My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.

That being said, I think mindfulness in western countries skips a lot of Buddhist teachings, which are in large part designed to help deal with this kind of experience. I highly suggest that anyone that is going down this path seek out teachers that have experience and can be of aid. There are pragmatic aspects of it that go beyond meditation and in my opinion are just as important if not more so.

And just to contextualize this, I’m a Buddhist. I live in Thailand and it’s something that is part of my normal life. As such, it’s rare the I’m meditating outside of a temple and I have easy access to a whole host of teachers. I would urge caution around retreats and other intensive practices. Mindset and setting are extremely important and should be considered carefully.

I’ve had a lifetime to learn to live like this and I would not want to see anyone dropped in the deep end without proper preparation.

1) avoid problems like this, and

2) clean up problems like this when they do happen.

And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamboo tube." And so on.

I put together a system for solo practitioners working with absolutely minimal oversight in 2015. People doing it since then, I talk to them roughly once (on average) to check they're doing it right, then don't hear back from them for years until they're getting into the weird "foothills of enlightenment" end stage stuff -- if they make it that far. Most don't, they plateaux. Which is fine, that's a good, safe place to be.

Instructions here. There's a bunch of other stuff in that same directory structure. It's fine.

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/...

The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.

The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.

I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.

> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.

The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.

I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!

It's much better to start with a simple meditation practice or go on a shorter retreat (1-3 days), build up a base and periodically dip your feet in deep waters. There are too many people in the west who treat it like an extreme sport and get burned out in the process.

It reminded me of when Tim Ferris decided to go on a 10-day meditation retreat after a multi-day fast and almost had a full mental breakdown.

"60% of the participants reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers"

"Britton theorized that the effects of mindfulness might follow an inverted U-shaped curve, where at some point therapeutic returns not only diminish but mindfulness could have negative side effects"

I have been meditating 20 years, and I have gone trough intensive retreats, so I share.

If you read Buddhist sutras, you find out that Buddha experienced similar and worse while meditating. Going into horrible states of mind at some point is what almost everybody goes trough if they meditate intensively at some point. That's not Buddhism going bad that's what Buddhism has been for 2000 years. If you stay in monasteries long enough, you see monks recovering from bad experience, even some rare cases who are permanently broken somehow. That's rare but it happens.

If your image of intensive meditation is "maintaining constant calm", or that "middle path" means no storms just the calm, you are mistaken. Human's don't naturally pay attention into their inner workings as much as they do in intensive meditation, something will happen. That's why you are doing it.

Living normal hectic life and doing intensive meditation retreats can be a problem. If you live in a monastery or similar place where you meditate 3-4 hours daily, attending intensive retreats is more balanced experience. Taking one year sabbatical and doing nothing but meditation was important step for me.

This was a couple of years before the "meltdown". While meditation surely may have induced mental health issues, the drugs and alcohol probably didn't help.

What stands out is that he had mental health issues and some point that grew worse, sadly. It temporally correlated with meditation but that doesn't mean it was predominantly caused by it.

The meditation may have triggered things, sure, but my guess is he likely would have had a meltdown also if he went all-in on some other activity for 10 years.

After all, with multiple years (4, 6?) between the first dissociative symptoms and the break down, you could also argue that the mediation may even slowed or alleviated the effects of the mental disorder until some threshold was hit.

Most things are fine when done in moderation, most things are bad when taken to the extremes.

"13 days to go" suggest this was some crazy regimen, if you would do that to prisoners I bet it's actually considered torture.

If I read about his past, it sounds to me like he might have some underlying mental health problems that would be good to address. Not by guru's, retreats, or pseudoscience, but psychologists and other professionals.

I think he does come to the right conclusion that the extremes can be very harmful. They are not that far from cults, always some guru or leader, then many people blindly following their weird practices based on absolutely nothing but pseudo science and believe, with a tendency to get more extreme (and more expensive!) the deeper you get into them.

Meditation is fine if done in moderation and as long as you don't expect it to solve all your problems. It can help with certain things, it also won't solve serious mental problems.

