I can't help thinking that most of these examples of negative side effects are related to intensives rather than meditation/mindfulness itself. There's a world of difference between 20 minutes a day and 10 days in a retreat looking inward. Maybe it's just better for you in short bursts, not long marathons. I once experienced negative effects after joining a Buddhist meditation group while at university. Every time I faced anything which provoked anxiety, such as preparation for my final exams, I would turn to meditation assuming it would help me get things done but it had the opposite effect of avoiding what I needed to face. I ended-up spending longer and longer periods meditating but I felt I was getting weaker both physically and neurologically. Eventually, during the end-of-term holiday break, I consulted a doctor who gave me tranquillisers for a few weeks and I left the Buddhist group when I returned to university but it took a while to get back to normal.
These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.
I expect there will be higher cases of psychosis happening on intense retreats, but as anecdotal as this, I had it happen to me (albeit not as extreme as OP) after meditating for much shorter periods (approx 10 minutes up to an hour).
I really did not see it coming. For some context, I don't know of any deep seated trauma that I have and I liked to think of myself as someone robust mentally.
I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me. This was really nice for about two weeks. I started to think that I should be looking to help other people and become a guru, perhaps write a book to help humanity, but then my ego (I expect) came back with a vengeance, kicked my ass and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system). I experienced huge panic attacks like I have never had before, I carried this constant feeling of absolute dread in my soul, like a sense of impending doom. I have heard it described as the dark night of the soul. Some try to push through this, but I held back as i cannot afford to have a complete meltdown as I need to care for a young family and hold down a job.
I spoke with a well respected meditator about this, and they said the some people are wired to have an accelerated experience and are able to obtain deep introspection with limited time on the cushion.
I would say I am almost back to normal now. I had to stop all meditation and instead focused on health food, sleep habits and lots of exercise. My main mediation type thing is now running, it quietens my mind, but the grounding effect of the movement keeps me in a safe play pen to explore my reality.
meditation is incredibly powerful, in the west we have confused it as being a corporate stress ball that you squeeze or like a lavender scented, candle lit bath while listening to Enya. The truth is, it can reveal incredibly deep seated aspects of ourselves that we are in no way prepared to witness, let alone accept.
Most people will reap most of the health benefits that meditation has to offer by sitting for 20 minutes a couple times a day.
You can go much deeper, of course, but that's a philosophical / spiritual quest to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you - it's not a health pursuit. A multi-day meditation retreat is in many ways like running an ultramarathon: it's not really a healthy undertaking, per se, but you might learn something about yourself by doing it, and the way to do it responsibly is by working your way up to it over months and years of practice.
Haven’t we all looked inwardly too much already? I’d list that as a top reason for the general malaise I see around me. I’ve never really found looking inward that useful, looking outward and acting outward and thinking about others has to be a 100:1 ratio on returns vs looking inward.
I think stories like this relate to misunderstanding the point of meditation practice, the practice. The time spent may be helpful in of itself but really you're meant to do the practice and learn more about how your mind works and be able to have better control of your emotional states. Not retreat into meditating whenever you fell something other than contentment. Disappointing that you apparently didn't learn this from a Buddhist group and instead focused on the actual act of meditating as the useful thing.
> I would turn to meditation assuming it would help me get things done but it had the opposite effect of avoiding what I needed to face.
Marcus Aurelius—quoted from memory, so probably not quite right, and it's in translation at any rate:
> You can pass your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way and to act the right way.
I personally found the "think the right way" easy to get into, but without the "act the right way" it can indeed lead to apathy, detachment, and avoidance. Whoops.
One of the findings from researchers in the book Altered Traits is that largest (positive) cerebral changes were associated with time spent at intensive retreats. This is also very much a part of Zen practice (etc) so presumably practitioners have found some additional value in intensives over the years.
Not entirely sure if any study demonstrating the benefits of meditation or mindfulness considers counting 9 to 1 repeatedly an act of either. That aligns much more closely with the advice given to those with panic disorders in how to ride out their panic attacks or prevent them when they feel coming on.
Maybe the brain is smart, once you know meditation works, it then anticipates it to work. The expectation of it working interferes with the actual mindfulness and you take longer and longer.
Is a law of diminishing utility thing and also a basic instinct for people to get used to stuff the more they are exposed
There are often first-hand comments about the dangers of mindfulness practice here on HN. But when the commenters describe their practices they are so extreme that it was almost inevitable that they had negative effects.
