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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

In the midst of all of the "You're just doing Buddhism wrong!" comments, I would like to point out the PLOS One paper mentioned in the article, "The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists" (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...).

"In one of the only prospective studies to use qualitative methods to deliberately ask about adverse effects, Shapiro (1992) [67] found that 63% of meditators on an intensive Vipassana retreat reported at least one adverse effect, with 7.4% reporting effects negative enough to stop meditating, and one individual hospitalized for psychosis."

It appears that mindfulness-based meditation is being prescribed or promoted with no regard to the side-effects.

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An intensive Vipassana retreat is just that, an INTENSIVE retreat. I've meditated for ~10 years. I don't think anyone's FIRST meditation experience should be a 10-day Vipassana retreat. I don't think anyone's first silence experience should be a 10-day Vipassana retreat. That's like going to a Navy Seal bootcamp when you've never exercised in your life.

A lot of Buddhist or meditative practices also have close student-teacher relationships. You should have an active human coach guiding you through the process, because shit comes up, people have different mental health setups (just like a physical therapist has different workout plans for people with injuries and physical conditions) and if it's just DIY experimenting, you can encounter something and get screwed.

A good example of this is the Tim Ferris podcast where he did a 10-day Vipassana retreat and decided to fast for a certain number of days to amplify the effect and almost had a complete mental breakdown. It worked out and led to a very vulnerable podcast down the line (https://tim.blog/2020/09/14/how-to-heal-trauma/), but these are things to keep in mind when going into deep waters.

> "A lot of Buddhist or meditative practices also have close student-teacher relationships. You should have an active human coach guiding you through the process"

This seems to also open the door to a lot of fraudster con-man types and cults, so worth being wary of that relationship imo.

The author seemed to have experienced a bit of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization which I've felt before and can be quite scary.

I knew picking that example would derail the discussion.

I don't think it derailed it, I think it actually highlighted a very important point.

You're right that disregard for the side-effects are common, but this disregard is also often in discussions where the dosage is low and so probably fairly safe.

Dose always matters, and this should be more widely communicated for meditation practice.

So while I don't think it's valid to extrapolate results from an intensive retreat (high dose) to casual meditators that meditate maybe 20 mins a day (low dose), pointing out the relevance of dosage is insightful.

I mean... That's exactly what the "you're just doing Buddhism wrong" crowd is saying.

There's a vast variety of methodologies and approaches to meditation, that come with their own effects, some bad some good. This is all quite well documented among the practitioners over the centuries. And beyond documentation, that's also why it's heavily suggested that one have guru or someone to actively guide and judge "progress", at least among the Hindus.

The study was looking at guided meditation which consisted of 60% of it’s sample. So, suggesting a guide on it’s own doesn’t solve the issue.

Having better guides is exactly what will solve the issue though. Unless you're making some kind of inherent argument, where all meditation is inherently nebulous and impervious to methodological approaches.

The guides may or may not be qualified. So the real problem is the lack systematization of it in meditation, more specifically a more reliable metric to judge "guides". As the extensive literature on meditation quite clearly outlines the limitations and dangers of various practices.

Tantra for example is quite clear about the dangers of practicing it.

Suggesting the guides themselves are the problem is a different testable idea. I am not saying it’s wrong, but without knowing what guidance is better there isn’t anyway for someone to implement it.

> promoted with no regard to the side-effects.

Many people are blind to the inherent risks of anything which can be labelled as "natural". We've been socially conditioned through health campaigns and advertising to believe that if something is "all natural" or part of a certain "organic" lifestyle it literally cannot precipitate any kind of harm. Those kinds of "appeal to nature" arguments are all around us, constantly. And many people see meditation as falling within the scope of "natural remedies". So it's not surprising that people would, by their conditioning, believe meditation to be innocuous.

The general theme I'm seeing in this thread is that vipassana is not for beginners, not a panacea, and not representative of buddhism/meditation/mindfulness as a whole. There are multiple people downthread comparing intensive vipassana retreats to diving head first into high impact sports.

The problems that the OP experienced appear to be directly related to this dynamic (doing a 10 day retreat a mere two years into meditative experience, and characterizing his practice as gateway drugs), whereas several comments are pointing out the importance of the eightfold path (a system aptly named after eight pillars of conduct) as a prerequisite, or suggesting less "hardcore" east asian traditions.

On a more fundamental level, I'm actually surprised nobody brought up yet the basic fact that sitting on your ass for 12+ hours per day for days on end gets physically painful. Just google "vipassana back pain".

My takeaway would be: don't assume all meditation techniques are the same. Vipassana retreats in particular strike me as quite extreme commitments.

Vipassana is not like a week at a spa.

No ten-day meditation retreat is for beginners. I had been meditating daily for ten years before I ever did a seven-day retreat.

You certainly don't need a ten-day retreat. Even a one-day retreat is rather extreme, for a beginner. A two-hour session, starting with instruction, and ending with 30 minutes of practice, is a reasonable way to approach Vipassana as a beginner.

> Vipassana is not like a week at a spa.

Right, I was conflating two separate points there: one is definitely about lengthy extreme programs, but another is that some people mentioned that it's better to spend more time with other forms of meditation (e.g. samatha) to develop other aspects of the eightfold path first, before getting into vipassana.

That's kinda funny because there are thousands of different ways to do Buddhism, and there are just as many, if not more, ways to do mindfulness and meditation.

For this reason I think it'd be really good on the one end to start pairing up terms and systems with psychologies and gifts/preferred methods of perception, in order to make these systems more effective...

And on the other end to build comprehensive guidelines for the ethics of promotion of mindfulness and meditation. Be Like Me is not a suitable ethical standpoint from which to prescribe such a tool or system.

10-day vipassana retreat was worst decision i did in my life lol

well please elaborate, now I'm curious!

see sibling comment reply

Why do you feel like this? I'm wondering because I'm considering going on one next year.

So after coming back, I had the opportunity to speak with some old yoga teachers who had been around for a while and studied how modern organizations like the "Vipassana" one by Goenka was created. Vipassana used to be only administered to people who were already very 'fit' to meditate 6-8 hours and who were ready to 'go deep'. Think years of training at an ashram, doing all the marshal arts/yoga things. (think shaolin/ashtanga yoga, not that easy lululemon fluff). I also spoke to a chinese massage person who dealt with lots of martial arts students (these guys were tough) and some had come back from the center _fuucked up_ in their nervous system.

I think its a symptom of our western culture where we can try things out without the necessary 'pre-conditions' or prerequisites taken care of.

If your comfortable sitting cross-legged for around 2-3 hours upright, no back support, and dont have knee pain after a session like that, also have no stress and no psychological issues... then perhaps its for you. Some people seem to benefit from it... others, it makes them 500% _more_ crazy than before.

I also hear its great for criminals whose minds are so 'set' in their ways its hard to mentally break through to them. some videos have been made about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phHib5VaCeE

I think for lots of the HN crowd, we are type 'A' learning personalities who can endure a lot of pain pushing through to achieve knowledge etc... however, pushing through against your own inner psyche is usually a bad idea, you want to gradually go up against it, and use bodily medidations like yoga to work with the Trauma. Sitting in a static position for 6-8 hours and doing intense absorption technics like the OP Article, can be a recipe to set off a bomb in your nervous system. I think a better solution for a lot of people is to see a therapist to talk about mental health (finding a good one is hard in itself), and then add in sustainable exercise routines to stay healthy.

I'm also shocked by "you're doing it wrong" comments, "get a teacher" advices (this is addressed in the OP article as well), and a barrage of anecdotal evidence.

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