Lost on the road to enlightenment

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Speaker 8 I want you to find a comfortable seat, maybe sitting in a chair or cross-legged on the floor. You can lie down if you want for this meditation.
And I want you to just focus on your breath.

Speaker 8 Breathing in

Speaker 8 and out.

Speaker 8 In

Speaker 8 And out.

Speaker 8 How did you first get into meditation?

Speaker 9 My dad sent me a book by Jack Kornfield called A Path with Heart.

Speaker 9 And so that was my gateway drug.

Speaker 8 Willoughby Britton is a scientist and a meditation expert, but back then she was in college. And all she knew was her childhood friend had just died.
And she was spiraling.

Speaker 9 It was sort of opened up the whole issue of mortality, which now I'm 50 and you're like, oh yeah, it's kind of obvious.

Speaker 9 But when you're young and it's the first person to have died who's also young, it just suddenly made me realize how vulnerable we are.

Speaker 9 And I just became terrified. I just saw danger everywhere

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 just had basically had an anxiety disorder.

Speaker 9 Now I would call it that.

Speaker 8 Willoughby did not want to take anxiety meds, but she did like this book.

Speaker 8 A Path with Heart, a Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life with author, meditation instructor, and clinical psychologist Jack Kornfield.

Speaker 9 I was like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about because he's describing my experiences of anxiety with you know extreme precision and detail and it made me trust him to have a solution.

Speaker 8 Did you start meditating a lot?

Speaker 8 I did, yeah.

Speaker 9 I carried that book with me everywhere for probably a decade and I had cassette tapes.

Speaker 10 You may notice the feeling of each breath.

Speaker 9 Remember cassette tapes?

Speaker 10 Of each half-breath.

Speaker 9 I had boxes and boxes of cassette tapes.

Speaker 10 You can trust the body. It knows how to breathe by itself.

Speaker 9 Different, you know,

Speaker 9 meditation teachers teaching different things.

Speaker 11 Set aside the usual mode in which we operate, that of more or less constant doing, and switch to

Speaker 11 a mode of non-doing.

Speaker 11 A mode of simply being.

Speaker 8 Your interest, your enthusiasm is going.

Speaker 12 There's my friend.

Speaker 8 There's the breath. There's the breath.

Speaker 8 Willoughby became a meditator. She also just got interested in the mind and how to heal it.
She ended up going to graduate school in clinical psychology and studying meditation as an academic.

Speaker 9 Pretty much every paper I wrote was about meditation and all of my instructors were like, can you write about something else, please?

Speaker 8 Willoughby's like, nope. When it was dissertation time, she decided to study whether meditation could improve sleep.
Her guess was that it probably would, but she's a scientist. She designed a test.

Speaker 8 She had two groups of subjects, and one of them went through a standard eight-week mindfulness meditation course. The other group did nothing, just lived their normal lives.

Speaker 8 Then they all came into the lab, and Willoughby and her team recorded their brain waves while they slept.

Speaker 9 And when the data came in, it was like the complete opposite of what I expected. The meditation group had less deep sleep, faster brain waves,

Speaker 9 pretty much every measure you could have of cortical arousal. So like being more awake, the meditation group had more.

Speaker 9 And even worse or even more convincing that that was that it was the meditation was that the more you meditated, the more each of those markers of arousal went up.

Speaker 9 There was really no way around it. It was a very clear finding, but because it was sort of the wrong answer, I just, I didn't publish it.
I just sat on the data.

Speaker 9 So that's my first confession.

Speaker 8 Willoughby was not ready to open that door, but eventually she would.

Speaker 8 In fact, she would become one of the main voices in a growing counter narrative within mental health that says meditation is not good for everyone.

Speaker 8 For some small group of people, it can get very, very

Speaker 8 bad.

Speaker 8 This is Unexplainable. I'm Sally Helm.
Today, when science tries to take on an ancient religious practice, it's not always an easy fit. What can psychology make of the adverse effects of meditation?

Speaker 8 And how do you tell the difference between a mental health crisis and a spiritual one?

Speaker 8 Scientists are not supposed to suppress data that doesn't line up with their worldview. Willoughby knows this.
She believes in science.