> These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly.
If it works for you that's great. However, I would say approaching meditation from a "mind control" exercise such as "counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly" goes counter to its purpose and will hinder its full potential. If you're willing to experiment with other methods, try letting your mind wander and don't let it stick; just experience the ebb and flow. Twenty-minute sessions sound about right for me as well.
I have a theory that meditation/mindfulness is essentially just an excercise in self-erasure. This can be beneficial to some degree in that we all need to erase those negative associations and question our assumptions. However, carried to an extreme, it can erase some of the associations we need to make in order to live and create extreme hyper-selfawareness. Or in other words, you open up your mind too much, your brains start to fall out.
buddha was not enlightened through meditation. that is a dangerous falsehood that has been added by monks. he was enlightened through his accumulation of virtue through his specific practices of educating others while he was in the mountains. this placed him in turmoil. he left the mountains, and sat down under a tree to collect himself. it was only after he became calm that he realized that he had already attained the supreme enlightenment. you cannot attain it through any other means than teaching after entering a samadhi. but to enter samadhi means you have to stop your karma. even then, it can be reborn, just like anything else. the final enlightenment - that of a buddha - is to burn down all your karma. the greatest way to do this is the practice of true love.
this is a path which will cause you to face inordinate difficulties and loneliness. most people are waylaid. "strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto Life and few there be who find it."
I'm no expert, but this still seems like avoidance more than mindfulness. Obviously, meditating for six hours as a means to escape and avoid uncomfortable thoughts is healthier than blacking out or doing opioids, but it's still escaping versus being present, processing, and facing uncomfortable feelings and emotions.
I’m an autistic person and it sounds like in some way this person achieved exactly the point of certain forms of meditation like this which is to open up awareness. And I think as many autistic folks will tell you, being very aware is extremely difficult and is mentally and physically taxing. If you aren’t prepared for it I could indeed see it being extremely disturbing. Being exposed to all your inner workings and thoughts constantly is not for the faint of heart.
That being said, I think mindfulness in western countries skips a lot of Buddhist teachings, which are in large part designed to help deal with this kind of experience. I highly suggest that anyone that is going down this path seek out teachers that have experience and can be of aid. There are pragmatic aspects of it that go beyond meditation and in my opinion are just as important if not more so.
And just to contextualize this, I’m a Buddhist. I live in Thailand and it’s something that is part of my normal life. As such, it’s rare the I’m meditating outside of a temple and I have easy access to a whole host of teachers. I would urge caution around retreats and other intensive practices. Mindset and setting are extremely important and should be considered carefully.
I’ve had a lifetime to learn to live like this and I would not want to see anyone dropped in the deep end without proper preparation.
Was going to post this. There are reasons we have brains with selective attention instead of constant mindfulness, and a whole spectrum of disorders that arises when that sort of a filter breaks down. (I am lucky. I don’t have it bad.) Unfiltered mindfulness of this sort sounds like basically the same thing.
I came here to say the same thing, and you said it much more charitably than I was going to. This is what you get when you try to turn complex religious practice into multi-level marketing, with certifications, and people being paid to instruct.
All of the real meditation traditions around the world - including the ones inside of Christianity - spend decades training highly skilled teachers to help people
1) avoid problems like this, and
2) clean up problems like this when they do happen.
And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamboo tube." And so on.
I put together a system for solo practitioners working with absolutely minimal oversight in 2015. People doing it since then, I talk to them roughly once (on average) to check they're doing it right, then don't hear back from them for years until they're getting into the weird "foothills of enlightenment" end stage stuff -- if they make it that far. Most don't, they plateaux. Which is fine, that's a good, safe place to be.
Instructions here. There's a bunch of other stuff in that same directory structure. It's fine.
The same thing plays out with psychedelics. Many cultures have thousands of years of passed down knowledge with a community of elders to guide people through a trip. In the west we think we can replicate the same thing, sitting at home with a friend who has no clue what they are doing when things go bad.
All long term buddhist retreats will essentially sit you down and try make sure you're mentally healthy enough and prepared to partake. People losing it during long bouts is a regular occurrence.
Thanks for sharing, going to check this out later off my work computer. I've been trying to become more disciplined with my meditation practice, I try to do 10 minutes every day.
I have been told that Trungpa said "they always run".
The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.
The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.
I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.
> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.
I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!
