[coffeecat]

Strongly disagree. There's more to meditation than just sitting quietly. I'd say it's more analogous to breaking out of a sandboxed VM and gaining read/write access to the underlying OS and kernel.

My personal anecdote - I developed a difficult-to-control, anxiety-inducing thought* while dabbling in meditation a couple of years ago. I experienced a week or two worth of extreme anxiety, and had a panic attack. To this day, the obsessive thought is still with me and causes occasional distress. I can't say with certainty that the meditation practice was the cause, but the timing coincides, and I've never experienced anything like this prior to the meditation practice.

* not exactly a thought, but I'm not quite sure what to call it. It's more of an involuntary, difficult-to-control channeling of my focus/perception toward sensations which I perceive as uncomfortable and disturbing.

[bckr]

> an involuntary, difficult-to-control channeling of my focus/perception

I'm really curious about this. Say more?

[krageon]

It sounds like intrusive thoughts. Some (a lot of?) people have thoughts that pop up in certain contexts where they are incredibly unwanted and they can be disturbing to experience.

[coffeecat]

This is a difficult topic for me to articulate, so the below explanation is merely my best effort to express the experience in words.

The perception of my own heartbeat is something that I've always been squeamish about, but for most of my life it was never a problem. It made me a bit uncomfortable during high intensity exercise, but it was easy enough to just ignore.

During meditation, I began to perceive my heartbeat more intensely than ever before, and it became a "center of gravity" that my attention would often "fall into". My attention would gravitate toward intense perception of my heartbeat not only while meditating, but also at other times (while trying to fall asleep, while trying to focus on work, while driving), and paired with my pre-existing squeamishness, this became very uncomfortable. I might go through most of my day normally, but as soon as my mind becomes idle for a bit, or if something triggers me to start thinking about my heart, my mind will uncontrollably gravitate toward perceiving my heartbeat, and I'll struggle to ignore my heartbeat and to focus on other things.

My strategy at the time was to attempt to become more comfortable with my heartbeat through continued meditation. I thought that by deliberately focusing on my heart during meditation rather than trying to ignore it, I could "fight the monster face-to-face", kill off the squeamish feeling, and learn to perceive my heartbeat as a benign sensation.

Unfortunately, I developed a delusion that I might gain the ability to consciously control my heartbeat (analogously to how we can consciously control our breathing when we think about it), and that I'd injure or kill myself because I'm not at all qualified to exercise that kind of control. I convinced myself that this is impossible because the heart uses its own pacemaker, unlike the lungs which are controlled by the nervous system. But this didn't kill the delusion - it just transformed it into a more vague anxiety, centered around the notion that I might be inadvertently abusing whatever regulatory connections exist between my heart and my brain. I think this delusion is really just a transformation of the visceral squeamishness that I originally felt when I began perceiving my heartbeat, into a more cerebral form of "squeamishness". I made the decision to stop meditating a couple years ago, but the delusion still lurks in my subconscious and comes back from time to time.

So to summarize, when it first began, the uncontrollable heartbeat perception paired with the squeamishness/delusion caused a lot of agony for about two weeks. I've gotten significantly better at ignoring my heartbeat and not being so troubled by it, but it's a problem that I haven't been able to completely get over.

[mtalantikite]

I've heard about a similar thing happening to someone on a Goenka Vipassana retreat. The sound from their heartbeat became too overwhelming for them and they had to stop.

Maybe taking refuge in the impermanence of that feeling could help? That the squeamishness is just a state of mind and like all things arises from emptiness (sunyata) and returns to it? But yeah, putting away the practice sounds completely reasonable in this case.

In a Thai tradition I practiced a bit from they'd tell you to not focus your attention and awareness on anything above the heart center at the beginning, to really just keep it at the naval, as these sorts of difficulties with the body aren't uncommon.