I certainly had heard about this aspect of deep meditation and that it is in many cases a stopping point for many serious practitioners. I like that the article touches on the search within esoteric religious practices of dark experiences.
I didn't read the article totally but this experience seems to be a result of incorrect practice. Just meditation without mastering the previous steps of Ashtanga Yoga is not advisable. Yes - you can use it but not as the main vehicle for your practice. I meditate daily - between 1/2 hr to an hour. I do not have the time to spend doing it for hours at a stretch. I do not think I have the temperament to do it either. Forcing myself to do it for hours on end is repressive - the focus and concentration should come about naturally. Even then a highly contemplative practice is not recommended without the close and personal guidance of a Teacher (or Guru).
The entire article reeks of fear-mongering on the basis of rare and extreme anecdotes. It's good that people are investigating any potential side-effects that may exist, but until they find something that's conclusive and statistically significant, it's not worth worrying about.
Let's not forget that the psychological/physiological benefits of meditation have been well documented and demonstrated by numerous scientific studies. If you're someone considering trying out meditation, you have much more to gain than lose by giving it a shot.
> The entire article reeks of fear-mongering on the basis of rare and extreme anecdotes.
At least in vipassana, the dark night period is considered to be a phase along the path or whatever. In other words, you basically can't reach enlightenment without having a complete mental breakdown and losing your ability to hold down a job and function normally in society, often for a couple years if not permanently. C.f. her interviews on the Buddhist Geeks.
You're not going to have issues if you're just meditating for fifteen or twenty minutes a day or whatever, it's only if you're doing this for hours every day and getting into the ego dissolution stages.
I feel that "at least in vipassana" is too broad to be useful – "vipassana" in Pali just means "insight", and there are an awful lot of different groups that lay claim to the term. That's especially true without more resources that support that claim. I'm no expert in this, but I have explored the meditation ecosystem a bit, and this is the first time I've heard the claim that the dark night is necessary.
Each tradition within vipassana has a slightly different roadmap, but they all seem to have some sort of 'completely losing your shit' stage somewhere in the middle:
I meditate two hours a day, every day. Mostly Zazen. I haven't experienced mental breakdowns. However, when I first started using imagery as a focal point, I would weep uncontrollably about mid-way through my meditation session. I think it was a release of pent-up emotion.
It lasted about a week and then stopped completely.
I sometimes start crying midway through a meditation (I do mostly Goenka-style mindfulness meditation). At this point, I just sort of see it as normal.
For an article that decries the lack of scientific research in this area it sure is eager to pull conclusions from anecdotes rather than remaining unsure. I mean, the article uncritically quotes someone as saying they stopped digesting their food because of a bad experience while meditating.
Honestly, it sounds like David is someone with depression and mild anxiety. If I'd abandoned as much of my life as he had to fruitlessly chase an experience which wasn't returning then I think the same might happen to me.
People get unwell for many reasons. I think it'd be pretty uncontroversial to say that the sort of people willing to go hardcore with meditation are probably more likely to be susceptible to these problems. In the absence of any alternative evidence I'll continue to think of horses not zebras when I hear hoofbeats.
That's not to say that there couldn't be an issue. Self guided CBT can be prone to misuse by practitioners but that's just a symptom of their underlying depression, not the fault of the CBT.
The first half seemed to be about fear mongering but I found the last half more balanced. And discussing the Three Marks of Existence as the full breadth of what meditators are supposed to achieve was quite refreshing to read from a mainstream Western source.
Overall, what I got out of this article was that in some cases, problems can arise from engaging in contemplative practice. But these instances are rare and usually come about due to existing mental illness.
The article's tone is pretty questionable, but I think it may be highlighting a topic worth discussing.
Among people who meditate seriously (i.e. not over a corporate weekend retreat) this is hardly the first time I've heard mention of this sort of thing. Meditation produces some fairly obscure frames of mind, and some of those (especially when mixed with ill-health, or drugs, or sleeplessness) seem to have the potential to be worryingly dissociative.
My biggest complaint isn't the lack of statistical rigor - it's a fluff piece - but the lack of rigorous terminology. Mindfulness meditation as taught in the west is mostly about "being in the moment" and I've rarely heard these claims associated with it. Samatha and other 'detached' meditations are the ones I've heard blamed for dissociation, and the article seems to almost actively not differentiate between different practices.
Meditation can induce a psychoactive experience much like you can get with a chemical agent. just as you can go on a bad trip or experience religious ecstasy on a drug, you can induce a similar state through meditation. This is neither good nor bad. You just need discipline and an understanding of the risks.
In many respects deep meditative states resemble sensory deprivation. The majority of people find both calming, but hallucinations, altered states of consciousness and deeply unsettling experiences are possible in both cases.
These experiences during meditation are real. It is therefore very important to develop compassion for yourself. In the Dhammapada the Buddha teaches to "Love yourself and watch". If you cannot love yourself, it may be better to not meditate (yet). There is a related and equally well known quote by Dogen which cautions against "driving the self to enlightenment". If one doesn't love himself, that will be what he will attempt to do and then because things don't work that way desperation results.
yes, definitely developing compassion at the same time as encountering "nothingness" is a huge thing! Otherwise, totally possible to spin off into a sort of depressive nihilism.
One of the interviewees mentioned that meditating was very difficult because he kept having thoughts that were not supposed to come up emerge. My immediate thought was to what I learned in Buddhist teaching to have compassion for oneself. If he had been instructed well, we would have known to accept all the thoughts that arose and merely observe them.
The following passage from Thich Nhat Hanh comes to mind:
Before the Buddha attained full realization of the path, for example, he tried various methods to suppress his mind, and they did not work. In one discourse (the Mahasaccaka Sutta), he recounted:
I thought, Why don't I grit my teeth, press my tongue against my palate, and use my mind to repress my mind? Then, as a wrestler might take hold of the head or the shoulders of someone weaker than he, and, in order to restrain and coerce that person, he has to hold him down constantly without letting go for a moment, so I gritted my teeth, pressed my tongue against my palate, and used my mind to suppress my mind. As I did this, I was bathed in sweat. Although I was not lacking in strength, although I maintained mindfulness and did not fall from mindfulness, my body and my mind were not at peace, and I was exhausted by these efforts, This practice caused other feelings of pain to arise in me besides the pain associated with the austerities, and I was not able to tame my mind.
About 1 in 4 adults experience some level of mental illness in a given year.
> "I started having thoughts like, 'Let me take over you,' combined with confusion and tons of terror," says David, a polite, articulate 27-year-old who arrived at Britton’s Cheetah House in 2013. "I had a vision of death with a scythe and a hood, and the thought 'Kill yourself' over and over again."
That's not an effect of meditation, that's a symptom of a mental illness. Meditation probably helped him discover it earlier than he otherwise would have.
I mean, the words "mental" and "illness" don't even appear in the article.
Yeah, they didn't mention "mental" or "illness", instead the article used the words "psychotic break" and "worsen symptoms in people who have certain psychiatric problems".
So, yes the article did cover what you wanted them to. Someone who has an underlying problem may not have a good experience when he digs deep and explores his own thoughts.
> So, yes the article did cover what you wanted them to.
Not as I read it. In the article, "psychotic break" was used in the context of being caused by meditation instead of by an underlying mental illness.
The second example gets closer to addressing the point I was making, but it's still just listing a possible risk for people who already have psychiatric problems.
What I wanted the article to cover is the far more likely explanation: That 1 in 4 people who meditate will experience some level of mental illness in any given year — but not because of meditation.
Of course, "meditation madness" is a much sexier premise.
>Is it possible for a person to simply "think" themselves into a certain states or flavors of insanity, or rather the more proper term, mental illness?
Of course it is possible to think yourself mentally ill. Paranoia, various phobias require nothing more than negative thought spirals (not to mention eating disorders).
Yup. We are taught ao thoroughly that our thoughts are distinct from reality, that we have trouble grasping thier power over our bodies. While you cannot move objects with your mind, in the domain of your body and mind, the mind itself is king.
My understanding and experience is that it's more accurate to call it meta-thinking, rather than just thinking. Perhaps semantics, and the lines are not at all clear, but it's helping me find balance in my life.
Also, "psychotic break" is an extreme mental condition that is, I think, rare. Depression and anxiety disorders are much more common, and neither was brought up in the article.
Except meditation is sold (yes, sold) even to the mentally ill as if it were a completely benign cure-all, suitable for use in preventing or attenuating exactly that kind of mental disturbance.
After all, leaving someone alone with their own thoughts... what harm could that do? And who could be blamed for such problems, except the individual?
It's almost like prescribing absolutely nothing.
So, when someone tells you this will surely ease your pain, but, rather than cure, or even do nothing at all (the general assumption a naive individual might make), it greatly amplifies one's problems, as if one were given a service animal only to be viciously attacked by it, such a result is probably going to surprise you.