Speaker 8 So the fact that she didn't publish that paper, it shows how deep she was inside the meditation is great bubble.

Speaker 9 You know, I was an evangelist. I wanted to promote this thing.
And, you know,

Speaker 9 it wasn't promoting it. It was actually saying that it was causing insomnia, which is not what I wanted to have out there.
And I mean, it wasn't just me in a vacuum.

Speaker 9 I also now had lots of friends who were into meditation and Buddhism. And we were all evangelists.
And so it didn't seem as sort of unethical and problematic as it does now.

Speaker 9 But yeah, I didn't publish it.

Speaker 8 I mean, I think I also can imagine you would be like, I'm a young scientist and can this be right? Like the findings seem so clear, but it seems wrong.

Speaker 8 Like, were you also just kind of like, maybe I messed this up somehow.

Speaker 9 Yep, definitely. It was my second study.
So yeah, it was really different than anything else that was out there. You know, it's in the ether, it's in the water.
everybody's saying it's good for sleep.

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 8 not

Speaker 8 everyone.

Speaker 9 I remember going to a meditation retreat and it was the kind of thing where you're asking questions for the teacher, like after a day of practice.

Speaker 9 And I think somebody asked about,

Speaker 9 they're like, I am not sleeping or I'm, you know, having trouble, something about sleep. And then

Speaker 9 I like raised my hand and was like, oh, I just did a study on this and I found that.

Speaker 9 And that's when I got chastised.

Speaker 9 I remember a teacher saying,

Speaker 9 you know, I don't know why all you psychologists are trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping.

Speaker 9 And I was like

Speaker 9 completely blown away by that comment.

Speaker 8 This teacher was kind of being like, meditation is not just about wellness. It's also about spiritual awakening.
So if it's about awakening, maybe it's not surprising that it's not good for sleep.

Speaker 9 And so that was a kind of slap in the face and also a wake-up call to be like, what kind of assumptions do we have as mental health professionals or even just people?

Speaker 9 We think that meditation is a kind of therapy.

Speaker 9 And like this teacher was like, it's, that's not at all what it's for.

Speaker 8 By this point, Willoughby herself had trained as a meditation teacher.

Speaker 8 She'd studied with the legendary John Cabot-Zinn, who created something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which has been enormously influential.

Speaker 8 Scientists tend to study it because it's standardized and secular, and it's also reached the masses.

Speaker 8 But it's just one particular version of a practice that's been around forever.

Speaker 9 What I realized was that there were other meditation worlds that thought that the one that I was in was

Speaker 9 short-sighted or naive or uninformed or just kind of like

Speaker 8 JV.

Speaker 8 Whether it was JV or not, Willoughby was all in on this, still studying clinical psychology. And near the end of her PhD, she did a residency at Brown University.

Speaker 9 I was working in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. And that one year, there were two people who

Speaker 9 came, had come off retreat, and they were both completely psychotic.

Speaker 9 And so I went back to that.

Speaker 8 Same on meditation retreats who show up in the emergency room.

Speaker 9 Well, at the psych hospital, yes. At the psych hospital.
Okay.

Speaker 9 And they like they, yeah. So they were there like for many days or weeks, like not just, not just an emergency room visit, but like an inpatient hospital.

Speaker 8 Two psychotic meditators in one year seemed like a lot. So Willoughby started asking around, kind of casually bringing it up at conferences or retreats.

Speaker 9 And then people would come up to me and be like, that thing you said, that happened to me. There were people like everywhere.
It was impossible not to find people.

Speaker 8 They told her about all kinds of experiences that didn't seem to line up with a story about meditation as this great therapeutic practice. Experiences that were painful or distressing or just weird.

Speaker 8 Willoughby was fascinated. So alongside her research on the benefits of meditation, she starts kind of like a secret little side gig.

Speaker 9 Basically just going to meditation teachers,

Speaker 9 really well-known teachers that ran their own centers, that had been doing it for decades, and just asked them, you know, what types of meditation-related challenges have you seen?

Speaker 9 And what do you do about it?