Working through mental health problems is no fun and a lot of work with many ups and downs, there is no easy solution, there are no shortcuts. Get professional help, get therapy, get medication if needed, be kind to yourself, and just keep working at it one step at a time.

Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight...

In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible author) talks about people going insane from ill-advised meditation methods of suppressing body and mind.

It seems like these early 'mystical' offshoots around meditation-heavy religion typically don't typically involve or speak well of a lot of meditation, truthfully. Zen Master Bankei didn't want his monks to meditate at all.

The problem is that meditation is a cargo-cult. Early in the history of Dzogchen, they had trekcho, "cutting straight through", not a heavy emphasis on meditation. Early in the Zen tradition, they had precious few words to say anything well of meditation at all.

Zen Master Foyan wrote, maybe around 1200ish?:

> Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish!

As someone into this stuff, there is kind of something there--it's the advaita vedanta like realization that this is it, the eye never sees itself. It's hard to describe in a few words, and has nothing at all to do with vipassana or jhanas. Alternatively, I think it has to do with switching to the floodlight perception of the right hemisphere as the default resting state of the mind. The left hemisphere tends to over-dominate because it works on positive-feedback--the more it engages with something, the more it wants to engage. It gets overheated and starts to turn its tunnel vision into a primary aspect of ordinary awareness and places a really heavy overlay on direct experience. The right hemisphere does the more typical negative feedback/diminishing marginal utility thing most of the time.

I'm a big fan of direct-path teachings like Loch Kelly gives. I think heavy meditation, especially vipassana, is just a cargo-cult hazing.

Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shrooms and for the same reasons. There are a lot of these people on hn and in the tech world, overachievers high on the neuroticism scale. A normal person doesn’t meditate more than 30 minutes a day. That alone is a symptom of deeper issues.

I remember reading that while training for an ironman and getting a bit spooked. But then I realized that the folks who suffer from OTS are taking it to such an extreme. This article reminded me a lot of that - it sounds like you can take anything too far. At the 99.99th percentile, probably any healthy activity can become an obsessive act that can ruin your life. But anywhere in between the 50th and 99th percentile it's probably still a good thing.

Also, I'm a bit suspicious of the quiet references to alcohol and drugs. I'm far from a tee-totaler, but I recognize that one man's casual drinking or smoking (i.e. THC) is another's depression or anxiety-inducing dose.

Mindfulness meditation made me feel better during and for about half an hour afterward, but it wasn't "me again": it was some altered state that not only wasn't addressing the underlying issues (that I've since made great strides on in psychotherapy). I felt periods of great calm, but it was as if I was taking some drug to achieve an altered state.

I read a lot about how to "bring the meditative state into daily life", and that only made the anxiety worse when it broke through, because it sensitized me to focus increasingly on internal physical phenomena. Yeah, I tried not to "judge" them, to neither anticipate their arrival and to just observe their rise and fall, but the observing meant attention, and the attention magnified them.

I finally beat the anxiety mostly for good by acknowledging and facing the problems in my life. I haven't even solved much of them yet, but I'm pretty honest about it both to myself and the people close to me.

It requires a much slower progression that is usually done with a more experienced mentor, who will guide you through the process and help you when you encounter these issues.

These techniques are powerful and helpful and can definitely help alleviate stress and anxiety, but like in the Nietzsche quote

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you”

The way we teach it in the west does not equip us for when the abyss gazes back

> According to Ingram, one must continue to meditate through these awful experiences until reaching a deeper state of awakening. He makes it clear that the consequences of stopping are severe.

Ron Hubbard himself couldn't have stated it any better. He'd be proud.

Yeah, I'm sure that has nothing to do with psychotic breakdowns.

It sounds crazy already. No wonder it turned out badly.

> For the past several decades, a growing flood of books, articles, and teachings has advanced theories about the practice of mindfulness which are highly questionable and—for anyone hoping to realize the end of suffering—seriously misleading. The main aim of this book is to show that the practice of mindfulness is most fruitful when informed by the Buddha’s own definition of right mindfulness and his explanations of its role on the path.

