Showing posts with label Meditation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Meditation. Show all posts
Psychedelic drugs
Psychedelic drugs are a controversial topic, but despite decades of negative press, science suggests these plants may actually have psychiatric benefits worth exploring. According to data from the National Institute of Mental Health, the prevalence of anxiety disorders in the U.S. may be as high as 40 million, or about 18 percent of the population over the age of 18, making it the most common mental illness in the nation.1,2
The conventional approach to anxiety and depression treatment typically involves antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs. Unfortunately, studies have repeatedly demonstrated antidepressants are no more effective than placebo. In the long term, they also produce changes in the brain that may actually worsen your condition.
Psychedelics, such as psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms, clearly have a mind-altering effect, but it's quite different from conventional psychiatric drugs. While the scientific evidence is still slim (since their illegal status makes them difficult to study), two of the most recent studies on magic mushrooms found they had truly profound benefits for cancer patients struggling with anxiety and depression.
Psychotropic Drugs — Gateway to Happiness Through Enhanced Understanding of Reality?
The featured film, "The Reality of Truth,"3 explores how psychotropic drugs can enhance your understanding of reality, thereby freeing you up to be happy, regardless of outward circumstances. Deepak Chopra opens up the conversation noting that the human brain has specific receptors for psychoactive substances such as psilocybin, and the fact that we have them is a clear indication that we are part of their nature, and these plants are part of ours.
In other words, psychotropic plants appear to have a role to play in the human experience. But what is that role? Psychotropic plants are well-known for their ability to induce dramatically altered states of consciousness. Many of these altered states correlate to religious or spiritual experiences, and such experiences, Chopra says, is part of being a whole human being.
A common experience (although by far not the only possibility) is the experience of being "at one" with God or "the source of all creation" — a feeling of no longer being separate from anyone or anything, not just in our immediate surroundings but indeed the entire universe. As Chopra says, psychotropic drugs "help people break out of the hallucination of separation."
Many believe psychotropic plants have a rightful place in human life, as they can act as a key, if you will, to expanded levels of consciousness and a personal experience of the divine. By making them illegal, we're effectively been barred from using natural substances to explore the spiritual dimensions of our being that can be tremendously healing and beneficial.
Psychedelics Are Illegal in the US
For clarity's sake, let me state for the record that I am not advocating the use of illegal substances. Doing so may land you in prison, regardless of how pure your intentions. Psychotropic plants may be "all natural," but they are extremely potent mind-altering compounds that should not be experimented with willy nilly.
Psilocybin, for example, is a Schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act.4,5 The mushrooms are typically ingested in their fresh or dried form, or can be made into tea. Large doses have been known to induce panic and/or psychosis, which is why careless experimentation is strongly discouraged (in addition to their use being illegal).
My intention for posting this video is for educational purposes only, to allow you to explore some different points of view. It is not an invitation or a recommendation to partake in illegal substances — for any reason. At present, the only legal way I know of to use psychedelics in the U.S. is to be part of a registered study. Other countries have different laws pertaining to psychedelics and their use.
Going Within
The video starts out by exploring historical references to psychedelics and meditation, giving examples of celebrities who have embraced meditation as a way to improve their mental health, creativity and happiness. As noted in the video, most of us search for happiness outside ourselves. More often than not, it's a fruitless search. At the end of the day, we realize that new car, the new romantic partner, the money in the bank, all failed to produce a lasting effect.
The idea that true, lasting happiness can only be found inside yourself is an ancient one. You'd be hard-pressed to find a single philosopher throughout history who thought otherwise. But how do you get "inside?" Meditation is one of the oldest, most tried-and-true ways of reaching your own core. Changing our own state of mind is also thought to be the best, if not only, way to achieve lasting societal change.
The way to reduce war in the world is for each individual to be an agent of peace by being more peaceful. You can't fake inner peace. You have to work at it. Similarly, the way to reduce environmental destruction is for each and every individual to act in less destructive ways; to become more environmentally conscious and make different choices in our day-to-day lives.
Transcendental Meditation 101
Transcendental Meditation (TM) is one of the most popular forms of meditation, practiced by millions of people around the world. You choose a mantra that has meaning for you, sit quietly with your eyes closed, and repeat your mantra for a period of about 20 minutes, once or twice a day.