But mental illness can have all sorts of causes. I don't think it's crazy to suggest that meditation itself could in rare cases be one of them. Or suppose the person never meditated and lived and died with a latent mental illness that never actually manifested. Could they be said to have a mental illness at all?
The article in question doesn't state that meditation was a cause of their problems, but pretty obviously details that people coming to meditation looking for ways to improve their lifestyle, instead began down a road to a much worse place.
While it might be unsurprising that meditation did not provide direct benefits to mind or body, it also failed to insulate or deflect these people away from new misery.
It's interesting to learn that the people described in the article had uncovered unsettling realities about themselves while meditating.
Knowing what I know about many people, uncompromising introspection is not something everyone would be comfortable with. Some people are jerks. Some people have their head in the clouds.
Grinding one's life to a halt, and taking a hard look in the mirror, is bound to derail an unrealistic world view now and again. But if, on the other side of an unceremonious introduction to cold reality, awaits absolutely no way to fix profound disappointment...
I'm not convinced that time didn't do the uncovering, and meditation happened to be what they were doing at the time. Correlation != Causation and all of that, you know.
You can suppose till the cows come home, but reality is that this is the first I've ever heard of this. I've certainly never experienced it, and I've had some fairly traumatic things happen far in the past. I found meditation helps relieve dissonance. It's not going to cure it, however. If someone's dissonance is strong, and they attack the wrong side of it, it's possible it could go south.
There are some Tibetan monks who meditate on dissolving chunks of their being slowly as they meditate so that all is left is nothing of them or their consciousness. They merge into nothingness. Other practices focus on merging into the global consciousness. Maybe the article is about someone who wandered off into parts he didn't have any business wandering in?
Anecdote is also often the first sign that a phenomenon exists. It shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but if all the evidence you have is anecdotal, that's your cue to gather something more robust.
Sometimes, yes. I'm not going to try to play any kind of numbers game here, but I personally think more of the "first signs" have (historically) come from experiments where the experimenter goes "Hm, that's weird." Not some sort of thing where a random stranger comes in off the street and says "Now, here's something weird that happened to me...".
Actually anecdote is exactly what is most trustworthy in the context of another's mind. The primary reason is, in order to disprove my hypothesis that meditation is good for me, you must be me. Given you can't be me, disproving my assertion requires disproving what I'm saying about my own thoughts and feelings. While we, as humans, are exceptionally good at speaking for others, it's a horrifically inefficient process to render someone else's feelings. Chances are, you'll be wrong about how I feel, given you aren't me and simply don't have enough time left in this world to accomplish being me. And trust me, you don't want to be me.
Note that my "reality" here is lack of circumstantial evidence for the harmful effects of meditation, which would just help identify there was a problem to begin with. In theory, this could be put to the scientific method to prove or disprove, given you could measure someone's mental state using something other than "he seems unstable today", which you can't, without speaking for someone else.
> Meditation probably helped him discover it earlier than he otherwise would have.
Religious or Spiritual Problems is it's own section in the DSM-IV. While that particular issue isn't especially exciting, a lot of the symptoms that can manifest don't correspond with any other mental illness.
The whole article is about how, as the result of a religious experience, he started having visions of a religious figure telling him to kill himself. That seems like a pretty clear-cut case to me...
The question is if we can avoid it with the proper knowledge. Maybe avoiding meditation in some cases.
I'm speaking of memory, it has been a while since I read about those things, but in some of the classic texts of Zen and Chan there are warnings about this kind of thing. I think there are even advice in how to deal with it. Somebody should go to the sources instead of just forget about all that accumulated experience.
I'm not going to say I'm the most experienced meditator in the world, but I've gone fairly deep. I'd argue that if you aren't getting into weird ego-dissolution experiences you are still meditating for comfort (which is totally okay! meditation is a great stress dissolver) and not moving towards the actual point of most meditative practices...but this also points to two things -- 1) meditation can't "cure" everything, sometimes you need a good therapist, or some chemicals, or some combination of the above 2) you absolutely must have a meditation teacher you trust if you want to do deep dives (yes, a 10 day vipassana retreat is certainly a deep dive, as is a zen sesshin). Preferably one you know has actually touched most of these spaces, is well grounded and compassionate, isn't woo-ey or ego-challenged in terms of feeling like your bad experience might threaten their "good teacher" status, etc.
I'd just note that the best "marketed" vipassana retreat, dhamma.org/Goenka is extremely woo-ey. Apart from simply false claims (eg cloud chambers we're always useless), the stated purpose of his practise is to excise "deeply rooted" problems so as to reincarnate better. This is in spite of them insisting it's a pure technique with zero dogma.
I know that might not represent vipassana as a whole, just adding a warning since it's the most popular one.
Exactly what claim are you disputing about cloud chambers? According to Wikipedia they were extremely useful to the discoverers of the positron, the muon and the kaon.
Sorry for being unclear. During Goenka's "discourses" he went off on many things. One of them being that cloud chambers were pointless as they only revealed things known to Buddha and Indian meditators for millennia. Yeah...
That was just one thing out of many that put me off from those courses.
Agreed it does seem unlikely that one could observe fundamental particles by looking inwards. Probably best to understand his use of language from particle physics as analogy. I don't suppose old Goenka had much of an education in modern science, you could cut the guy some slack :)
I'm a physicist and went to a number of Vipassana retreats. I also disagreed with the science comments and was fairly agnostic on the reincarnation comments. But, in Goenka's favor, he basically says, ignore all of the metaphysics and just see whether or not the technique works for you. Give it a fair try and if it doesn't work, don't use it. It wasn't about reincarnating better, but whether or not it offers you some benefit in this life. I really appreciated that attitude.
That's the marketing line: try and see. And that's the only reason I even went, as my woo-meter was off the chart. Except Goenka explicitly states the end goal, then goes on with a parable about how, if you don't accept it, you're like an ignorant child and will come around to his way of thinking. It 100% is about reincarnation; he makes this totally clear in his talk on day 3 (or thereabouts).
What really put me over the edge though was his chanting. "For good vibrations". What made me think it was cult like was the number of people repeating things in dead languages.
Additionally, he'd use manipulative techniques while speaking. Even though he was capable of speaking clearly, he'd intentionally lay on the accent, draw words out, repeat words over and over. This was laid even more clear I took a course in two languages. The translated version was quick and succinct.
Like you say, he denies this. At one point he says a sentence like "we have no dogma, nothing to believe, just the universal truth" - with no trace of irony.
Overall, between the woo and flat-out falsehoods, I found it very disingenuous. It certainly doesn't do meditation as a whole any benefit, just reinforces stereotypes. Which is a shame because some of the locations are superb, and the volunteers were extremely nice people.
Apart from mental illness, perhaps some practitioners of deep meditation have simply trained their brains to disconnect from physical reality and not align with the physical and emotional stimulus that keeps thoughts "normal"
Not at all convincing. I have been meditating for more than 10 years and it has always been an exhilarating experience. The author is trying to make up a story, it seems.
Anecdote, just like lots of people have great times with psychedelics. If you search you'll see "some" stories of people suffering derealization/depersonalization after going on a meditation retreat, for instance.
I meditate daily, and I'm part of a community that encourages it, but only after a thorough process of mental housecleaning. If you're full of un-dealt-with bitterness, anxiety, resentment, guilt, restlessness, shame, etc.—to say nothing of untreated mental illness or trauma—yeah, meditation is going to be a supremely unpleasant experience. Shutting out all distractions is only comfortable if you haven't been using those distractions to keep from having to deal with life.
There was stuff dropping away … [and] electric shocks through my body. [My] core sense of self, a persistent consciousness, the thoughts and stuff, were not me."
This sounds to me like the beginnings of psychosis. I don't doubt that these feelings could be induced by meditation, but I do doubt that they would not have emerged in some other way.
I remember reading this when it came out, and noticing how it reflected some of my personal experiences.
I found that meditation unlocked some of my inner anxiety and I was experiencing frequent panic attacks when I wasn't meditating. I had to stop for months.
I have started again, mostly because I miss the benefits of meditation, but it is closer to what another poster labeled "comfort meditation." I still consider one of the longer retreats, but I don't know that I'm yet ready to face that again.
I never did meditation but did a few "retreats" into other countries to get away from everything and just have some time for myself. I had a similar experience where it made 'click' and suddenly I was a lot more aware of all the anxieties that I have and usually don't think about. It made everything else so insignificant that I feel I am constantly wasting my time with almost everything I do.
I still have it and not sure how to get rid of this feeling. At the same time I feel "good" that I "found myself". It made clear for me what I actually want in life. Now I treat things like a stable job, work and a salary are just temporary and intermediate steps to reach my actual goals.
Getting reminded about these things with a scary anxiety attack is indeed not nice but I learned to "use it" to my advantage as good as I can.
At the same time I need to keep myself busy to not get reminded about it too much.