[1] https://www.dhammatalks.org/ebook_index.html#right_mindfulne...

The stoics, buddhists, and taoists all had a similar idea of moderation of two extremes. The similar idea of having a dark night of the soul because you are imbalanced in some way leading to a crisis of faith. Even Shugendo/Yamabushi practices are a long extended journey where meditation is met with physical exhaustion. Thus it balances itself out.

It’s a lifelong practice and seems the awareness is doing its job of making one aware of the pain to work through. I don’t think Buddhism is the problem here, the over attachment to it seems to have left the author with suffering.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jennifer-stranges-family-awarde...

I don’t know what happened to the OP. Maybe he was experiencing psychosis, maybe he was in some stage of enlightenment, maybe he’s the victim of a harmful practice.

But I do know he took mindfulness to an extreme that only a tiny fraction do.

Anything in excess can kill you. Even drinking water. The 10 to 20 minutes per day many mindfulness meditators do doesn’t seem likely to have the same effect as experienced by the OP.

Meditation teacher !== experienced meditator. Author seems to have been hanging out in a McMindfulness milieu, with lots of people who are "professional" practitioners, and in an environment where lots of people treat meditation as something divorced from the Buddhist religion.

I was annoyed when my teacher insisted that Buddhism was not a "science of mind", or some body of secular practices; it was intrisically religious. I tried for a decade to live with that, but eventually I gave it all up.

They would get angry or hungry or grumpy, but 'they' were a step away from this person that was hungry or angry or whatever.

It's like they had zoomed in and drawn some separations between the various layers of consciousness that we consider all one and the same.

Fascinating, but not something I'm interested in doing.

if this were not true then we would have teaching and advancements in human society from many fully realized beings. they would be able to realize anything in physics or the way and causes to any desired effect in real life. but we obviously dont have this. instead what we have left are platitudes and falsehoods which are designed to confuse the opponent.

If your goal is to develop yourself to go beyond every limitation that you ever believed about yourself, to transcend every piece of identity that you ever identified with in order to reach enlightenment, then it is best to look for a teacher that:

1. has achieved the goal you are after. (A teacher that practices what they preach) 2. is willing to take you as a student 3. You are willing to commit to their path and working through the difficulties like the ones outlined in the post

Note that this is explicitly about no longer identifying with your ego, and will be a very difficult, and sometimes dangerous road. Otherwise, then take the advice of the article and just do a little here and there.

Just don't conflate the two things, and - especially if you are doing the latter - definitely don't go around shopping for a bunch of different methods and try to practice them all as the author did. Grab a method and stick with it, if it's not for you then chose another one and stick with that, but don't fall into the trap of trying to create your own medicine from the vastness of teachings and methods.

Every couple months when it takes an hour or two to fall asleep, I get this otherworldly feeling; like a specific part of my body is growing unbelievably heavy, large and uncontrollable. It feels like this body part will end up crushing me, suffocating me, imploding, etc. It feels like it's happening to me, but I am not in my body. I start to feel emotions start to wash by me, it starts with curiosity, shifts to discomfort then quickly on to anxiety, fear, depression, terror, and once the last three in a horrifying mix.

It started when I was young, probably 10 or 12, and has slightly decreased over time. I'm closer to 25 now, and it's lost it's hold slightly. Two or three times it got me out of bed and pacing around grabbing things for fear of death or an unimaginable irrational fear of my swelling tounge. Currently I have a high level of control over it, I can choose whether I want to dive in or what level of emotion I want to experience.

Is this an accidental over application of meditation? Is it dementia at an extremely young age?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

But this is pretty tough issue, or balance, because meditation does help people, so how do they get exposed if there is no organization? People have to get started somewhere, so some weekend meditation courses or sittings are good for an organization to 'organize' and get the word out.

The big mistake is people jumping right into these long week long silent retreats. Those are supposed to be for advanced meditators, not right off the couch. Like doing a 10K right from the couch, don't do a week long retreat from nothing.

