My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown

Since this is a long article, here’s a summary for fellow readers — it’s mostly about the negative side effects of meditation that the author believes is under-documented or under-reported due to the ‘hype’ of meditation as the 21st century cure-all. He talks about dissociative experiences (which is well documented in medical research), it being a pseudo-religion, and lastly, his belief that the extended use of meditation is the ‘opposite’ of stoicism in the way that it can render a person not less, but more susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses, like one of a traffic jam. He also attempts to make a biological argument on how this works by invoking something he calls the limbic system feedback loop, however I have found that argument unconvincing due to lack of any actual evidence.

Ha! I thought it might have been vipassana. My own experience of this (a 10 day silent retreat, not having done meditation before) was a full blown manic-psychotic experience (never having had any such thing before, nor in family history). If you&#x27;re interested, I made some audio files [0] talking about what happened.<p>I honestly think it&#x27;s _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven&#x27;t done meditation and allow them to do a 10 day silent retreat. I honestly think it&#x27;s like taking a regular person and allowing them to go down a grade 4 or 5 river. They might make it, but they might get seriously hurt too.<p>I actually raised this point with the local (New Zealand) health and disability ombudsman. I said that vipassana ought to have a psychologist to assess people as they left, or at least _something_ like that. Nothing changed as far as I am aware.<p>I hope the author continues to get better. It was a long journey for me.<p>[0]. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingvipassana.blogspot.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;02&#x2F;bipolar-chronicles.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingvipassana.blogspot.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;02&#x2F;bipolar-chronicl...</a>

A lot of people come into meditation&#x2F;mindfulness with this preconceived notion that you sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and find your inner bliss. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. You sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breathing, and come face to face with the tornado of thoughts and emotions that is raging inside you. It&#x27;s like running htop on your brain to find the runaway background processes that are consuming all your processing power.<p>It&#x27;s what you do once you get to that place that matters. In the eastern tradition, you&#x27;re supposed to observe the thoughts and feelings with non-judgment, accept them for what they are without &quot;running along with them&quot;, then let them be as you return your focus to your breathing. IMO that&#x27;s good advice - up to a point. I think actually solving some of the problems weighing on your mind should absolutely be part of your toolbox. (Stressed about work? Maybe talk to your boss about setting more humane goals). And finally, for the really big things you find, that can neither be solved nor accepted easily (the skeletons and&#x2F;or demons), you&#x27;re going to want to supplement meditation with something else. Maybe just reflection, where you take time to actually dig into it instead of trying to let it go. Maybe therapy where you get help to unpack it. Maybe even medication to help you be less anxious when you try to unpack it.<p>Whatever you do, don&#x27;t scale up the duration of meditation if you find yourself dissociating. It&#x27;s supposed to be intense, but not psychedelic. Start with short sessions (5-10 mins) and only increase the duration if you find that you&#x27;re able to consistently return your focus to your breathing. If the thoughts and feelings take you for a ride that you can&#x27;t get off, and you scale up the duration, then you&#x27;re basically giving yourself a bad trip.<p>Done right, it can be a kind of conscious garbage collection to help ground you and train your awareness to return to the world at hand. Done wrong, it can be gambling with your sanity, removing avoidance as a coping mechanism without anything to replace it.

In the midst of all of the &quot;You&#x27;re just doing Buddhism wrong!&quot; comments, I would like to point out the PLOS One paper mentioned in the article, &quot;The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal.pone.0176239" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal...</a>).<p>&quot;<i>In one of the only prospective studies to use qualitative methods to deliberately ask about adverse effects, Shapiro (1992) [67] found that 63% of meditators on an intensive Vipassana retreat reported at least one adverse effect, with 7.4% reporting effects negative enough to stop meditating, and one individual hospitalized for psychosis.</i>&quot;<p>It appears that mindfulness-based meditation is being prescribed or promoted with no regard to the side-effects.

This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason.<p>I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually <i>work</i>, even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West.<p>Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.<p>The fact that it could be dangerous and mentally destabilizing, and lead to such dramatic changes in personality and outlook as described in the linked articles and reinforced by replies here, is obviously reason for caution - but it also signifies strong evidence that this a very powerful and effective practice. I’m much more interested in learning about meditation than before reading the article.

I&#x27;ve found that many people (myself included) start down the path of Vipassana(analysis) type of meditation too early or from a position where we weren&#x27;t prepared for the consequences. I wish I had spent more time with metta(compassion) and samatha (calmness) meditation and build up stability&#x2F;forbearance and kindness&#x2F;compassion first before starting to de-construct experience. It is said that one type of meditation leads to the others and even with Vipassana you might have the realization that &quot;I&#x27;m suffering because I was doing a thing, I laid the trap and stepped in it&quot; and achieve peace of mind, but that won&#x27;t happen on a schedule. I would recommend any busy person to avoid Vipassana until they have more experience and focus more on sense-calming (avoiding sensuality), and compassion&#x2F;generosity practice. It will bring a quicker (though possibly less deep) taste of the peace of mind that is possible.

Wow, there are a lot of judgemental and defensive responses here, from people who are allegedly working towards greater self knowledge and detachment...<p>So many saying some variation of &quot;he&#x27;s not doing it right&quot;. Yet with ten years of practice, it doesn&#x27;t seem like this person was just dabbling or dipping their toe in the water.<p>Surely, even if they are &quot;doing it wrong&quot; that just goes to prove the point, that what&#x27;s being taught and lauded so much as a panacea by some in the western world is potentially dangerous? And such dangers are downplayed or hand-waved away?

Lapsed Buddhist here.<p>&gt; The Arahat Daniel M. Ingram<p>According to the instruction I received, there have been no arahants since a few decades after the death of the Buddha. Choose your teacher carefully. Many meditation teachers are charlatans; watch out especially for those who claim to be enlightened.<p>&gt; The type of meditation I had been practicing was jhana<p>...or &quot;dhyana&quot;, if you go with the Sanskrit version.<p>The OP spends a lot of his words talking about &quot;mindfulness&quot; and the industry associated with it. But if he was practising the dhyanas, he was NOT practising mindfulness as such. Practising the dhyanas is serious, headbanging stuff, involving deep, single-pointed concentration. The dhyanas build on mindfulness, which is really a basis for all practice; but single-pointed concentration is almost the opposite of normal mindfulness practice.<p>The OP is correct that the &quot;mindfulness industry&quot; blames the faults of meditators for bad experiences. I&#x27;ve known people who survived bad experiences with meditation, but who were finally broken by being gaslighted by their teacher.<p>The &quot;mindfulness industry&quot; minimises the risks of meditation practice. The industry generally claims to be secular, or at least, to not depend on a religious interpretation. If you folllow an openly-religious meditation teacher, you shouldn&#x27;t hear that reassuring touchy-feely nonsense; instead you will be told that the path you have embarked on is dangerous, and that if you aren&#x27;t prepared to stick it out to the end, then it would be better not to begin.<p>And if you arrive at meditation as a result of psychiatric problems, step away quickly. You need to be mentally fit to undertake meditation practise.