Speaker 9 From there, a lot of the teachers would tell these stories

Speaker 9 about kind of like their worst case scenarios. And, you know, they'd be like, well, let me see if that person will talk to you.

Speaker 8 Willoughby ended up formalizing these conversations into a study, a way to start to map this part of the meditation terrain that psychologists seem to have barely charted.

Speaker 8 She and her team interviewed about 100 serious meditators meditators and meditation teachers.

Speaker 8 All of them identified as Buddhist, or at least doing Buddhist practices, but they were largely practicing in a Western context, largely white.

Speaker 8 And Western meditators, that's who this study was about and really who it's for.

Speaker 8 The point was to formally interview these people about their self-reported meditation challenges, symptoms that they had after meditating, that often went away if they stopped.

Speaker 8 A qualitative study like this, interview-based, it doesn't tell us anything about how frequent these problems are in the real world.

Speaker 8 It doesn't untangle all the possible confounding factors here, but it does begin to bring these unusual meditation experiences into the realm of science, where they can be looked at more closely.

Speaker 9 There's so many different

Speaker 9 kinds of experiences. Sometimes people would just feel like they're having almost almost like convulsions where they're just having kind of over all over body ticks.

Speaker 8 People reported visual symptoms.

Speaker 9 You can start seeing lights that can look kind of like Christmas lights.

Speaker 8 Some people re-experienced past traumas or got intensely emotional, like panicking.

Speaker 9 But You also see the opposite where people lose all emotion.

Speaker 8 There were cognitive symptoms, like someone forgot what numbers were.

Speaker 9 There was a number five on

Speaker 9 their house, like a address number. And they were like, what is that shape? What is that? Is that some kind of Sanskrit or something? Like, they just didn't remember that it was a five anymore.

Speaker 8 It took years for Willoughby and her team to document and categorize these experiences. And the entire process, it highlights how tricky it can be for scientists to study a religious practice.

Speaker 8 For one thing, it wasn't easy to call all of these experiences adverse effects.

Speaker 8 Many of these people had struggled with the question of whether these symptoms were actually an important part of the spiritual path.

Speaker 8 Like, if you stop being so goal-oriented, Maybe that looks like losing motivation to live your life could be negative, or maybe it's the whole point of your practice.

Speaker 8 Get out of the productivity rat race.

Speaker 8 But some people in the study reported becoming suicidal, which these experienced Buddhist meditation teachers pretty universally said was not a good sign.

Speaker 8 Also worrying, symptoms that lined up with psychosis.

Speaker 8 Teachers described getting psychological intervention in those cases, and even some of the more ambiguous effects could be things that people just didn't want.

Speaker 8 This time, Willoughby publishes the study.

Speaker 8 She is ready to put something out there that is very different from the standard meditation story within psychology, and that certainly goes against all the hype.

Speaker 13 I would say that more than any other factor

Speaker 13 having any effect on my success, it's been meditation.

Speaker 8 Man, it's so hard to crystallize into one thing how great meditation is.

Speaker 14 If pharmaceutical companies could bottle up even a quarter of those benefits, it would be the best drug in the world.

Speaker 8 Now, look, there is, of course, still a lot of evidence that meditation can be good for you. I talked to another researcher who has published a ton on the benefits of meditation.

Speaker 8 His name is Richie Davidson. And he was like, I gotta remind you, for the vast majority of people, meditation is, in fact, safe.

Speaker 15 I would say for the average person, the risk for psychosis of meditation is not greater than the risk of walking down the street and producing psychosis.

Speaker 8 As for why this happens to some people, scientifically, it's not clear. Willoughby has some ideas.
She thinks some of the symptoms might be best described as side effects of concentration.

Speaker 8 You focus in so much on your breath that you almost put yourself in a sensory deprivation situation.

Speaker 8 But the brain likes a certain level of stimulation, so it ends up creating some of these strange symptoms. Richie was like, maybe, but there could be other things going on.

Speaker 8 We just don't have good evidence either way.

Speaker 15 I think the kind of evidence you would need is hard to come by, and that would be having a sufficient number of cases where you can actually get recordings from them during these periods of decompensation.

