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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

The entire article reeks of fear-mongering on the basis of rare and extreme anecdotes. It's good that people are investigating any potential side-effects that may exist, but until they find something that's conclusive and statistically significant, it's not worth worrying about.

Let's not forget that the psychological/physiological benefits of meditation have been well documented and demonstrated by numerous scientific studies. If you're someone considering trying out meditation, you have much more to gain than lose by giving it a shot.

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For an article that decries the lack of scientific research in this area it sure is eager to pull conclusions from anecdotes rather than remaining unsure. I mean, the article uncritically quotes someone as saying they stopped digesting their food because of a bad experience while meditating.

Honestly, it sounds like David is someone with depression and mild anxiety. If I'd abandoned as much of my life as he had to fruitlessly chase an experience which wasn't returning then I think the same might happen to me.

People get unwell for many reasons. I think it'd be pretty uncontroversial to say that the sort of people willing to go hardcore with meditation are probably more likely to be susceptible to these problems. In the absence of any alternative evidence I'll continue to think of horses not zebras when I hear hoofbeats.

That's not to say that there couldn't be an issue. Self guided CBT can be prone to misuse by practitioners but that's just a symptom of their underlying depression, not the fault of the CBT.

> The entire article reeks of fear-mongering on the basis of rare and extreme anecdotes.

At least in vipassana, the dark night period is considered to be a phase along the path or whatever. In other words, you basically can't reach enlightenment without having a complete mental breakdown and losing your ability to hold down a job and function normally in society, often for a couple years if not permanently. C.f. her interviews on the Buddhist Geeks.

You're not going to have issues if you're just meditating for fifteen or twenty minutes a day or whatever, it's only if you're doing this for hours every day and getting into the ego dissolution stages.

I feel that "at least in vipassana" is too broad to be useful – "vipassana" in Pali just means "insight", and there are an awful lot of different groups that lay claim to the term. That's especially true without more resources that support that claim. I'm no expert in this, but I have explored the meditation ecosystem a bit, and this is the first time I've heard the claim that the dark night is necessary.

Each tradition within vipassana has a slightly different roadmap, but they all seem to have some sort of 'completely losing your shit' stage somewhere in the middle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1...

See also Daniel Ingram's book, which Buddhist Geeks also talks about all the time: http://www.buddhistische-gesellschaft-berlin.de/downloads/ma...

I meditate two hours a day, every day. Mostly Zazen. I haven't experienced mental breakdowns. However, when I first started using imagery as a focal point, I would weep uncontrollably about mid-way through my meditation session. I think it was a release of pent-up emotion.

It lasted about a week and then stopped completely.

I sometimes start crying midway through a meditation (I do mostly Goenka-style mindfulness meditation). At this point, I just sort of see it as normal.

The article's tone is pretty questionable, but I think it may be highlighting a topic worth discussing.

Among people who meditate seriously (i.e. not over a corporate weekend retreat) this is hardly the first time I've heard mention of this sort of thing. Meditation produces some fairly obscure frames of mind, and some of those (especially when mixed with ill-health, or drugs, or sleeplessness) seem to have the potential to be worryingly dissociative.

My biggest complaint isn't the lack of statistical rigor - it's a fluff piece - but the lack of rigorous terminology. Mindfulness meditation as taught in the west is mostly about "being in the moment" and I've rarely heard these claims associated with it. Samatha and other 'detached' meditations are the ones I've heard blamed for dissociation, and the article seems to almost actively not differentiate between different practices.

The first half seemed to be about fear mongering but I found the last half more balanced. And discussing the Three Marks of Existence as the full breadth of what meditators are supposed to achieve was quite refreshing to read from a mainstream Western source.

Overall, what I got out of this article was that in some cases, problems can arise from engaging in contemplative practice. But these instances are rare and usually come about due to existing mental illness.

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