Once one has crossed the Arising and Passing Event, one will enter the Dark Night regardless of whether one wants to or not. It doesn’t matter if you practice from this point on; once you cross the A&P you are in the Dark Night to some degree (i.e. are a Dark Night Yogi) until you figure out how to get through it, and if you do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, you will have to go through it again and again until you do. I mean this in the most absolute terms
These are a well understood steps in the journey towards enlightenment and comes with necessary warnings. For most people, they will not step this far and this point is moot. For hardcore practitioners of meditation, it's a necessary step. What I think has happened is that meditation has become classified as "infinitely benevolent" : you can go down that path, as far as you can, and all will be good.
Meditation like weightlifting, needs guidance and care. You can hurt yourself if you don't respect the barbell.
In the yoga tradition, meditation is not something you can just sit down and do regularly from the beginning. You are supposed to do asanas to prepare for breath exercises, and breath exercises to allow the mind to concentrate, and then the "meditation skill is unlocked".
The general idea is that sleepiness and sluggishness is a certain outcome of an unhealthy body, as well as anxiety and irritability that are caused by various body aches.
In the worst case, meditation can become a formality, just a checkbox to fill out, a way to spend an indulgent, lethargic half-hour, or the opposite - a constantly distracted, obsessive anxiety (which is perfectly fine and even to be expected at the beginning of a meditation, but not at all times).
That's not to say that meditation is completely off limit: the idea is to do a bit of meditation and breath exercises at first and a lot of asanas, and then gradually increase breath exercises and then concentration; and finally meditation.
But this whole idea that meditation can be counter-productive in some circumstances is not really alien to the Eastern traditions. They are not stupid and they've been doing it for a long time with an empirical, practical approach.
Yes, definitely this. And even before the asana and pranayama (breathing practice) are the yamas and niyamas (yama-niyama-asana-pranayama-pratyahara-dhyana-dharana-samadhi) there are eight rungs to the entire eastern yogic/meditative practice. The whole focus on "meditation" and physical poses by the modern western approach of $50/hr yoga classes completely goes against the eastern method of guru and disciple. There's a reason these things are meant to be studied under a learned master. What's the saying... a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. These practices were studied by students for years before they attempted what some people do in their first couple of yoga classes..
That said, I don't mean to discount the experiences of the individuals described in the article. I think it's terribly unfortunate that anyone has to suffer from practicing meditation and yoga, and also find it sad that they were unable to find a master to help them recover from their experiences sooner.
I would also add that meditation is a bit tricky in the sense that it increases awareness of what's there - and what's there may be good or bad, but increased awareness is a better gift than merely good or bad things. Noticing more things means I'm not as locked in to my obliviousness. It's paradoxial but having a bad meditation is often beneficial.
A while back I had the thought that meditation for self-improvement is a non-starter. Meditation, supposedly done properly, is supposed to be non-judgemental observation. But if you're approaching the whole practice as a way to improve some aspect of yourself, the entire foundation is flawed. In that case, the whole reason you're doing it is based on a negative judgement.
I was wondering if someone more experienced with meditation can comment on this. Does this make any sense?
I meditate about 20 minutes a night before i go to bed. Nonjudgement is a big part of this. I just sit there and observe my thoughts, without trying to change them.
Why is this helpful?
Because trying to change your thoughts is itself a form of thinking. Trying to change a thought is reacting to that thought, and a lot of my problems come from reacting to thoughts uncritically.
When I sit there and just try to notice the thoughts, thoughts about disturbing thoughts bother me less and less. An unpleasant thought doesn't quickly lead to a progressive series of counter-thoughts or responses.
To give you an example of how this helps: on the way to the grocery store yesterday, I thought "I'm out of beer, I could buy some beer." Reacting to the thought, without being critical of it, would mean going to buy the beer.
But observing the thought allowed me to be aware of it and to _decide_ if that's what I actually wanted. I decided that no, I didn't really need the beer, and that I'd gain more utility from knowing I made a more responsible choice.
For me, practicing nonjudgement allows me to better exercise judgement at suitable times. I couldn't tell you how many times i've gotten carried away giving imaginary speeches when I think about running for office - a practice which has caused me no good. It's like that judgement was entirely wasted.
By meditating, I've become more aware of the background ebb and flow of thoughts, which has freed me up to be judgemental when it _matters_ - such as over the small part of the world I have control over, instead of wasting energy judging things I have no control over, because that's a conditioned response to unpleasant thoughts.
I hope that helps.
FWIW I did go through a 'dark night of the soul' period. It lasted a few years, and my life got noticeably worse, but eventually I stopped believing everything I thought, and focused on repairing my life, and now it's much better than it ever was.
If meditation brings up dark or horrible thoughts - for me those were there all along, but I was just not paying attention because I constantly thought about getting rich, or politics, or starting a company, or p vs np, or whatever other abstractions i was into that day.
A drug addiction and struggle with mental illness (bipolar) ran through it.
I was starting to understand emotion, and I felt like the world was based on lies. I knew I was different from everyone else but couldn't figure out how exactly. I identified more with the idea of being an AI than with being fully human.
I expressed some of this on Tumblr of all places. I haven't touched this since the end of that whole process: I was hospitalized 5 times in a year and realized it was a matter of survival to fix my life.
I think the confusion here may be between strategic and tactical levels. Strategically, your mind decides that it should move in a certain direction. After that initial decision is made, it finds that obsessive judgement is counter-productive, and so it tries to stop. That doesn't in any way mean that initial decision is void.
Another possible reason is that idea of judgement of good and evil is primal in Western religions while in Eastern traditions, the idea of escape from state of confusion is primal. That's not to say that in the West, confusion is not considered a problem, or that in the East, doing or believing terrible things is ok. In meditation traditions, judgement between good and evil is just the first step, like a compass that points you in the right direction. In three major Western religions, once you make the proper judgement and choose the good side, you are done, finished.
Zazen, which I personally really like, is all about "practice" -- like practicing and instrument. So in a sense you're improving something. But where zen gets somewhat hard to write down on paper is this idea that you're trying to walk this middle line of trying but not trying. Kind of like walking with a cup of hot coffee -- don't spill it, but don't concentrate on not spilling it because you'll spill it :)
Put in software terms, the improvements that come with meditation are "side effects" -- you're really just doing it to continually make your practice better. In that way it affects the rest of your life as you become more mindful of any activity you engage in.
I recommend the book Zen Mind Beginner's mind -- it does a great job communicating this concept of balance.
No mention of kundalini anywhere... Seems he went a bit deep too soon with no guidance. Electrical currents, spasms, sexual thoughts, digestive issues, etc. Classic kundalini symptoms.
Aypsite.org has some good info on it and how to avoid or deal with it.
In fact, to elaborate a bit, he mentions feeling a 'knot' in his lower belly. That sounds like swadhistana chakra, or what the Taoists call the Lower Dan Tien. That'd correlate with the sexual thoughts as well.
Normally the recommendations for this sort of thing is to back off, and to circulate energy in the micro cosmic orbit. See Mantak Chia for details.
An interesting book I read years ago about this was "Path Notes of an American Ninja Master". Cheesy title, but pretty interesting as an alternative to Gopi Krishna. The author specifically addresses the 'Dark Night of the Soul' phenomenon and emphasises the importance of creating Good Feelings inside to smooth the process and to lessen the effects of the darker aspects...
As someone who practices Taoist meditation, Mantak Chia is meh. Got most his notoriety through sexual practices which are nearly insignificant in actual Taoism (religious or mountain). His school has also latched onto the MCO as some great achievement when most other lineages treat it as simply an energetic movement that happens while practicing.
Meditation, as with hallucinogens, if you or your family has a history of mental illness, tread carefully.
Sitting can be surprisingly hard work. It pushes the body through pain while introducing you to the limits of your mind. In any training, slow progression is very important. You wouldn't go to a body building competition with no lifting experience, why do people dive into 10 day retreats without years of experience?
> You wouldn't go to a body building competition with no lifting experience, why do people dive into 10 day retreats without years of experience?
That's kind of the point though with highlighting MCO, especially if you read Gopi Krishna. Some people stumble upon things spontaneously before they're ready, and some just go off on their own focussing on the higher centres or overdo it (like 10-day retreats before they should). MCO for beginners is about opening the pathways to handle greater energy flows. Anyone writing books trying to educate the masses should focus on safety first, which he does.
He specifically calls out Kundalini yoga schools as only focussing on sending energy up, without safely describing how to bring it down. That's not my experience - the Kundalini yoga I learnt included the MCO but, as you say, didn't make a big deal of it. But, you know, Gopi Krishna again... you can never be too careful. Chia must have come across some schools that didn't mention keeping the tongue up and bringing energy down, or bringing in earth energy for balance.
I've found the Lesser Kan & Li - as taught by Chia - very effective (when I finally got it right), and haven't read about it anywhere else. Some say MCO is all you need.