&gt; I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators. They were both kind, compassionate, and welcoming, suggesting various ways that I might alter my meditation practice to alleviate my symptoms &gt; &gt; In fact, in Britton’s study, 60% of the participants reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers, rebutting Davidson’s argument that experienced meditators don’t end up in difficult territory.<p>It sounds like a scary failure mode due to survivorship bias, where meditation retreats don&#x27;t have experienced leaders, because those that have had adverse effects of meditation simply stop teaching it. I wonder how many other fields suffer from the same, where it&#x27;s easy to deny anything could go wrong until it happens to you, and that removes you from the race.<p>&gt; A few months ago, I began dabbling with teaching mindfulness again, which may seem surprising. [---] I feel that I could do something for my students that wasn’t ever done for me: tell the truth.<p>This is great, and I hope Dan succeeds in making it sustainable.

I definitely feel bad for the guy, and I hope he got&#x2F;gets the full help he needs.<p>That having been said, I think there&#x27;s something about meditation traditions that come from and are part of monastic traditions vs. meditation techniques that have been removed from their monastic roots.<p>Basically, he was meditating at monk-like levels, and if he were actually in a monastery, he would probably have gotten help at some point beforehand. Maybe he was neglecting part of his health, or emphasizing one technique over another without being fully-rounded in his approach, or a number of other similar things that would have been caught by a community&#x2F;teacher in a monastery. They literally have hundreds of years worth of meditation troubleshooting under their belts, though some of it is codified in ways that directly intertwine with religious beliefs&#x2F;practices.<p>But when you try to remove the practice from the culture surrounding it, there&#x27;s a danger that you left behind some important pieces. I find it kind of scary that he mentions there are recovery groups and such, especially for meditation teachers. I mean, it&#x27;s awesome that they&#x27;re supporting each other and recovering, but this seems like a red flag that maybe the a-religious form of meditation as it&#x27;s being taught and marketed right now needs to go back to the source and figure out what monks are doing differently, or, even better, make sure they immerse themselves deeper into the source cultures to be able to troubleshoot adequately.<p>I guess it&#x27;s like eating an olympic athlete&#x27;s daily meal while ignoring the rest of their training regimen as &quot;religious superstition&quot; and getting drastically different results and being surprised.

There was an excellent article in Harpers about this a few months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harpers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harpers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;lost-in-thought-psycholo...</a><p>I had no idea, but schizophrenic breaks and other psychological symptoms are not uncommon at meditation retreats, and staff are often untrained on how to deal with it.<p>Sorry this happened to you OP, and I hope you&#x27;re able to get effective help.

&gt;<i>When Buddhism Goes Bad - How My Mindfulness Practice Led Me To Meltdown</i><p>Well, meditation and buddhism are supposed to be a way of life, not a stress reliever or a passtime. You can&#x27;t be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side (or merely try to half-follow some general tenets in your everyday totally non-bhudist life).<p>Or rather you can, and thousands do, and there are fancy retreats and the like, but then you&#x27;re a tourist to the whole thing, and what you do has little to do with the original spirit and what makes it work - which is all about context (even if there&#x27;s a plethora of second rate, several times removed from the culture, snakeoil books in the shelves selling this exact approach).<p>Leonard Cohen spending 5 years on the monastery got it far more right.<p>&gt;<i>I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators.</i><p>Aka, some random guys who&#x27;ve read some books, perhaps studied under another random guy in the same line of work, opened their own retreat (or work in one), and play the role of buddhist luminaries for lucrative western audiences....<p>&gt;<i>As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats. I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned Western meditation teachers.</i><p>In other words, they&#x27;ve made a mess of different practices, cultures, approaches, etc., mixing and matching, and always separating it from its context, from the culture they live in, from the environment, and from lifestyle commitments (aside from &quot;medidation&quot; itself).

It&#x27;s not unheard of. After spending a year in a meditation center I have been in contact with several people that burned out. My teachers forced me to take more time off to avoid this.<p>Meditation is wonderful, but it&#x27;s powerful. Something powerful can be misused to hurt yourself, otherwise it wouldn&#x27;t have much of an effect. A saw that can&#x27;t cut your fingers will not be very practical.<p>Having a proper environnement helps a lot to limit this, and the right people with you, but it&#x27;s not bulletproof.<p>I feel my practice is too taxing sometimes and slow down. One should not create an idea of what the path looks like and force a way into it until some kind of landmark is reached. Espacially with our lifestyles, going steadily, but gently, is important.<p>I have several friends, including myself, that reverted to using intoxicants, material comfort or distractions for a while because we couldn&#x27;t handle more. Then after some time, went back to a more strict practice. Or didn&#x27;t and accepted to stay at that level.<p>It&#x27;s hard, pace yourself. Other practitionners should not judge you, we all have struggles.

(background: I have been doing zen meditation for 20 years. Several hours per day and participated in 50 intensive retreats or so).<p>Absolutely. If you meditate so much that it starts to work, it&#x27;s like any effective medicine or treatment. It has potential for adversarial side effects. Even mentally healthy people get into some crazy states and can experience meltdowns while meditating. I have seen several cases of people having full blown psychosis needing psychiatric care.<p>Saying that if you get into a bad place you are not meditating right is also wrong. Buddhist tradition knows about these, but they are described in a way that often makes people think it&#x27;s some kind of philosophical otherworldly metaphor. They can be pleasurable or horrifying or just weird. Japanese zen tradition calls all these just makyō (the realm of demons).<p>Everyone who has meditated long enough has encountered them. You can read sutras to see Buddha fighting with crazy. Almost every honest autobiography from famous meditation teachers has mentions of them. Zen Master Hakuin had probably the most famous complete meltdown. He called it Zen sickness. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hakuin_Ekaku#Zen_sickness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hakuin_Ekaku#Zen_sickness</a> He had to stop and seek help.<p>Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not safe.<p>--<p>Making things worse: Meditation attracts people with mental issues, and many treat them as a substitute to medication or therapy. Meditation is neither. It can be used as part of therapy, but it&#x27;s not a substitute. Better get your therapy&#x2F;medication right and then meditate moderately if that feels fine.

Kundalini syndrome. Not great. Widely written about but you need to know where to look. Gopi Krishna is probably the most widely known case, but you only have to peruse Reddit&#x27;s Kundalini subs for more.<p>That&#x27;s my issue with all this mindfulness stuff. A load of Westerners ripped the guts out of practices to shed the &quot;dogma&quot;. But that &quot;religion&quot; they chucked out was the result of generations of people interpreting these strange experiences and is supposed to provide some kind of map of the terrain. Only since not everyone experiences spontaneous Kundalini events most of them don&#x27;t understand the symbology.<p>I&#x27;m told a guide is invaluable, if you&#x27;re fortunate enough to track down someone legit.

I also experienced something similar. While meditating at work I experienced a state of profound bliss and extreme bodily sensations. What followed this was a disintegration where I dropped into an existential crisis that lasted for about a year. However during this time I faced a number of demons which I hadn’t been able to face up until that point. Now, about 5 years later I am in a good place and am ramping up my meditation practice once more.<p>Meditation is what it says on the tin, a way to uncover real truth. It’s powerful and dangerous. It’s a path for truth seekers, who are willing to pay whatever it takes to see what is truly there. For me its a blessing.<p>For most these experiences are ones of positive disintegration rather than negative. After the dark night of the soul has passed we find ourselves more fully integrated than before.<p>For many that’s not something they were after and in this way I agree with the article, meditation is being miss sold.