The idea is to reach a place of "restful" or "concentrated" alertness, which enables you to let negative thoughts and distractions pass by you without upsetting your calm and balance. Ultimately, TM is said to open you to universal consciousness, a transcendental state where all apparent divisions disappear, and you recognize yourself as being a part of everything.
While this state of bliss is, well, blissful, the idea is not to remain there forever. Your aim is to return to normal waking life, and slowly, over time, integrate more and more of this transcendental nature into your waking state. Effects include a greater sense of peace, harmony and happiness — regardless of outer circumstances. It also improves emotional resilience, the ability to bounce back from stress, which has direct implications and benefits for physical health.
The Psychedelic Experience and Its Potential for Healing
The film explores what appears to be references to meditation and psychedelics in religious texts, and interviews a number of people who have experimented with these drugs about their experiences. By and large, people say the experience of "oneness" produced a radical shift in the way they view not only themselves but all of life going forward. The experience is life-altering and seemingly permanent.
Indeed, the two studies I mentioned earlier concluded that this spiritual component was one of the determining factors that allowed patients to release their fear of death, and hence their anxiety and depression over their cancer diagnosis. In a Time magazine article, Dinah Bazer recounts her personal experience with psilocybin.6
A cancer survivor struggling with severe anxiety (driven by her fear of a recurrence), Bazer agreed to participate in a magic mushroom trial conducted at the NYU Langone Medical Center. While fear gripped her when the drug first brought her "tumbling through space," the experience ended up being a profoundly healing one:
"… I started to feel love. I felt like I was being bathed in love and it was overwhelming, amazing, wonderful … The feeling of immense love lingered for weeks, and four years later I still feel it at times. My fear and anxiety were completely removed, and they haven't come back …
The experience changed how I wanted to live my life. I used to get up, grab a quick snack and eat it in the car. But I no longer want to be in a hurry. Now I get up an hour early, make a real breakfast and read my paper … I used to imagine what it would be like if the cancer recurred, but I don't think about it the same way anymore. When I don't feel well and thoughts of a recurrence creep into my mind, I lack fear and simply think, 'Let's just see what happens.'"
Psilocybin — An Immediately Acting Anti-Anxiety Remedy
Another cancer patient that took part in the NYU trial was Patrick Mettes, a television news director. His magic mushroom trip helped him make peace with and overcome his fear of death, his widow told CNN.7
"He was not afraid of death and, in fact, he seemed to grow through the process of dying. My brother was with us quite a bit during that time and says that he felt that Patrick's spirit grew as his body declined … I believe it helped him, and both of us, live life fully up to the very end."
Addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky, who is interviewed in the film, admits the research very clearly demonstrates the benefits of psychedelic plant medicines in end-of-life care, for the fact that it very rapidly helps people come to peace with their own dying process. He also believes end-of-life care may be the area where we'll eventually see psychedelic drugs be used.
According to lead author Dr. Stephen Ross, director of substance abuse services and associate professor in the department of psychiatry at NYU Langone, their investigation revealed that psilocybin "was a rapid, immediately acting anti-anxiety and antidepressant." The second psilocybin study was done at Johns Hopkins University. Fifty-one patients participated, randomly receiving either a high dose or very low dose of psilocybin. As reported by CNN:8
"… [T]he high-dose psilocybin resulted in significant decreases in both clinician-rated and self-reported measures of depressed mood and anxiety among the patients. The effects lasted in 78 percent of patients for depression and 83 percent for anxiety in a follow-up assessment six months later.
'These effects appear to be sustained in our study at least six or seven weeks and very plausibly more than six months,' Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medicine and lead author of the study, said … '[I]t's a very exciting opportunity to consider entirely new approaches to therapy.'"
