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> It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology

This is not something that meditation should ever be about. Meditation is about exploring the inner workings of your experience, in a way that ultimately aims towards equanimity. It requires some deep (and continuing!) experience in practical ethics (turns out if you really learn to care about other sentient beings around you, it's a lot easier to care about yourself too!), as well as a kind of intellectual knowledge or wisdom that's perhaps best associated today with the Stoic tradition, albeit surely not exclusive to it (even a cursory understanding of the Buddhist literature on vipassana should familiarize you with the same concepts, albeit of course phrased differently).

The idea of meditation as "fighting" with oneself should definitely raise many alarm bells, the practice is surely challenging enough on its own! (The "Dark Night of the Soul" is legitimately scary, especially if you're not told in advance that it might occur and that there's ways past it.)

> The "Dark Night of the Soul"

I've always wondered if there'd be less incidents of that if it didn't have such a sexy name.

As mentioned in a sibling thread, the real "dark night" is something that happens only after one is deep enough in the development of contemplation - both the Christian and Buddhist tradition are very clear about this. In fact, that's the reason it's so insidious: many inexperienced meditators get as far enough as reaching a stage of insight that subjectively feels a lot like the common folk trope of "sudden enlightenment". But the "dark night" comes right after that stage, and then they don't know that they're supposed to meditate more and look for the way out (through the insight of equanimity). It's a very understandable mistake, which is why it makes sense to warn about it.

I know what you're talking about, and I went through 3(!) major episodes of that kind. Of course, in the end I came out a much better person with a lot of weight lifted off of my shoulders.

Also, I was being very conservative with my comment and it is impossible for me to truly highlight my experiences without writing a book about it. I can say that I met a lot of very interesting people, educated and wise people who helped me a lot.

Actually, if you look at the old texts from Hindu Rishis and Swamis who lived throughout India - most of them talk about teachers appearing if you have the correct discipline.

This was my experience.

Thanks for sharing. I'm curious, did you consider at any point untangling those feelings with a psychotherapist?

Your experience resonates with me, but I came to a different conclusion. Meditation did open the doors to a more conscious awareness. That sounds grandiose but it isn't. It means having a practice of observing thoughts and emotions as they arise. As you describe, this can lead to more clarity into the order or nature of things. But meditation ends there, it is a tool to bring about conscious awareness. It does not "create" those thoughts or emotions.

I ask whether you've worked with a psychotherapist because I found myself in a similar predicament. I realized that my discontent had little or nothing to do with my "spiritual" practice. Simply put, the hustle and bustle of daily life is a sure way to keep many thoughts and emotions at bay. A meditative practice lets the stream pour through. For me meditation became a tool to bring those thoughts to the foreground and getting to know them. Through that process I get to know myself better. If necessary, I'll work with a psychotherapist to go through it.

This is how I feel as well. I think combining meditation with good psychotherapy is almost a must. Meditation allows things from subconscious to rise to the conscious, and psychotherapy allows you to work through them and resolve them.

I would guess that in the past, meditation teachers fulfilled the psychotherapist role. But an actual qualified therapist would be much better - especially now that meditation is a relatively common aspect of psychotherapy.

In fact, it seems like there is a lot of similarity generally between the role that priests of all kinds were supposed to perform in a community, and therapists. I wonder if it would be a good idea for humanity to essentially build a secular replacement to religion like that.

I'm sorry, but this is such an extreme example. You should not overdo anything, be it meditation, gaming, playing, reading, any sport, even drugs. Drugs also give you a state of mind that, when taken to the extreme, can harm your social life and well-being. That is not a problem specifically of meditation.

You can safely do anything up to the point that it benefits you. The moment your well-being suffers, or you neglect important parts of life, like friendship, you should stop.

That's what I did. I mean, my story is quite unique in that I never knew what meditation was (or religion, to be honest) and it just fell into my lap.

I think, looking back I can safely say that it did help me address a lot of emotional trauma. I didn't exactly have a gentle upbringing and I somehow entangled myself into all those memories.

Meditation helped me to clear the air, but as you say - it blindly became a somewhat of an addiction. So I stopped and started focusing on other things. And I still have a long way to go.

20 minutes twice a day for 5 years is not at all extreme

Absolutely, and this is the fallacy with tautological arguments like "You should not overdo anything".

The real question is how much is considered "overdoing", and then the argument falls back to a common-sense fallacy (until it doesn't work)...

From the article, it sounds like the author was spending more than just 40 minutes a day on their spiritual pursuits. They also didn't describe their actual practice.

This thread seems to be full of people trying to debunk meditation as some kind of dangerous dark art.

> I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.

Respectfully this is not an outcome that you can lay at the feet of meditation. It’s like blaming the catechism for the years you spent cut off from the world in a Benedictine monastery.

Meditation is an input, it is not the program.

It’s a common enough effect that it should be noted. Many spiritual people end up being detached from the world, for better or worse.

Detachment is a tenet of Buddhism, not an effect of meditation.

Certainly not in the sense of "overlooking anything else in your life". Moral living is a key component of successful dharmic/meditative practice according to Buddhist and other teachings.