Meditation is one way to practice mindfulness. It’s NOT the only one. It’s by no way the silver bullet for all your problems. It’s also not a technique recommend for beginners. No Buddhist master would recommend it for you, if you haven’t studied the Buddhist teachings sufficiently.

Above all, Buddhist meditation should always be practiced in accordance with the Buddhist teachings, first and foremost with compassion in mind. Abuse any technique and it will bring harm, especially on yourself.

It at least sounds like they were unaware of the differences, and unaware that the concentration-based styles are quite well documented as tending to produce various phenomena (glorious or horrifying and all points between and beyond) on the route.

Even ignoring "awakening kundalini" types of things that other commenters mentioned, this is where most practitioners would say this kind of experience is why it helps to have a "guru" for assistance.

"Yet, somewhere six or seven years into my practice, whatever progress I was making petered out. I was experiencing a growing sense of bodily agitation and began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Looking back, it was also during this time period that I had my first dissociative experiences, in which elements of my sense of self became separated in a way that impaired my ability to function."

Also, recreational drugs may introduce negative experiences in your meditation journey.

Buddhism is a religion associated with a way of life and a culture. It's not something a businessman does on a "weekend retreat" as "mindfulness practice" to get back in the rat race refreshed.

I say that because a while back I started using CBD oil (yes, I bought into awesome benefits in listicles!) AND it triggered the worst 3 weeks of my life ever! Endless stream of panic attacks, paranonia and Depersonalization-Derealization [1].

I'm never touching CBD again!

[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization-derealizatio...

Having had almost life ruining psychosis for pandemic related reasons in between then and now, reading this makes me glad I didn't and keen to learn more on this side of the issue.

The MKS[1] one hundred years ago spoke of crude tools for developing “mindfulness” and allowing the “master mind” to emerge (you discover you are not alone in your mind.) superficially this is blamed for positive thinking as “the secret”. The “secret” is others can hear your thoughts and take mischievous (or benevolent) interest in our interests.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Key_System

The thing they don't seem to get is that what they are experience may just be normal consciousness to many people who don't have a mind that is continually discriminating and sorting. I take more as an indictment of the disconnection our culture creates in people than the practice itself.

(Note that I rarely meditate anymore, but it did help me through some difficult times)

https://www.aypsite.org/38.html - self pacing

https://www.aypsite.org/13.html - deep meditation

They might want to read "Running on Empty" - the book notes that various forms of emotional neglect can have effects like trauma, but this is often overlooked by psychologist and therapists. I enjoyed the part in the article where the author said they finally allowed themself to be angry and wanted to ask "who should that anger really be directed at?"

Finally, after hours, the attack smoldered and I drifted off. It was the worst night of my life.

The next morning, while making coffee...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34855673

There is no need for a "meditation market", and the term itself is absurd. Can I make a shameless plug for Vipassana here? In the tradition of the Buddha, the Vipassana school offers classes and retreats worldwide, and they do not charge a time; only accepting donations and service in return. dhamma.org

It's kinda like people who are in reasonably healthy mental shape suddenly decide to run an ultramarathon of the mind. I'm not sure if OP may have the correct expectations.

I've also done many healing modalities, including somatic experiencing.

From my perspective, we have taken "Buddhism" and "meditation" and we have done what us Westerners almost always do: we boil it down into "stuff that does stuff" and "everything else".

We are so intensely and impatiently interested in "doing stuff".

So, we have taken a tradition/religion that has existed for thousands of years, includes many practices and parts, and we have pulled out the part that "does stuff", and we call that mindfulness.

But, if you really look at the tradition itself, particularly in non-Zen forms of Buddhism, what you often see is what are called "preliminary practices". Used to, if the Westerner goes east in search of meditation instruction, he or she has to get special permission to skip the preliminary practices.

And what our preliminary practices? In the West we call that therapy.

So, this really important thing, that one must do therapy and what they would call in the East "purification" before one is ready to start meditating has been tossed aside because it doesn't yield immediate results like a few days of mindfulness.