The Importance of Spiritual Connection
Sherry Marcy, diagnosed and treated for cancer in 2010, described herself as "very depressed" when signing up for the Johns Hopkins study. After a single dose of magic mushrooms, "the cloud of doom seemed to just lift. From then on, I was fine," she says. Many others had similar experiences.9,10,11,12,13
Regardless of one's opinion about hallucinogens, it's pretty remarkable to consider that a single dose of a substance can result in several months' worth of relief. Certainly, it's far safer than opioids that have already killed nearly a quarter million people in the U.S. alone. Some patients even report being anxiety-free four years later. Other research has confirmed that the effects of controlled psilocybin administration indeed appears to be long-lasting in a majority of cases.14
According to researchers, the freedom from anxiety and depression appears to be the result of spiritual reconnection. The feeling of love and being "one" with everything results in alterations in the brain itself — a mechanism ascribed to neuroplasticity, where your brain changes in accordance to experience. Indeed, a majority of the participants ranked it among "the most meaningful" experiences of their lives.
Psilocybin also binds to the same receptors as serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in mood and perception. Studies using MRI imaging show psilocybin alters brain activity, allowing for communication between regions of your brain that normally do not connect. This is believed to be part of the breakthroughs people report.
Aubrey Marcus, founder and CEO of Onnit, is one of the individuals interviewed in "The Reality of Truth" who admits using psychedelics as an aid in his explorations of "experiential spirituality" — a journey in which the plants have been his "greatest teachers." Amazon John Easterling, a conservationist, compares the use of psychedelics to "10 years of therapy in seven hours," because the experience really cuts to the core of your problem, whatever it might be.
Psychedelics to Explore Human Potential
Documentary host Mike "Zappy" Zapolin travels to Peru to get the psychedelic experience firsthand. Aside from magic mushrooms, there are a number of other plants and traditional brews with psychedelic effects. Ayahuasca, for example, is commonly used for spiritual exploration. As with magic mushrooms, ayahuasca users often have positive mental and emotional breakthroughs, brought on by the overwhelming depth of the spiritual experience.
Ayahuasca is prepared from a mixture of ayahuasca vine bark and leaves from the cacruna plant. San Pedro or "huachama" is another ancestral medicine, made from the San Pedro cactus. The Andean people have used San Pedro for healing and religious divination for over 5,000 years. Under the guidance of a Peruvian San Pedro shaman, Zapolin and his co-explorers, who include actress Michelle Rodriguez, partake of both of these ritual beverages. Their shaman guide discusses these traditional plant medicines saying:
"When you do the medicine [San Pedro], 50 percent of the medicine's responsibility is to do all the healing, all the cleansing, all the awakening, all the clearing, all the harmonizing that it needs to do. But the other 50 percent — of taking it further, of taking it deeper, is always yours. Part of my work in this is to make the transition possible, from being very sleepy to being fully awake …
Each person has a pattern, and that pattern is 50 percent woven by the person and 50 percent by the divine. Ayahuasca is capable of changing that pattern. From being one person one day, the next day you're completely another person."
The Ayahuasca Experience
An example of this kind of 180-degree shift in personality and outlook on life is given in the film in the form of a firsthand account by Gerard Powell, who broke his addiction to smoking, alcohol and drugs with a single dose of psychedelics. Recounting his own ayahuasca trip, Zapolin says he suddenly realized he had died:
"As I was looking at death, experiencing death, I saw how dynamic it was and how much was going on, and I realized that I never needed to fear death again. It was totally liberating. And, as I spent time in this ayahuasca experience, I realized I was sitting in a place where I could ask any question.
I could go into the future, into the past; whatever I wanted to know … I decided to ask, 'Why do bad things happen?' Immediately … I was whipped out into the edge of space … I was out there at the edge, looking at everything in the universe … and as I'm looking at it, spirit said to me, 'You see that? It's totally balanced. It's perfect.'"
Daily Transcendence Through Breathing
After his trip to Peru, Zapolin sought to practice transcendence on a daily basis. Along the way, he was introduced to sudarshan kriya yoga (SKY),15 a breathing technique taught by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. More than 65 studies have investigated the effects of this technique.16 Among the findings, studies have shown it can help:
- Increase deep sleep by 218 percent
- Increase hormone secretion associated with well-being by 50 percent
- Decrease stress hormones by 56 percent
- Decrease depression by 70 percent
- Reduce anxiety by 44 percent
Like other experts on breathing, Shankar notes that for every emotion, there's a corresponding rhythm of breath. Since the two are linked, by regulating your breathing, you regulate your emotions. Practicing SKY, Zapolin discovered he could in fact enter into a psychedelic state simply using his breath.
