[Hasu]

I've been noticing an increasing trend of people saying things like this, and I don't get it. Meditation has many forms and traditions, within and without Buddhism. Which ones are "safe" and which ones aren't? Is using Headspace twice a week enough to be dangerous, or is there some lower bound where meditation practice without Buddhist beliefs switches from harmless to dangerous? And are Hindu or Christian meditation practices dangerous, or just the secular stuff? What precisely is the nature of this danger?

> I personally know two people who went into severe psychosis and depression by trying to practise meditation in a secular context.

Sorry, but I simply can't believe this. I mean I believe you have two friends with mental health issues, but I don't believe that psychosis can be triggered in a normal person by practicing "secular meditation". That's an extreme claim that requires a lot of evidence.

[stryan]

> And are Hindu or Christian meditation practices dangerous, or just the secular stuff? What precisely is the nature of this danger?

I don't think the argument is usually "meditation without Buddhism is dangerous" but rather "meditation techniques taken from their context can be dangerous". Regular mindfulness or insight meditation can cause shifts in mental state that a person isn't used to and they may not have the tools required to deal with it in a healthy manner.

It's like the mental equivalent of a normal person suddenly starting the same workout routine as an professional athlete, or even just an experienced weightlifter. They might be able to do the exercises, but they don't have the context provided by having a coach/being in the sport/etc to provide them with tools like "how to fall properly" or "knowing a torn muscle versus a normal sprain". That doesn't mean that doing the exercises in general are bad or that you need to do sport foo in order to exercise.

[Enginerrrd]

>That's an extreme claim that requires a lot of evidence.

For what it's worth, I Don't think it's an extreme claim at all.

The potential for ill-effects from more extreme efforts in Meditation is starting to be documented by western scientists. A lot of adverse outcomes aren't only possible, but actually quite common.

I personally had ZERO prior mental health issues, but after 3-4 months of meditating 30-90 minutes everyday in addition to fairly intense mindfulness practice throughout the day, I started to experience a lot of issues: strange emotional outbursts disconnected from any memory or thought, anger management issues, tension headaches, depression, etc.

These ultimately only resolved by stopping meditation entirely for a long time and only carefully reintroducing it in smaller less frequent doses.

It's really not all sunshine and rainbows.

[titanomachy]

I think this stuff is actually pretty typical for folks who progress to a certain stage. I experienced it as well, if that makes you feel any better.

The Buddhists definitely know about this, but a lot of their writing is pretty impenetrable and interlaced with weird metaphysics. Here's some modern, secular words on the subject (from the admittedly controversial author Daniel Ingram):

https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight...

Here's a more traditional buddhist description of the same thing:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/mahasi/progress....

I think a very small fraction of people actually meditate enough to get to that point. Meditating 90 minutes a day (plus the constant mindfulness practice) is pretty extreme by most people's standards (at least in US secular culture).

[Enginerrrd]

Yeah, it came as a real shock to me at first. I had made many mistakes in my early meditation career. But I learned a lot more and suddenly started progressing. This was wonderful at first. I started to feel and experience some pretty mind-blowing things on the cushion at first and then extending well off the cushion into the rest of my life. Then... I remember random memories started to kind of pop into my awareness. I started to see a bright light shining through my eyes/head while I was on the cushion. This was accompanied by these almost divine feelings of bliss and content, which sometimes extended for hours after my sit. This was very cool at first. Then... this weird head pressure and uncomfortable feeling between my eyes started showing up. My single pointed focus was impossible to maintain because the intense feeling of pressure between my eyes or on the crown of my head would grow more and more distracting as I tried to regain the single pointed focus I had been enjoying. Then... shortly after that, the pressure turned into full tension headaches that lasted all day on bad days. Then... I was working in my office at home one day and my vision suddenly became blurry. Then, I started to feel nauseous. I went to throw up, I could feel the usual feelings of vomiting coming up from my abdomen, then up my throat, then... when it reached my mouth/face, instead of vomit this wave of intense sadness reached my face and it contorted into an expression of anguish. For the next like 30 minutes, wave after wave of this sadness, in every nuanced flavor I'd ever experienced started coming up, taking over my face, then passing. Then the rage. So much anger and rage and betrayel and hurt came and did the same thing. Wave after wave. I had NO idea WTF was happening to me, but I'd always been an absolute pinnacle of mental stability so this was very unusual. I didn't know what else to do but to let it pass.

After that, for months, the head pressure / headaches would reappear and then they'd be relieved by me crying. Feeling the intense feelings and going away.

