a little lesson there. Did you learn it? It can be about you, other party, world, your dog. Doesn't matter. Get that little message, put it into your pocket, leave the emotion behind. That's not easy all the time. This is why instructors/masters are important. This is why the way is important.
Sometimes there's nothing to go through, at least for now. In a good practice, practice itself shouldn't search for problems but to explore what's inside and strengthen oneself. This strength and self-familiarity triggers the discovery of these hidden-traumas or not-so-right state of oneself. This mechanism is not fully understood, but it can be said that with self familiarity and self confidence, the practitioner has more courage to face with the problems which he/she buried to cope, so subconscious mind surfaces them to be dealt with. This is again where guidance and masters play a very important role.
I meditate everyday. I don't uncover the hell inside me every day, but it helps me to reflect, understand what I did right, what I did wrong, what I still carry. It helped me tremendously for transforming from a potato to myself, after years of physical and emotional bullying. It helped me to get rid of my dance phobia, fear of expressing myself and lack of self confidence.
There are many wrong ways to both meditation and psychotherapy. We're very very cautious with our practitioners. Everyone benefited somehow from our ways. Most important thing is, many friends has diverted to different paths and they're free to do so. There's no strings attached. We give the tools and show how to use them correctly. If another set of tools are better for them, we're happy. No hard feelings.
>> Hidden trauma is not something like a faceless blob. It's something you remember, you know, however you didn't realize that it created a trauma with you.
Some people will block the memory. Others are aware of it but don't associate it with current feelings, thoughts, or actions, so when asked they will essentially "forget" it and say "no trauma". Yet other forms of trauma form from years of subtle mistreatment and can not be traced to a specific event - only through extensive work can that be pieced together.
The subconscious can be a minefield, and to say poor outcomes are due to poor practice is almost as bad as victim blaming. I think triage is important, but there is a lot of belief that any practitioner can handle any person. I think that's false even with the best of them.
However, I want to heavily emphasize that there's no such thing as "poor outcomes are due to poor practice" in our way. I never got that treatment from my masters or my deceased instructor. Same is valid for me. I'd never say something something similar to any of my students.
These students give us all their trust. Their wellbeing is more important than ours during practice and after that. We'd do anything in our capacity to help them, and we have preliminary response protocols if something goes wrong. This brings us to next point of you, which is equally valid.
> I think triage is important, but there is a lot of belief that any practitioner can handle any person.
That's absolutely true. If we sense something is beyond us, we direct our students to medical doctors. If there's an emergency, we directly take them there. Having knowledge of preliminary medical first aid is essential (we have them). Funny thing is, other trainer in my city is an MD. Our master was a field medic.
We neither denounce nor ignore modern medicine. We just can complement in lots of instances or teach people to help themselves. I think it's equally important to know the value and capacity of tradition and accept things evolve and advance.
It's assuring that none of students had any adverse effects or negative events in their life due to practices they made with us. If anything happens, its responsibility is on us, not them. We're showing the way, and we don't have the luxury to make mistakes.
A sudden confrontation with this can be completely destabilizing.
> A sudden confrontation with this can be completely destabilizing.
Many ways force a confrontation, and that's indeed dangerous. However, it doesn't have to be like that.
Emotions are like onions. They're layered. Slow practice and slow advancement naturally brings practitioners to outer layers of these onions, which are easier to understand, remove and resolve. In our way, you can't get to the next level unless you have the power to do so.
If you have the power, you can remove and solve it. If you can't remove that layer, you don't face with anything. It all happens progressively.
All in all, there's no forced search for battles to fight. Ours is self exploration. You face only what you're ready for. We have safeguards against it.
I'm doing this for ~7 years and I still get to harder levels of the same issues sometimes. It's not easy, but it's worth it.
I’ve also spent time with numerous different meditation groups from different traditions.
My experience is that they vary a lot.
> You face only what you're ready for. We have safeguards against it.
Your particular community may have safeguards.
That is simply not true in the general case as the linked article asserts.
When it becomes a competition or a drug or a lifestyle or an experimental therapy or hobby or social or cult activity, there are greater dangers. People should be meaningfully informed of the risks. But there is money to be made, so...