In closing, I want to reiterate that I do not condone or recommend imbibing illegal drugs, be they "plant medicines" or not. Should you decide to experiment, make sure you do it in a place where it's legal, and under the guidance of someone with the proper experience.
The most important point, I think, is that what these kinds of psychedelic experiences tell us is that spiritual connection is an important part of life, health and happiness. Fortunately, you don't have to take a psychedelic to gain similar benefits. A consistent meditation and/or breathing practice can help you reap similar benefits, albeit over a longer period of time.
Myths of meditation
If you’re considering it, here are seven common beliefs about meditation that are not supported by scientific evidence.
Myth 1: Meditation never has adverse or negative effects. It will change you for the better (and only the better)
Fact 1: It’s easy to see why this myth might spring up. After all, sitting in silence and focusing on your breathing would seem like a fairly innocuous activity with little potential for harm. But when you consider how many of us, when worried or facing difficult circumstances, cope by keeping ourselves very busy and with little time to think, it isn’t that much of a surprise to find that sitting without distractions, with only ourselves, might lead to disturbing emotions rising to the surface.
However, many scientists have turned a blind eye to the potential unexpected or harmful consequences of meditation. With Transcendental Meditation, this is probably because many of those who have researched it have also been personally involved in the movement; with mindfulness, the reasons are less clear, because it is presented as a secular technique. Nevertheless, there is emerging scientific evidence from case studies, surveys of meditators’ experience and historical studies to show that meditation can be associated with stress, negative effectsand mental health problems. For example, one study found that mindfulness meditation led to increased cortisol, a biological marker of stress, despite the fact that participants subjectively reported feeling less stressed.
Myth 2: Meditation can benefit everyone
Fact 2: The idea that meditation is a cure-all for all lacks scientific basis. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” the psychologist Arnold Lazarus reminded us in his writings about meditation. Although there has been relatively little research into how individual circumstances – such as age, gender, or personality type – might play a role in the value of meditation, there is a growing awareness that meditation works differently for each individual.
For example, it may provide an effective stress-relief technique for individuals facing serious problems (such as being unemployed), but have little value for low-stressed individuals. Or it may benefit depressed individuals who suffered trauma and abuse in their childhood, but not other depressed people. There is also some evidence that – along with yoga – it can be of particular use to prisoners, for whom it improves psychological wellbeing and, perhaps more importantly, encourages better control over impulsivity. We shouldn’t be surprised about meditation having variable benefits from person to person. After all, the practice wasn’t intended to make us happier or less stressed, but to assist us in diving deep within and challenging who we believe we are.
Myth 3: If everyone meditated the world would be a much better place
Fact 3: All global religions share the belief that following their particular practices and ideals will make us better individuals. So far, there is no clear scientific evidence that meditation is more effective at making us, for example, more compassionate than other spiritual or psychological practices. Research on this topic has serious methodological and theoretical limitations and biases. Most of the studies have no adequate control groups and generally fail to assess the expectations of participants (ie, if we expect to benefit from something, we may be more likely to report benefits).
Myth 4: If you’re seeking personal change and growth, meditating is as efficient – or more – than having therapy
Fact 4: There is very little evidence that an eight-week mindfulness-based group programme has the same benefits as of being in conventional psychological therapy – most studies compare mindfulness to “treatment as usual” (such as seeing your GP), rather than one-to-one therapy. Although mindfulness interventions are group-based and most psychological therapy is conducted on a one-to-one basis, both approaches involve developing an increased awareness of our thoughts, emotions and way of relating to others. But the levels of awareness probably differ. A therapist can encourage us to examine conscious or unconscious patterns within ourselves, whereas these might be difficult to access in a one-size-fits-all group course, or if we were meditating on our own.
Myth 5: Meditation produces a unique state of consciousness that we can measure scientifically
Fact 5: Meditation produces states of consciousness that we can indeed measure using various scientific instruments. However, the overall evidence is that these states are not physiologically unique. Furthermore, although different kinds of meditation may have diverse effects on consciousness (and on the brain), there is no scientific consensus about what these effects are.