My criticism of Mantak Chia is that he doesn't sufficiently emphasise single-pointedness, i.e. what others generally refer to as meditation. If you read his books you could come away with the impression that meditation is always active, always moving energy around.
That's why I prefer the aypsite approach - half chi kung/pranayama, half awareness with a mantra. It's much more balanced with an emphasis on going slowly and self-pacing. And the really interesting stuff happens in the stillness anyway...
It is strange for me to read in the comments all the advice to--as I understand it--be a relatively "whole" person before beginning meditation. In my limited experience and perspective, I was under the impression that meditation can assist one with releasing stress and anxiety... I thought meditation was one tool which could be applied for achieving more "wholeness" as a person, and I'm surprised at the suggestion that apparently other means must be pursued first?
It seems to me that it would be hard to go wrong with 15-30 minutes of "meditation" spent focusing on breathing and non-judgmentally observing your thoughts as they bubble up and dissipate. I've often felt that a lot of my stress and anxiety and even depression is the result of hanging onto things and the result of trying to control things which are actually outside my control.
Or perhaps these other comments are directed toward the serious, multiple-hour, practice of meditation? I have no desire to separate my consciousness from my physical being, for instance. I'm happy to stay firmly rooted on earth, while learning to accept the good in my inherent existence. If that makes sense.
This isn't talking about 15-30 minutes of meditation. It's talking about 2+ week retreats.
Having been on a couple 10-day retreats, I've experienced what I can only describe as significantly altered states of consciousness (after 6+ days of meditating 14-16 hours a day). Fortunately, I managed to make my way back into the world after they ended, but I can see how some people might be permanently altered.
Eventually, life lost its meaning. Colors began to fade. Spiritually dry, David didn't care about anything anymore. Everything he had found pleasurable before the retreat—hanging out with friends, playing music, drinking—all of that "turned to dirt," he says, "a plate of beautiful food turned to dirt."
That's depression. Clinical depression. Fits my experience to a T. The first thing out of my mouth when I finally saw a "real" doctor was "I can't see colors or taste food anymore... I mean, I can tell you its red or blue or tasted like chicken but I can't see or taste it anymore. I know that sounds crazy but..."
This article is a little dangerous. Like saying "Running causes heart failure" but omitting "in people with congestive heart failure". Its the heart condition that's the problem, not the running.
If you have these symptoms, it wasn't the meditation. You're depressed. See a doctor. They can fix you.
This is kinda something that meditation is supposed to do. It brings problems you have to the fore so that you can see them clearly and fix them.
This is something entirely ignored by the new-agey "im super spiritual" types. Meditation isn't something to make you blissful or happy or whatever they're saying it does these days. It's just a tool to see yourself just like a microscope is a tool that allows you to see what's already there.
Depression is a medical diagnosis because it has physical make up that causes people to be depressed.
I work and live with people who think depression is a "spiritual" or personal lifestyle problem. I think they are wrong.
I lost a sister to cancer when she was 15, my brother to probably suicide when he was 19 and my son died of cancer at 12. I seriously can say I never had a day of depression. I have had a broken heart missing them and feeling the pain. I will cry for them (I did for my son on Sunday while I was unloading groceries (Go figure)) But I have never lost the taste of food nor anything else. I have sorrow but their is a root cause for that. Depression is sorrow with no real root cause (to me). So I usually come out to defend people who are depressed since I feel like I should be the kind of depression but have never experienced it due to the luck of my genetics.
This is an incredibly insightful post on depression. As a father of two young children, I am incredibly sorry for your loss and reading about it really struck me... Strangely enough, this thread being about mindfulness meditation, made me halt my instinctive reaction to keep scrolling and confront the emotions I was feeling reading it. My instinct was to keep scrolling and distract my mind with other things, but instead I realize your post confronts me with the terrifying possibility of losing my own children.
I think you really illustrate the difference between depression and sadness. Depression I imagine is like experiencing dulled senses, a vapid gray world of numbness. While sorrow and sadness are incredibly vivid emotions that can overpower us, like when they struck you so suddenly unloading groceries. I'm so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing such personal information.
But, there are lifestyle and "spiritual" things that can be done to help treat depression. Things like exercise, diet, social interaction, exposure to nature and sunlight, and other environmental factors can have an effect on the physical make up of the brain. Now none are cure alls and a lack of any one of them isn't necessarily to blame either, but there is merit to some of these "spiritual" practices that get more of those things in one's life.
> But, there are lifestyle and "spiritual" things that can be done to help treat depression
(I am the OP on going through loss and sadness and not being depressed.)
Yes 100% correct. Just like if you have heart disease or a bad back their are non-medical activities that will help those medical condition. My statement is that their is a medical piece that people discount and/or actually dismiss. A person can't just "fix themselves" and having the medical piece help them with treatment with counseling is a big help. Depression isn't that your sad.
Depression Definition: Clinical depression is a mood disorder in which feelings of sadness, loss, anger, or frustration interfere with everyday life for weeks or more.
Symptoms of depression include:
Low mood or irritable mood most of the time
Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
A big change in appetite, often with weight gain or loss
Tiredness and lack of energy
Feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and guilt
Difficulty concentrating
Slow or fast movements
Lack of activity and avoiding usual activities
Feeling hopeless or helpless
Repeated thoughts of death or suicide
Lack of pleasure in activities you usually enjoy, including sex
Exercise is important, and it might help prevent depression, but the good quality evidence we have says that exercise is at best a weak treatment for depression for some people, and not at all a treatment for the rest.
I have dealt with huge, soul crushing depression. In my case it was absolutely a spiritual/lifestyle problem. Specifically, my core values involve personal growth, and contribution to society, and I felt incapable of either. I had a good job, a girlfriend, good relationships with family, etc, but none of that mattered. The rational I had was that my in the big scheme of things I didn't matter - I could just as well not exist, and outside of a couple of people absolutely nothing would change.
I feel like the massively connected nature of modern society is directly responsible for flourishing depression. Odds are, you are redundant; if most people disappeared suddenly, someone else could probably pick up the pieces in fairly short order. Additionally, being hyper-connected means that whatever you're good at, it is probably easy to find examples of people who are much better at it than you, which can be be somewhat marginalizing. Not feeling necessary or exceptional in any way is a pretty sure fire recipe for angst.
The nasty thing about depression is that it is a self-reinforcing cycle. When you start to get depressed, your ability to take measures to address the root cause of the depression is impacted. The result is a downward spiral that results in self obviation, through suicide, self destructive behavior or substance abuse.
Exactly, I've been to a Vipassana meditation retreat, and the whole point is to eradicate suffering by eliminating feelings of craving and aversion. To see things as they are, without passing judgment.
This creates a clear mind, free from worries and dwelling, and a more stable personality. From this comes happiness, as this is our natural state of mind.
People tend to mix up pleasure and happiness and think meditation provides the first.
Meditation, just like a psychedelic experience, can show you where you stand in life, and this can be scary. One can find out that they've been doing things wrong all their life, or realize that they are on a destructive path. The changes required might affect their spouse, children, friends or their job, creating a seemingly impossible dilemma, to go on and keep suffering, or to change and hurt others.
Meditation can provide pleasure which is why it can be harmful without proper guidance. My last retreat I came to a state of bhanga very early. It felt wonderful but it fucked with my equanimity when it stopped I felt depressed. Guidance helped me get through it.
The key difference between meditation and psychedelics is regularity. Psychedelics are more like antibiotics in that they can be used in short bursts to shock the system but meditation should be used continually like a vitamin.
>> This is kinda something that meditation is supposed to do.
Incorrect. Meditation helps to find balance, meaning, sort out things, but in a same way as it won't cure cancer, it won't cure clinical depression, or broken arm.
Whole heartedly agree. In my experience, meditation is a tool, not a cure-all. When I started getting into meditation, yoga, etc. I did a couple of legit non-new agey satsangs which is something like a chanting meditation type thing. Those were very deep, moving experiences, yet I felt extremely depressed after each one.
Some things can be too fast and unlock too much at once. This is where regular, consistent, meditation helps quell the unrest and let you tackle things at a sane pace. I had to work through those bouts of heavy depression, but now I can do very spiritual events and benefit from them.
This happened to me as well. I went to a two-hour gong-bath/satsang, and was nearly suicidal by the end. To be honest I'm relieved that this isn't unique to me.
Yes, but with a small twist on what you are saying: Depression lies at the intersection of the external world and the internal. It's influenced both by it's contact with the external world and by the content of our thoughts.
It can be caused both by external factors and our internal mental life.
Yeah, I thought the same thing, I know that feeling.
And combined with the statements from this poor guy about not being able to block out intrusive thoughts ... people with clinical depression or schizophrenia need to be careful not to practice dissociating instead of meditating. Especially beginners who may think the point is to "keep pushing thoughts away and think of nothing". Mindfulness meditation is pretty different, and it's the one most of the promising research is concerned with.
