Can people suffer emotional distress through practicing meditation?
Meditation is supposed to make people calmer, so it is surprising that sometimes it seems to give people emotional problems. This can be problems with anxiety, anger, depression, mania or dissociation.
The first clue that I had to this is when years ago I read the book Sharing the Quest by Muz Murray. He said that he talked to people who he had known who told him they experience acute psychological pain as a result of their meditation practice. I wondered how this could be. I hoped that is was not true because I didn't want that to happen to me.
In the New Scientist magazine on 16 May 2015 was an article Ommm...aargh! The dark side of mindfulness. Meditation and mindfulness have a dark side that should not be ignored, say psychologists Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm. Research shows 7 per cent of people on meditation retreats experienced profoundly adverse effects, including depression.
On BBC Radio 4 on 16 March 2016 at 11 am a programme said much the same thing but in more detail. The presenter Jolyon Jenkins interviewed two people who have practiced meditation, Suzanne and then Patrick. She started suffering from panic attacks while he had an episode of mania.
The next person Jolyon spoke to was Daniel M Ingram. Daniel was introduced as a doctor who runs a forum about meditation. Jolyon didn't say that Daniel believes he is enlightened and has written a book about Buddhist meditation. Daniel talked about what he calls the 'Arising and Passing Away' and the 'Dark Night'. These are two stages in Theravada Buddhist meditation. It is the Dark Night stage that is the problem. During the Dark Night a few people experience "depression, micro-psychotic episodes and psychotic depression, and can make people suicidal and occasionally even kill themselves". He says that this is predictable and not just with his form of meditation.
Psychologist Tim Lomas says that a quarter of people who were taught meditation had 'substantial difficulties'. Psychologist Miguel Farias talked about research into the effects of meditation in general, as in his book 'The Buddha Pill'. He said that mindfulness isn't any better than sitting quietly. A study was mentioned that showed that people practicing mindfulness had higher levels of cortisol which would suggest that they had higher stress levels.
What are we to make of all this? First of all it seems that only a minority of people suffer these problems. Even Daniel M Ingram says that for most the effects of the Dark Night are mild. It seems that some people are more prone to it than others. Secondly it could be that some forms of meditation will produce more of it. It could also be that some forms of meditation produce a temporary negative effect which is followed by a long-lasting positive outcome.
Jolyon talked quite a bit about Transcendental Meditation. Here he was not trying to show it is dangerous, presumably because he couldn't find any evidence that it is. Instead he was trying to show that it doesn't live up to its claims. So maybe TM isn't a problem.
Jolyon didn't say what sort of meditation Suzanne and Patrick had been practicing, but it seems that in both cases it was Goenka vipassana meditation. The retreats were 10 day intensives and involved scanning the body. I have read a lot of bad things about Goenka meditation in internet forums. Goenka was an Indian man who learned his method while in Burma from the influential teacher U Ba Khin.
Goenka's form of meditation is different from others within the Theravada Buddhist tradition. He and U Ba Khin didn't teach samatha meditation, except for the preparatory meditation on the breath. He didn't teach the use of jhanas. Jhanas are states of consciousness achieved through samatha meditation. They are used in conjunction with vipassana meditation.
Meditation on the breath is the beginning of samatha meditation, but samatha goes beyond that to these altered states of consciousness called jhanas. Some meditators in the Theravada Buddhist tradition will enter the jhanas before going on to the practice of vipassana meditation. In vipassana meditation you allow yourself to be aware of different things such as physical sensations, emotions and thoughts.
However, in Goenka's form of vipassana practitioners are taught to be aware only of physical sensations (hence the 'body scanning'). This is only one of the four traditional subjects of awareness during vipassana. Awareness of emotions or thoughts is not taught. So it seems that the Goenka technique - which is similar but not identical to that pioneered by U Ba Khin - is missing most aspects of Theravada Buddhist meditation as far as we can tell from the earliest Buddhist texts. Yet their literature says their form of meditation is the same as Buddha's.
That could be the problem, as could the 'boot camp' approach on the 10 day intensive retreats. It does seem that people are taught to work through any physical or emotional pain so that they can emerge on the other side. This is probably a wrong approach. It's probably better for people to stop vipassana for a while if they feel emotional distress. Samatha meditation on the other hand could be fine, in fact it might calm and stabilize people. But of course Goenka didn't teach it.
Transcendental Meditation is from the Hindu tradition not Buddhist but could be described as a form of samatha meditation.