Myth 6: We can practise meditation as a purely scientific technique with no religious or spiritual leanings
Fact 6: In principle, it’s perfectly possible to meditate and be uninterested in the spiritual background to the practice. However, research shows that meditation leads us to become more spiritual, and that this increase in spirituality is partly responsible for the practice’s positive effects. So, even if we set out to ignore meditation’s spiritual roots, those roots may nonetheless envelop us, to a greater or lesser degree. Overall, it is unclear whether secular models of mindfulness meditation are fully secular.
Myth 7: Science has unequivocally shown how meditation can change us and why
Fact 7: Meta-analyses show there is moderate evidence that meditation affects us in various ways, such as increasing positive emotions and reducing anxiety. However, it is less clear how powerful and long-lasting these changes are.
Some studies show that meditating can have a greater impact than physical relaxation, although other research using a placebo meditation contradicts this finding. We need better studies but, perhaps as important, we also need models that explain how meditation works. For example, with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), we still can’t be sure of the “active” ingredient. Is it the meditation itself that causes positive effects, or is it the fact that the participant learns to step back and become aware of his or her thoughts and feelings in a supportive group environment?
There simply is no cohesive, overarching attempt to describe the various psychobiological processes that meditation sets in motion. Unless we can clearly map the effects of meditation – both the positive and the negative – and identify the processes underpinning the practice, our scientific understanding of meditation is precarious and can easily lead to exaggeration and misinterpretation.
• Catherine Wikholm is the co-author, with Dr Miguel Farias, of The Buddha Pill
Citation links have now been added to this article
Mindfulness
The police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, showed no mercy to Jon Kabat-Zinn in May 1970. The man now considered the godfather of modern mindfulness was a graduate student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an anti-Vietnam-war protester, agitating alongside the Black Panthers and the French playwright Jean Genet.
“I got my entire face battered in,” he recalls. “They put this instrument on my wrist called the claw, which they tightened to generate enormous amounts of pain without leaving any marks. But they certainly left a lot of marks on my face. They pulled me into the back of the police station and beat the shit out of me.”
Today, at 73, Kabat-Zinn’s restful, lined face shows no scars from that protest outside a police station, when a trip canvassing support for a nationwide university strike boiled over into violence,leaving him with stitches.
He sits beneath the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on Parliament Square in London taking a breather after going straight from an overnight flight out of Boston into a 90-minute talk to a gathering of international parliamentarians about how he thinks mindfulness could – to put it bluntly – change the world.
The once “very macho” anti-war activist who raged against MIT’s role in nuclear weapons research is the catalyst behind the west’s mushrooming interest in mindfulness meditation, having reimagined Buddhist contemplation practices for a secular age almost 40 years ago.
With others, he pioneered an eight-week mindfulness-based stress-reduction course at the University of Massachusetts Medical School for patients with chronic pain, harnessing the fundamentals of mindfulness meditation as taught by the Buddha, but with the Buddhism taken out. “I bent over backwards to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, new age, eastern mysticism or just plain flakey,” he says.
Kabat-Zinn had been meditating since 1965, but had no compunction in playing the Buddhism right down. “I got into this through the Zen door which is a very irreverent approach to Buddhism,” he says. He talks a lot about dharma, the term for the Buddha’s teaching, but he’s not a Buddhist and remarks that to insist mindfulness meditation is Buddhist is like saying gravity is English because it was identified by Sir Isaac Newton.
The UMass Stress Reduction Clinic opened its doors in 1979 and taught people with chronic back pain, victims of industrial accidents, cancer patients and sometimes paraplegics. Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness meditation as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. By focusing on the breath, the idea is to cultivate attention on the body and mind as it is moment to moment, and so help with pain, both physical and emotional.
“It often results in apprehending the constantly changing nature of sensations, even highly unpleasant ones, and thus their impermanence,” he says. “It also gives rise to the direct experience that ‘the pain is not me’.” As a result, some of his patients found ways “to be in a different relationship with their pain” while others felt it diminish. The title of his 1990 bestseller about the clinic captures his approach to accepting whatever life throws at you: Full Catastrophe Living.
Now, in 2017, Kabat-Zinn vibrates with an urgent belief that meditation is the “radical act of love and sanity” we need in the age of Trump, accelerating climate change and disasters such as the Grenfell Tower fire.