In addition, the traditions are almost totally unaware of our understanding of trauma and the best they can do is use the language of "demons".

So, I'm aware of "mindful-based stress reduction", but I'm not intimately familiar with it. It doesn't make sense to me why someone would use mindfulness to reduce stress or in place of a therapeutic or trauma modality.

I mean, sometimes it is way more comfortable to not be aware of things than to be aware of things. And, in my experience, becoming aware of oneself is just a bunch of not fun realizations, including realizations like "I'm a people pleaser" or "I always sabotage relationships in a similar way".

These realizations are not fun because just seeing the truth or the pattern doesn't change it, so you sit and watch yourself doing the same shit over and over and not quite having the power to change it... That requires much deeper meditation and awareness.

At any point in this process, one can become too aware and too burdened with one's issues, and that can result in all kinds of stuff including breakdown and psychosis.

At the end of the day, meditation and mindfulness and all the rest is basically just the matrix movie... Don't take the red pill unless you really want the red pill because sleepwalking through life unaware of one's issues and happily eating the steak that isn't there is sometimes more pleasant.

Meditation is for those who want the truth, regardless of whether it feels good or not. For everyone else, there's therapy.

You need to solve your life issues in first place to do whatever you want.

Stay, doing nor thinking nothing about it? No, the problems is still there.

You don't make it go away with your wasting time doing nothing like a Buddha (Buddha has no life issues to solve).

[1] https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/i-believed-the-hype-and-d...

Sample: https://twitter.com/a_yawning_cat/status/1329310154630696960...

But I can say for sure that I am able to replicate the experience if I start meditating.

Mindfulness employed as part of a spiritual practice however, should be practiced within the right context and with the right guidance. You have to remember that mindfulness is Buddhist in origin and, as a practice, sits within a whole web of practices that all support and interpenetrate. You absolutely cannot remove mindfulness from the other aspects of the path. It makes no sense to divorce it from right livelihood, right effort etc.

Tldr. If you want spiritual progression, respect the tradition. That might sound a little conservative, but this is my own take on it at least. Jumping into a long retreat with no prior exposure to this amount of meditation and without a wider practice to ground it in, is not wise imho.

Meditation is probably fine. I don’t see a reason to reject the null hypothesis that it is no more dangerous than any other intense pursuit. Work and capitalism probably have 10,000x the psychiatric casualty rate. In fact, open plan offices are probably more dangerous than an LSD trip once per year (though I don’t recommend the latter except in a controlled therapeutic setting).

Hoochi-mama! Hoochi-mama!

Guess how I overcame them :-) yep, you guessed, meditation - but it took time. I no longer have panic attacks but it was not a smooth journey. I also made big life changes and spent a lot of time in nature, coupled with medications.

On reflection I was pushing myself hard and was filled with ego - I'd had difficulties in the past before I started meditating and was massively overworking myself. A crash was inevitable. I am humbled by what I passed through - and that in itself is a victory.

Do I think meditation 'caused' the panic attacks, no, it brought to the surface something that was pretty much inevitable because of how I was living my life. Should I have treated meditation more respectfully and seriously. Yes, for sure.

Meditation is not a miracle drug, a panacea or a therapy. It should be viewed as the journey out of suffering - and that path by its very nature is likely to confront you with difficult experiences. If I can offer a tip or two from my own experiences :-

AGAIN: Meditation is not a miracle drug, a panacea or a therapy.

Serious meditation is a serious endeavour, like free-climbing. You should never take it lightly and you must be serious about it. When you take something seriously you do so with awareness of the dangers and the hardships you may face.

You may have genuinely very difficult experiences as the OP did, that is why it's important to have an experienced and wise Teacher. They can help you face these experiences and help you to grow stronger by doing so.

Take your time, the path is a long path, don't try for Nibbana by Tuesday, instead look for small concrete improvements and build on them over time. Be humble and realise that you have a lot of stuff to deal with and it takes time.

NEVER EVER lie, omit or exaggerate on an application form. This is how meditation teachers determine the risk of you having an experience you can't deal with. This was mentioned in the article, but I can say for sure that the teachers of Goenka retreats do try their hardest to not accept people on causes who might have difficulties. They also do drill in the idea that it's a serious undertaking.