Note that the tenet of Buddhism is non-attachment, not detachment. They are different.

Traditional sutric Buddhism was definitely about detachment (or “renunciation”); you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.

The presentation of Buddhism as chill and peaceful and all about meditation is a modernization to keep it alive after the white people found it.

> you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.

Possibly as an instrumental practice on the way to full buddhahood (and that would come after even the very advanced stage of arahantship, which basically means guaranteed complete enlightenment after your lifetime!). Surely not as mere penance or mortification of the flesh shorn of any contemplative practice, because that was very clearly criticized by the Buddha as misleading and useless when the Hinduists were doing it.

(Then again, IIRC, the Stoics talk about doing something very similar. The idea itself would not have been unfamiliar in the West.)

There are plenty of ways to meditate without adhering to Buddist belief and practice.

So no part of buddhism is about healthy re-integration into society? That seems troubling.

Pretty much every "meditation was bad for me" story seems to play out like this. The author basically abused meditation in the way that someone might abuse drugs.

Some people clearly are susceptible to being caught up in this kind of behavior. So I think the point in TFA: "meditation can have risks for some people" is valid. But that "some people" seems to be a fairly specific personality type, and most people could probably benefit from some mind-calming body-centering breathing exercises every day.

As a beginner, in zen, for example, it is advised against meditating alone as your practice may just turn to fortifying your own beliefs, views and opinions.

That's why there is a sangha - a group of fellow meditators who will tell you if you start drifting too much away and will advice you.

Don't practice alone. At least not in the beginning.

It’s interesting that everyone who has had a bad experience seems to have really tuned their practice up to 11. Silent retreats etc. seem to show up in these stories a lot

That is my impression as well. An ultra marathon is not a walk around the block even if they both commonly involve moving your legs.

Moving your legs might not be for everyone!

Yes but walking is rarely the cause that issue.

'Walking is not for everyone' and 'Exercise is not for everyone' is technically true since it is going to do more harm than good for a small subsection of society.

It is even more true that some people should not run marathons or ultra marathons, but it would be odd to notice that then write an article based on that evidence that 'walking is not for everyone' rather than 'marathons are not for every one'. And when I have read of serious consequences of meditation it is from doing the equivalent, or more than, an ultra marathon, but then the conclusion is the equivalent of 'walking is not for everyone'.

I'm always amazed at how many people are experiencing meditation for the first time who do this. It must be like suddenly being arrested and stuck in solitary among lifers.

On a related note, I've enjoyed my time so much staying at temples that the idea of being stuck in solitary for a long stretch is like a weird ambition! If you see my name in the news for a crime you'll know why…

My anecdotal experience is that this is a personality type. "Some is good, more is better" is just not a valid way to approach things, neither in quantity nor in intensity.

To inject another perspective from an outsider, to me it read like meditation actually was a positive experience for you. One of the implicit intentions and outcomes of meditation, at least in Buddhist and Hindu belief systems, is that it's meant to be a technique to _overcome_ wordly illusions and temptations (Maya) and attain enlightened state (Moksha) thus escaping the cycle of birth and rebirth into this world. Seems instead you reverted back to the _samsara_ (world filled with Maya) - although not necessarily for me to judge whether that is good or bad.

It was! Honestly, my comment is pretty raw and it doesn't give the full picture. But you are absolutely right. Meditation changed me and gave me insights about myself and life that I perhaps would have never encountered otherwise.

And you're correct about turning back to a "stale" way of being. This is literally what happened, so kudos to you for noticing. As someone once told me, "You're still young. You have time.".

And I need that time.

I would actually point you towards deepening your equanimity, as opposed to trying to renounce the world in this lifetime when you're basically nowhere near ready for that. If it feels like your way of being in the world is "stale", that's the pattern you should be working on. It should be fully possible to engage with the world, even and perhaps especially as an enlightened being.

I always wanted to write a book about what happened to me. The specifics of how spirituality came into to my life, because it was very unusual. And my story could captivate even the most dedicated of skeptics. It was that authentic.

But, for some reason - I was always very afraid to write such a book because it would mean giving away a part of "me". So, in this context, having more time means I can enjoy life without needing to preach a story that perhaps some people are not ready to hear. I don't know...

Funny thing is, I write for a living. Only web dev stuff opposed to digging deep into the psyche of this world.

My take away from your experience is that anything can be abused (in a sense that it becomes more bad than good for you), even meditation.

You are describing slimming down on things that didn't seem important to you within the context of an entirely new way of living. What exactly is the problem here? That you'd make different decisions in a different context? This is true for literally every human being in every significantly changed context, it has nothing to do with what that context is (i.e. meditation or literally anything else).

Yeah it feels like living in a hospital bubble to maximize health. I'd think we need to blend meditative view points (ability to keep some distance, to cool down) with normal daily lives.

Thanks for reading. You have an interesting perspective - and one filled with more diverse experience than mine, I'd be very interested in reading about it.

What sort of meditation practice did you do?

I was never initiated or dedicated myself to a specific practice. I can say today it was a mix of mindfulness and practical Vipassana.