Philosophical studies and religious faith and teachings seem to smooth the way. Know thyself. Everything in moderation. To thine own self be true. The small still voice within. If it isn’t making you more kind and loving to all you meet, whatever it is, then stop. As true about meditation as anything else.
The best introduction I ever found on the topic of meditation was Introduction to Yoga Principles and Practices by Majumdar, University Books, 1964. No cult, no workshops, been dead for a while.
That seems like a tautology to me.
You are essentially saying that those who practice safely do not need safeguards.
This is true, but of course the safeguards are not for those people.
They are for people who are at risk but don’t know it.
My guess is, it's not understood by modern science exactly because it's underrated by "woo woo" people :( But I notice in later years an increased focus on mental studies so maybe modern science will get to this as well. That is, if it's not too busy explaining the earth is round... (*edited to reformat)
This causes the emotion to ferment underneath that layer, and since it's prevented from venting itself, the person sometimes emotionally deforms more and everything becomes harder to solve.
Part because person is blind to what's happening and has a very powerful defensive layer which prevents everyone (including psychiatrists) reaching from problematic emotions and trying to heal them.
Sounds odd - what exact methods are you talking about?
I don't know the exact names of the methods, but they essentially train to push these bad experiences deeper and pretend that they didn't happen or affect you in the first place.
However, they both happened and affected the person. Pretending not is dangerous akin ignoring a wound with infection.
Every emotion/trauma affects you and these effects manifest somehow. These effects are self-regulated via feedbacks like "I feel X", "I'm not feeling OK", "Hey, this makes me happy" or "Why do I feel like that", etc.
Ignoring an emotion's or secondary effect's presence removes the self regulation circuit hence, allows it to run amok. Since person trained him/herself to ignore these emotions or its manifestations with great effectiveness, wounds grow deeper while practitioner pretends it's OK.
At the last stage, person permanently ignores the problem and pointing to it results in violent responses from the affected person.
I've met with people these symptoms. All of them practiced or was practicing self-affirmation / self validation practices with minimal or no supervision.
Every practice, done mindlessly is dangerous. Including Zen, Yoga and others.
As someone who has instructed meditation, our lineage has many safe guards to make it mild for the neophyte to pick up and practice safely. First off all, not by renouncing the world, but by being part of it. Second to never overdo it. Third, no more than three pranayama breaths when you start.
The yoga sutras talk about sthira and sukha, effort and ease, which should be in balance. Basically you wouldn’t send someone up mount Everest untrained. Nor is there a reason to for the layman interested in the relaxation of the mind.
The word "meditation" is used for almost everything and in different senses.
Sitting in half lotus or milder variations is hard for the chair accustomed person! Not to mention that lotus/half lotus can be tough, sometimes wrecking even, on the knees,hips or lowerback.
I suppose were I to subject myself to a week+ of meditation in my current state, I could conceivably "injure" myself if I were stubborn in my persistence. So maybe the warnings in this article aren't so unintuitive after all.
Would love for someone knowledgeable to contrast this form to the other forms mentioned in this thread for someone who is open minded and not a complete outsider.
The explanation might be difficult for you to accept, if you don't accept Buddhist philosophy (if you don't believe in enlightenment, basically).
If you are a materialist, you don't believe there is anything else besides matter. You are just your body.
Well, at some point during your meditation, you might experience the fact that this world is a construct, a fabrication. But if you don't know how to put it into context, it will feel like nothing, void, nonexistence. This could shock your mind-body system.
There are several ways to avoid this.
First, familiarise yourself with the Buddhist conceptual framework. Entertain the possibility that it is an accurate view of reality. The best book that I know for this is Dreams of light by Andrew Holecek.
Second, look into practices that cultivate positive mental states. Some examples are forgiveness meditation and metta meditation. A relaxed and open mind can more easily hold difficult experiences.
Third, take it slow and don't push yourself if you're having difficult experiences. Find a teacher or a community where you can ask for advice. One community that I recommend is /r/streamentry on Reddit.
I hope meditation is fruitful for you. Let me know if you have questions.
Without being arrogant or facetious this feels like a truism to me? After all, our sense of self is an emergent property of unfeeling chemical machines.
I suppose this is where philosophy of the self and ego comes into play which tends to stick people into two camps.