Wow. Like a few others have commented, I&#x27;m surprised to see the amount of positive associations people have had with meditation. I&#x27;ll admit, I definitely never thought the benefits of meditation were anything more than the placebo effect, though I&#x27;ve also never had reason to give meditation any real thought as a solution to my problems, because I&#x27;ve fortunately always been able to cope and function through them to find solutions. This article definitely opened my eyes a bit, however.<p>That being said, I&#x27;ve been actively weight lifting or doing other sports since I was a teenager, and I often wonder if that has helped contribute to my successes. For example, proper weight training takes years of practice to develop a solid mind-muscle connection, and I find both the moments between sets and the repetitions themselves help train mental focus. This is especially true with heavy weight lifting because you need to visualize the movement before you do it, and as you&#x27;re going through the movement you need to focus carefully on your muscle tension throughout your body.<p>For those who have never seriously trained, it is probably easy to dismiss that weight training can have a positive impact on one&#x27;s ability to focus. I assure you, a few sets of heavy squats takes a toll on the nervous system as well as the musculoskeletal system. Likewise, I find that when I am in a proper training regimen, it is easier to eat better and easier to sleep deeper.<p>I&#x27;ve never done any guided meditation, so if there are any active athletes who have practiced meditation as described in the article, I&#x27;d be interested to here your thoughts.

Actual title: When Buddhism Goes Bad<p>The author was practicing a specific kind of Buddhist meditation while at a 2-week meditation seminar. It sounds like he was meditating most of his waking hours?<p>This is not about “mindfulness” as you probably think of it.

This is probably a relatively naive observation, but I&#x27;ve found that the way some people describe meditation and how their mind change is sometimes the same as how people describe their experience under psychadelics. These bad side effects of meditation sound a bit like a bad trip, but without being able to tell yourself that it&#x27;s chemically induced and thus will stop in a few hours.

&gt; And I didn’t have a history of any major trauma prior to the retreat<p>Yeah, right.<p>&gt; in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar … I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life … &gt; That … represented a constant battle I had waged over the prior decade with anger and other negative emotions. I drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships …<p>Would put my money on unacknowledged childhood trauma.

There&#x27;s a wide range of experience being lumped under the terms &quot;meditation&quot; and &quot;mindfulness&quot; here.<p>Alice finds a 5 minute walk after lunch improves her mood and suggests it to Bob. Bob mentions his brother was injured while walking a marathon. The ensuing conversation ends up not being very productive.<p>For some, &quot;mindfulness&quot; means sitting for 5 minutes and observing the moment without goals, judgement, or expectation. For the author, &quot;mindfulness&quot; means week long retreats.<p>As someone who sometimes suggests meditation, I am not saying the author is doing it wrong so much as I am saying that what he is doing is different than what I am suggesting.<p>That said, the author&#x27;s warning is important. Be careful doing the mindfulness equivalent of a marathon, but if your interested a 5 minute walk probably won&#x27;t hurt.

I&#x27;ll acknowledge some bias on my part as someone who has experienced more disassociative episodes (unrelated to meditation) than I care to have had but I think some of the replies here are very callous given how scarring I&#x27;ve found those experiences to be.<p>My first contact with mindfulness-based meditation was cognitive behavioural therapy through mental health professionals and haven&#x27;t received any warnings to heed.<p>Seemingly, the author has had to endure their fair share and maybe a modicum of sympathy is warranted - at least.

As someone who experienced countless panic attacks, I find the description of his symptoms to be very on point with my experience.<p>I&#x27;ve hit rock bottom about 10 years ago, experiencing these about three times a week. The road to building myself back was pretty long and is still an every day effort, but nowadays I only experience these once or twice a year, if any.<p>If that&#x27;s of any help to anyone, I&#x27;ve found countless of little things that put together helped a lot. They aren&#x27;t ground breaking by any mean, just sharing my experience and tips:<p>- Therapy. yes, good old fashioned therapy. Shop around to find the right person. - Life change, I moved from one country to another. Spoiler alert, the panic attacks followed me, but it certainly gave me more confidence. - Identify your triggers. It took me years, but my trigger was a stomach inflammation that I identified as being my heart having an issue. So I changed my diet, stopped smoking too. - Exercise. Finding what you like is a long and painful process, I only found what I liked around 30. For me it was hiking, then climbing, then more recently (pandemic), yoga.<p>I hope that&#x27;s useful for someone.

I am nowhere near the experienced meditator or Buddhist student that the author is but this part stuck out: &quot; I described how on numerous occasions all my thoughts disintegrated and I bathed for extended periods of time in states of deep, non-conceptual bliss. I thought awakening was right around the corner &quot;<p>Isn&#x27;t this particularly warned against in meditation? To me this is more akin to trance and in Buddhism, more akin to escapism and self-delusion. From a magical perspective, it seems obvious this guy was playing with fire.<p>Just like the quote about how one can travel extensively and still leave all their preconceptions intact, people can meditate a lot and still leave their attachments intact. My impression was not that meditation leads to bliss; that&#x27;s some New Age pap. It leads to awareness, and that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.<p>It sounds like the author may have delved into meditation enough to access the control panel, but that is a dangerous place to be. It&#x27;s why there are so many safeguards built around it in the first place. I am just surprised that this was unexpected.

&quot;I was a guitar string being tuned beyond its highest range. The string popped. A spike of fear slashed through my guts. And that’s when I split apart.&quot;<p>I read on Twitter about this one guy who gave himself brain damage by constantly working for months on end while programming.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that a few others described a similar sensation. Their brain feeling like a guitar string. There&#x27;s a moment where they can detect something goes wrong.<p>It seems like they put themselves through a very stressful situation and triggered a cascading effect.

One item that i found intriguing is the research that negative experiences are more common than people think.<p>One must wonder, why this is not common knowledge? Also, are there causation links, or not?<p>My personal conclusion is that the sample is biased -- that is, some people seeking meditation are looking to self-medicate (subconsciously or not) on personal issues they wish to overcome.<p>It would seem that perhaps a non-trivial portion of meditation practitioners are ending up with worse outcomes than they started out.<p>One is left to wonder whether meditation practice should come with warning labels ( just like medication does for adverse effects)...

As with many other types of exercise, practitioners are bound to have injuries. I&#x27;d even say the injuries the author suffered are equivalent to breaking a leg while running.<p>This is the take away for me:<p>&gt; &quot;I believe that these practices, with the correct framework, dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving mental health. &quot;

&gt; In the aftermath, I floated for months in a state free of discontent.<p>This is interesting. As a human, I always have something to be discontent about. It never stops, and it is not supposed to stop - as those are my instincts driving me.<p>I love my mindfulness moments, and being able to look into my emotions. But I wouldn&#x27;t want to stay months without discontent.<p>Overall, several of the author&#x27;s quotes point to a very extreme practice. He is mixing internal state and reality as if it was one and the same. These two factors are bound to lead to problems.<p>But I don&#x27;t see most people doing 30 min per say having these issues.

I believe a lot of people are doing meditation in a similar way as they would do a workout session and it simply doesn&#x27;t work. It&#x27;s supposed to be your time off and enjoyable. I&#x27;ve seen a lot of starters that are extremely focused on doing at least 30 mins a day, and it&#x27;s just incredibly hard. Start small, start with whatever you&#x27;re confortable with, it could be a minute for all it&#x27;s worth and increase progressively but make sure that that minute is mindful.

My teacher describes this issue as such: meditation is like going to the gym. You don&#x27;t send someone with broken arm to the gym to make them better. Even though gyms are generally good, they should be avoided when you&#x27;re injured.<p>Psychotic or neurotic mind needs healing, not intense training. This knowledge is present in genuine Buddhist schools that are not for profit organizations. The mindfulness industry have, sadly, the wrong incentives.<p>As a Buddhist myself I hope this article helps a lot of people.