I think you're conflating the concentration and insight jhanas/meditative practices. What you said about losing the sense of self is true of the insight jhanas, but "mindfulness" as a meditative practice is more reminiscent of concentration. Also, it's not like "losing the sense of self" is always bad for you; it depends how deep your attachment to the self was in the first place. Sīla (moral and ethical practice) and intellectual insights like Stoicism can help you gradually loosen the notion that a personal self must be integral to existence, without abandoning it completely.
> The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench.
I found quite a few signs of egotism in the writer, so I'm not surprised that he experienced a great wrench in confronting his sense of selfhood. And then lashes out at the teachings and practices he had previously rushed to embrace.
Realisation of no self (anatta) would be canonically fit into vipssana meditation whereas mindfulness (sati) is something done for concentration practice
Doing intensive meditation retreats is a Navy Seal hell-week for your mind. If people took that into consideration, they would be better prepared for the results.
It's much better to start with a simple meditation practice or go on a shorter retreat (1-3 days), build up a base and periodically dip your feet in deep waters. There are too many people in the west who treat it like an extreme sport and get burned out in the process.
It reminded me of when Tim Ferris decided to go on a 10-day meditation retreat after a multi-day fast and almost had a full mental breakdown.
I'm submitting this article because I thought it was somewhat objectively written and an interesting subject to consider. My impression (from far away) of some of the meditation gurus is also that they look like they are kinda addicted to their new "hobby". Also, it's rarely healthy if your income depends on you strongly believing in something (anything, really).
"60% of the participants reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers"
"Britton theorized that the effects of mindfulness might follow an inverted U-shaped curve, where at some point therapeutic returns not only diminish but mindfulness could have negative side effects"
What he experienced is actually expected, deeper states of meditation bring out even harder experiences. Meditation is marketed in the west as some sort of a relaxation pill, designed to cure anxiety and other mental ailments. It's actually not. Meditation is a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you.
It's really frustrating when intensive meditation is sold as always positive. Like you can't get injured, and even if you do you did something wrong.
I have been meditating 20 years, and I have gone trough intensive retreats, so I share.
If you read Buddhist sutras, you find out that Buddha experienced similar and worse while meditating. Going into horrible states of mind at some point is what almost everybody goes trough if they meditate intensively at some point. That's not Buddhism going bad that's what Buddhism has been for 2000 years. If you stay in monasteries long enough, you see monks recovering from bad experience, even some rare cases who are permanently broken somehow. That's rare but it happens.
If your image of intensive meditation is "maintaining constant calm", or that "middle path" means no storms just the calm, you are mistaken. Human's don't naturally pay attention into their inner workings as much as they do in intensive meditation, something will happen. That's why you are doing it.
Living normal hectic life and doing intensive meditation retreats can be a problem. If you live in a monastery or similar place where you meditate 3-4 hours daily, attending intensive retreats is more balanced experience. Taking one year sabbatical and doing nothing but meditation was important step for me.
> ...and began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Looking back, it was also during this time period that I had my first dissociative experiences, in which elements of my sense of self became separated in a way that impaired my ability to function.
This was a couple of years before the "meltdown". While meditation surely may have induced mental health issues, the drugs and alcohol probably didn't help.
What stands out is that he had mental health issues and some point that grew worse, sadly. It temporally correlated with meditation but that doesn't mean it was predominantly caused by it.
The meditation may have triggered things, sure, but my guess is he likely would have had a meltdown also if he went all-in on some other activity for 10 years.
After all, with multiple years (4, 6?) between the first dissociative symptoms and the break down, you could also argue that the mediation may even slowed or alleviated the effects of the mental disorder until some threshold was hit.
It sounds like he tortured himself then got PTSD from it.
Most things are fine when done in moderation, most things are bad when taken to the extremes.
"13 days to go" suggest this was some crazy regimen, if you would do that to prisoners I bet it's actually considered torture.
If I read about his past, it sounds to me like he might have some underlying mental health problems that would be good to address. Not by guru's, retreats, or pseudoscience, but psychologists and other professionals.
I think he does come to the right conclusion that the extremes can be very harmful. They are not that far from cults, always some guru or leader, then many people blindly following their weird practices based on absolutely nothing but pseudo science and believe, with a tendency to get more extreme (and more expensive!) the deeper you get into them.
Meditation is fine if done in moderation and as long as you don't expect it to solve all your problems. It can help with certain things, it also won't solve serious mental problems.