If we look at Daniel M Ingram's methods we see that he teaches the use of samatha meditation including the jhanas. His form of vipassana is that pioneered by an influential Burmese teacher called Mahasi. The Mahasi form of vipassana involves something called naming or noting or labeling. Physical sensations, emotions and thoughts are named. It's a way of becoming aware of thoughts etc but whether this is the same form of vipassana as that taught by the Buddha is a subject of much debate.
It could be that vipassana/mindfulness could be inherently destabilizing. If that happens then it would seem sensible to decrease the amount or stop it altogether for a while. Perhaps use your meditation time for samatha only. How do we explain this emotional distress? One possibility is that when we practice vipassana we gradually become more aware of sensations that have always been there but rarely noticed. It's not that we have more internal distress but that we become more aware of it. When we do become fully aware of it then it might go away.
Another possibility is that we get way outside of our comfort zone as our sense of reality is changed. We feel a sense of discomfort that can manifest as restlessness/agitation, anxiety or dissociation. Or it could be that emotions that we were unable to feel fully in the past are making themselves apparent. The memory of childhood traumas or at least the emotions associated with them are pushing their way into our consciousness.
You get the idea reading the book by Daniel M Ingram and some of the ones by Jack Kornfield that this often happens on retreats. Daniel is quite scornful of people who encourage this - he thinks that they are wasting their time - but Jack seems to be aware that some kind of therapy is required by many people and would be an important part of their spiritual unfoldment. You would think that vipassana/mindfulness in itself might be therapeutic, perhaps it is the way some people teach it, or perhaps we have yet to discover exactly the methods that Buddha taught.
I have heard it said that Buddhists shouldn't discuss things too much, they should start practicing meditation, then they can discuss their experience of that if they wan't to. The problem with that is that if someone wishes to try vipassana, signs up for a Goenka 10 day intensive retreat and is damaged by it, they might find out that it bears little resemblance to Buddha's methods and wonder why someone didn't tell them that to begin with.
People who have had more difficult childhoods might be the ones who encounter the most emotional distress when they practice vipassana. So much so that it might be best for them to avoid it. There is the other problem though and that is that meditation doesn't seem to work for some people. It just doesn't do anything. It doesn't go anywhere, they get bored and give up. These too are likely to be people who have had difficult childhoods, but their emotions express themselves in a different way.
Meditation is supposed to make people calmer, so it is surprising that sometimes it seems to give people emotional problems. This can be problems with anxiety, anger, depression, mania or dissociation.
The first clue that I had to this is when years ago I read the book Sharing the Quest by Muz Murray. He said that he talked to people who he had known who told him they experience acute psychological pain as a result of their meditation practice. I wondered how this could be. I hoped that is was not true because I didn't want that to happen to me.
In the New Scientist magazine on 16 May 2015 was an article Ommm...aargh! The dark side of mindfulness. Meditation and mindfulness have a dark side that should not be ignored, say psychologists Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm. Research shows 7 per cent of people on meditation retreats experienced profoundly adverse effects, including depression.
On BBC Radio 4 on 16 March 2016 at 11 am a programme said much the same thing but in more detail. The presenter Jolyon Jenkins interviewed two people who have practiced meditation, Suzanne and then Patrick. She started suffering from panic attacks while he had an episode of mania.
The next person Jolyon spoke to was Daniel M Ingram. Daniel was introduced as a doctor who runs a forum about meditation. Jolyon didn't say that Daniel believes he is enlightened and has written a book about Buddhist meditation. Daniel talked about what he calls the 'Arising and Passing Away' and the 'Dark Night'. These are two stages in Theravada Buddhist meditation. It is the Dark Night stage that is the problem. During the Dark Night a few people experience "depression, micro-psychotic episodes and psychotic depression, and can make people suicidal and occasionally even kill themselves". He says that this is predictable and not just with his form of meditation.
Psychologist Tim Lomas says that a quarter of people who were taught meditation had 'substantial difficulties'. Psychologist Miguel Farias talked about research into the effects of meditation in general, as in his book 'The Buddha Pill'. He said that mindfulness isn't any better than sitting quietly. A study was mentioned that showed that people practicing mindfulness had higher levels of cortisol which would suggest that they had higher stress levels.
What are we to make of all this? First of all it seems that only a minority of people suffer these problems. Even Daniel M Ingram says that for most the effects of the Dark Night are mild. It seems that some people are more prone to it than others. Secondly it could be that some forms of meditation will produce more of it. It could also be that some forms of meditation produce a temporary negative effect which is followed by a long-lasting positive outcome.