I&#x27;ve had some very negative anxiety-driven experiences with dissociation (depersonalization &#x2F; derealization &#x2F; de-something-zation), usually when traveling to somewhere I&#x27;m unfamiliar with. It usually only lasts for 5 to 15 minutes rather than hours, but it does sound a lot like what he describes.<p>Relating this to meditation: On the rare occasion that I try meditating, it doesn&#x27;t trigger anything negative, but I have found that I can induce such negative dissociative experiences on purpose (at least to some degree) by inducing a certain meditative-like thought pattern. It&#x27;s hard to describe, but it has to do with time. It&#x27;s like the mind is usually thinking at least a fraction of a second ahead, it&#x27;s focused at least just a little into the future. If you break that, then meaningfulness seems to collapse and... it&#x27;s not good, and you have to snap out of it.<p>I wonder if meditating is triggering something like that for the author.<p>Instead of meditating, mindfulness, thinking about your own thinking and purposefully trying to dissociate from yourself by conscious force, it may be more helpful just to find something that helps you relax. The point is to clear away stressful thoughts and thought patterns by letting the mind focus on <i>something else</i> rather than nothing (or itself).

Vipassana and Marijuana lead me to a full-blown psychosis for 2 weeks in a medical center which unraveled my mind and the perception of my world. But I also feel I have a deeper understanding of myself and how balances in my mind work, having now recovered. I was forced to reconstruct my mind manually. Before this my control over my depression and anxiety was null, but now I may be getting off of medication soon.

Do poor people have breakdowns? Always read about rich or middle class people having breakdowns or burning out. Dude is on a Buddhist retreat and has a meltdown, but I feel like poor people rarely get like this, they just trudge on.

It should be noted that in the introduction to Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Daniel does say:<p>&gt; people who do strong and intensive practice can hurt them- selves and freak out. Just as serious athletes can hurt their bodies when they take a misstep or push themselves beyond their limits, just so serious mental athletes can strain their minds, brains, and nervous systems, and strained brains can sometimes function in very strange ways.<p>&gt; To rewrite the operating system rapidly while it is running doesn’t always go so well in the short term or occasionally in the long term. Thus, while I will include nearly endless exhorta- tions to find the depths of power and clarity that you are capable of, I will also add numerous warnings about how to keep from frying yourself.<p>&gt; By “frying yourself”, I mean explicitly severe mood instability and psychotic episodes, as well as other odd biological and energetic disturbances, with some practitioners occasionally ending up in inpatient psychiatric facilities for various periods of time.

It sounds to me like the author had a severe anxiety attack for the first time. And just throwing out a wild guess that they possibly had recently experimented with ayahuasca or some other form of DMT.

&gt; Yet, somewhere six or seven years into my practice, whatever progress I was making petered out. I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation 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.<p>Lots of good discussion in this thread on how meditation can lead to problems, particularly intensive sessions like retreats, but I think it&#x27;s important to highlight this paragraph from the article.<p>If we accepted that meditation can induce alterered states of consciousness, like various medications can also do, it seems dangerous to wantonly start mixing such things without rhyme or reason. Dissociation seems almost inevitable.

Major selection bias here.<p>From a 10,000 foot view it looks like:<p>&quot;Flaky dude attracted to Buddhist retreats who uses words like <i>jhana</i> had a freak out. Say it ain&#x27;t so ...&quot;

&quot;As I lay there musing in the brisk darkness, I suddenly sensed a tightening inside me. It was as if I was being ever so gently wound. Then quickly, the pressure intensified, and I breathed in rapid-fire staccato and violently shook. I was a guitar string being tuned beyond its highest range. The string popped. A spike of fear slashed through my guts. And that’s when I split apart.&quot;<p>This has come up in a number of threads about burnout which frequent Hacker News. It&#x27;s anecdotal per account and I&#x27;ve found weak evidence to corroborate its actual basis however... I think it&#x27;s interesting that a lot of people report hearing the same thing: a guitar string, bending and snapping in their head. More specifically, a bass guitar.

I see a lot of defensive comments here, but this post made me aware of the fact that there are a lot of documented cases of adverse effects of meditation as well. TLDR:<p>&gt; Willoughby Britton is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and associate professor at Brown University<p>&gt; The meat of Britton’s talks was the results of a 2017 paper she co-published with her husband, Jared Lindahl, called the Varieties of Contemplative Experience1. In it, they examined distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.

I interpret the author’s difficulties and frustration as a byproduct of a particular misapprehension of Buddhist teachings in modern society. Many modern-day practitioners, both in the east and the west, are under the impression that simply by mechanically practicing mindfulness meditation they will eventually reach a state of enlightenment. Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding that the Buddha himself addressed in the teachings. The Noble Eightfold Path is at the heart of Buddhist practice, and it’s structured such that “right view” comes in first place, while “right mindfulness” and “right concentration” come at the very end. According to these teachings, it’s impossible to attain the right kind of mindfulness conducive to the cessation of stress without first satisfying the precondition of right view. Without right view, the practitioner is essentially flying blind. The modern mindfulness movement in its zeal to secularize these practices is incapable of accepting the proposition that the right teaching has to be first grasped before embarking on the practice, as this contradicts the purely empiricist approach of mechanically practicing mindfulness with the expectation that this leads to enlightenment. The author’s comments such as “I thought awakening was right around the corner and now feel broken and betrayed” are indicative of such an expectation being broken. The Buddha explains the danger of misconceiving the teachings using the snake simile, in which the Buddha compares the teachings to a snake that has to be first grabbed by the head and then tail. Trying to grab the snake by the tail first will only result in being bitten. This simile can be applied quite literally to the structure of The Noble Eightfold Path, where right view can be interpreted as the head of the snake, and right mindfulness&#x2F;concentration as the tail.

I found many problems with this article. The author of this article seems to assume that Cheetah house has all the answers!!! (Perhaps this article is an ad for that place.)<p>Regarding his statement “symptoms diagnosed by a therapist” – does the author know how psychiatry comes up with ‘diagnosis’ of so called “mental disorders” using checklists? I can cite many academic articles, but maybe just have a look at the following article: Psychiatric Drugs Increase Suicide. CAMPP’s Film “Prescripticide” Exposes the Harms By Dr. Chuck Ruby.<p>The author of the article discussed here also does not seem to understand Buddhism, although he says he has read many books. For example, it is best to leave Jhana practices (i.e., deep concentration practices) to monks because developing them needs a great deal of commitment and an incredible amount of patience. Also, these Jhana practices are not needed for full enlightenment [See the sutta reference AN 4.170: In Tandem].<p>Considering his following statement at the end, I am hoping that the author will understand things better with time: &quot;A few months ago, I began dabbling with teaching mindfulness again, which may seem surprising. However, I believe that these practices, with the correct framework, dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving mental health.&quot;<p>Mindfulness has helped me beyond words - I think it has saved my life. I am so very grateful to have found it.