Working through mental health problems is no fun and a lot of work with many ups and downs, there is no easy solution, there are no shortcuts. Get professional help, get therapy, get medication if needed, be kind to yourself, and just keep working at it one step at a time.
> Once we have crossed the Arising and Passing Away (and if we don’t suddenly die or get severe brain damage due to some unfortunate life circumstances), we shall enter insight stages five through ten regardless of whether we want to. It doesn’t matter if we practice from this point on; once we cross the A&P, we are in the Dark Night to some degree and become what is sometimes called a “Dark Night yogi”, or simply “darknighter”, until we figure out how to get through it. If we do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, we will have to go through it again and again until we do. I mean this in the most absolute terms. It appears to be a hardwired part of human physiology as far as I can tell. I have a very large and growing body of case studies and a wealth of shared experiences among meditation friends and acquaintances to back this up, and I am not alone. Tens of thousands of meditators have noticed these stages in their own practice and countless teachers have noticed them also.
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
The dark-night-of-the-soul phenomenon is associated with vipassana meditation.
In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible author) talks about people going insane from ill-advised meditation methods of suppressing body and mind.
It seems like these early 'mystical' offshoots around meditation-heavy religion typically don't typically involve or speak well of a lot of meditation, truthfully. Zen Master Bankei didn't want his monks to meditate at all.
The problem is that meditation is a cargo-cult. Early in the history of Dzogchen, they had trekcho, "cutting straight through", not a heavy emphasis on meditation. Early in the Zen tradition, they had precious few words to say anything well of meditation at all.
Zen Master Foyan wrote, maybe around 1200ish?:
> Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish!
As someone into this stuff, there is kind of something there--it's the advaita vedanta like realization that this is it, the eye never sees itself. It's hard to describe in a few words, and has nothing at all to do with vipassana or jhanas. Alternatively, I think it has to do with switching to the floodlight perception of the right hemisphere as the default resting state of the mind. The left hemisphere tends to over-dominate because it works on positive-feedback--the more it engages with something, the more it wants to engage. It gets overheated and starts to turn its tunnel vision into a primary aspect of ordinary awareness and places a really heavy overlay on direct experience. The right hemisphere does the more typical negative feedback/diminishing marginal utility thing most of the time.
I'm a big fan of direct-path teachings like Loch Kelly gives. I think heavy meditation, especially vipassana, is just a cargo-cult hazing.
I’m inclined to think this stuff is more correlation than causation.
Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shrooms and for the same reasons. There are a lot of these people on hn and in the tech world, overachievers high on the neuroticism scale. A normal person doesn’t meditate more than 30 minutes a day. That alone is a symptom of deeper issues.
Reminds me a lot of Overtraining Syndrome (OTS), the condition where your body stops responding positively to the stress of endurance sports and essentially stops recovering quickly. A 20 mile run no longer makes you faster, instead the fatigue from it just settles inside your body.
I remember reading that while training for an ironman and getting a bit spooked. But then I realized that the folks who suffer from OTS are taking it to such an extreme. This article reminded me a lot of that - it sounds like you can take anything too far. At the 99.99th percentile, probably any healthy activity can become an obsessive act that can ruin your life. But anywhere in between the 50th and 99th percentile it's probably still a good thing.
This feels like part of a western habit of cherry-picking from other traditions, and, in this case, not understanding the context we're pulling from. We see things like Zen as fun, playful and liberating, but miss the whole part of it that entails "killing the self". It's a practice of systematically disassembling what you thought you were until there is nothing left...and this is a process that is generally done in a highly structured, supervised way. It's telling that we just pluck out the practice and think it will let us deal with our shit so we can get more done at work.
I say this from the context of having studied in Zen temples in Japan in my 20s, and having done myself real harm.
I'd like to know what physical activity and exercise the author was getting during this period. I believe that 10 - 12 hours of breath counting was mentioned, and I can't imagine that being physically still for that long is good for the body. Some of the stuff about involuntary jerking and the author's shoulder reminded me of my experience with a pinched nerve due to a bulged disc in my neck.
Also, I'm a bit suspicious of the quiet references to alcohol and drugs. I'm far from a tee-totaler, but I recognize that one man's casual drinking or smoking (i.e. THC) is another's depression or anxiety-inducing dose.
I suffered from bad anxiety for a while post pandemic.
Mindfulness meditation made me feel better during and for about half an hour afterward, but it wasn't "me again": it was some altered state that not only wasn't addressing the underlying issues (that I've since made great strides on in psychotherapy). I felt periods of great calm, but it was as if I was taking some drug to achieve an altered state.