Jolyon talked quite a bit about Transcendental Meditation. Here he was not trying to show it is dangerous, presumably because he couldn't find any evidence that it is. Instead he was trying to show that it doesn't live up to its claims. So maybe TM isn't a problem.
Jolyon didn't say what sort of meditation Suzanne and Patrick had been practicing, but it seems that in both cases it was Goenka vipassana meditation. The retreats were 10 day intensives and involved scanning the body. I have read a lot of bad things about Goenka meditation in internet forums. Goenka was an Indian man who learned his method while in Burma from the influential teacher U Ba Khin.
Goenka's form of meditation is different from others within the Theravada Buddhist tradition. He and U Ba Khin didn't teach samatha meditation, except for the preparatory meditation on the breath. He didn't teach the use of jhanas. Jhanas are states of consciousness achieved through samatha meditation. They are used in conjunction with vipassana meditation.
Meditation on the breath is the beginning of samatha meditation, but samatha goes beyond that to these altered states of consciousness called jhanas. Some meditators in the Theravada Buddhist tradition will enter the jhanas before going on to the practice of vipassana meditation. In vipassana meditation you allow yourself to be aware of different things such as physical sensations, emotions and thoughts.
However, in Goenka's form of vipassana practitioners are taught to be aware only of physical sensations (hence the 'body scanning'). This is only one of the four traditional subjects of awareness during vipassana. Awareness of emotions or thoughts is not taught. So it seems that the Goenka technique - which is similar but not identical to that pioneered by U Ba Khin - is missing most aspects of Theravada Buddhist meditation as far as we can tell from the earliest Buddhist texts. Yet their literature says their form of meditation is the same as Buddha's.
That could be the problem, as could the 'boot camp' approach on the 10 day intensive retreats. It does seem that people are taught to work through any physical or emotional pain so that they can emerge on the other side. This is probably a wrong approach. It's probably better for people to stop vipassana for a while if they feel emotional distress. Samatha meditation on the other hand could be fine, in fact it might calm and stabilize people. But of course Goenka didn't teach it.
Transcendental Meditation is from the Hindu tradition not Buddhist but could be described as a form of samatha meditation.
If we look at Daniel M Ingram's methods we see that he teaches the use of samatha meditation including the jhanas. His form of vipassana is that pioneered by an influential Burmese teacher called Mahasi. The Mahasi form of vipassana involves something called naming or noting or labeling. Physical sensations, emotions and thoughts are named. It's a way of becoming aware of thoughts etc but whether this is the same form of vipassana as that taught by the Buddha is a subject of much debate.
It could be that vipassana/mindfulness could be inherently destabilizing. If that happens then it would seem sensible to decrease the amount or stop it altogether for a while. Perhaps use your meditation time for samatha only. How do we explain this emotional distress? One possibility is that when we practice vipassana we gradually become more aware of sensations that have always been there but rarely noticed. It's not that we have more internal distress but that we become more aware of it. When we do become fully aware of it then it might go away.
Another possibility is that we get way outside of our comfort zone as our sense of reality is changed. We feel a sense of discomfort that can manifest as restlessness/agitation, anxiety or dissociation. Or it could be that emotions that we were unable to feel fully in the past are making themselves apparent. The memory of childhood traumas or at least the emotions associated with them are pushing their way into our consciousness.
You get the idea reading the book by Daniel M Ingram and some of the ones by Jack Kornfield that this often happens on retreats. Daniel is quite scornful of people who encourage this - he thinks that they are wasting their time - but Jack seems to be aware that some kind of therapy is required by many people and would be an important part of their spiritual unfoldment. You would think that vipassana/mindfulness in itself might be therapeutic, perhaps it is the way some people teach it, or perhaps we have yet to discover exactly the methods that Buddha taught.
I have heard it said that Buddhists shouldn't discuss things too much, they should start practicing meditation, then they can discuss their experience of that if they wan't to. The problem with that is that if someone wishes to try vipassana, signs up for a Goenka 10 day intensive retreat and is damaged by it, they might find out that it bears little resemblance to Buddha's methods and wonder why someone didn't tell them that to begin with.
People who have had more difficult childhoods might be the ones who encounter the most emotional distress when they practice vipassana. So much so that it might be best for them to avoid it. There is the other problem though and that is that meditation doesn't seem to work for some people. It just doesn't do anything. It doesn't go anywhere, they get bored and give up. These too are likely to be people who have had difficult childhoods, but their emotions express themselves in a different way.
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