I can relate to this a lot, also with my own experiences of Somatic Experiencing and forms of therapeutic breathwork.<p>I did a few retreats myself, with the knowledge going in that it would be fucking brutal and that I could bring a lot of shit to the surface that I&#x27;d repressed for years. I had a therapist before, during, and after, as the primary focus was healing integrated with tantric practises.<p>Even then it was 6 years of deep introspection, an enormous amount of suffering, and eventually a complete mental break that led to a few suicide attempts, self-harming and a year or so on medication. I didn&#x27;t blame the retreats for that, or the meditation, and I still don&#x27;t. I just didn&#x27;t have the capacity to deal with it all and I never had a good coping mechanism in the first place, yet I was still facing this incredible amount of torment head on. Truly staring into my own abyss.<p>I would not recommend this, or any kind of deep meditation, to anyone. Not unless they have a support network in place and only if they understand that it is a difficult journey that can and will see things getting worse for you before they get better.<p>These days I&#x27;m off the medication, and I&#x27;m a different, more resilient, more self-aware person. Enough to know that what&#x27;s done is done, the past is exactly that, and there&#x27;s a lot more for me in the present moment. I am still very fond of what I learned through Tantra in that sense, and I&#x27;m glad I found my way through enough of that past trauma to start being able to live with it.

Is it surprising that extended, intensive mental practice (in this case, mindfulness style meditation) can reshape how our brains work?<p>As babies, we form our sense of being - from what touch &quot;feels&quot; like to what food tastes like - from our experiences. And we tend to go through life adding and slightly modifying those fundamental neural pathways we&#x27;ve built.<p>But if you then do a 180 and start practicing and reinforcing very different pathways, where will you end up? In the article, where he ended up seems bad indeed, but that is relative to where he started (and where most of us live).<p>Probably many of us here have at one time or other spent way too much time and focus on one obsession. Take chess, for example. If you spend hours a day focused on chess, it will absolutely reshape the way you think, and that will bleed over to non-chess moments. You may find yourself sitting at a restaurant, mentally playing out the possibilities and scenarios of an impending conversation with the server where you will attempt to avoid having to buy dessert (because you don&#x27;t want it, or whatever your reason). Or you may find that in the middle of a meeting, you suddenly only exist on a chessboard, stuck in a game problem you have been trying to find a good answer to.<p>But with this mindfulness meditation, especially since it also explicitly closes off external reality, you will be building some very strange new paths in your mind. Stay there too long, and perhaps you get lost.<p>The old wisdom is probably worth heeding here: all things in moderation.

&gt; In fact, today mindfulness meditation is primarily used as an off-label treatment for mental health issues<p>I think this perhaps goes too far; MBSR is pretty well documented and is not “off label” — I’m fairly sure there are FDA approved apps for mindfulness therapy for example. If you are meditating 30 mins a day and it’s helping your symptoms, I don’t think this report should be justification for you to stop.<p>This is not MBSR. If you are going for Jhana, you are way off piste from the “mindfulness meditation” path. The authors retreat was full-day meditation for many days in a row.<p>This is the DMT of mind altering substances, where light mindfulness meditation could be compared to a glass of wine.<p>I do strongly agree with the authors point that the western conception of meditation omits the scary&#x2F;mind-altering stuff that can happen when you go deep, and it’s important to have a full picture of the risks and benefits before you embark on that path. I just worry that this sort of article without appropriate caveats might make people unjustifiably scared of light meditation, which as far as I’ve seen doesn’t result in this kind of dramatic reaction and does have clear benefits.<p>I’d recommend “Mastering the core teachings of the Buddha” for a no-BS deep dive on what going deep looks like. Particularly the section on “the dark night of the soul”.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mctb.org&#x2F;mctb2&#x2F;table-of-contents&#x2F;part-iv-insight&#x2F;30-the-progress-of-insight&#x2F;5-dissolution-entrance-to-the-dark-night&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mctb.org&#x2F;mctb2&#x2F;table-of-contents&#x2F;part-iv-insight...</a>

Meditation is a blade with no hilt.<p>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.<p>At the time I lived nearby mountains, and after &#x27;coming to&#x27;, 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 &#x27;Both Sides Now&#x27; by Joni Mitchell.<p>&#x27;I&#x27;ve looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down, and still somehow It&#x27;s cloud illusions I recall I really don&#x27;t know clouds at all&#x27;<p>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.<p>It changed my entire life -- weeks later later I lost my job and fell into a 5 year extreme depression &#x2F; 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.

Horrible premise.<p>None of this is Buddhism and &quot;using&quot; Buddhism doesn&#x27;t do what you want it to do.<p>It&#x27;s like someone saying &quot;I tried to go to confession at the Catholic church but I don&#x27;t feel any better after killing and raping. This doesn&#x27;t work!&quot;<p>or saying &quot;I went and got baptized but I don&#x27;t feel any different! I&#x27;m supposed to be saved! Where are my just rewards and I&#x27;m supposed to be able to see Jesus!&quot;<p>erm ...

&gt; As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats.<p>These numbers are telling everything you need to know about the the state of meditation in the Western world... His teachers were probably not much better.

&gt; The terrain of fractured, disruptive and altered states of consciousness has often been explored in Buddhist teachings through the centuries, but when these practices made their journey into Western culture, a sufficient understanding of the downsides of meditation was lost in transit.<p>Why would one go on a serious retreat not led by a real Buddhist teacher? Is there a shortage of geshes already?

Isn&#x27;t this a repost of a repost, where the underlying facts are that he did a bunch of drugs, and then blamed his bad trip on mindfulness?<p>Edit: yeah here it is<p>&gt; I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation and began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Looking back, it was also during this time period that I had my first dissociative experiences<p>So, guy takes a bunch of mind altering drugs for years, admits to having difficulty controlling his emotions his entire adult life, and yet blames meditation for his psychological instability. Definitely been posted here before. Completely unreliable narrator. Meditation is not a replacement for psychological help based on the practice of medicine. The guy probably needs to talk to an actual psychiatrist who has worked with former drug addicts, not just ignore his problem with feel good retreats<p>The truth is he probably fucked up his meatware with drugs. The meatware malfunctioned, and he let it go untreated for years

Every time I read something like this, the author turns out to be a regular drug user. I don’t necessarily have anything against that, but, having been sober my entire life, and having experimented heavily with natural hallucination methods such as lucidity, I seriously doubt that this level of intensity is possible. Aside from actual near-death experience (been there), it is extremely hard to hold onto even mild sensation without breaking lucidity. And if it takes drugs to get there, then don’t call it meditation, and don’t blame meditation for the side effects.<p>I’m not an expert, but, for the others like me, I think the best you may hope for in meditation is the ability to not be bothered by thoughts and distraction, the zen master being Grigori Perelman, who would not let a million dollar prize distract him from picking mushrooms.

The journey to the center of self in anything but easy; the ones who do it seriously, will eventually face their own demons; and it&#x27;s not easy to look deep into the mirror.<p>The mirror, just like the abyss, will start looking back at you, and it&#x27;s ugly AF.

Is it possible that the author suffering from undiagnosed depression?<p>I&#x27;ve been a regular meditator for a few years and one thing I&#x27;ve found is that the the initial stages, meditation enhances whatever you&#x27;re feeling subconsciously. That is why some people have intense emotional experiences at the beginning.<p>Secondly, mindfulness is not a 10 minute scheduled practice. It has to be followed throughout the day. However, you need to gradually ease into it, starting with 10 mins.<p>It&#x27;s like pouring milk into a glass. If you start gently, there won&#x27;t be a splash. But if you turn your milk container upside down over the glass, there will be a big splash and possibly spilling.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste - or to tinker with haphazardly. I&#x27;m reminded of when Palm came out with &quot;Graffiti&quot;, their stylus-stroke way of entering western characters into the thing. Folks were hospitalized with aphasia, where they couldn&#x27;t figure out how to write normally any more. They&#x27;d jumped the well-work grooves they&#x27;d been in since primary school and couldn&#x27;t find their way back.<p>As adults we are a wired mess of stimulus-response formed by uncoordinated childhood and young-adult experiences. To start pulling those wires and plugging them in elsewhere, risks losing something. Maybe something you value.