Speaker 15 It's very challenging to do that kind of research.

Speaker 8 By that, do you mean someone would have to be in an MRI machine while they're becoming psychotic after meditating? Something like that?

Speaker 15 Yeah, something like that.

Speaker 8 So, like, difficult. But Richie is pretty convinced that the danger here is limited to a small group of people.

Speaker 8 Those with some kind of psychological risk factor, like a mental health disorder, and those involved in super-intensive meditation practices.

Speaker 8 Obviously, there are many different kinds of meditation, and maybe you're more at risk if you're like going on long, silent meditation retreats.

Speaker 8 Willoughby agrees that those are risk factors, but she is adamant that they don't explain the entire phenomenon. She says there were people in the study who had like a squeaky clean psych history.

Speaker 8 And she has only gotten more convinced over time that the mental health world and the meditation world just really need to take all this more seriously.

Speaker 9 I'm hearing the victim saying, like, people didn't believe me. Like, the teacher didn't believe me.
The therapists like laughed in my face.

Speaker 8 After she published the study, she started hearing from a lot of struggling meditators who felt like, finally, maybe this researcher can give me some answers.

Speaker 9 The lab phone rang and rang and rang to the point where we were collecting data for another study. We had to actually turn it off because it was like disrupting

Speaker 9 data collection.

Speaker 8 Plug the phone.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And,

Speaker 9 you know, we're

Speaker 9 a university lab is not a hotline.

Speaker 9 That's not what we do. And so we basically had to create a hotline.

Speaker 8 The people calling in are like, okay,

Speaker 8 science can argue about who exactly this happens to and why, but it's happening to me or to my kid. I need to figure out what to do.

Speaker 8 Like, do I get therapy, take medication, read a thousand-year-old text about this?

Speaker 8 Uh,

Speaker 8 maybe

Speaker 8 that is after the break.

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Speaker 8 So after Willoughby publishes her study, her lab phone starts ringing off the hook with meditators in distress who are feeling confused, blindsided.

Speaker 8 But another person hears about Willoughby's research and is not surprised at all.

Speaker 19 The kinds of symptoms that they have been describing, to me, were immediately recognizable as having analogs in historical text. Now, I thought to myself, isn't this interesting?

Speaker 8 Pierce Salgero, professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State.

Speaker 19 Of course, the language is completely different. They had their own medical paradigms that have to do with, you know, qi or with prana or with the four elements or with demons.

Speaker 19 But as a historian of medicine who specializes in looking at how ideas are transmitted and translated across cultures, that's what I do, without sacrificing our appreciation for the nuance, I still think we can say there's a thing here that people are pointing at and describing in different ways.

Speaker 8 Pierce started a whole project with like 25 colleagues to translate accounts about meditation difficulties from ancient scriptural sources and medieval historical sources, from India, China, Tibet.

Speaker 8 He said descriptions of negative meditation side effects go all the way back to the beginning of Buddhism. There are even descriptions of meditation problems from the Buddha himself.

Speaker 19 He describes kinds of headaches and other sorts of symptoms that he had from doing meditation, you know, either too much or incorrectly or too intensely.

Speaker 19 And essentially, you know, this idea that meditation can cause harm in some cases,

Speaker 19 I don't want to overstate it, but it seems like it can be found pretty much in all places and all times within the Asian Buddhist tradition.

Speaker 19 It's also really well known just in society more generally.

Speaker 19 So I don't think it would be surprising at all if you grew up in one of these Buddhist, historically Buddhist cultures, you might sort of have the understanding that meditation, when you pick up meditation, you're playing with fire.

Speaker 8 That is part of the point.

Speaker 19 The original purpose of this practice

Speaker 19 was to radically destabilize your sense of self in order to produce what in Buddhism is being sought after, which is a transformation in your consciousness, a loss of your sense of separate selfhood,

Speaker 19 you know, powerful mystical experiences that are going to transform your life permanently. And that these were being had

Speaker 19 by people in social contexts where they had left behind the world, right, and gone off into monasteries or caves in order to do these practices.