If you have a difficult experience and can face it, even a little, your mind is stronger for it. The next time it happens maybe you can face it a little more.

I hope this article does not put people off meditation, it turned my life around. But at the same time, I hope people can take away the seriousness of such endeavours as the article does highlight.

When something that over a 100,000 people a year do any activity there will always be a tragic story. Be it running a marathon, boating or driving cars. Of course we should do everything possible to avoid that happening. But we do need to be realistic and acknowledge that tragedies do happen even when people have the mental equivalent of a driving license, air bags, seat belts and drive carefully.

Wishing you all happiness.

Good to see so much sensible awareness and respect of the powerful nature of these practices here in the comments! It gives me hope.

Also, I really wanna wholeheartedly agree with what one person said which was that the people are probably not getting a lot of exercise during that time. I think physical activity exercise is so essential to mental health and the body's ability and the mind's to regulate itself. Our bodies were evolved and designed to require certain amount of movement every day, or fairly fucking regularly and without that I mean, you just get mentally ill, really. I mean, mostly. I mean you need regular physical activity to maintain good mental and emotional and I believe energetic health. So the physical activity is one thing that’s really important and actually one main point of hatha yoga is to provide that physical activity foundation and to prepare the body to be able to support those kinds of meditation practice.

I think another thing that’s happening is our solar system is passing through the galactic current sheet so there’s more high energy, radiation and particles impacting The earth, effects on the magnetosphere as well as an uptick in solar events affecting earth and so all of the stuff will drive people a little bit more crazy.

Add that to as other comments, said how these meltdowns seem to happen after intensive‘s. Also, consider the economic aspects of these intensive that are normally high outlay sort of transformation type workshop things that are at least from one level, essentially designed to generate a large amount of money from participants. I’m not saying everyone who creates those things is shady at all, but I think there is that there’s an economic aspect of those things that is intensive as well, and sometimes that probably coincides with less Karen attention to authentic and safe practices, and consideration towards the participants… and in any case for someone joining that it’s not the same as if you’re just going to yoga class three times a week or less for 90 minutes or whatever.

People don’t realize how powerful some of these simple practices are and they’re playing with things they don’t know how to control and they don’t know what they are and things get out of hand. So doing those intensively day in and day out, the sort of like the energetic equivalent of basically taking people to Everest base camp and saying “well you know you’ve seen the intro video and here’s a map we will be with you in radio contact. you’re ready to go! up there is your direction.”

The other thing I think is going on is that the Indians as in people from the subcontinent, you know Hindus and others from from India, I think well aware of the powerful effects on subtle energy that these types of practices can have and people are playing with energies and abilities and information that they have no framework to understand or interpret, and they have no ability to control, or even the awareness of what they’re doing on an energetic level. And things are bound to go wrong, especially the sort of commoditization of commercialization of a lot of these practices, at least in western countries although it’s probably happening in many places, things are bound to go wrong in that case, where these powerful techniques are divorced from the whole context of teaching and awareness for what they’re actually doing, and how do use them in a safe and sustainable manner. That may sound to woo for some people but it’s real and I think some of what is happening is it by participating in the such practices people are unwittingly unlocking and plugging into these sorts of abilities, energies, information, and they don’t have the training or the framework or the ability to be able to handle that and so they go nuts.

By the sixth day I was hallucinating gold and purple snakes slithering out of my belly onto the ground around me.

By the eighth day I had visions of a cloud island vista with animals the world had never seen. They were cautious but friendly, and rode with me until the end of my journey that day.

By the twelfth day, I could see nothing but heard the most beautiful music. Melodies and harmonies fluttered and floated across my audible plane, bringing an intense sense of peace and joy.

When I left that place, I was a changed spirit. I may have been alone in physical form, but the universe embraced my inner self and showed me the path to enlightenment.

They've never meditated properly even once. Teacher my ass, these people do way more damage than help anyone.