From personal experience and what I've read, there's a clear dose response relationship. If you meditate enough, especially if do a lot of insight (vipassana) meditation without doing much concentration (samatha) or Metta meditation, you will begin to deconstruct yourself. That's what it does. Often you will find a new, and better way to relate to your conscious experience, but sometimes you break things and they don't get fixed.
Or at the very least doesn’t mean what St. John of the Cross means by it.
When I took ascetical theology in seminary, my professor told us that if someone comes to you and says they’re undergoing the Dark Night, they probably aren’t. (Unless you for some reason happen to be the spiritual director of a contemplative order, but even then.) He wasn’t being flippant; it was just a recognition of the degree of spiritual progress needed even to arrive at that point.
It can be easy to confuse aridity or even unaddressed psychological issues for something like the Dark Night, but it does have a precise technical meaning in the mystical literature. It isn’t just “prayer is difficult for me right now.”
Well, vipassana meditation is just as intense as any other tradition of contemplative prayer.[0] Canonically the Dark Night happens soon after the first loose "hint" of stream entry or actual awakening/enlightenment, namely the second vipassana jhana, characterized by seeming effortlessness of insight (Daniel Ingram calls this the "Arising and passing away") and this should be enough to tell whether you're facing it.
[0] And yes, in case you didn't know, prayer is definitely a legitimate part of meditation, even going by Buddhist teachings - the typical metta/loving-kindness meditation is indistinguishable from a kind of prayer.
Arguably, a very legitimate role can even be recovered/reconstructed for outright theistic contemplative worship directed at the "Ultimate Self", essentially the Brahman of Hinduism - although this would of course reflect a very imperfect understanding of the Brahman, one way too error-prone for those who would seriously aim at enlightenment and unity with the Ultimate Self in this very lifetime. But nonetheless plenty enough to look forward to what's effectively an afterlife in the Pure Abodes realm as an anagami or "non-returner"! Hinduists in the "dualist" tradition, for all its imperfection, have of course always been aware of this as a possible path.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that vipassana isn’t a serious and intense contemplative discipline. If I did, that certainly wasn’t my intent.
At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the term is used in the vipassana tradition (making the necessary accommodations for the translation needed to take a Christian mystical concept and import it into that tradition).
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very fact that it is understood as a transition stage between different degrees of insight.) Daniel Ingram's book on Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha does a very nice job of "decoding" the Buddhist tradition in very modern and understandable terms, and I'm not aware of people involved in the actual tradition who have raised any deep, substantive objections to the understanding he conveys.
(Note that "Dark Night" as applied to vipassana meditation is a modern term, but one that does reflect traditional understanding of the relevant jhanas-- the Buddhist traditional name is apparently "dukkha ñana", or "Knowledge of Suffering", and in the Vimuttimagga it is known, rather descriptively, as the stage of "fear and disadvantage and disenchantment", followed by "delight in deliverance and equanimity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1... It was not the result of forcefully "importing" something that came from outside, but rather of carefully drawing empirically-sensible parallels between the two traditions.)
Not exactly but I find meditation really "painful".
I am more of the anxious side of things and being super focused on myself is very stressful. Sure I feel calmer afterwards but the process feels like a cold shower in winter.
The only times I found meditation enjoyable is in a group setting. Normally I am quite introverted and prefer to do most activities alone but here it is reversed.
"and being super focused on myself is very stressful."
Can you explain, what exactly is stressful to you, by focusing on yourself? Or is it just that you feel you want to move but you also want to be still?
It's just not not having anything to distract you of your mental pain. Like having a flesh wound and instead of using pain killers, you put you finger on the wound and actually focus on the pain. That would be quite stressful, right?
Have you ever had something bad happen and you try to distract yourself by working or watching something? Meditation feels like the reverse of that.
It can feel like that when you resist the painful memory or emotion. But if you stay with it, accepting it, neither rejecting nor holding it, you may notice that it dissolves. It's like the effect of exposure in behavioral therapy, phobias are treated with sustained exposure to the feared stimulus.
Yeah, I know how to accept them and don't resist but it's not like I will be able to sort out my issues in a 20min session. The best I can hope is to get to the deeper issues which will be even more painful.
I personally found the combination of regular physical exercise plus reading physical books (training my concentration, helping me relaxing) the best way to stay productive. If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down.
"If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down. "
Yup, that is a good combination. And if you do sports in nature, you might find good spots to calm down in between. Being next to moving water I found helpful, or atop on some mountain with the wind.
Not meditation related, but a lot of people with ADHD have some serious shame issues, and taking meds that treat the ADHD can put them in a state where they can no longer easily distract themselves from the fact that they hate themselves, which is ... not a great feeling.
Are you able to clearly manifest an image of anything in your mind's eye? If not then you might have aphantasia (i.e. "third eye blind").
When I was younger I sat several Vipisana and Zen retreats across multiple traditions. While it changed me in the sense that I became far less impulsive and more grounded, there was never anything mystical about the experiences, just periods of calm and quiet, like the internal world had slowed way down.
But that's unusual, I suspect most who seriously take up meditation do indeed have full blown psychedelic experiences (thus the author's reference to LSD), not long after taking up practice, and certainly within the first week long retreat or two.
It's common among people who meditate seriously. A significant fraction of the Tipitaka consists of documentation and interpretation of such experiences.
I think it might be more useful to recommend that they consult a good meditation teacher, because you really need to know both about meditation and about yourself to make the decision—though, as you point out, identifying a good meditation teacher when you aren't one is a difficult problem.