Were you to ask me—I know you haven’t—about the
effectiveness of mindfulness meditation I would say that it appears to have
helped large numbers of people.
I have no experience with it. I do not practice it. I have
known a very small number of people who do, and they have attested that it has
benefited them.
Without further evidence I am inclined to believe that
mindfulness meditation, at the least, can do no harm. I have no reason to
dissuade someone from trying an exercise that might bring inner peace.
Mystical journeys into the depths of one’s soul have been
around for a long time. Many religions allow, if not promote them. Even a noted
atheist like Sam Harris touts spiritual self-actualization.
Dr. Miguel Farias, of Coventry University in England, saw
the issue in roughly the same way. And then something happened that caused him
to begin to question the value of meditation.
He recounts it in The Independent:
Aaron
Alexis was looking for something. He started attending a Buddhist temple in
Washington and learned to meditate; he hoped it would bring him wisdom and
peace. "I want to be a Buddhist monk," he once told a friend from the
temple. His friend advised him to keep studying,
and Alexis did. He learned Thai and kept going to the temple – chanting,
meditating. But other things got in the way.
On 16
September 2013, Alexis drove into Washington's Navy Yard. It was 8am. He'd been
working there not long before, and security let him in. Minutes later, the
security cameras caught him holding a shotgun, and by 9am, 12 people were dead.
Alexis killed randomly, first using his shotgun and, after running out of
ammunition, the handgun belonging to a guard he'd just killed. He died after an
exchange of gunfire with the police.
It took
only 24 hours for a journalist to notice Alexis had been a Buddhist, prompting
her to ask: "Can there be a less positive side to meditation?"
Western Buddhists immediately reacted: "This man represented the Dharma
teachings no more than 9/11 terrorists represented the teachings of
Islam," wrote one. Others explained that Alexis had a history of mental
illness. However, some noted that meditation,
for all its de-stressing and self-development potential,
can take you deeper into the recesses of your mind than you may have wished
for.
One notes with Farias that mindfulness
meditation did not offer anything resembling a treatment for Alexis’s troubled
mind.
Nevertheless, this all feels a bit anecdotal. Is there any
real evidence that would cause us to question the therapeutic value of
mindfulness meditation?
Farias went looking for research in the question. Among
other things, he found this:
In
1992, David Shapiro, a professor at UCLA Irvine, published an article about the
effects of meditation retreats. After examining 27 people with different
levels of meditation experience, he found 63 per cent of them had
suffered at least one negative effect and seven per cent profoundly adverse
effects.
The
negative effects included anxiety, panic, depression, pain, confusion and
disorientation. But perhaps only the least experienced felt them – and might
several days of meditation not overwhelm those who were relatively new to the
practice? The answer was no. When Shapiro divided the larger group into those
with lesser and greater experience, there were no differences: all had an equal
number of adverse experiences. And an earlier study had arrived at a similar,
but even more surprising conclusion: those with more experience also had
considerably more adverse effects than the beginners.
He also found some older observations by Arnold Lazarus and
Albert Ellis, two of the founders of cognitive-behavioral treatment noted this:
Amid
the small pile of articles on the topic, I found two by Arnold Lazarus and
Albert Ellis, co-founders of CBT. In 1976, Lazarus reported that a few of his
own patients had had serious disturbances after meditating, and strongly
criticised the idea that "meditation is for everyone". And Ellis
shared his misgivings. He believed it could be used as a therapeutic tool, but
not with everyone – and overall, that it could be used only in moderation as a
"thought-distracting" or "relaxing" technique. "Like
tranquilisers," he wrote, "it may have both good and bad effects –
especially, the harmful result of encouraging people to look away from some of
their central problems, and to refrain from actually disputing and surrendering
their disturbance-creating beliefs."
And he came upon the work of neuroscientist Willoughby
Britton:
Willoughby
Britton, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Brown University, is now trying
to map what she calls "the dark side of Dharma", an interest that
arose from witnessing two people being hospitalised after intense meditation practice,
together with her own experience after a retreat in which she felt an
unimaginable terror. And reading through the classical Buddhist literature, she
realised that such experiences are often mentioned as common stages of meditation.
"I
was woefully uninformed," she now admits. Meditation
retreats easily lead people to sense the world differently: the hearing gets
sharper; time moves more slowly. But the most radical change that can occur is
in what Britton calls "the narrative of the self". Try this out:
focus on the present moment, nothing else than the present moment. You may be
able to do it easily for a very short time. However, if you try extending this
"presentness" for one or two hours, and keep trying for some days,
your usual sense of self – that which has one foot in the past and the other in
the future – collapses. The practice may feel great for some, but for others it
is like being tossed around a roller coaster.
Other
unpleasant things can happen, too, as Britton discovered through interviews
with numerous individuals: arms flap, people twitch and have convulsions;
others go through euphoria or depression, or report not feeling anything at all
as their physical senses go numb. Still, unpleasant though they are, if these
symptoms were confined to a retreat, there wouldn't be much to worry about –
but they're not. Sometimes they linger, affecting work, child care and
relationships. They can become a clinical health problem, which, on average,
lasts for more than three years. What's more, meditation teachers
know about it – Britton says – but researchers are usually sceptical; they ask
about the psychiatric history of meditators who develop mental illness, as if meditation itself
had little or nothing to do with it.