I read a lot about how to "bring the meditative state into daily life", and that only made the anxiety worse when it broke through, because it sensitized me to focus increasingly on internal physical phenomena. Yeah, I tried not to "judge" them, to neither anticipate their arrival and to just observe their rise and fall, but the observing meant attention, and the attention magnified them.
I finally beat the anxiety mostly for good by acknowledging and facing the problems in my life. I haven't even solved much of them yet, but I'm pretty honest about it both to myself and the people close to me.
From what I have read, negative experiences from mindfulness practice have more to do with the fast food way of approaching it that we go about it in the west.
It requires a much slower progression that is usually done with a more experienced mentor, who will guide you through the process and help you when you encounter these issues.
These techniques are powerful and helpful and can definitely help alleviate stress and anxiety, but like in the Nietzsche quote
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you”
The way we teach it in the west does not equip us for when the abyss gazes back
> According to Ingram, one must continue to meditate through these awful experiences until reaching a deeper state of awakening. He makes it clear that the consequences of stopping are severe.
Ron Hubbard himself couldn't have stated it any better. He'd be proud.
[+] [-] cutler|3 years ago|reply
These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.
[+] [-] jossclimb|3 years ago|reply
I really did not see it coming. For some context, I don't know of any deep seated trauma that I have and I liked to think of myself as someone robust mentally.
I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me. This was really nice for about two weeks. I started to think that I should be looking to help other people and become a guru, perhaps write a book to help humanity, but then my ego (I expect) came back with a vengeance, kicked my ass and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system). I experienced huge panic attacks like I have never had before, I carried this constant feeling of absolute dread in my soul, like a sense of impending doom. I have heard it described as the dark night of the soul. Some try to push through this, but I held back as i cannot afford to have a complete meltdown as I need to care for a young family and hold down a job.
I spoke with a well respected meditator about this, and they said the some people are wired to have an accelerated experience and are able to obtain deep introspection with limited time on the cushion.
I would say I am almost back to normal now. I had to stop all meditation and instead focused on health food, sleep habits and lots of exercise. My main mediation type thing is now running, it quietens my mind, but the grounding effect of the movement keeps me in a safe play pen to explore my reality.
meditation is incredibly powerful, in the west we have confused it as being a corporate stress ball that you squeeze or like a lavender scented, candle lit bath while listening to Enya. The truth is, it can reveal incredibly deep seated aspects of ourselves that we are in no way prepared to witness, let alone accept.
[+] [-] rrrrrrrrrrrryan|3 years ago|reply
Most people will reap most of the health benefits that meditation has to offer by sitting for 20 minutes a couple times a day.
You can go much deeper, of course, but that's a philosophical / spiritual quest to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you - it's not a health pursuit. A multi-day meditation retreat is in many ways like running an ultramarathon: it's not really a healthy undertaking, per se, but you might learn something about yourself by doing it, and the way to do it responsibly is by working your way up to it over months and years of practice.
[+] [-] naasking|3 years ago|reply
Actual marathons aren't great for your body either, especially if it's not something you've diligently trained for properly, so that makes sense.
[+] [-] Mistletoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamsmith143|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
Marcus Aurelius—quoted from memory, so probably not quite right, and it's in translation at any rate:
> You can pass your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way and to act the right way.
I personally found the "think the right way" easy to get into, but without the "act the right way" it can indeed lead to apathy, detachment, and avoidance. Whoops.
[+] [-] heydemo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waboremo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|3 years ago|reply
Is a law of diminishing utility thing and also a basic instinct for people to get used to stuff the more they are exposed
[+] [-] ycombinete|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxFlow|3 years ago|reply
If it works for you that's great. However, I would say approaching meditation from a "mind control" exercise such as "counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly" goes counter to its purpose and will hinder its full potential. If you're willing to experiment with other methods, try letting your mind wander and don't let it stick; just experience the ebb and flow. Twenty-minute sessions sound about right for me as well.
[+] [-] starkd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueprint|3 years ago|reply
this is a path which will cause you to face inordinate difficulties and loneliness. most people are waylaid. "strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto Life and few there be who find it."
