You Shouldn’t Meditate…Until You Read This.

B.E. Vecchiola

In July 2014, blessed with leisure and opportunity, I allowed myself the privilege of four days of meditation and mindfulness practice on the beach at the Pinery Provincial Park, near Grand Bend, Ontario. On the last day, as I sat on the warm sand, diving deeply into the wonder of our star high in the afternoon dome, the glistening blue water reflecting the sun’s crisp light, the wind howling past my ears, the waves crashing and splashing upon the shore, the heat of the relentless summer air on my receptive skin, and the streaking of birds sailing upon the gusting winds, I had a profound realization, the depths of which I had never experienced before; and have only captured a handful of moments since then. The realization was this: all the moments of my life —every single one— every first kiss, every last goodbye, every failure and triumph, every pang, every confused and tortured night, every jubilant dance, every mistake and misstep, were stones on a path laid out behind me which led me to that beach, where everything was perfect. I felt an alloy of gratitude, meaning, awe, smallness, greatness, understanding, forgiveness, and love that I know I will not be able to convey in English, had I thousand years to study Shakespeare.

I imagine my description is the type of experience novice mediators mostly expect when they think of meditation. What the Tibetan Buddhists call a Proximal Nirvana: close to, but not quite the big Nirvana Shakyamuni Buddha reached in his awakening experience. However, my reason for beginning a meditation practice wasn’t religiously motivated. I just wanted to stop hurting. Like most people who turn to meditation in the West, I did so because I was told that if I wanted to heal, then meditation would help, and like a good little patient, I took my daily dose. Six months later, after the relentless, consistent application of a Mindfulness meditation practice, my relationship with myself and with my life had changed. The functional impairments I was experiencing, which sent me into a meditation practice, were no longer a problem. I believe in what Anderson, Suresh, and Farb, in their article Meditation Benefits and Drawbacks: Empirical Codebook and Implications for Teaching (2019,) call the “non pharmacological cognitive enhancing” effects of meditation, but…it wasn’t easy to develop this practice. At times it was painful, at times it was terrifying, at times I wanted to quit.

In recent decades, meditation, especially mindfulness, has become a cultural staple. There is no shortage of apps, YouTube channels, yoga shops, secular-spiritual organizations, and teachers touting the benefits of mediation. In 2014, the year of my little awakening, the cover of Time Magazine was “The Mindful Revolution”; and things haven’t let up since then. Scholarship and research have kept abreast with, or perhaps, caused this “revolution” of mindfulness. The Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program (developed by Jon Kabat-Zin), a ten-week meditation treatment, was among one of the first quasi-experimental trials (circa 1985) to demonstrate that meditation could be effective in managing chronic pain. This opened the gates to further empirical investigation. Today, Cognitive Neuroscientists from the University of Toronto’s Regulatory and Affective Dynamics Lab (Radlab) investigate how people regulate emotions and thinking in the face of stress, and the way techniques such as Mindfulness can help people get a grip on their emotionality. The benefits of meditation are well known, but not the potential challenges a person will have to face on the road to deepening their  meditation practice.

We need more meditators! In an increasingly medicalized, and over-prescribed society, meditation has the potential to alleviate so many of the daily challenges people face in the course of this crazy western way of living. With the benefits of managing chronic pain so clearly established and considering that the over prescription of opioids has unleashed an epidemic, it seems a disservice to our fellow human beings not to ensure their understanding of what this ancient (yet updated) technology of mind can do. Unfortunately, meditation practices are eventually abandoned by would-be practitioners 30% of the time. Perhaps more people would stick with it if teachers and meditators were aware in advance of the challenges or, quite frankly, horrifying experiences a person could have while meditating.

Anderson and Co. report three categories of challenges that have emerged form the published literature on meditation drawbacks: Mental health, physical health, and spiritual health. The specific drawbacks (prepare yourself) are reported to be “anxiety, mania, traumatic memories, existential challenges, depersonalization and derealization…acute schizophrenia or  meditation-induced psychosis.” Basically, the worst sorts of experiences you can have. Shocking if you don’t  meditate, or you have been misled to believe something untrue about meditation. However, this list of drawbacks were reported by deep-time practitioners who had been hitting the cushion for 9-10 hours a day. Possibly, these elite meditators might be diving into waters the rest of us aren’t. Nonetheless, in my own meditation practice, I have experienced traumatic memories, forgotten memories, existential challenges, and anxiety. As it turns out, I am not alone! 

