[samcodes]

Meditation is a pretty broad term encompassing many different activities/intentions (though they all look pretty similar from the outside). In the studies I’ve read on the adverse effects of meditation, the style has a major influence. Due to historical accidents, vipassana is a common style in the West - I find this mind blowing, since it is probably the most likely to cause adverse effects.

As a long time meditator, my experience with vipassana is that it is the hardcore path, for those willing to risk crashing and burning to get to enlightenment faster. Techniques like mettā, tonglen, or dzogchen seem to be ~5-10x less likely to be associated with a psychotic event - which at that point, seems like it could just be about prior history [1]. It's worth mentioning that Britton, the academic meditation critic in the article is a co-author of this paper.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[mtalantikite]

When I started meditating I also was introduced via Theravada based vipassana and eventually felt the need to give it up after having some strange things come up and also falling into the nihilism trap I think is common to hit. Thankfully years later I encountered Mahayana teachings and it clarified a ton for me, letting me restart my practice.

That’s all to say I think it’s important that people take it slow and get familiarized with the actual teachings to ground the experience. Jumping in to a 10 day, 10 hour per day training with little or no context is going to be seriously difficult. We have to understand that these practices come from places where the students wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar with the basics of the teachings. There would be at least a basic cultural understanding of the point of meditation (an actual spiritual practice) as opposed to a kid from the US that hears it makes you feel better and might make you more productive.

[im3w1l]

It's an interesting natural experiment, that will help us learn what is essential and what is merely incidental. A human sacrifice to gain wisdom..

[samcodes]

having the laity meditate at all is, AFAIK, a pretty modern development

[lukasb]

What you say about metta etc being less likely to induce psychosis than vipassana makes sense, Goenka retreats especially are super-intense bootcamps. Do you have a citation for the 5-10x figure? I can't find it in the Britton paper.