The Case Against Meditation

Meditation has enjoyed an extraordinary rise in the West. Once associated primarily with Asian religious traditions, it has been transformed into a mainstream treatment for stress, anxiety and unhappiness. Meditation courses are offered by universities, hospitals and corporations. Mindfulness applications have millions of users, while psychologists and medical practitioners sometimes recommend the practice alongside conventional treatments for anxiety and depression.

There is substantial evidence that meditation can help some people. The problem is not that meditation is useless, still less that sitting quietly and controlling one's attention is inherently dangerous. The problem is that a psychologically powerful practice has frequently been presented as though it were almost entirely benign. The evidence accumulated over recent years suggests that this confidence was misplaced.

Willoughby Britton, a clinical researcher at Brown University, became one of the most prominent investigators of the problem after initially approaching meditation from a broadly sympathetic position. Her research led her to question some of the stronger claims made on behalf of mindfulness, particularly the assumption that meditation necessarily improves sleep. Research into meditators produced results considerably more complicated than the popular literature suggested.

Britton's own experience also changed her view of the practice. Intensive meditation was associated with disturbing alterations in her sense of self and her perception of the world around her. Experiences that might be interpreted positively within some Buddhist traditions as stages on a path towards diminishing attachment to the self can look very different when they occur unexpectedly in an ordinary Western practitioner who simply wanted relief from anxiety.

This distinction is important because Western culture removed meditation from the religious and philosophical system in which it developed. Traditional Buddhist meditation was not invented as a corporate stress-management exercise. It formed part of a much larger discipline concerned with suffering, attachment, desire and ultimately liberation from the ordinary conception of the self.

Whatever one thinks of those religious claims, they should make us cautious about presenting meditation simply as mental relaxation. A practice intended to produce profound changes in consciousness cannot simultaneously be assumed to have no capacity to produce unwanted changes in consciousness.

Western mindfulness largely avoided this difficulty by separating meditation from its original metaphysical objectives. The religious terminology disappeared, while the practice was promoted as a method for becoming calmer, healthier and more productive. This undoubtedly made meditation accessible to millions of people who would never have entered a Buddhist monastery, but it also encouraged the assumption that meditation was essentially a neutral psychological technology.

The emerging research on adverse effects challenges that assumption. Britton and researcher Jared Lindahl investigated difficult experiences reported by Western Buddhist meditators and meditation teachers. The experiences described included anxiety, panic, fear, altered perception, loss of motivation, depersonalisation, hallucinations and other significant psychological disturbances. In some cases the difficulties persisted long after the meditation itself had stopped.

There are obvious qualifications. Research involving people selected because they experienced meditation-related difficulties cannot tell us how frequently those problems occur among everyone who meditates. Nor does the fact that somebody experiences depression, psychosis or dissociation while practising meditation prove that meditation alone caused the condition. People who undertake intensive meditation may already differ psychologically from the general population, while mental illness ordinarily has multiple causes.

Nevertheless, the existence of serious adverse experiences is now difficult to dismiss. Subsequent research has found that unwanted effects occur in a meaningful minority of practitioners, although estimates vary considerably according to how researchers define an adverse effect, the population studied and the intensity of the practice. Intensive retreats appear to deserve particular caution, but difficulties are not confined exclusively to people meditating for many hours each day.

This should not be surprising. Almost every intervention powerful enough to produce psychological benefits has the potential to produce unwanted effects. Antidepressants have side effects. Psychotherapy can occasionally make people worse. Sleep deprivation can alter consciousness. Psychoactive drugs can produce dramatically different experiences in different individuals. There was never a compelling reason to assume that systematically altering attention and awareness would somehow be exempt from individual differences.

The comparison with medication is particularly revealing. Prescription medicines are accompanied by warnings describing known risks and circumstances in which patients should seek assistance. Patients are routinely told that adverse reactions are possible even when the statistical likelihood is small. Meditation, by contrast, has often been presented through the language of wellness, making adverse effects appear almost conceptually impossible.

This can create a second problem when practitioners do encounter psychological distress. Within a religious tradition, disturbing experiences may sometimes be interpreted as stages of spiritual development. That interpretation may make sense to someone who has voluntarily entered a disciplined religious practice under experienced supervision. It is much more problematic when applied automatically to an ordinary person experiencing insomnia, panic, derealisation or depersonalisation after beginning meditation for stress reduction.

Telling such a person simply to meditate more may be exactly the wrong response. Psychological deterioration should not automatically be reclassified as spiritual progress merely because it occurred during a practice associated with spirituality.

The modern enthusiasm for mindfulness also illustrates a broader tendency in Western therapeutic culture. Ordinary human distress is increasingly treated as a condition requiring an intervention. Stress, sadness, distraction and dissatisfaction become problems to be managed by therapy, medication, applications or techniques. Meditation fitted perfectly into this environment because it promised an inexpensive and apparently natural method of regulating unpleasant mental states.

There is a conservative objection to that assumption which has little to do with Buddhism itself. Not every unpleasant mental state is pathological. Anxiety can warn us that something is wrong. Dissatisfaction can motivate change. Grief is a natural response to loss. Boredom can drive activity and creativity. Human beings should not necessarily seek to extinguish every uncomfortable thought simply because a technique exists that may reduce its intensity.

Nor should meditation be dismissed merely because it carries risks. Millions of people practise forms of meditation without suffering serious harm, and many report genuine benefits. Short, moderate practices aimed at relaxation or attention are not equivalent to prolonged retreats or intensive attempts to dissolve ordinary patterns of consciousness. Dose, individual vulnerability, context and purpose all matter.

That is precisely why informed consent matters as well. Someone considering intensive meditation should know that unusual psychological experiences can occur. People with histories of serious psychiatric disturbance may require particular caution and professional advice. Teachers should be prepared to recognise when a student's condition is deteriorating rather than automatically interpreting every disturbing experience through a spiritual framework.

The larger lesson is that Western institutions should stop treating meditation as though it were simply exercise for the brain. It emerged from traditions that took its capacity to alter consciousness very seriously. Modern psychology retained the technique while often discarding the warnings, philosophical framework and close supervision that historically accompanied intensive practice.

Perhaps the older traditions understood something that the wellness industry temporarily forgot. If a practice is capable of changing how a person experiences thought, identity and reality, then it is capable of changing those things in undesirable ways as well.

Meditation therefore deserves neither the unquestioning enthusiasm of its promoters nor the alarmism of its strongest critics. It deserves the same standard applied to other interventions that affect the mind: evidence of benefit, honest acknowledgement of risk, attention to individual vulnerability and clear advice about when to stop.

For some people meditation may provide calm, concentration and relief from anxiety. For others, particularly at greater intensity, it may produce experiences they neither expected nor wanted. A responsible culture should be capable of acknowledging both facts at once. The problem was never that Westerners learned to meditate. It was that something psychologically powerful was too often marketed as though it could do good without also possessing the capacity to do harm.

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