Finding Bliss When Meditation Is Anything But
Contrary to widespread accounts, you are not alone, and you have options
When I started practicing yoga seriously, I began hearing about this being inside, this golden orb of light supposedly at the center of all beings, a wellspring of love, accessible through meditation. Sign me up! thought I.
But when I sat to meditate, the only thing I came in regular contact with was anger, red and hot. Apparently, my inner Buddha was a real bitch. And she was pissed.
Where was my fucking bliss?
At the time, I was reeling from the end of my marriage. When at last I was sick and tired enough, I quit my job and hopped on a plane to study yoga in India. I thought the time out would cure me, but it didn’t. So, I decided I needed something more drastic. Maybe a 10-day silent meditation course?
The application included a question about my history with mental illness. I’d heard through various yoga circles that applicants were regularly turned away from retreats, and felt fairly confident that a truthful answer would be a disqualifier.
Ten days of seated stillness for nine hours a day with no human interaction was objectively grueling. But could it trigger something more insidious than a stiff neck?
I’d heard that vipassana (both the style of practice and the common reference for these 10-day sits) resulted in feelings of never-ending love, compassion, and goodwill. I’d have settled for ‘not miserable all the time.’ What if this was the thing I needed to finally be free of my unhappiness?
Besides, I equated past hospitalizations with my abuse of drugs and alcohol. By the time I arrived at the retreat, I hadn’t touched either in close to a decade. Nor had I returned to those institutions. Even my therapist didn’t have me on any medication. So I lied to get in.
I would be vigilant. If I wasn’t sleeping, or if my thoughts started racing or looping, I could always leave. This meant actively ignoring the flaw in this plan, that one of the hallmarks of losing a grip on reality was denial. It never occurred to me that the meditation itself could heighten my anxiety, regardless of my previous mental history.
Vipassana meditation involves observing bodily sensations without attaching visual or verbal comment. This is to help participants see that reality, at its most basic level, is a crafted story. What I learned, years after my first vipassana, was that the process of dissolving a personal narrative can be destabilizing.
The research shows
In 2017, researchers at Brown University released a study categorizing the adverse effects meditators often experience. Their report shows that fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia are most often reported by meditators (82 percent). In addition, experienced meditation teachers acknowledge that ill effects happen regularly, and they are to be expected. For some, the consequences are dire.
In one example, a 25-year old Maryland woman jumped to her death ten weeks after attending a 10-day silent meditation retreat. In the note she left behind she wrote, “I remember what I did at the retreat. I finally got that memory. I can’t live with me.”
While that kind of meditation-induced psychosis is rare, her story felt familiar. At the retreat I attended outside Bangalore, I sat on a dirt floor and listened to tape-recorded instructions. Over the course of the ten days, I relived painful memories on repeat.
Unlike me, the Maryland woman’s application included the fact that she suffered from anxiety and was on medication. She even got a doctor’s approval to participate. Over the course of the retreat, according to reports, her condition was deteriorating. Yet she wasn’t sent home.
This is less shocking than it may seem on the surface. It’s common for students to experience adverse reactions on extended retreats. Contrary to most portrayals, though meditation is a tool to help you become less reactive to stressors, it’s not a vehicle for feeling good.
Likewise, the centers aren’t run by trained clinicians, but volunteers. Annie Gurton, a psychological therapist who has been on several vipassana retreats, explained that people “often disguise [their symptoms] well.”
Gurton says she was once barred outright from leaving a vipassana retreat, and called the organizers “dictatorial.” She acknowledges that she was mentally stable at the time but says that “someone frailer or who had serious mental issues might have found it repressive and abusive. If they were paranoid it would have fed into those thoughts.”
In my case, I felt I deserved feeling like hell as a punishment for having torpedoed my marriage. After completing the ten days I went home and continued to meditate, using the practice as a weapon. I became plagued by thoughts of turning my bicycle into New York City traffic, but I told no one, believing that through meditation, I’d figure out what was wrong with me. Meanwhile my practice kept me morbidly fixated on finding my flaws. And I kept finding more of them.
Like any co-dependent relationship, the situation was complicated. The Brown study reveals that the next most commonly reported meditation experience is “positive affect” (75 percent). This was true for me, too.
Between bouts of fetal weeping and suicidal ideation, I had more energy. I was better able to cope with stress. But those “bouts” were problematic, and I remained convinced there was something blocking my ability to live life to the fullest. Something I needed to figure out about myself. So, two years after my initial retreat, I went back for another.
My head told me that returning would amplify my positive experiences. But by the end of my second session, my mind shocked me. “I don’t hate myself enough to do this,” I found myself thinking. That moment wasn’t the end of my fault-finding odyssey, but it marked the beginning of a change.