But... I really wasn't expecting any of that. I just wanted to be able to focus better and think more clearly. I didn't sign up for THIS. So I just let it go and fade. I didn't really want to accidentally screw my brain up. So, unfortunately, I haven't started a daily practice again since. It all did feel pretty cathartic though.

I've dabbled here and there with meditating again. When I do it with any real regularity though, the head pressure tends to come back.

[frostwarrior]

Those are the kind of things that make me stay away from deeper forms of meditation and mindfulness.

Also, I'm not very fond of taking the traditional advice so literally. These sources focus solely on training new Buddhist monks, and most people doing secular practice just want some peace of mind while they continue their, productivity focused, western lifestyle.

We need to take these sources with a grain of salt and reorient our practice so that it cultivates more peace of mind without making us implode when the cultivated buddhist mindset creates a conflict with our western lifestyle

[bowsamic]

There aren’t Buddhist meditation practises that have no risk of causing this. Any meditation practise that involves mindfulness and concentration done for more than 15 or 20 mins a day carries this risk

I agree that the goals of Buddhism contradict the goals we have in western society though. That said, Steve Jobs was a devout Zen Buddhist, so he sat many thousands of hours of zazen

I do find it funny though when companies train their employees in mindfulness. It’s almost like they want workers who have less emotional connection with their work. As I said elsewhere, it’s all a matter of whether you follow the instructions. If you do, it will have adverse effects.

[frostwarrior]

> Any meditation practise that involves mindfulness and concentration done for more than 15 or 20 mins a day carries this risk.

Looks like mindfulness to 15 or 20 minutes a day is a sensible choice then.

> Steve Jobs was a devout Zen Buddhist, so he sat many thousands of hours of zazen

Steve Jobs was a powerful and a very influential man. He didn't have a boss urging him to be productive 24/7 like a field employee has. Investors expected his company to deliver working products. And it delivered all of that.

> I do find it funny though when companies train their employees in mindfulness. It’s almost like they want workers who have less emotional connection with their work. As I said elsewhere, it’s all a matter of whether you follow the instructions. If you do, it will have adverse effects.

IMHO they want their employees to become stoic productivity machines that make no demands and cope with whatever shitty working condition they set up.

[titanomachy]

Wow, thanks for sharing. I have no advice to offer but maybe an experienced teacher could help.

I've experienced intense emotional swings like you describe but not the pain or pressure. The emotional swings at least were something I was able to get through, eventually. They were strong for a while but stopped with continued practice. I'm definitely still more sensitive than I was before. I feel both positive and negative feelings more intensely, but hold onto them less.

[bowsamic]

Yep, I've heard of multiple people with these exact symptoms. It's a very familiar story

[Enginerrrd]

Yes, I'm very secular. But the fact that these things happen with such regularity and there is remarkable consistency and precision in them really lends itself toward the religious interpretations. Also, the skeptic in me says it's unreliable, but those glimpses of actual visual light (flickering at first, then steady) coupled with feelings of (for lack of a better word) divinity, are still hard for me to reconcile with a purely secular interpretation.

One big takeaway I had was realizing that outside the west, these types of things are well known. Here though, it seems almost no one who purports to be a "teacher" knows much about them or what to do with them.

[bowsamic]

> The Buddhists definitely know about this, but a lot of their writing is pretty impenetrable and interlaced with weird metaphysics. Here's some modern, secular words on the subject:

This and linking MCTB (of all things) are the exact dangerous taking out of context I’m warning against. Daniel Ingram is a terrible resource, he should not be recommended

[titanomachy]

You seem pretty experienced in this stuff. I agree with a lot of what you're saying in this thread: meditation can be dangerous and should be taken more seriously. Treating it as on par with a psychedelic therapy sounds about right.

Here's where I think we differ: a lot of people in secular western culture are intensely put off by all the religious stuff that comes with Buddhism. The metaphysics and reincarnation stuff is, in my view, a reflection of the culture that Siddhartha Gautama grew up in and taught in, rather than a necessary part of eliminating suffering. I think that retelling these lessons in a way that's accessible to modern audiences is important. Some people simply will not accept something taught in the form of ancient mysticism. Should those people be denied insight just because they didn't grow up in India during the Iron Age?

I get that Ingram is polarizing. I'll add a link to Mahasi Sayadaw as well, but I just don't think he explains things in a way that's as clear to someone with my cultural background.

[bowsamic]

The Buddha never taught that those aspects are optional and every tradition has preserved them from India to China to Japan, until now! Why are we special that we can forgo all of the religious trappings? We aren’t

Of course the teachings must be made to appeal to westerners. This does not mean totally gutting them

People who won’t accept anything spiritual or religious don’t need this practise. In Buddhism we don’t try to convert, for some people it is simply not their time

[titanomachy]

I think there is a difference between accepting spiritual and religious practices.