That said, I like more dissociative types of meditation as well, it can be fun to try and get calm and focused enough to approach no thoughts at all. It taught me how to cure my insomnia for one, now I can stop that narrating train of thought that would often keep me awake and fall asleep basically whenever I want.
Also they seem to be freely mixing facts about research on mindfulness meditation with anecdotes about all different kinds of meditation. That's nonsense, there is no reason to assume the long term effects are similar.
> Especially beginners who may think the point is to "keep pushing thoughts away and think of nothing"
So if meditation is not thinking about nothing, how is it different from just sitting with your eyes closed? If there's a physical impact of meditation then surely there has to be a feasible technical explanation of the process?
My understanding is that you're supposed to let things come, but to note their happening in your mind's voice. I start by noting each breath, then as my awareness of it fades in and out I note people, noises, feelings, and thoughts.
In my humble opinion / understanding, mindfulness is about reaching a state where you observe what's happening around you without judgment. When you begin actively pushing thoughts away, you're once again engaging the ego.
You observe, without passing judgment. If a thought comes, just let it come, and don't 'reply' to it. When you notice you drift off, just acknowledge that, without judgment, and continue the process of observation.
For the sake of clarity, let's look at the mind as if it's a separate entity (like a child) that is constantly asking our attention. When we give in, when we reply to our thoughts, its behavior is rewarded and it will keep asking for attention. If you just acknowledge that it's there, but don't act on every thought, the stream will become less and less. The main goal being that it eventually shuts up unless you actually need (ask) your mind to help you with a task.
Other comments have already talked about what mindfulness meditation is but that's only a part answer.
You could say it's not different, since anything done in that physical pose is something we're going to call meditation. There are a lot of different practices from different cultures, and really what they have in common is that you quietly sit and focus on being in a certain state of mind, continuously trying to bring yourself back to that state of mind if/when you get distracted.
For mindfulness it's non-judgemental awareness of the present moment and your own mind's activity
For zen it's controlled focused attention on the object of meditation (nothing at all in the cliche)
For compassion meditation it's compassion/kindness/love towards yourself/others/everything
For the various types of body awareness meditation it's your own feeling of your physical body
There are mantras and guided meditation and many others, with a lot of historical cross pollination and tons of wacky woo-filled stuff. Many types that are likely complete junk that's useless or harmful because the whole edifice is built on magical thinking.
I think the feasible technical explanation is pretty simple, "neurons that fire together, wire together". It seems very reasonable to me that practising attaining a certain state of mind will make it easier to do at will and/or make shift your normal state in that direction. A lot of it is literally as simple as learning "If I focus on X for a short time I feel like Y, so now I know how to feel like Y when I want"
You are actively trying to change how you think. It's not necessarily thinking about nothing. In many cases it's about coming at the same thoughts from a different perspective, often an external and non-judgemental one.
It really depends on which tradition or practice of meditation you're talking about. In the exercise I go through, it's different because it's specifically focused on acknowledging whatever thoughts come through without judging or reacting to them like I would impulsively. Being able to accept especially the negative thoughts at face value helps me a lot with managing the coping process.
Yes see a doctor. However, I feel that doctors often take a sledgehammer approach to mental illness, prescribing SSRIs and/or MAOIs whenever they hear the word "depression" or "anxiety". I'm not a MD, but after reading a little about the topic, it seems that a much better approach is to see what could be the cause of the deficiency in certain neurotransmitters. The reason could be that some of the enzymes involved in the process of producing them are defective due to genetic mutations. Certain tests (such as provided by 23andme) could reveal these defects, and could in theory provide much better treatment options. In many cases this could even start with taking certain dietary supplements, which help the body create the neurotransmitters. Such an approach seems so much more sensible than just "drowning" the brain in neurotransmitters, which is basically what SSRIs and MAOIs do.
However, I have yet to see a doctor that knows anything about metabolic pathways and such.
Look for someone who works with a lab that does neurotransmitter testing.
If you're not psychotic, but plainly depressed, the question is basically if you need your serotonine or your dopamine/noradrenaline boosted. A blood test can tell you that.
Other than that:
. Go outside every single morning. A study in a german hospital showed that 20 minutes of daily exposure to daylight can reduce meds by 30%.
. Go running for 15 minutes every single day. I say 15 minutes because it's supposed to become an easy "no-brainer" ritual.
. Keep a diary in which, every single day, you make a list about strictly only the positive things that happened that day.
This is good advice for supplemental improvement if you are already getting professional help.
I just wanted to add. If these things don't work, or you are feeling suicidal, or haven't talked to anyone -- please talk to your doctor. The same treatments will not work for everyone and it is not your fault if a regimen doesn't help or you can't stick with it. Even 15 minute no brainers are difficult when you are depressed.
Also, be honest about your symptoms. Anxiety may be easier to talk to your doctor about, but you can wind up prescribed addictive narcotics that will hurt rather than help.
>However, I have yet to see a doctor that knows anything about metabolic pathways and such.
You have to keep in mind that the vast majority of psych-related clinicians are average to below-average performers that were too incompetent to become real doctors. That would explain why your "doctor" doesn't understand anything taught in a basic undergrad neuroscience survey course.
It's like expecting an auto mechanic to design a new car engine - sure, they could try their best, but at the end of the day, they're still an auto mechanic, not an engineer.
Well, I suspect doctors still get paid more than the average medical researcher :)
And that researcher is not accessible to the general public. The strange thing is that we now see people on the internet fora doing the metabolic/neurochemistry research themselves, for lack of better options.
Arguably, traditions with "metta" meditation treat this issue by enforcing the connection between people. Isolated meditators who make progress too quickly can disconnect from people and without some form of metta or some guide from an experience teacher they may find themselves in a tricky spot. Some people just advance too quickly into a more equanimous state than others. That's not depression, its progress and what many seek out when learning meditation or when they follow a spiritual path. You can't act surprised when you achieve an equanimous mind and you aren't interested in the things you were before.
I'm a bit like this. I don't crave bad TV shows, hollywood junk, conflict, drama, money, trying to be seen a very smart/successful, etc like I used to. I certainly still fail at this, but there's probably a practical limit here considering my lifestyle. I'm not depressed, its just I quickly outgrew what those in my peer group valued and that has left me with a social hole in my life. I just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to go back to how I was, even if the previous me was "more fun." I'm a very different person than I was pre-meditation/pre-whatever. I don't see that as a problem.
I think its dangerous to just dismiss everything you don't understand as mental illness. Not too long ago we were doing this with the gay community, non-neurotypicals, and those from cultures with different values. Its also crazy that Western culture can call anyone not "having fun" all the time depressed. A more quiet and contemplative life shouldn't be seen as some horrible pathological condition. In a perfect world, people like that should be valued, not dismissed, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in.
Adverse outcomes of meditation practices described in the article covered a range of disorders, e.g., depression, panic attacks, possibly frank psychosis. These conditions are familiar to psychiatrists and not rare, guessing something like <=5% of the whole population have a serious form of such conditions.
We know that assigning a singular cause of psychiatric disorders is spurious since all major conditions have been connected to multiple genetic, social and environmental factors.
It's certainly conceivable that meditation could precipitate an episode of a psychiatric disorder, and of course it is mostly impossible to say if or when the condition would have emerged otherwise.
IOW the apparent sequential onset of psychiatric symptoms could be just chance occurrence reflecting the general population prevalence, or there might be a genuine causal effect of the preceding meditation event. Logically, at this time there's as much basis to assert meditation "caused" the condition as asserting meditation did not cause it. Until a lot more information is available, the relation remains indeterminate, or undefined.
It's a good principle (and the safest course) to hold that any/all spiritual practices or psychiatric treatments have risk of bad outcomes. No "prescription" is going to be good for everyone.
The idea that meditation and psychotherapy have overlapping risk potential is compelling. Haven't looked into to it yet, but definitely worth finding out what if any studies have been done.
Along those lines there's a just-published meta-analysis re: outcome of treatment for depression with CBT or medication. With both treatments, ~5-7% of subjects had at least some "deterioration" of their condition, and those with the greatest pre-treatment symptoms had the worst outcomes. [0]
While the domains are only partially congruent, 5% is probably a good initial guess concerning the probability of mild or greater adverse effect of meditation, IIRC corresponding to ~2 SD from the mean. I didn't see any references in the article to publications by the researchers profiled, but I'd imagine they'd have some data that sheds light on the prevalence of the outcomes they're studying.
The title is wrong on the linked page. It says The Dark Knight of the Soul and everywhere else in the article refers to it as the Dark Night. I do appreciate the Batman of the Soul though.
I practice mindfulness meditation and the way it has always been taught to me is to simply sit and observe without judgement. That is, don't actively try to push away thoughts. Simply acknowledge them as they arise, and return your focus to breathing in and out. Forcing away thoughts is just another way of engaging ego -- you get caught up trying to get somewhere rather than simply being in the moment.