Why I’m sharing this
I had a hard time pitching this essay when I first wrote it in 2018, and since then, the piece has been taken down. What I see most is an endless parade of benefits. I’ve seen meditation touted as a cure for everything from sleep deprivation to heart disease to shrinking brain matter. And so many classes advertising you can create the life you want through meditation.
Because I didn’t have the life I wanted and I wasn’t feeling the never-ending love, compassion, or goodwill, I figured I just needed to work harder at the meditation thing. Until that second vipassana. But you know? Though I switched to different contemplative practices, I still thought I was shirking. Until I came across this study and reported this essay.
“Just like finding the right exercise for someone who is physically challenged, it’s possible to find a style of meditation practice that serves someone with symptoms of trauma,” Tara Brach, clinical psychologist and author of Radical Acceptance, told me in our interview.
This was welcome news to me, especially considering the hype around meditation.
Brown University wasn’t even the first to publish such research. The Buddha Pill (Watkins Publishing, 2015) cites an even older study suggesting that 63 percent of participants in meditation retreats suffered at least one negative effect, such as anxiety, panic, depression, pain, confusion or disorientation . Yet the reports remain sparse.
The research does have its challenges—from the self-reported nature of results to the bias of control groups to the variation in duration and style of practice. It’s also important to note that no study has found a causal relationship between a meditator’s experience level, duration per session, or mental history. Negative responses could occur at any time, and the research has yet to uncover why challenging experiences may arise.
Discovering that different psyches need different styles of contemplative practice makes me one of the lucky ones. Today my practice varies between different techniques I’ve learned, and I use it strictly for stress management. Many would say my method is wrong, that despite the prevailing narrative, the primary objective of meditation is not comfort. But I disregard a fuckton of ancient “wisdom,” like the biblical decree that a woman was made to submit to a godly husband.
In the absence information about problems that can be associated with meditation, I was lucky to realize that changing my meditation style could be the thing to alleviate my stress. No one should have to rely on luck.
Meanwhile, the juggernaut of wellness rolls forward, and with it, the idea that meditation can be consumed like kale for feel-good benefits. The idea isn’t merely objectionable, it’s damaging.
If you, like me, crave a spiritual practice but haven’t found solace from the style of meditation you’ve tried — try a different style! Better to change up your meditation than doggedly insist on trying the thing that’s “supposed” to work. Offering myself this compassion turned out to be the thing that finally led to my discovery of, yes!, an internal wellspring of boundless love and optimism.
In the pic below I’m signing copies of the book that’s based on this essay — Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Overcoming the Wellness Revolution — at the delightful Tombolo Books in downtown St. Pete. (You can buy the book from them by clicking on the pic, or the link above takes you to a variety of sites to purchase.)
You’re here, let’s talk about it…
Do you meditate? Or did you try it and hate it and have sufficient self-esteem to say, Next!
Ever been to a vipassana? What do you wish you knew beforehand?
Do you love Tara Brach, too? I can’t believe I got to talk to her!
Does this surprise you about meditation?
Or, AMA!
I love hearing from Ill-Behaved readers!
Want more LLK stories? Check out
-Mental Disorders, Addictions, and Dementia All Walked Into a Thai Restaurant
-The Secrets of Great Storytelling
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I accidentally ended up on a 3-day Vipassana retreat in Thailand when I was 23 - long story, but to sum it up quickly, an overcrowded ferry, nothing booked, a random interaction with a guy who was going to one, a "meh, why not, how bad could it be", and an hour later I was on a wooden plank of a dorm bed with no mattress, no pillow, gearing myself up for three days of silence.
It actually ended up being one of the best things I've done, but honestly, if I'd had more time to think about it I don't think I would've gone. I'd lost my best friend a few years before and was still a total mess (at this point I'd packed up my whole life, booked a one way ticket to SE Asia and was a year into what would be a 10+ year journey), but fortunately it all worked out for the best.
Honestly, though, I think it's really important to talk about the places that these things can take you to, and the fact that we all carry so much trauma and a lot of it is buried deep in our subconscious. So many people in the spiritual "arena" tout things like this or psychedelics as a "fix all", but there's not really any short cut to actually doing the work, and any short cuts you try can absolutely lead to bigger problems. Turns out long cuts - like packing your life into boxes and fucking off to the other side of the world for 10 years - also lead to bigger problems, but maybe there will just always be problems, haha! Anyway, thanks for sharing. Loved this one!
So funny! Of course I prefer a human foot massage but not always available! I always say that even if massage does not ever have tons of evidence-based research behind it, it feels great (unless you're getting deep tissue of course) so I'll take it over having needles inserted in meridians. Acupressure or shiatsu also enjoyable for me.