The dark side of meditation

[Ninshub]

There’s a dark side to meditation that no one talks about
Quartz
By Lila MacLellan
May 29, 2017

(...) What contemporary and ancient meditators have always known, however, is that while the hype may be warranted, the practice is not all peace, love, and blissful glimpses of unreality. Sitting zazen, gazing at their third eye, a person can encounter extremely unpleasant emotions and physical or mental disturbances. (...)

However, this demanding and sometimes intensely distressing side of meditation is rarely mentioned in scientific literature, says Jared Lindahl, a visiting professor of religious studies at Brown University, who has an interest in neuroscience and Buddhism. Along with Willoughby Britton, a psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown, the two meditators have co-authored a study that documents and creates a taxonomy for the variant phenomenology of meditation. The paper, published in Plos One, is the beginning of an ongoing series of studies. “Just because something is positive and beneficial doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be aware of the broader range of possible effects it might have,” Lindahl says.

To conduct their research, the pair interviewed 60 Western Buddhist meditation practitioners who had all experienced challenging issues during their practice. They included both rookies and meditation teachers, many of whom had accumulated more than 10,000 hours of meditation experience in their lifetime. All belonged to either Theravāda, Zen, or Tibetan traditions.
The researchers identified 59 kinds of unexpected or unwanted experiences, which they classified into seven domains: cognitive, perceptual, affective (related to moods), somatic, conative (related to motivation), sense of self, and social. Among the experiences described to them were feelings of anxiety and fear, involuntary twitching, insomnia, a sense of complete detachment from one’s emotions, hypersensitivity to light or sound, distortion in time and space, nausea, hallucinations, irritability, and the re-experiencing of past traumas. The associated levels of distress and impairment ranged from “mild and transient to severe and lasting,” according to the study. Most would not imagine that these side-effects could be hiding behind the lotus-print curtains of your local meditation center.

I was doing meditation in bed as a private practice and eventually developed some kind of seizure disorder. Been to the doctors and there's nothing demonstrably wrong with me medically. There would be moments when I was meditating for long periods where my body would feel like it would explode if I didn't move, I've read the sensation can result from insufficient relaxation during meditation. It's possible also that it's related to sleep cycling as my brain tries to wind down while I'm personally trying to stay lucid, or that it's linked to a sedentary lifestyle.

Would be interested if anyone has information on this, or similar experiences.

The worst thing I ever found about meditation and similar is how it seemed to turn me into a beacon that other entities could then find. In many ways it could be said that it ruined my life.