One of my favorite descriptions is by Alan Watts, called "listening meditation":
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadLet's not forget that the psychological/physiological benefits of meditation have been well documented and demonstrated by numerous scientific studies. If you're someone considering trying out meditation, you have much more to gain than lose by giving it a shot.
At least in vipassana, the dark night period is considered to be a phase along the path or whatever. In other words, you basically can't reach enlightenment without having a complete mental breakdown and losing your ability to hold down a job and function normally in society, often for a couple years if not permanently. C.f. her interviews on the Buddhist Geeks.
You're not going to have issues if you're just meditating for fifteen or twenty minutes a day or whatever, it's only if you're doing this for hours every day and getting into the ego dissolution stages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1...
See also Daniel Ingram's book, which Buddhist Geeks also talks about all the time: http://www.buddhistische-gesellschaft-berlin.de/downloads/ma...
It lasted about a week and then stopped completely.
Honestly, it sounds like David is someone with depression and mild anxiety. If I'd abandoned as much of my life as he had to fruitlessly chase an experience which wasn't returning then I think the same might happen to me.
People get unwell for many reasons. I think it'd be pretty uncontroversial to say that the sort of people willing to go hardcore with meditation are probably more likely to be susceptible to these problems. In the absence of any alternative evidence I'll continue to think of horses not zebras when I hear hoofbeats.
That's not to say that there couldn't be an issue. Self guided CBT can be prone to misuse by practitioners but that's just a symptom of their underlying depression, not the fault of the CBT.
Overall, what I got out of this article was that in some cases, problems can arise from engaging in contemplative practice. But these instances are rare and usually come about due to existing mental illness.
Among people who meditate seriously (i.e. not over a corporate weekend retreat) this is hardly the first time I've heard mention of this sort of thing. Meditation produces some fairly obscure frames of mind, and some of those (especially when mixed with ill-health, or drugs, or sleeplessness) seem to have the potential to be worryingly dissociative.
My biggest complaint isn't the lack of statistical rigor - it's a fluff piece - but the lack of rigorous terminology. Mindfulness meditation as taught in the west is mostly about "being in the moment" and I've rarely heard these claims associated with it. Samatha and other 'detached' meditations are the ones I've heard blamed for dissociation, and the article seems to almost actively not differentiate between different practices.
The following passage from Thich Nhat Hanh comes to mind:
Before the Buddha attained full realization of the path, for example, he tried various methods to suppress his mind, and they did not work. In one discourse (the Mahasaccaka Sutta), he recounted:
I thought, Why don't I grit my teeth, press my tongue against my palate, and use my mind to repress my mind? Then, as a wrestler might take hold of the head or the shoulders of someone weaker than he, and, in order to restrain and coerce that person, he has to hold him down constantly without letting go for a moment, so I gritted my teeth, pressed my tongue against my palate, and used my mind to suppress my mind. As I did this, I was bathed in sweat. Although I was not lacking in strength, although I maintained mindfulness and did not fall from mindfulness, my body and my mind were not at peace, and I was exhausted by these efforts, This practice caused other feelings of pain to arise in me besides the pain associated with the austerities, and I was not able to tame my mind.
> "I started having thoughts like, 'Let me take over you,' combined with confusion and tons of terror," says David, a polite, articulate 27-year-old who arrived at Britton’s Cheetah House in 2013. "I had a vision of death with a scythe and a hood, and the thought 'Kill yourself' over and over again."
That's not an effect of meditation, that's a symptom of a mental illness. Meditation probably helped him discover it earlier than he otherwise would have.
I mean, the words "mental" and "illness" don't even appear in the article.
So, yes the article did cover what you wanted them to. Someone who has an underlying problem may not have a good experience when he digs deep and explores his own thoughts.
Not as I read it. In the article, "psychotic break" was used in the context of being caused by meditation instead of by an underlying mental illness.
The second example gets closer to addressing the point I was making, but it's still just listing a possible risk for people who already have psychiatric problems.
What I wanted the article to cover is the far more likely explanation: That 1 in 4 people who meditate will experience some level of mental illness in any given year — but not because of meditation.
Of course, "meditation madness" is a much sexier premise.
And so, to stretch further, this paraphrasing of what meditation actually IS, at the end of the day...
Is it possible for a person to simply "think" themselves into a certain states or flavors of insanity, or rather the more proper term, mental illness?
Of course it is possible to think yourself mentally ill. Paranoia, various phobias require nothing more than negative thought spirals (not to mention eating disorders).
That's basically the premise of the people at https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas
That isn't to say it didn't hurt OP.
After all, leaving someone alone with their own thoughts... what harm could that do? And who could be blamed for such problems, except the individual?
It's almost like prescribing absolutely nothing.
So, when someone tells you this will surely ease your pain, but, rather than cure, or even do nothing at all (the general assumption a naive individual might make), it greatly amplifies one's problems, as if one were given a service animal only to be viciously attacked by it, such a result is probably going to surprise you.
While it might be unsurprising that meditation did not provide direct benefits to mind or body, it also failed to insulate or deflect these people away from new misery.
It's interesting to learn that the people described in the article had uncovered unsettling realities about themselves while meditating.
Knowing what I know about many people, uncompromising introspection is not something everyone would be comfortable with. Some people are jerks. Some people have their head in the clouds.
Grinding one's life to a halt, and taking a hard look in the mirror, is bound to derail an unrealistic world view now and again. But if, on the other side of an unceremonious introduction to cold reality, awaits absolutely no way to fix profound disappointment...
What then?
There are some Tibetan monks who meditate on dissolving chunks of their being slowly as they meditate so that all is left is nothing of them or their consciousness. They merge into nothingness. Other practices focus on merging into the global consciousness. Maybe the article is about someone who wandered off into parts he didn't have any business wandering in?
Note that my "reality" here is lack of circumstantial evidence for the harmful effects of meditation, which would just help identify there was a problem to begin with. In theory, this could be put to the scientific method to prove or disprove, given you could measure someone's mental state using something other than "he seems unstable today", which you can't, without speaking for someone else.
Religious or Spiritual Problems is it's own section in the DSM-IV. While that particular issue isn't especially exciting, a lot of the symptoms that can manifest don't correspond with any other mental illness.
The question is if we can avoid it with the proper knowledge. Maybe avoiding meditation in some cases.
I'm speaking of memory, it has been a while since I read about those things, but in some of the classic texts of Zen and Chan there are warnings about this kind of thing. I think there are even advice in how to deal with it. Somebody should go to the sources instead of just forget about all that accumulated experience.
I know that might not represent vipassana as a whole, just adding a warning since it's the most popular one.
That was just one thing out of many that put me off from those courses.
What really put me over the edge though was his chanting. "For good vibrations". What made me think it was cult like was the number of people repeating things in dead languages.
Additionally, he'd use manipulative techniques while speaking. Even though he was capable of speaking clearly, he'd intentionally lay on the accent, draw words out, repeat words over and over. This was laid even more clear I took a course in two languages. The translated version was quick and succinct.
Like you say, he denies this. At one point he says a sentence like "we have no dogma, nothing to believe, just the universal truth" - with no trace of irony.
Overall, between the woo and flat-out falsehoods, I found it very disingenuous. It certainly doesn't do meditation as a whole any benefit, just reinforces stereotypes. Which is a shame because some of the locations are superb, and the volunteers were extremely nice people.
This sounds to me like the beginnings of psychosis. I don't doubt that these feelings could be induced by meditation, but I do doubt that they would not have emerged in some other way.
I found that meditation unlocked some of my inner anxiety and I was experiencing frequent panic attacks when I wasn't meditating. I had to stop for months.
I have started again, mostly because I miss the benefits of meditation, but it is closer to what another poster labeled "comfort meditation." I still consider one of the longer retreats, but I don't know that I'm yet ready to face that again.
I still have it and not sure how to get rid of this feeling. At the same time I feel "good" that I "found myself". It made clear for me what I actually want in life. Now I treat things like a stable job, work and a salary are just temporary and intermediate steps to reach my actual goals.
Getting reminded about these things with a scary anxiety attack is indeed not nice but I learned to "use it" to my advantage as good as I can.
At the same time I need to keep myself busy to not get reminded about it too much.
Again, still no idea how to "solve" this problem.
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki...
Once one has crossed the Arising and Passing Event, one will enter the Dark Night regardless of whether one wants to or not. It doesn’t matter if you practice from this point on; once you cross the A&P you are in the Dark Night to some degree (i.e. are a Dark Night Yogi) until you figure out how to get through it, and if you do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, you will have to go through it again and again until you do. I mean this in the most absolute terms
These are a well understood steps in the journey towards enlightenment and comes with necessary warnings. For most people, they will not step this far and this point is moot. For hardcore practitioners of meditation, it's a necessary step. What I think has happened is that meditation has become classified as "infinitely benevolent" : you can go down that path, as far as you can, and all will be good.