Is mindfulness meditation risky or dangerous? If its adepts rationalize it by saying that it merely brings out underlying problems, at the least they are saying that it does not treat or cure.
It's important to make the distinction that Britton makes. It’s one thing to take a break from the
day in order to relax, clear your mind and focus on your breathing. But, once you make such
meditation a way of life you might end up not knowing who you are. Your sense of self,
she says, collapses.
Most of those who try to explain why mindfulness meditation
might produce negative psychological effects focus on the mind. They suggest
that when people get too deeply into their minds and that they discover things that
they would rather not have seen or known. The truth does not set you free; it risks destroying you.
But, there might be other ways to see the risks and
dangers of mindfulness meditation.
Following Britton’s idea, when meditation disconnects you
from your world, from your reality and from your network of social contacts, it
is not merely giving you access to your mind.
It causes you, as I would put it, to lose face. As I
have often opined, the reason you know who you are and continue to have a
coherent sense of self is that other people are constantly
affirming it. It might even be the case that surrounding yourself with familiar objects, feeling like you are at home, also affirms your identity and your sense of self.
You do not, in other words, descend into your mind to find
your Self. In that David Hume was certainly correct.
You find your Self, you know who you are, when other people recognize you and interact with you.
If meditation causes you to disconnect so completely from the world, it risks
crushing you… unless, of course, the practice provides you with a new identity
as a member of a new community of believers, a new religion.
5 comments:
re: If its adepts rationalize it by saying that it merely brings out underlying problems, at the least they are saying that it does not treat or cure.
I'll agree with this statement, both the rationalization as true, and the consequences that awareness of self is not simply helpful without learning new skills.
This subject also reminds me of an apparent quote from Dalai Lama, and this cautionary response.
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/11/15/why-the-dalai-lama-is-wrong-to-think-meditation-will-eliminate-violence/
“If every 8 year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.”
So we can accept things are not so simple, we have to consider the risks are similar to how drugs affects people, like alcohol can be said to reduce inhibitions, so a person with repressed rage is more likely to express that rage if he's triggered under the influence of alcohol.
So meditation might offer something similar, giving you access to fragmented subpersonalities that you don't have regular conscious awareness of, and so just like a married couple needs good communication skills, our fragmented selves may compete for attention and dominance and so in states like meditation, which includes a sense of surrender, or receptivity, that our lesser selves are going to arise and make us uncomfortable.
In parallel I remember reading a split between Freud and Jung was that Freud saw the unconscious as primarily dark, irrational and savage, so needed to be repressed, while Jung was more open to looking deeper into what his own unconscious had to say, and although it disturbed him, he had methods to not associate these unsconscious voices directly with self, but as archetypes, like human instincts to meet certain needs, so they could be heard for what they are, and not as something that needed to be followed. So whatever comes up from meditation might include some of this.
Probably both Freud and Jung would agree that individual awareness of the unconscious can be disturbing and frightening to individuals who don't know what they are experiencing.
I accept the idea that a social identity can be a useful and even necessary counter-balance against chaotic inner experiences that might arise from any "altered states" of awareness whether drugs or dreams or meditation.
But the other side is that all "culture" also contains its own necessary "cognitive dissonance", things you have to know to be true, but know can't be talked about because its not polite, and so whatever "fragmented inner selves" that exist, probably they are in part reflections of "fragmented social selves."
So its nice to believe in the hippy world "We're all people who need people", but there's also craziness going on in any culture, and so if your meditation is disturbing, it might be that something of your social self is disturbing and needs integration?
Anyway, I've never seriously tried meditation, but found journal writing as helpful for releasing emotion-tinged thoughts, and contrasting how they change over time. So if any single disturbing thought arises, I can step back and remember other states of mind.
But perhaps most people would rather keep their unconscious hidden, and stay within a closed community that all believes the same comforting lies that hold the inner chaos at bay.
I mock it perhaps, but more out of despair to see most people prefer comforting lies than stark truths
Psychologist Robert Moore calls this "protection against the numinous," ways we protect ourselves from inner forces, that might overwhelm us unprepared.
I've also read about the sense of a "container", using physical and ritual structures to separate ordinary and sacred time and space, and it makes sense this is best done in a religious community where others can help guide us through disturbing experiences.
The Chinese have an idiom, zou huo ru mo, that translates roughly as, running into fire, possessed by devils, to describe a kind of psychosis that can result from excessive or wayward meditation. Hearing it from time to time in my youth, I always felt that the expression meant that someone has dabbled foolishly in magic or magical thinking, a selfish pursuit, and made themselves wickedly ill. It seemed to me a poignantly face losing pathos.
It is risky if road to nirvana has a dead man's curve.
Read the book, A Death on Diamond Mountain by Scott Carney.
This man was definitely NOT helped by meditation. It killed him in the end.
But he took to extremes.
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