Hakuin, one of the most famous Japanese Zen master&#x27;s, got &quot;Zen Disease&quot; when he was in his 20s and doing intense meditation. The symptoms sound very similar to what was in the article. He recommended a particular meditation as a cure. No clue about the efficacy of that, but this problem is clearly not unknown even among entirely orthodox practitioner&#x27;s who presumably have qualified teachers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buddhismnow.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;zen-sickness-by-zen-master-hakuin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buddhismnow.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;12&#x2F;zen-sickness-by-zen-maste...</a>

Sounds like a bad trip. Not saying it was in this case, but I could definitely imagine seedy retreats putting a little something &quot;extra&quot; in the evening supper to boost the spiritual RoI of their service offering.

Interesting post, but part of the post feels fairly disingenuous.<p>&quot;One might wonder if these wounded meditators had preexisting conditions that triggered these experiences. Most of us don’t, a finding similar to Britton and Lindahl’s study, which reported that 57% of practitioners suffering adverse effects didn’t have a trauma history and 42% had no psychiatric issues at all prior to meditation practice.&quot;<p>The framing is disingenuous. If you flip it, nearly half of people who have negative responses to meditation had trauma histories, and nearly 60% had previous mental health conditions.

This is an interesting discussion as I wasn&#x27;t aware that meditation could go wrong if done improperly (never really thought about it). I have only started mindfulness recently, here in the UK via an NHS approved course (though not free...) called BeMindful. I haven&#x27;t finished the course but so far I like it, and I am wondering what would you suggest for the best next steps?<p>So far the list I have to explore is:<p>* Thich Nhat Hanh and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plumvillage.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plumvillage.org</a><p>* Joseph Goldstein<p>* Sharon Salzberg<p>* Apps (though I am a bit reluctant): Ten Percent Happier, Headspace

I feel like saying something spooky like, &quot;If you leave the front door open, you never know who will walk in&quot;, but the fact is that meditation is just a practice that emphasizes and strengthens certain brain states&#x2F;EEG rhythms, neural synchronies, and given heterogeneity in brain structure, connectivity, and genomes, there will be no guarantee that this will be an entirely positive shift in neural dynamics. For analogy, for many people keeping themselves busy at work keeps themselves from constant rumination of a traumatic past.

From my experience, what the writer is talking about is a transcendental experience that sounds awfully similar to what happens under psychedelics. Experiences like this are highly influenced by set, setting and expectations, and can go wrong.<p>Meditation is an incredibly deep practice, and if you engage in it you must be aware that it is much more than a stress-relief tool. Many people meditate with the explicit purpose of reaching that state. When you keep that fact in mind, experiences like what was described in the article are desired and welcome.

Sounds like &quot;走火入魔&quot;, a mental state mentioned in many Wuxia&#x2F;Chinese-Kongfu-Fantasy novels when a rigorous 内功修炼(internal training&#x2F;meditation)goes bad, which I thought was a myth.

The end goal of mindfulness is to make you realize that you don&#x27;t exist, and to make you realize you don&#x27;t have free will, and there is no you. While it&#x27;s all true, it&#x27;s not a good place to leave someone without a next step. It can be useful to make people realize that their thoughts aren&#x27;t their own, which can help with anxiety. Maybe it can also lead to meltdowns like the one in this article if you continue the practice long past &quot;I don&#x27;t exist and I have no free will.&quot;

One could see how meditating could lead to a break like that. When you do something that connects your mind to the real and physical present inside your senses, which can suppress the reflections and noise from the way we interpret the representations of the world around us, coming back is jarring and panic inducing.<p>This bad meditation effect sounds like the same effects of hyper-paranoia from cannabis, or a &quot;bad trip,&quot; on hallucinogens, which can have dramatic short term and pervasive long term effects.

We don&#x27;t really have the language to discuss the subtle emotional states involved when experience turns uncomfortable. Music with movement is better at communicating it.<p>People are going to keep poking around in their minds and finding things that disturb them. There is a lot to be said for learning to stay with the difficult things, if you can not yet afford yourself faith.

&gt; I thought awakening was right around the corner and now feel broken and betrayed<p>While I feel sympathy for the author, I can’t help but think that this is ultimately a self-caused problem. You shouldn’t be absorbing yourself in a meditation practice with the goal of “awakening” or “enlightenment” or whatever. That’s dragon-chasing nonsense which will lead you to bad times.

Everything has a down side. Exercise is the most helpful thing you can do for your health, but you can break your leg running... or even die of a heart attack while running.<p>This is a great article to highlight how little most people think about what the &quot;healthy&quot; amount of meditation is and how to know if you&#x27;re over doing it or are suffering an injury from it.

Also see <i>&quot;The Dark Knight of the Soul: For some, meditation has become more curse than cure...&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;health&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-dark-knight-of-the-souls&#x2F;372766&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;health&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-dark-...</a>

How did we give the hacker news &quot;hug of death&quot; to substack.com ? This is basic text on page, pretty lightweight right?

I have a soft spot for Buddhism teachings. Don&#x27;t know ehy. But I don&#x27;t have the habit of meditating. It comes easy to me to let go of things. I do okay to let go of emotions but some emotions stick and it takes an effort to kind of pull you away to not sink with them. You can&#x27;t ignore that. You have to make that effort.

&#x27;Enlightenment&#x27; appears to be thrown around liberally while it is clear that few people achieve it (if at all that word refers to a concrete state) perhaps spiritual practice mixed with great expectations underlines the same lack of clarity or understanding and trust which lead the west to esoteric ego infalting practices.

Healing trauma is a much better approach, look into Julie Brown talks, &quot;Nurturing Resilience&quot; by Kathy Kain, Irene Lyons channel.<p>Vipassana is a form of trauma healing anyway, to clear the nervous system from your past essentially, and then keep going further where the ego itself as a form of &quot;contraction&quot; in the entire musculature and nervous system, also lets go.<p>The problem with those retreats is Vipassana is a completely outdated approach that was made for people living 1000+ years ago. The world, our lives drastically changed since.<p>A buddhist on a podcast said &quot;trauma is the human condition&quot;.<p>Practicing gratitude, loving kindness, compassion are spiritual practices and also part of healing trauma... and should provide a much more stable ground for opening the body .<p>Or for a purely physical approach Yoga is great, though after a while... yoga will also surface anger, etc... if it needs to be processed.<p>I also did retreats 3 times. Yes I felt an immense love when I was there, and I was still miserable years later ... when I finally looked into therapy in general, and then trauma specifically.<p>When you go into the body and build capacity to feel the intense emotions that may be there, some say possibly even inherited trauma from before birth, you need to balance it out with some kind of grounding. THAT grounding is somewhat provided on retreats by the safe environment, and whatevers going on energetically (very strange)... but essentially they dont teach you that or very little, so then they send you on your way and now you know how to intensely feel the body, but you have no tools to handle the intense levels of fear, anxiety, grief and so on..that may come up.

“ In 2011, I sat my first meditation retreat in the Vipassana tradition of S.N Goenka. I spent ten days in silence, focusing on my breath and body for 10 to 12 hours a day. It was grueling, but toward the end of the retreat I had a life-changing experience.”<p>In hindsight sight, maybe he should have got out on top.