Meditation like weightlifting, needs guidance and care. You can hurt yourself if you don't respect the barbell.
The general idea is that sleepiness and sluggishness is a certain outcome of an unhealthy body, as well as anxiety and irritability that are caused by various body aches.
In the worst case, meditation can become a formality, just a checkbox to fill out, a way to spend an indulgent, lethargic half-hour, or the opposite - a constantly distracted, obsessive anxiety (which is perfectly fine and even to be expected at the beginning of a meditation, but not at all times).
That's not to say that meditation is completely off limit: the idea is to do a bit of meditation and breath exercises at first and a lot of asanas, and then gradually increase breath exercises and then concentration; and finally meditation.
But this whole idea that meditation can be counter-productive in some circumstances is not really alien to the Eastern traditions. They are not stupid and they've been doing it for a long time with an empirical, practical approach.
That said, I don't mean to discount the experiences of the individuals described in the article. I think it's terribly unfortunate that anyone has to suffer from practicing meditation and yoga, and also find it sad that they were unable to find a master to help them recover from their experiences sooner.
As someone with Aphantasia, I'm absolutely fascinated by this.
I was wondering if someone more experienced with meditation can comment on this. Does this make any sense?
Just do the non-judgmental observation stuff and see what happens and decide if you want more of it.
Why is this helpful?
Because trying to change your thoughts is itself a form of thinking. Trying to change a thought is reacting to that thought, and a lot of my problems come from reacting to thoughts uncritically.
When I sit there and just try to notice the thoughts, thoughts about disturbing thoughts bother me less and less. An unpleasant thought doesn't quickly lead to a progressive series of counter-thoughts or responses.
To give you an example of how this helps: on the way to the grocery store yesterday, I thought "I'm out of beer, I could buy some beer." Reacting to the thought, without being critical of it, would mean going to buy the beer.
But observing the thought allowed me to be aware of it and to _decide_ if that's what I actually wanted. I decided that no, I didn't really need the beer, and that I'd gain more utility from knowing I made a more responsible choice.
For me, practicing nonjudgement allows me to better exercise judgement at suitable times. I couldn't tell you how many times i've gotten carried away giving imaginary speeches when I think about running for office - a practice which has caused me no good. It's like that judgement was entirely wasted.
By meditating, I've become more aware of the background ebb and flow of thoughts, which has freed me up to be judgemental when it _matters_ - such as over the small part of the world I have control over, instead of wasting energy judging things I have no control over, because that's a conditioned response to unpleasant thoughts.
I hope that helps.
FWIW I did go through a 'dark night of the soul' period. It lasted a few years, and my life got noticeably worse, but eventually I stopped believing everything I thought, and focused on repairing my life, and now it's much better than it ever was.
If meditation brings up dark or horrible thoughts - for me those were there all along, but I was just not paying attention because I constantly thought about getting rich, or politics, or starting a company, or p vs np, or whatever other abstractions i was into that day.
I was starting to understand emotion, and I felt like the world was based on lies. I knew I was different from everyone else but couldn't figure out how exactly. I identified more with the idea of being an AI than with being fully human.
http://noisebloom.tumblr.com
I expressed some of this on Tumblr of all places. I haven't touched this since the end of that whole process: I was hospitalized 5 times in a year and realized it was a matter of survival to fix my life.
Another possible reason is that idea of judgement of good and evil is primal in Western religions while in Eastern traditions, the idea of escape from state of confusion is primal. That's not to say that in the West, confusion is not considered a problem, or that in the East, doing or believing terrible things is ok. In meditation traditions, judgement between good and evil is just the first step, like a compass that points you in the right direction. In three major Western religions, once you make the proper judgement and choose the good side, you are done, finished.
Put in software terms, the improvements that come with meditation are "side effects" -- you're really just doing it to continually make your practice better. In that way it affects the rest of your life as you become more mindful of any activity you engage in.
I recommend the book Zen Mind Beginner's mind -- it does a great job communicating this concept of balance.
Aypsite.org has some good info on it and how to avoid or deal with it.
Normally the recommendations for this sort of thing is to back off, and to circulate energy in the micro cosmic orbit. See Mantak Chia for details.
An interesting book I read years ago about this was "Path Notes of an American Ninja Master". Cheesy title, but pretty interesting as an alternative to Gopi Krishna. The author specifically addresses the 'Dark Night of the Soul' phenomenon and emphasises the importance of creating Good Feelings inside to smooth the process and to lessen the effects of the darker aspects...
Meditation, as with hallucinogens, if you or your family has a history of mental illness, tread carefully.
Sitting can be surprisingly hard work. It pushes the body through pain while introducing you to the limits of your mind. In any training, slow progression is very important. You wouldn't go to a body building competition with no lifting experience, why do people dive into 10 day retreats without years of experience?
That's kind of the point though with highlighting MCO, especially if you read Gopi Krishna. Some people stumble upon things spontaneously before they're ready, and some just go off on their own focussing on the higher centres or overdo it (like 10-day retreats before they should). MCO for beginners is about opening the pathways to handle greater energy flows. Anyone writing books trying to educate the masses should focus on safety first, which he does.
He specifically calls out Kundalini yoga schools as only focussing on sending energy up, without safely describing how to bring it down. That's not my experience - the Kundalini yoga I learnt included the MCO but, as you say, didn't make a big deal of it. But, you know, Gopi Krishna again... you can never be too careful. Chia must have come across some schools that didn't mention keeping the tongue up and bringing energy down, or bringing in earth energy for balance.
I've found the Lesser Kan & Li - as taught by Chia - very effective (when I finally got it right), and haven't read about it anywhere else. Some say MCO is all you need.
My criticism of Mantak Chia is that he doesn't sufficiently emphasise single-pointedness, i.e. what others generally refer to as meditation. If you read his books you could come away with the impression that meditation is always active, always moving energy around.
That's why I prefer the aypsite approach - half chi kung/pranayama, half awareness with a mantra. It's much more balanced with an emphasis on going slowly and self-pacing. And the really interesting stuff happens in the stillness anyway...
It seems to me that it would be hard to go wrong with 15-30 minutes of "meditation" spent focusing on breathing and non-judgmentally observing your thoughts as they bubble up and dissipate. I've often felt that a lot of my stress and anxiety and even depression is the result of hanging onto things and the result of trying to control things which are actually outside my control.
Or perhaps these other comments are directed toward the serious, multiple-hour, practice of meditation? I have no desire to separate my consciousness from my physical being, for instance. I'm happy to stay firmly rooted on earth, while learning to accept the good in my inherent existence. If that makes sense.
Having been on a couple 10-day retreats, I've experienced what I can only describe as significantly altered states of consciousness (after 6+ days of meditating 14-16 hours a day). Fortunately, I managed to make my way back into the world after they ended, but I can see how some people might be permanently altered.
That's depression. Clinical depression. Fits my experience to a T. The first thing out of my mouth when I finally saw a "real" doctor was "I can't see colors or taste food anymore... I mean, I can tell you its red or blue or tasted like chicken but I can't see or taste it anymore. I know that sounds crazy but..."
This article is a little dangerous. Like saying "Running causes heart failure" but omitting "in people with congestive heart failure". Its the heart condition that's the problem, not the running.
If you have these symptoms, it wasn't the meditation. You're depressed. See a doctor. They can fix you.
I work and live with people who think depression is a "spiritual" or personal lifestyle problem. I think they are wrong.
I lost a sister to cancer when she was 15, my brother to probably suicide when he was 19 and my son died of cancer at 12. I seriously can say I never had a day of depression. I have had a broken heart missing them and feeling the pain. I will cry for them (I did for my son on Sunday while I was unloading groceries (Go figure)) But I have never lost the taste of food nor anything else. I have sorrow but their is a root cause for that. Depression is sorrow with no real root cause (to me). So I usually come out to defend people who are depressed since I feel like I should be the kind of depression but have never experienced it due to the luck of my genetics.
I think you really illustrate the difference between depression and sadness. Depression I imagine is like experiencing dulled senses, a vapid gray world of numbness. While sorrow and sadness are incredibly vivid emotions that can overpower us, like when they struck you so suddenly unloading groceries. I'm so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing such personal information.
(I am the OP on going through loss and sadness and not being depressed.)
Yes 100% correct. Just like if you have heart disease or a bad back their are non-medical activities that will help those medical condition. My statement is that their is a medical piece that people discount and/or actually dismiss. A person can't just "fix themselves" and having the medical piece help them with treatment with counseling is a big help. Depression isn't that your sad.
Depression Definition: Clinical depression is a mood disorder in which feelings of sadness, loss, anger, or frustration interfere with everyday life for weeks or more.
Symptoms of depression include:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003213.htmI feel like the massively connected nature of modern society is directly responsible for flourishing depression. Odds are, you are redundant; if most people disappeared suddenly, someone else could probably pick up the pieces in fairly short order. Additionally, being hyper-connected means that whatever you're good at, it is probably easy to find examples of people who are much better at it than you, which can be be somewhat marginalizing. Not feeling necessary or exceptional in any way is a pretty sure fire recipe for angst.