Speaker 19 So if you're doing this practice because you expect to have a little stress reduction and what happens is your self gets destabilized and you start having, you know, weird mystical experiences, the practice is actually doing what it was intended to do.

Speaker 8 Obviously, many people who meditate today are not monks. I'm from Los Angeles and it's like you can barely order a coffee without being offered a side of meditation.

Speaker 8 So, I wanted to talk to people who had had these radically destabilizing meditation experiences in our modern context. And I found someone who first got into meditation through a very secular source.

Speaker 20 I think it was a for dummies book, like that series.

Speaker 8 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 20 And the first time I practiced meditation,

Speaker 20 it was

Speaker 20 quite a radical experience, I would say. And not everyone has that, you know, sometimes it happens later.

Speaker 20 But I felt my mind become very still and very peaceful. I felt my body also deeply relax.

Speaker 8 Scott Lippett started meditating when he was 15. And I really want to give him his due here.

Speaker 8 Like, he may have started with meditation for dummies, but after that, he got really into Buddhist teachings. He studied the spiritual side of the practice for years.

Speaker 8 He meditated regularly, 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night. And one evening, about five years in, he meditated in his college dorm on his special orange cushion.

Speaker 20 I sat up and went to just do my bedtime routine, brushing my teeth, but when I looked in the mirror, I did not

Speaker 20 recognize myself necessarily. Like it, it felt as though it was a photo of me, or

Speaker 20 I logically knew it was me, but it didn't have the felt sense of, oh, that's me.

Speaker 20 I almost felt like my thoughts and my ability to perceive the nuances and detail of them was that dial was turning up.

Speaker 20 And I've often described it as if anyone has

Speaker 20 experienced marijuana, maybe too much marijuana, and they've felt almost like life was looking cartoony or almost started to feel like I was experiencing life frame by frame.

Speaker 8 Even when you weren't meditating.

Speaker 20 Yes, definitely towards the

Speaker 20 back end of those 10 years. That meditative state became my reality day to day.

Speaker 8 He'd be in a work meeting at his environmental protection job and feel like, am I even really here?

Speaker 20 I actually felt out of my body at that point, like

Speaker 20 almost as though I was a foot behind myself, just watching everything happen.

Speaker 20 And there was a lot of anxiety with that because I knew that I had to be participating in this meeting, but I was having a borderline psychedelic experience at the same time.

Speaker 8 Not in a fun way.

Speaker 20 No, yeah, not in a fun or not in an insightful way, just in a difficult and terrifying way. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Now, Scott, he may not have been a monk, but he was also not unprepared for the idea that meditation could be radically destabilizing.

Speaker 20 So much of my goal of meditation at that time was to free myself from the illusion of self. For some people, that might lead to a liberation and like deep peace and all of that.

Speaker 20 But for me, it led to a really cold and empty reality

Speaker 19 where

Speaker 20 not only was I feeling terrible, but

Speaker 20 I have no agency either. And what's the point? I think that's where those kind of suicidal ideations came to play.

Speaker 8 Through all this, Scott just kept meditating harder. That's kind of the message he got when he asked spiritual teachers what to do.

Speaker 20 They're just like, oh yes, you're in the dark night of the soul. You need to do X, Y, and Z.

Speaker 20 But if I look at the data, it's been five years of like immense and confusing suffering that was just leading me to be disconnected from family.

Speaker 8 Scott eventually got treatment for depression, which helped. But he said a key thing that he had to do to get his life back was to stop meditating.

Speaker 8 And eventually, the symptoms lifted.

Speaker 20 I now view them as induced states. It'd be like someone taking a strong psychedelic every day and complaining about not feeling themselves or struggling with work and,

Speaker 20 but saying like, yeah, but I'm going to like see the truth and then everything will work. It's like,

Speaker 20 or you could stop taking a strong psychedelic every day, you know?

Speaker 8 I talked to about five meditators who'd gotten into some kind of trouble, ranging from I had bouts of anxiety and maniacal laughing, to my experience of time got extremely weird, to I went to a meditation retreat, then landed in the hospital with psychosis.