[+] [-] pmart123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ystad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeattleAltruist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CitizenKane|3 years ago|reply
That being said, I think mindfulness in western countries skips a lot of Buddhist teachings, which are in large part designed to help deal with this kind of experience. I highly suggest that anyone that is going down this path seek out teachers that have experience and can be of aid. There are pragmatic aspects of it that go beyond meditation and in my opinion are just as important if not more so.
And just to contextualize this, I’m a Buddhist. I live in Thailand and it’s something that is part of my normal life. As such, it’s rare the I’m meditating outside of a temple and I have easy access to a whole host of teachers. I would urge caution around retreats and other intensive practices. Mindset and setting are extremely important and should be considered carefully.
I’ve had a lifetime to learn to live like this and I would not want to see anyone dropped in the deep end without proper preparation.
[+] [-] sclarisse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b800h|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeebeqn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starkd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leashless|3 years ago|reply
1) avoid problems like this, and
2) clean up problems like this when they do happen.
And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamboo tube." And so on.
I put together a system for solo practitioners working with absolutely minimal oversight in 2015. People doing it since then, I talk to them roughly once (on average) to check they're doing it right, then don't hear back from them for years until they're getting into the weird "foothills of enlightenment" end stage stuff -- if they make it that far. Most don't, they plateaux. Which is fine, that's a good, safe place to be.
Instructions here. There's a bunch of other stuff in that same directory structure. It's fine.
http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/...
[+] [-] jossclimb|3 years ago|reply
The same thing plays out with psychedelics. Many cultures have thousands of years of passed down knowledge with a community of elders to guide people through a trip. In the west we think we can replicate the same thing, sitting at home with a friend who has no clue what they are doing when things go bad.
[+] [-] colechristensen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiidrew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] roflyear|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.
The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.
I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.
> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.
I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!
[+] [-] yakubin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oska|3 years ago|reply
I found quite a few signs of egotism in the writer, so I'm not surprised that he experienced a great wrench in confronting his sense of selfhood. And then lashes out at the teachings and practices he had previously rushed to embrace.
[+] [-] passion__desire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wirrbel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dayvid|3 years ago|reply
It's much better to start with a simple meditation practice or go on a shorter retreat (1-3 days), build up a base and periodically dip your feet in deep waters. There are too many people in the west who treat it like an extreme sport and get burned out in the process.
It reminded me of when Tim Ferris decided to go on a 10-day meditation retreat after a multi-day fast and almost had a full mental breakdown.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
"60% of the participants reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers"
"Britton theorized that the effects of mindfulness might follow an inverted U-shaped curve, where at some point therapeutic returns not only diminish but mindfulness could have negative side effects"
[+] [-] me551ah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|3 years ago|reply
I have been meditating 20 years, and I have gone trough intensive retreats, so I share.
If you read Buddhist sutras, you find out that Buddha experienced similar and worse while meditating. Going into horrible states of mind at some point is what almost everybody goes trough if they meditate intensively at some point. That's not Buddhism going bad that's what Buddhism has been for 2000 years. If you stay in monasteries long enough, you see monks recovering from bad experience, even some rare cases who are permanently broken somehow. That's rare but it happens.
If your image of intensive meditation is "maintaining constant calm", or that "middle path" means no storms just the calm, you are mistaken. Human's don't naturally pay attention into their inner workings as much as they do in intensive meditation, something will happen. That's why you are doing it.
Living normal hectic life and doing intensive meditation retreats can be a problem. If you live in a monastery or similar place where you meditate 3-4 hours daily, attending intensive retreats is more balanced experience. Taking one year sabbatical and doing nothing but meditation was important step for me.
[+] [-] marhee|3 years ago|reply
This was a couple of years before the "meltdown". While meditation surely may have induced mental health issues, the drugs and alcohol probably didn't help.
What stands out is that he had mental health issues and some point that grew worse, sadly. It temporally correlated with meditation but that doesn't mean it was predominantly caused by it.
The meditation may have triggered things, sure, but my guess is he likely would have had a meltdown also if he went all-in on some other activity for 10 years.
After all, with multiple years (4, 6?) between the first dissociative symptoms and the break down, you could also argue that the mediation may even slowed or alleviated the effects of the mental disorder until some threshold was hit.
[+] [-] codeptualize|3 years ago|reply
Most things are fine when done in moderation, most things are bad when taken to the extremes.
"13 days to go" suggest this was some crazy regimen, if you would do that to prisoners I bet it's actually considered torture.
If I read about his past, it sounds to me like he might have some underlying mental health problems that would be good to address. Not by guru's, retreats, or pseudoscience, but psychologists and other professionals.