The nasty thing about depression is that it is a self-reinforcing cycle. When you start to get depressed, your ability to take measures to address the root cause of the depression is impacted. The result is a downward spiral that results in self obviation, through suicide, self destructive behavior or substance abuse.
People tend to mix up pleasure and happiness and think meditation provides the first.
Meditation, just like a psychedelic experience, can show you where you stand in life, and this can be scary. One can find out that they've been doing things wrong all their life, or realize that they are on a destructive path. The changes required might affect their spouse, children, friends or their job, creating a seemingly impossible dilemma, to go on and keep suffering, or to change and hurt others.
The key difference between meditation and psychedelics is regularity. Psychedelics are more like antibiotics in that they can be used in short bursts to shock the system but meditation should be used continually like a vitamin.
Incorrect. Meditation helps to find balance, meaning, sort out things, but in a same way as it won't cure cancer, it won't cure clinical depression, or broken arm.
Some things can be too fast and unlock too much at once. This is where regular, consistent, meditation helps quell the unrest and let you tackle things at a sane pace. I had to work through those bouts of heavy depression, but now I can do very spiritual events and benefit from them.
> it's just a tool
Tools are a means.
> to see what's already there
That is also a means. (Unless one is merely curious.)
> blissful or happy
To arrive at-rest/contenment with Reality. At which point the distinction between "happy"/"unhappy" is understood to be nil.
It can be caused both by external factors and our internal mental life.
And combined with the statements from this poor guy about not being able to block out intrusive thoughts ... people with clinical depression or schizophrenia need to be careful not to practice dissociating instead of meditating. Especially beginners who may think the point is to "keep pushing thoughts away and think of nothing". Mindfulness meditation is pretty different, and it's the one most of the promising research is concerned with.
That said, I like more dissociative types of meditation as well, it can be fun to try and get calm and focused enough to approach no thoughts at all. It taught me how to cure my insomnia for one, now I can stop that narrating train of thought that would often keep me awake and fall asleep basically whenever I want.
Also they seem to be freely mixing facts about research on mindfulness meditation with anecdotes about all different kinds of meditation. That's nonsense, there is no reason to assume the long term effects are similar.
So if meditation is not thinking about nothing, how is it different from just sitting with your eyes closed? If there's a physical impact of meditation then surely there has to be a feasible technical explanation of the process?
For the sake of clarity, let's look at the mind as if it's a separate entity (like a child) that is constantly asking our attention. When we give in, when we reply to our thoughts, its behavior is rewarded and it will keep asking for attention. If you just acknowledge that it's there, but don't act on every thought, the stream will become less and less. The main goal being that it eventually shuts up unless you actually need (ask) your mind to help you with a task.
You could say it's not different, since anything done in that physical pose is something we're going to call meditation. There are a lot of different practices from different cultures, and really what they have in common is that you quietly sit and focus on being in a certain state of mind, continuously trying to bring yourself back to that state of mind if/when you get distracted.
For mindfulness it's non-judgemental awareness of the present moment and your own mind's activity
For zen it's controlled focused attention on the object of meditation (nothing at all in the cliche)
For compassion meditation it's compassion/kindness/love towards yourself/others/everything
For the various types of body awareness meditation it's your own feeling of your physical body
There are mantras and guided meditation and many others, with a lot of historical cross pollination and tons of wacky woo-filled stuff. Many types that are likely complete junk that's useless or harmful because the whole edifice is built on magical thinking.
I think the feasible technical explanation is pretty simple, "neurons that fire together, wire together". It seems very reasonable to me that practising attaining a certain state of mind will make it easier to do at will and/or make shift your normal state in that direction. A lot of it is literally as simple as learning "If I focus on X for a short time I feel like Y, so now I know how to feel like Y when I want"
It really depends on which tradition or practice of meditation you're talking about. In the exercise I go through, it's different because it's specifically focused on acknowledging whatever thoughts come through without judging or reacting to them like I would impulsively. Being able to accept especially the negative thoughts at face value helps me a lot with managing the coping process.
Yes see a doctor. However, I feel that doctors often take a sledgehammer approach to mental illness, prescribing SSRIs and/or MAOIs whenever they hear the word "depression" or "anxiety". I'm not a MD, but after reading a little about the topic, it seems that a much better approach is to see what could be the cause of the deficiency in certain neurotransmitters. The reason could be that some of the enzymes involved in the process of producing them are defective due to genetic mutations. Certain tests (such as provided by 23andme) could reveal these defects, and could in theory provide much better treatment options. In many cases this could even start with taking certain dietary supplements, which help the body create the neurotransmitters. Such an approach seems so much more sensible than just "drowning" the brain in neurotransmitters, which is basically what SSRIs and MAOIs do.
However, I have yet to see a doctor that knows anything about metabolic pathways and such.
If you're not psychotic, but plainly depressed, the question is basically if you need your serotonine or your dopamine/noradrenaline boosted. A blood test can tell you that.
Other than that:
. Go outside every single morning. A study in a german hospital showed that 20 minutes of daily exposure to daylight can reduce meds by 30%.
. Go running for 15 minutes every single day. I say 15 minutes because it's supposed to become an easy "no-brainer" ritual.
. Keep a diary in which, every single day, you make a list about strictly only the positive things that happened that day.
I just wanted to add. If these things don't work, or you are feeling suicidal, or haven't talked to anyone -- please talk to your doctor. The same treatments will not work for everyone and it is not your fault if a regimen doesn't help or you can't stick with it. Even 15 minute no brainers are difficult when you are depressed.
Also, be honest about your symptoms. Anxiety may be easier to talk to your doctor about, but you can wind up prescribed addictive narcotics that will hurt rather than help.
You have to keep in mind that the vast majority of psych-related clinicians are average to below-average performers that were too incompetent to become real doctors. That would explain why your "doctor" doesn't understand anything taught in a basic undergrad neuroscience survey course.
It's like expecting an auto mechanic to design a new car engine - sure, they could try their best, but at the end of the day, they're still an auto mechanic, not an engineer.
And that researcher is not accessible to the general public. The strange thing is that we now see people on the internet fora doing the metabolic/neurochemistry research themselves, for lack of better options.
I'm a bit like this. I don't crave bad TV shows, hollywood junk, conflict, drama, money, trying to be seen a very smart/successful, etc like I used to. I certainly still fail at this, but there's probably a practical limit here considering my lifestyle. I'm not depressed, its just I quickly outgrew what those in my peer group valued and that has left me with a social hole in my life. I just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to go back to how I was, even if the previous me was "more fun." I'm a very different person than I was pre-meditation/pre-whatever. I don't see that as a problem.
I think its dangerous to just dismiss everything you don't understand as mental illness. Not too long ago we were doing this with the gay community, non-neurotypicals, and those from cultures with different values. Its also crazy that Western culture can call anyone not "having fun" all the time depressed. A more quiet and contemplative life shouldn't be seen as some horrible pathological condition. In a perfect world, people like that should be valued, not dismissed, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in.
We know that assigning a singular cause of psychiatric disorders is spurious since all major conditions have been connected to multiple genetic, social and environmental factors.
It's certainly conceivable that meditation could precipitate an episode of a psychiatric disorder, and of course it is mostly impossible to say if or when the condition would have emerged otherwise.
IOW the apparent sequential onset of psychiatric symptoms could be just chance occurrence reflecting the general population prevalence, or there might be a genuine causal effect of the preceding meditation event. Logically, at this time there's as much basis to assert meditation "caused" the condition as asserting meditation did not cause it. Until a lot more information is available, the relation remains indeterminate, or undefined.
It's a good principle (and the safest course) to hold that any/all spiritual practices or psychiatric treatments have risk of bad outcomes. No "prescription" is going to be good for everyone.
The idea that meditation and psychotherapy have overlapping risk potential is compelling. Haven't looked into to it yet, but definitely worth finding out what if any studies have been done.
Along those lines there's a just-published meta-analysis re: outcome of treatment for depression with CBT or medication. With both treatments, ~5-7% of subjects had at least some "deterioration" of their condition, and those with the greatest pre-treatment symptoms had the worst outcomes. [0]
While the domains are only partially congruent, 5% is probably a good initial guess concerning the probability of mild or greater adverse effect of meditation, IIRC corresponding to ~2 SD from the mean. I didn't see any references in the article to publications by the researchers profiled, but I'd imagine they'd have some data that sheds light on the prevalence of the outcomes they're studying.
[0] Vittengl JR, Jarrett RB, Weitz E, et. al. "Divergent Outcomes in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Pharmacotherapy for Adult Depression." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=divergent+outcomes+...
One of my favorite descriptions is by Alan Watts, called "listening meditation":
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7HYY4eitC9c