Speaker 8 And several of them did what Scott did. When the going got weird, they meditated more.

Speaker 8 I asked Pierce what the historical texts would say about that.

Speaker 19 So I think one of the ways that people get into trouble is this kind of like hardcore practicing, you know, having challenges and then meeting those challenges with even more intensive meditation because it must be working.

Speaker 19 So these texts do warn explicitly against that kind of logic. And there's one of the kind of common refrains within these texts too is

Speaker 19 about not taking too seriously

Speaker 19 any particular spiritual experience that happens

Speaker 19 and particularly not taking it as an indication of your attainment of some high level of enlightenment.

Speaker 8 If we've lost the cultural sense that meditation can be radically destabilizing, maybe we've also lost the sense for when that goes too far.

Speaker 8 Pierce told me different cultures draw the line in different places, but consistently, there is a line.

Speaker 10 They

Speaker 19 say,

Speaker 19 you know, these are kind of like the normal expected kinds of challenges and here's how to deal with them. And then here's something that's beyond the line

Speaker 19 where we can really classify this as a medical condition that needs specific medical interventions.

Speaker 8 Some texts call it meditation sickness. Symptoms can line up with things will be found.

Speaker 19 Things like depersonalization, depression, anxiety, psychosis.

Speaker 19 You know, these would be the labels that psychiatrists and contemporary medical practitioners would put on these conditions. I think it's important to

Speaker 19 underscore, though, that the Buddhist texts are suggesting that these kinds of symptoms may come and go within a meditation practice that can be managed in a certain way.

Speaker 19 You can pivot in your practice and the symptoms can be resolved.

Speaker 19 So it has more to do with, you know, your relationship to meditation, maybe not having proper balance in that relationship rather than any inherent characteristic of you yourself or of meditation itself.

Speaker 19 It has more to do with the relationship between the two.

Speaker 8 So yeah, maybe our cultural relationship to meditation has gotten a little shallow. We think of it as relaxing when actually it can be quite grueling.

Speaker 8 And for a practice that's often happening alone, in silence, we do really talk about it a lot.

Speaker 8 But recently, I've also found myself thinking about this whole other phenomenon. It's called the zeal of the convert.

Speaker 8 The idea is that people who convert to a new faith or discover a new practice, they tend to be way more fervent, way more intense than people who grew up in it, which makes sense.

Speaker 8 You see it all the time. That person telling everyone about the cute new little diner they discovered, they probably don't live next door.

Speaker 8 I think a lot of people who discover meditation today practice it with a sense of zeal. Sometimes they become evangelists.
They go all in.

Speaker 8 But when it comes to meditation, that fervor can lead to trouble if you have some intense experience and then double down.

Speaker 8 The advice from the historical texts seems to be something more like, oh yeah, that does a thing.

Speaker 8 Don't get caught up in it. Just shift your focus.
Do some other kind of practice for a while.

Speaker 8 Take a breath.

Speaker 8 This episode was reported and produced by me, Sally Helm. Editing from Jorge Just with help from Joanna Solatarov.
Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala.

Speaker 8 Music from Noam Hasenfeld and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch.

Speaker 8 Meredith Hodnott runs the show. Amy Padulla is determined not to catch a cold.
Julia Longoria is our editorial director. And Bird Pinkerton turned toward the doctopus, who was barely conscious.

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Speaker 8 You can go to vox.com/slash members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next time.

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Speaker 7 Treleka by OnePassword helps conquer SaaS sprawl and shadow IT by discovering every app your team uses, managed or not. Take the first step to better security for your team.

Speaker 7 Learn more at onepassword.com/slash podcast offer. That's onepassword.com slash podcast offer.
All lowercase.

Speaker 22 Oh, the car from Carvana's here.

Speaker 22 Well, will you look at that?

Speaker 2 It's exactly what I ordered. Like, precisely.

Speaker 22 It would be crazy if there were any catches, but there aren't, right?

Speaker 5 Right.

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Choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it.

Speaker 4 Buy your car today with Carvana.

Speaker 22 Delivery or pickup fees may apply. Limitations and exclusions may apply.
See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com.