That said, I have yet to feel my mind wander down these paths and experiences during meditation. Although I have experienced something almost similar to psycho activity/wakeful dreaming during yoga shavasana
In any case, I may not be conveying the message properly, because I'm still trying to understand these things conceptually.
The book I mentioned does a far better job with this.
I may not be disagreeing with what you mean, but one should be careful to differentiate between concepts, that are knowable, and things they refer to, which are not¹. Lots of confusion stems from mistaking the two. From what you were taught are apples to the world or ones own self.
As an illustration, if I slap your face, you may argue it is an illusion, it may not affect your later in life, and you may not even remember it. I take it as true, that words nor imagination are no match for an actual good slap. After a slap, people may disagree whether it was a slap, they may have illusions about who, what, how or why .. yet I don't think many will argue it is an illusion in the sense that nothing in fact happened.
¹ Well, most of them anyway.
Even that conceptual framework can not describe what can't be described. It can only get you to experience again and again what can only be experienced until the moment that concepts drop off.
> First off all, not by renouncing the world, but by being part of it.
What is the world to me? What am I to the world? Truly, the example of this world and myself is that of a rider who seeks shade under a tree, then he moves on and leaves it behind. - Prophet Muhammad
So there are the very subtle (but quite important) distinctions made by Muhammad (SAWS) here regarding the correct meaning of "detachment" and "world" and the mental and spiritual position of the 'Completed Human' regarding these matters. (Many in their misguided and mininformed zeal about "poverty" and "detachment" forget about that comforting "shade" he mentioned. "Seek shade under a tree". Mediate on that.)
Maybe I am missing something, but Zikr sounds suspiciously like japa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japa), which is a well accepted form of concentration meditation in all Dharmic traditions. Many teachers will ask neophytes to have a regular japa practice, where you recite a mantra a certain number of times often with the help of a mAlA, first audibly, and gradually, mentally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japa#Degrees_of_loudness). The idea being that it's easier to focus on a gross object at first to keep your mind steady, and later proceed to more subtle forms. Patanjali himself recommends that Om be chanted and its meaning reflected upon (https://www.himalayanacademy.com/saivite-scriptures/patanjal...).
The forms of meditations in dharmic traditions is quite bewildering. Patanjali himself recommends to concentrate on anything that you are comfortable with (https://www.himalayanacademy.com/saivite-scriptures/patanjal...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhikr
So of course, Zikr is a subset of general contemplation and given the universality of human body and psyche, you will find shared elements (such as seating, lowering & raising of head/gaze, and the big one, breathing) in various methodologies of contemplation across cultures, religions, and schools. This is to be expected and is natural.
In a sense, one could possibly say that Meditation aimed towards mastering the mind, whereas Zikr aims for breaking the imaginal boundary of lower self (i.e. aims for Unity of Selves harmonized by “Names”) by being fully focused and mindful of ‘The One’. Chanting Om is quite close to the effect.
Meditation is definitely not relaxation. In the language of Yoga (which meditative traditions share), long meditation sessions move the focus (prana) to certains parts of the body where long sustained focus can create "imbalances" and lead to breaks and other side effects (psychosis or related). Further description risks going into woo-woo land without a shared language.
Meditation carries with it the most definite risk of people experiencing a break. I would put the at-risk population in the low-to-mid single digits. I have seen folks go into long meditation retreats and experience breaks where they have an experience much like Megan in the article - they have to be admitted and most of them are never the same ever after. Very solid grounded people develop migraines, insomnia, loss of appetite, or start hallucinating.
Meditation and Pranayama are both neither innocuous nor mere placebo effects. There is a very strong mechanism at work which we do not understand in a modern scientific context. However, the majority of practitioners do not do long intense retreats and will get away without any serious consequences.
A good tradition will devote serious time on how to combat the effects of long meditation retreats. They will talk about it almost as much as the technique itself. The biggest antidotes are - getting good sleep, not overdoing it, physical exercise, long walks and getting enough food. The inversion - onset of insomnia or anxiety or loss of appetite - is a very bad sign and you should stop meditating immediately.
Please do not do take either practice lightly or you could risk effing up something internally for which we have no cure. Feel free to DM me if you want to chat more.