I think he does come to the right conclusion that the extremes can be very harmful. They are not that far from cults, always some guru or leader, then many people blindly following their weird practices based on absolutely nothing but pseudo science and believe, with a tendency to get more extreme (and more expensive!) the deeper you get into them.
Meditation is fine if done in moderation and as long as you don't expect it to solve all your problems. It can help with certain things, it also won't solve serious mental problems.
Working through mental health problems is no fun and a lot of work with many ups and downs, there is no easy solution, there are no shortcuts. Get professional help, get therapy, get medication if needed, be kind to yourself, and just keep working at it one step at a time.
[+] [-] andai|3 years ago|reply
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight...
[+] [-] theonemind|3 years ago|reply
In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible author) talks about people going insane from ill-advised meditation methods of suppressing body and mind.
It seems like these early 'mystical' offshoots around meditation-heavy religion typically don't typically involve or speak well of a lot of meditation, truthfully. Zen Master Bankei didn't want his monks to meditate at all.
The problem is that meditation is a cargo-cult. Early in the history of Dzogchen, they had trekcho, "cutting straight through", not a heavy emphasis on meditation. Early in the Zen tradition, they had precious few words to say anything well of meditation at all.
Zen Master Foyan wrote, maybe around 1200ish?:
> Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish!
As someone into this stuff, there is kind of something there--it's the advaita vedanta like realization that this is it, the eye never sees itself. It's hard to describe in a few words, and has nothing at all to do with vipassana or jhanas. Alternatively, I think it has to do with switching to the floodlight perception of the right hemisphere as the default resting state of the mind. The left hemisphere tends to over-dominate because it works on positive-feedback--the more it engages with something, the more it wants to engage. It gets overheated and starts to turn its tunnel vision into a primary aspect of ordinary awareness and places a really heavy overlay on direct experience. The right hemisphere does the more typical negative feedback/diminishing marginal utility thing most of the time.
I'm a big fan of direct-path teachings like Loch Kelly gives. I think heavy meditation, especially vipassana, is just a cargo-cult hazing.
[+] [-] 2devnull|3 years ago|reply
Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shrooms and for the same reasons. There are a lot of these people on hn and in the tech world, overachievers high on the neuroticism scale. A normal person doesn’t meditate more than 30 minutes a day. That alone is a symptom of deeper issues.
[+] [-] justsocrateasin|3 years ago|reply
I remember reading that while training for an ironman and getting a bit spooked. But then I realized that the folks who suffer from OTS are taking it to such an extreme. This article reminded me a lot of that - it sounds like you can take anything too far. At the 99.99th percentile, probably any healthy activity can become an obsessive act that can ruin your life. But anywhere in between the 50th and 99th percentile it's probably still a good thing.
[+] [-] fjfaase|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kouunji|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snozolli|3 years ago|reply
Also, I'm a bit suspicious of the quiet references to alcohol and drugs. I'm far from a tee-totaler, but I recognize that one man's casual drinking or smoking (i.e. THC) is another's depression or anxiety-inducing dose.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
Mindfulness meditation made me feel better during and for about half an hour afterward, but it wasn't "me again": it was some altered state that not only wasn't addressing the underlying issues (that I've since made great strides on in psychotherapy). I felt periods of great calm, but it was as if I was taking some drug to achieve an altered state.
I read a lot about how to "bring the meditative state into daily life", and that only made the anxiety worse when it broke through, because it sensitized me to focus increasingly on internal physical phenomena. Yeah, I tried not to "judge" them, to neither anticipate their arrival and to just observe their rise and fall, but the observing meant attention, and the attention magnified them.
I finally beat the anxiety mostly for good by acknowledging and facing the problems in my life. I haven't even solved much of them yet, but I'm pretty honest about it both to myself and the people close to me.
[+] [-] Decabytes|3 years ago|reply
It requires a much slower progression that is usually done with a more experienced mentor, who will guide you through the process and help you when you encounter these issues.
These techniques are powerful and helpful and can definitely help alleviate stress and anxiety, but like in the Nietzsche quote
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you”
The way we teach it in the west does not equip us for when the abyss gazes back
[+] [-] grufus|3 years ago|reply
> According to Ingram, one must continue to meditate through these awful experiences until reaching a deeper state of awakening. He makes it clear that the consequences of stopping are severe.
Ron Hubbard himself couldn't have stated it any better. He'd be proud.