He has a platform to build on. Mindfulness courses ultimately derived from his work are now being rolled out in the UK to school pupils, convicts, civil servants and even politicians. It is prescribed on the NHS in some areas to prevent recurrent depression, with 2,256 people completing eight-week courses last year. The course reduces the likelihood of relapse by almost a third, according to an analysis of nine trials. In the US, the NBA basketball champions, Golden State Warriors, are the latest poster boys for the practice after their coach, Steve Kerr, made mindfulness one of the team’s core values.
“He is Mr Mindfulness in relation to the secular strand,” says Lokadhi Lloyd, a meditation teacher in London who has been on courses led by Kabat-Zinn. “Without him, I don’t think mindfulness would have risen to the prominence it has.”
Supporters such as Willem Kuyken, a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University, even suggest that Kabat-Zinn’s pioneering work could one day see him mentioned in the same breath as Darwin and Einstein. “What they did for biology and physics, Jon has done for a new frontier: the science of the human mind and heart,” says Kuyken.
ut mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn figures, must now be harnessed in a bigger way than so far seen, to do nothing less than challenge the way the world is run. This latest mission is why he has flown into London to speak to parliamentarians from 15 countries about how to act more wisely.
“If this is another fad, I don’t want to have any part of it,” he says. “If in the past 50 years I had found something more meaningful, more healing, more transformative and with more potential social impact, I would be doing that.”
There are signs many others agree with its potential. Globally, 18 million people subscribe to the Headspace app, practising mindfulness meditations through their headphones.
In the shops, ranges of mindfulness clothing – not least “drop of mindfulness” tights (the only thing mindful seems to be the brand name) – colouring books and even dot-to-dot puzzles testify to the idea’s growing ubiquity – even if Kabat-Zinn derides much of this as “McMindfulness”.
His work has attracted its share of sceptics, such as Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, authors of The Buddha Pill, who caution that mindfulness is no cure-all and warn of a dark side if not taught correctly.
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Meditate to prevent heart disease
Meditation may help reduce some risk factors for heart disease, according to a new statement from the American Heart Association.
The statement, released Thursday, noted that a healthy lifestyle and medicines to control high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other heart threats are the most effective ways to prevent heart disease.
Dr. Levine and his colleagues reviewed studies on common types of sitting meditation, such as Zen meditation, Raja yoga and transcendental meditation, and their effects on heart disease risk factors.
Meditation and side effects
"Meditation can leave you feeling even more stressed," the Daily Mail reports.
The claim is prompted by a study of 60 practitioners of Buddhist meditation in the US which found they'd had a range of "challenging or difficult" experiences associated with the practice.
However, it's not clear how relevant the results are to the majority of people who use meditation apps or take mindfulness classes.
The study only included people in Western countries who meditated within one of three Buddhist traditions, and – importantly – who'd had negative experiences. So the numbers of people in the study reporting, for example, fear, is only representative of people who'd said they had a negative experience through meditation, not of all people meditating.
The study does make an important point, however, at a time when mindfulness and meditation has become more popular, that the effects of meditation are not always positive or harmless. Some people in the study reported feeling depressed or suicidal, and a few needed treatment in hospital as a result.
Classical Buddhist literature discusses potential pitfalls of mindfulness and meditation, such as makyō (hallucinations) and "Zen sickness" – a sense of imbalance and loss of identity. So these warnings should not be glossed over by teachers of Buddhist inspired techniques.
Also, healthcare practitioners who recommend meditation need to be aware of the associated risks.
Where did the story come from?
The study was carried out by researchers from Brown University and the University of California in the US. It was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the Bial Foundation, the Mind and Life Institute and the 1440 Foundation.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One on an open-access basis, so it is free to read online.
The Mail covered the study particularly badly. It began by sneering at the celebrities and "yummy mummies" that practice mindfulness, without apparently noticing that the study excluded generic mindfulness-based interventions and looked only at specific Buddhist meditation practices.
It reported that 82% of people questioned had experienced fear, anxiety or paranoia, without making it clear the study only interviewed people with negative experiences. It also said that people who had previous psychological problems had been "ruled out" of the study. Yet the study reported 32% of people interviewed had a history of psychiatric disorder (only people with current mental illness, or similar unusual psychological experiences not linked to meditation were excluded).