The guy who invented this, the historical Buddha, recommended many more techniques than just vipassana.<p>I think what happened in the west, is that—aside from zen centres&#x2F;monasteries which draw upon a wider, established set of traditions and practices¹—we have focused too much on a single technique.<p>Especially in clinical settings. I imagine that to get your therapy to be approved in clinical settings, and to get funding, you have to publish papers and your paper can&#x27;t be a survey of hundreds of differing &#x27;treatment&#x27; approaches.<p>You would get more traction by isolating a potent subset, preferably a single one, and then using it and publishing your results.<p>None of what I said above is to imply cynical motives to the researchers doing this, it&#x27;s just the usual reductionist worldview applied to a tradition spanning thousands of years, and what happens when &quot;early results are promising.&quot;<p>tl;dr: Buddhism is more than just Vipassana. There are multiple techniques that complement, counteract each other. The Buddhist &#x27;system&#x27; included different approaches for different personality types. More is not always better.<p>[1] Not that &#x27;tradition&#x27; is sufficient to insulate these organisations from problems either.

my $.02 on this- just because you&#x27;re not diagnosed and having &quot;just anxiety and agression&quot;, doesn&#x27;t mean youre ok and might be quite opposite- it&#x27;s probably for a reasons, that your conscious mind protects you from, something you dont know and have forgotten, and no simple evaluation will find this out but when you yourself &quot;stirr up&quot; your unconcious mind, all this started to &quot;leak&quot; into conscious mind and it took you by surprise as you thought of yourself as &quot;highly experienced&quot;.<p>to me the cabin episode sounds like a LSD trip gone bad and no proper, experienced sitter resulting in a traumatic experience.

The author is a lost cause. He messed himself up following the teachings of clueless gurus. Then, when he realised he was just damaging his mind, he switched to different gurus. Now he&#x27;s teaching meditation again, so he is himself taking on the mantle of the clueless guru, spreading around his mental illness to more unknowing victims.<p>This never stops. These people never face reality. The lure of the supernatural, of enlightenment, of insights, of metaphysical experiences, is too strong and they eventually lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and the crazy teachings of their books and their masters.<p>Madness is the loss of the ability to discern the boundary between reality and imagination. Meditation is just one of the many ways that supernatural and metaphysical sects have to push the mind beyond that boundary, lock the door behind it and throw away the key.

This &quot;Buddhist meditation retreat&quot; in a tiny cabin in the North Carolina mountains goes way beyond the practicing mindfulness the author describes it as.<p>As with everything else in life: don&#x27;t overdo it.

I can only say that, please do not practice any advanced kind of meditation without a guru&#x2F;experienced teacher and don&#x27;t do drugs or alcohol if you are meditating.

The real point of meditation is immolation of the person doing it. Done correctly, no Buddhism or religion can help you. Vehicle is discarded after destination.<p>Caveat empor, act accordingly.

A similar story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19222467" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19222467</a>

4000 hours of meditation practice is a lot.<p>I&#x27;m doing guided meditation(with Headspace) for 20 min each day and right now on 10 day streak and feeling good so far.

Uh taking drugs and then meditating is probably going to lead you straight to the demon that disposed you to taking drugs to start with.

There is a great podcast called &quot;Astray&quot; that talks about how bad mediation and the search for enlightenment can go.

&quot;Why my swimming practice, which involved me swimming the english channel every day, eventually led me to drown.&quot;

Anecdotally mindfulness increases my neuroticism by becoming too self aware. I’m curious if anyone else experiences this?

A former coworker of mine went to a silent meditation retreat. He&#x27;s been recovering ever since.

Forgive me if anyone has said as much, but something that directly stands out to me about all of the comments heretofore mentioned is that they are treating a state of consciousness in a formalist way, as if the mind exists independent of the body. The brain&#x27;s activities and the things the mind experiences are very much situated in the realm of bodily states. One state that is very common amongst people who follow certain paths is malnutrition.<p>I am not necessarily going to try to start a flame war over which diet or whatever could cause which set of nutrient deficiencies, but I think its a salient point that he has self professed clinical symptoms (like convulsing muscles) and never sought medical help, only seeking more help from the same overly formal realm of rules.<p>Additionally, the author mentions following all these buddhist frameworks, but in Theravada at least, part of the eight fold path is not drinking or doing drugs, yet he says he would drink and do drugs when he didn&#x27;t get the jolt he wanted from the practice. Alcohol and drugs, while not necessarily inherently bad, are great at depleting the body of essential things like vitamins, minerals, and neurotransmitters needed for proper brain functioning.<p>The only real treatment he gives to this is saying, &quot;no preexisting conditions.&quot; Of course, I hope I don&#x27;t have to explain that just because you haven&#x27;t been diagnosed with a deficiency of some kind, doesn&#x27;t mean it doesn&#x27;t exist. I also find his later comment that another practitioner had &quot;no preexisting conditions except anxiety,&quot; to be particularly problematic. Anxiety is a preexisting condition, which lends some probability that his evaluation of preexisting conditions could be overly lax, and his consistent search for confirmation bias that Buddhism would solve his medical&#x2F;biological problems could cause him to downplay actual preexisting conditions.<p>Anyway, I agree with many of the other people that dark nights, etc are well known phenomena, so I don&#x27;t want to downplay any of that. I just wanted to add to the conversation that nutrition is very important, and if you fuck that up, you can get really fucked up psychologically due to dysfunctional parts.

ah, my favorite type of hacker news post: &quot;smart&quot; western person finds a thing he doesn&#x27;t understand, begins to understand 25% of it, and then decides to &quot;fix it&quot; like it doesn&#x27;t have centuries of history and learnings around it

Stop spiritual fornication and turn to the living God. Jeremiah 2:13 John 14:6

Western &quot;Buddhism&quot; as repackaged solipsism is totally antithetical to the teachings of the Four Noble Truths.<p>Probably because the Four Noble Truths are antithetical to Christianity, liberalism and capitalism, the core aspects of Western culture.

I&#x27;ve been meditating for years and never had any problems.

I&#x27;ve practiced mindfulness and meditation for more than a decade.<p>Mindfulness, as I&#x27;ve learned it, means being aware of your thoughts and feelings, introducing positive thoughts and feelings, and replacing negative thoughts and feelings.<p>Meditation is also meant to be positive. You start with short sessions. The idea is to slow down and eventually stop your thoughts.<p>From what I&#x27;ve heard, a lot people just fall asleep at Vipassana retreats, due to the long meditation sessions, which would not be very useful. The way I learned meditation is that short, focused sessions are better than long sessions where you don&#x27;t focus &#x2F; just fall asleep. Based on this article, it sounds like these extended sessions might even be dangerous for some (almost like sensory deprivation or psychedelics can be in some cases).<p>Meditation on its own is not dangerous. The idea is to feel more grounded and centered after. The idea is to focus and develop your concentration. Otherwise, it&#x27;s just &quot;spacing out&quot;, which I&#x27;ve always been told is not meditation. If you space out and start to go into weird states of mind, that is not meditation, that is just dissociating &#x2F; falling asleep &#x2F; etc. There is a difference.<p>There&#x27;s nothing wrong with slowing down your thoughts. If people think that slowing down your thoughts is dangerous, to me that just sounds like the ego not wanting to lose its grasp. Egos can be almost as crazy as someone having a psychotic break. It&#x27;s fine to let yourself rest in your natural state for a little while. Nothing wrong with that. In my experience, that actually makes you more balanced then someone overthinking their whole life &#x2F; not being aware of what&#x27;s going on inside themselves.<p>I&#x27;m not a doctor, so get help if you need it, but one suggestion for a meditation practice is to start with 15 minutes a day, morning and evening. Set aside some space in your home and sit quietly for that period of time. Build up from there. Sitting in nature can also be helpful. If you start to feel weird, try to use your mindfulness practice during the day of focusing on positive things to get yourself out of it. Don&#x27;t stay in a dissociated state, that is unproductive and potentially dangerous. If that doesn&#x27;t work, stop and come back at a later time.<p>Meditation and mindfulness are meant to support one other. They are not exactly the same, but they are related. When you start to meditate you will become aware of how many thoughts you are having (most people go day to day not paying that much attention). With mindfulness, you practice directing your mind in a more positive way (i.e. neuroplasticity, you are restructuring your mind with a positive intent). This helps your meditations be better and more productive, and helps your life be better and more productive.<p>The way that I&#x27;ve been taught meditation and mindfulness are that they should be positive practices that support your life. If they are making life worse, something is off with that teacher or meditation school. Your own results can inform you if a teacher or meditation school is positive or not. If you&#x27;re not getting positive results, that&#x27;s not a good sign. These practices should make your life better.