The illusion of self can be observed directly. Perhaps it's even an inevitable conclusion of sufficiently intense introspection. I'd consider observing this to be a spiritual practice.

The metaphysics of realms of reincarnation, hungry ghosts, etc. is religious thought (and it was the dominant worldview when Siddhartha was born). These are not ideas that I can discover independently through introspection; if I believe them it's because someone told me to.

We might be talking past each other, though: if you're saying that the benefits of meditation are inherently inextricable from a Vedic worldview, I don't agree. But if you are just saying we haven't yet figured out which parts of the religion are actually necessary, then I agree. I personally learned meditation in a fairly Buddhist context, and naturally there are parts that resonate with me and parts that don't.

[bstrom]

I would be interested in hearing more about why Ingram is considered a terrible resource, if you care to share.

[bowsamic]

One reason is that he broke a major taboo in publicly declaring himself an Arhat

Then he has this book that is supposed to distil all of the powerful insight practises into a secular path, but everyone I’ve spoken to in his pragmatic dharma community is extremely toxic. It’s literally like the 4chan of Buddhism, huge amounts of racism, lots of depressed teens, very online, lots of people who think they are enlightened (one of which suddenly “rated my capacity for awakening” as zero, and when I said I didn’t care flew into a rage)

It’s exactly what you expect to happen when you take Buddhism, try and condense it down into a path for having the strongest and most intense experience, and market it to terminally online young adult men

Ingram was also heavily involved in this “fire kasina” stuff where you just stare at a flame for days until you start seeing things and go kind of crazy, which is a controversial practise in Buddhism

Finally he’s just not a qualified Buddhist teacher

[titanomachy]

I agree that a lot of people in that community (and online in general) seem to be chasing after some kind of peak experiences and there's a lot of weird spiritual dick-measuring.

For what it's worth, Ingram himself recommends Kornfield's "A Path with Heart" as one of his favorite books, which is largely about how the goal is to be a better person and that's not the same thing as developing incredible concentration abilities and having intense experiences.

[bowsamic]

I also had some of those side effects. I also had a trippy period, where I struggled to see anything as real. It was about a 2 week long solipsistic nightmare. I do think this is all “part of the path”, but without the traditional context, you will be quite lost on what to do next. Even with it, it’s very difficult

[bowsamic]

I would say that meditating for more than 15 minutes a day is very dangerous

I’m sorry that you don’t believe (edit typo) me, nothing I can do about that

[bowsamic]

I would say it’s an increasing trend because people who are more invested in the traditions have “had enough” of so called “mcmindfulness” or dangerous approaches

[Hasu]

If what you say is true, then it should be trivially easy to find an app that promotes these dangerous practices, find their daily active users, then check the reviews and find a high percentage (>10%) of negative reviews saying something like, "1/5, cannot recommend, after using this app every day for three months, I'm now experiencing horrible mental health issues".

There are plenty of apps out there with millions of daily active users. What percentage of those users do you expect to suffer negative mental health side effects? Where is the evidence that they exist at all?

[bowsamic]

I don’t have access to that data. Do you?

I would guess that about 5 to 10% of people who seriously try the practise for an extended period experience very scary and potentially trauma inducing effects

[Hasu]

I can use Google, and found this [1] article claiming over 4 million DAUs for Calm in June of 2020, with trendlines going up and to the right.

So the lower bound of your estimate gives us ~200,000 people who would be adversely affected. Looking through negative reviews, it's all complaints about pricing and paywalls. The same is true for Headspace, the second biggest app in this space (I don't have DAUs for them, but it's got about half as many downloads and reviews, so let's assume less than half as big).

I can't find a single complaint about adverse mental health effects, which doesn't mean it never happens, but it's not anywhere close to 5%.

[1] https://blog.apptopia.com/calm-app-outperforms-headspace-dur...

[bowsamic]

Interesting conclusion. I don’t agree, but I’ll leave you to it. I don’t even think that it’s possible to have the kind of experiences I’m talking about with headspace, unless it promotes a daily mindfulness practise of more than 15 to 20 mins a day

[vorpalhex]

You're assuming the people having issues realize Calm is the source. Also a DAU is not always someone meditating.

[Hasu]

Sure, it's a coarse and crude method that isn't perfect, but the point is that almost no one that practices "secular meditation" has any problems whatsoever - there is simply no good evidence supporting that meditation practice is dangerous in any way. The vast body of research available shows mild benefits.

The claimed hypothesis is absurd on its face. It's a wild and strong claim that needs strong evidence, so we don't need to be super precise here, if the effects were nearly as strong as 5-10%, we would see it.