Finally, the Mail said the study interviewed "nearly 100" people about their experiences, when they actually interviewed 60 people.
What kind of research was this?
This was a qualitative study. Qualitative studies, like this one, use interviews to ask people open-ended questions about their experiences of specific issues, such as meditation.
Experiences were then grouped into categories. The researchers looked specifically for people who'd had negative experiences of meditation, because they say these experiences had not previously been properly investigated.
This type of research is useful to gather detailed information about people's experiences. It doesn't tell us how common these experiences are, what causes them, or why these people in particular experienced them.
What did the research involve?
Researchers recruited 60 people who were regular practitioners of one of three types of Buddhist meditation, and who had experienced a challenging or negative experience linked to meditation.
They interviewed them about what they experienced, how they understood it, and what effect it had. They also interviewed 30 "experts" – mostly meditation teachers – about their understanding of what caused challenging experiences and how they could be managed.
The interviews were used to compile models of types of experience (described as "domains") and models of the factors that could affect people's likelihood of having this type of experience. Researchers say this element should only be understood as the opinions (often conflicting) of the teachers and experts interviewed, not as a definitive list of causes.
What were the basic results?
Researchers identified eight "domains" of experience from the interviews, which included both positive and negative experiences. These were:
- Cognitive, or related to thinking. This included changes in world view, delusions, irrational or paranormal beliefs, mental stillness, and change in the way people made decisions to do things (executive function).
- Perceptual, or related to information from the senses. This included hallucinations, visions or illusions, seeing lights and being more sensitive to sensory stimuli such as noise or bright light.
- Affective, or related to emotions. This included fear, anxiety, panic or paranoia, which were the most commonly reported group of challenging experiences; feeling blissful or very happy; depression or grief; re-experiencing of traumatic memories.
- Somatic, or related to body. This included feeling bursts of energy, changes to sleep patterns, feelings of pain, and both increased or released pressure or tension.
- Conative, or relating to motivation. This included changes in motivation, change in effort, loss of enjoyment of things usually found enjoyable and loss of interest in doing things.
- Sense of self, which included feeling a loss of boundaries between self and the rest of the world, a loss of sense of self.
- Social, which included difficulties in interacting with people, especially after returning from a meditation retreat or period of intensive practice.
Of the practitioners interviewed, 60% were also meditation teachers, and 41% of them said their challenging experiences followed meditation of 10 hours a day or more. This suggests they were more intensive practitioners than the average person doing perhaps half an hour a day.
The researchers said the experiences were likely to be caused by meditation, as they'd passed criteria designed to assess causation. These included whether they happened at the time of the meditation practice, whether they were linked to more intense practice, whether they receded when people stopped meditating and returned when they began again, and that they were consistently reported by people in the study.
Some experiences were directly caused by meditation, while others might be secondary – for example, fear at loss of sense of self – or even tertiary – for example distress at the way they were treated by a meditation teacher after having a challenging experience.
How did the researchers interpret the results?
The researchers say the results suggest that "meditation practices – on their own – may produce challenging effects, but the specific type of effect, as well as its likelihood, duration, and associated distress and impairment, is influenced by a number of additional factors."
They add that the results "should not be interpreted as conclusive" because the study is one of the first in its field.
Conclusion
Many people around the world find meditation can be helpful. However, as with most things, there can be downsides.
Some people – especially if they practice intensive meditation for many hours, such as on a retreat – have challenging or difficult experiences. Some religious teachers within Buddhism say these can be part of the path of the religious experience. However, for people doing meditation hoping to experience health benefits, without a religious context, these experiences can be unexpected and difficult to deal with.
There are limitations in this study that mean we shouldn't try to apply it too widely. The people interviewed were quite a select group – all had volunteered to talk about challenging experiences during meditation, the majority were meditation teachers, they were almost all white and highly educated (42% had a master's degree and 25% a doctorate). Their experiences may be different from those of the average person attending a meditation class or using a meditation or mindfulness app on their phone.
The serious, long-lasting nature of some of the negative experiences reported, however, are cause for concern. People who experience depression, suicidal feelings or other serious problems after meditation should seek medical help.
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