“Sam Harris never warned me about <i>this</i>!”

&gt; Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn’t take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life. My girlfriend was not happy. I wasn’t happy. Something had to change.<p>&gt; That speck in time represented a constant battle I had waged over the prior decade with anger and other negative emotions. I drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships with women. My mind wandered uncontrollably.<p>&gt; I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA<p>&gt; Yet, somewhere six or seven years into my practice, whatever progress I was making petered out. I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation 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.<p>Perhaps he has some unresolved deep-seated emotional processes that have not been mastered, seeking a silver-bullet &quot;cure&quot;, whether it be meditation, drugs, or alcohol. He would need to take responsibility over these &quot;low-level&quot; pains &amp; train his psyche, body, &amp; soul to handle this feedback mechanism in a holistic way, seeing these pains with his conscious mind, instead of disassociating his consciousness from them. Blaming meditation, drugs, alcohol are blaming the symptoms of a deeper issue. People recoil after touching a hot surface for good reason.<p>Note that dissociation is the conscious psyche&#x27;s firewall against trauma.<p>&gt; I was halfway to awakening.<p>Building consciousness is a continuous journey, not a waypoint where you can be halfway toward, since there is no end.<p>&gt; Before her death, Vogt sent two emails to the retreat center about her challenges, at one point writing that she thought her distress was “a sign that I need to give up my life for a more pure one.”<p>She probably needs a better framework to view her life. This is where upbringing &amp; social conditioning come into play.<p>&gt; In sifting through a patchwork of spiritual, psychological and biological frameworks, I have had to mix and match and to trust less in the words of experts and more in my intuition. It’s been, like much in life, an inside job.<p>People desire a simple silver bullet to solve all of their problems. Life is complex &amp; the map is not the territory, so it can be disadvantageous to be too dependent &amp; only focus on the map.<p>&gt; If you’re a meditation teacher or hold a powerful position in the mindfulness industry, perhaps take a moment to question what sort of legacy you want to leave. Transparency, honesty and humility are often the core values of religion, but are typically abandoned the moment a sacred idea is critiqued.<p>&gt; Is it the fate of the Western mindfulness movement to follow this trend? Is there some wiggle room around the idea that more awareness is always better? Is there potential for a pause in our desperate attempt to prove that we’ve found a magic bullet for all our ills?<p>He acknowledges the &quot;magic bullet&quot; singular tool to solve all problems mindset as being problematic.<p>&gt; My faith did not crumble gradually — but collapsed like a Jenga game, leaving me to pick through the ruins and to wonder, with tremulous apprehension, if anything was salvageable.<p>This sounds like the Shamanic Journey, where the soul is cut to pieces to be reassembled. Kindof like refactoring code.

&gt; This terrain was fresh. I had never previously experienced a psychotic episode and have no history of mental illness besides occasional bouts of mild anxiety and depression. ... &gt; Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn’t take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life.<p>YYMMV, but I feel the author is having problems they dont want to really accept. That is what the contradiction in the two quotes above indicates.<p>Aside from that, I couldn&#x27;t help but think about people having access to too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give you the most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it sort of becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip probability suddenly skyrockets. Or, put another way, even Siddhartha didn&#x27;t find awakening in the samana practices. They were only the first step (of three) to reach his goal. You can overdo everything, even the very very nice things.

I try to follow the more science-y literature and news on meditation, so here&#x27;s my take.<p>Diana Winston [1] runs the Mindfulness Education at UCLA&#x27;s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). In her book, The Little Book of Being, she describes a mental breakdown--for lack of a better word--during an extended meditation retreat, just as this author. She spent a year as a Burmese nun, too.<p>In it, she talks about how she would cry every day on some retreats, even in front of her meditation teacher. Looking back, she credits the experience to some psychological issues (my words, not hers).<p>Sam Harris PhD, one of most unforgiving people of bad science, has a great meditation app, Waking Up [2], which I really like. In it, he specifically says, if this is causing you harm, or you&#x27;re losing touch with reality, STOP immediately.<p>He likens it to exercise. Exercise is great for you; hell, it&#x27;s one of the best things you can do for your mind and body, and the research is very clear on this.<p>But, some exercises might be bad for you. If you have a bad shoulder, DON&#x27;T DO PUSHUPS. If you have bum knees, STOP JOGGING. You need to talk to a professional to find out how to do work around your specific injury.<p>Most of us aren&#x27;t able to self-diagnose our psyches like this. It&#x27;s almost impossible. There are, however, trained meditators out there of various religious and non-religious persuasions that can help you on your journey.<p>My two cents, and others have mentioned this too, is that removing some of the &quot;Eastern aura&quot; of meditation is great for us in the West. Less robes and incense, more love and kindness. The Dhali Llama has said that the Buddhism that he here in the West study is some of the &quot;purest&quot; there is.<p>But there&#x27;s thousands of pages in Buddhist literature about all the demons and bliss you can experience during meditation, and how to approach it and understand it. Put it into context, some one to tell you, &quot;Keep going, you&#x27;re starting to get it&quot;, or, &quot;Stop, you&#x27;re doing it wrong, you&#x27;re doing more harm than good.&quot;<p>BUT going on a 10-day silent meditation retreat, even one day, is insane if you&#x27;ve never meditated. Much like running an ultramarathon with no training. If your body doesn&#x27;t break down, your mind certainly will.<p>Personally, when I started meditating, I couldn&#x27;t do &gt;5 minutes at a time. Took me weeks to get to 20 minutes. And you gotta do the reading or join a group to help you understand what you&#x27;re going through, which also was very helpful for me.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dianawinston" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dianawinston</a> [2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakingup.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakingup.com&#x2F;</a>

The guy just had a panic attack and didn&#x27;t know how to deal with it. Getting kinda tired of the sensationalist articles acting like they discovered some unheard of horror that no other person has ever known.

Sounds like a psychotic episode.

Ah yes, the realizations of pointlessness of life, inevitability of death and the prison-like construct of our physical bodies for our actual minds.<p>Don&#x27;t need meditation to get there. But more importantly, you&#x27;re supposed to keep going and find peace with it. Not stop and run away in terror.<p>You have yet to succeed at awakening.