> On the first day of the retreat, Megan, a cheerful twenty-five-year-old with blue eyes and shoulder-length hair dyed a cardinal red, woke at four o’clock in the morning to the chiming of a bell. For a cumulative ten hours and forty-five minutes, she sat cross-legged on a rug, her spine erect, and tried to focus on her breath.

This to me sounds like the equivalent of trying to squat with a 200 kg weight on your back on day one when you have never trained with weights before.

In the context of Dharmic spiritual traditions, meditation (of various types) is intentionally aimed at facilitating a deconstruction of your normal sense of self and also induce altered states of consciousness. These should not be taken lightly.

If you are going to pursue it seriously, it's best to gradually ease into the tradition and respect the spiritual context in which these techniques are supposed to work. It's possible that the recommendations that Dharmic spiritual traditions have for ethics and devotional practices allow us to be more prepared for our experiences during mediation sittings and receive them in a more wholesome way.