I think one of the things people complain about when it comes to meditation is concentration. I was not one of those people. It came extremely natural to me.

Complaining about concentration is like starting to train soccer and complaining that you are not on a Messi level and dropping it.

Personally I agree that meditation isn't appropriate for everyone. But a specific issue about Vipassana is that it is marketed as a panacea, though historically it was developed as a practice to make monks out of householders. If it's causing detachment, it's working as intended. Anhedonia is the flip side of the end of suffering.

The same for me - I found mindfulness meditation easy and it’s concerning that it comes with all these “relaxation” “stress reduction” “empty your mind” memes. I don’t need that, I need a technique for the opposite of that.

Unfortunately there’s no good secular Tantra.

> The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time.

I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.

All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.

I would read up some more on psychology.

The problem, at it's core, is that the human mind is not a rational thing. Rational frameworks (at least the ones we have currently) do not play well with real-but-irrational things.

This is why early psychoanalysis and Gestalt works focused on symbolism as an abstraction of the human mind. Of course those areas are generally fraught with missteps and bad theory, but progress was still made.

If you want a real no-fluff experimentalist view of the psyche, look into psychonetics, a Soviet toolkit. To quote (from memory) from it's material:

"You may hear the sound of God talking to you. Do not be alarmed, even if you are an atheist. Remain calm and do not respond to the voice."

Psychonetics discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838445

Snake oil implies you're being sold something, doesn't it?

All I am saying is that meditation brought up a lot of things that I had buried in my past. Anger (being betrayed by people), hatred (being whipped with a leather belt by my step-father when I was a kid) - these are all real emotions that you have to process because in small little ways they do have an influence on your psychological behavior. And, thus, on the behavior of who you "think" you are as a person.

Meditation is a billions dollars business each year.

I've observed that sometimes "meditation" is used as a catch phrase for several different practices, especially those which the west adopted from eastern traditions.

I would not rush to dismiss all of it as disingenous just because some interpretation of it does not resonate with you. And it is ok if it doesn't resonate with you, we don't all have to agree on it.

There's a lot of scientific evidence for the benefits of mediation. You can ignore all of the noise about higher states of consciousness and suchlike and still receive documented benefits:

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-in-depth

Yep, this is my approach too.

I'm in the same boat as you.

I think there's a lot we don't know about human psychology, the brain and self-help practices, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works.

This 2017 publication sums it up nicely: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691617709589

> but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works.

"works" to what end?

The paper you've linked to (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589) points out methodological flaws in meditation-related research, ambiguities in the meaning of "mindfulness" etc.; it doesn't set out to prove that meditation doesn't 'work' (in the sense that it causes no effects).

In fact the paper acknowledges instances of meditation-induced adverse effects; if meditation didn't do anything at all, why would anyone experience even adverse effects? Clearly meditation does have effects.

If the definitions of the key terms and concepts in meditation is ambiguous, the body of scientific evidence of meditation doing anything is not particularly convincing.

What evidence have you seen? Every research paper in the first page of this search is evidence that it works.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=mindfulness+meditation

It seems to be a staple for therapists and psychologists to improve emotional intelligence. It gives you clarity about what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and what you're going to feel soon. From there it can be used for a whole host of other maladies: addictions, anxiety, depression, etc.

It’s not bad, but if you feel strongly against it, you’re not missing out on much. Overcoming the psychological resistance to meditate is probably not worth it.

> I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.

I don't know what world you're in, the 'meditation is eastern/new-age woo' seems to me very much the default outside of a certain Ram-Dass/Alan-Watts/Hari-Krishna crowd.

Why not say all exercise is fake? The mechanism isn’t very different.

You are very right to be Skeptical and much of what is being talked about when it comes to "Meditation" (both in this thread and elsewhere) should be taken with a "bucket full of grains of salt".

However, be careful to not "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Ignoring obvious woo-woo claims and just focusing on documented Health Benefits is the right way to approach it. Others have posted some useful links from NIH/NCCIH which gives you some good starting points for study.

Unfortunately, for that view at least, brain scans and experiments by notable scientists have shown incredible effects when meditators/meditation are put under the spotlight.

For example, from[1]:

> From studies with thousands of people, Ekman knew that people who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more open to new experience, more interested and more curious about things in general. They are also conscientious—reliable and efficient. “So I had expected that many years of meditative experience”—which requires both openness and conscientiousness—“might make them do better on this ability,” Ekman explains. Thus he had wondered if Oser might be better able to identify these ultra-fast emotions than other people are.

> Then Ekman announced his results: both Oser and another advanced Western meditator Ekman had been able to test were two standard deviations above the norm in recognizing these super-quick facial signals of emotion, albeit the two subjects differed in the emotions they were best at perceiving. They both scored far higher than any of the five thousand other people tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges—even Secret Service agents,” the group that had previously distinguished itself as most accurate.

That's just one of the many effects noted in the article.

[1] https://www.lionsroar.com/the-lama-in-the-lab/

n = 2.

If that's the best you've got I'll pass.

You should explain why that's significant.