Anderson, Suresh, and Farb point out that there is not a reliable source of evidence-based benefits and drawbacks supporting the experiences of lay practitioners like  me. Their first-of-a-kind study attempts to derive, from the experience of real-world (present and former) meditators, a model of benefits and drawbacks that would have practical applicability for lay practitioners in a Western context. Anderson and Co. conducted an online survey through the social-media and news source Reddit. Reddit is an online platform where many people can discuss topics of interest in online rooms called subreddits. The study requested participation from members of 20 different meditation subreddits that focus on everything from Mindfulness to something called Psychonaut ( huh?). They solicited the help of 240 people, mostly Caucasian, mostly male, and with an average age of 30. The survey included open-ended and closed questions in five categories: History of meditation,  meditation benefits and Drawbacks, Motivation/Achievement Styles, Personality, and Mood. The research team asked whether people had experienced good or bad events, how long they have been  meditating; asked questions about motivation, rewards and fun; assessed personality types using a short version of a well-established personality inventory; and used a “visual-mood board” to assess participant moods.

In this survey, 160 people reported benefits, while 43 people reported drawbacks;  211 reported continued practice (at least one meditation session a month), and 29 had stopped meditating altogether. Mindfulness, Vipassana (Traditional Indian insight meditation), Zazen (Traditional Chinese Buddhist insight meditation), other breath-based practices (e.g. Counting breaths), other established practices (e.g. Transcendental Meditation), and idiosyncratic practice were reported. The two most commonly reported meditation styles were mindfulness and “idiosyncratic practices”, which are a hodgepodge of various techniques.

After a long and laborious thematic analysis and organization of the data, Anderson and Co. landed on eight categories of benefits and seven categories of drawbacks (See Figure 1). The most commonly reported benefits were the emotional  gains: Calm, peace, relaxation, equanimity. The Cognitive Benefits were superior attention, including increased awareness, clarity of thought, focused concentration, self-control, feeling more intelligent, feeling better able to make decisions, and enhanced memory and creativity. Personal Growth, which includes insight and wisdom, was also endorsed as a common result. A list of desirable traits! The most commonly reported drawbacks were time demands (the most reported item between drawbacks or benefits, as some thought time could be better spent doing other things!), the learning curve (habit formation, slow progress, frustration, and finding a quiet location), and the negative emotional and psychological outcomes, which included troubling, scary, and sad thoughts, over-awareness, negative emotions, boredom, anxiety, nervousness, doubt, and fear of failure at meditation. Not such an appealing list!

What then, is to be done with this information? Firstly, it is important to note that the benefits were found to be more important than the drawbacks, indicating that the former is worth the latter. Secondly, current meditators were rated as having a significantly more positive mood, of being more open, and of feeling more spiritual than former meditators. Ultimately, Anderson and Co. took all of this data and arrived at three  major implications for meditation teachers: Informed consent, time commitment, and parallelism and reframing. With the existing literature on meditation, and now this first crowd-sourced model of meditation benefits and drawbacks in hand, teachers can ensure that students are aware of the potential risks and challenges involved with a “cognitive enhancement” technique like meditation; since it has the potential to be anything but enriching. Clearly, the time commitment issue needs to be broached up front with aspiring practitioners. Meditation demands time. For example, mindfulness-based stress reduction requires at least 45 minutes a day; and many traditional forms require at least an hour. However, according to this study, there was no discernable difference in meditation benefits after 20-minute sessions. Realistically, if you want to change your life, and your relationship with your emotions, thoughts, and sensations, if you can’t carve out 45 minutes a day, you’re probably not serious about personal transformation.

Parallelism and reframing are the most important implications to arise from this study for teaching. Many items on the benefits list had opposing drawbacks. So, even though positive emotional changes were reported, so too were negative emotional experience; Growth was contrasted with stressful personal change; health management clashed with negative health outcomes (e.g., pain while  meditating); and social-interpersonal benefits compete with social-interpersonal drawbacks. They suggest the stress and destabilizing experience of a changing worldview (as can happen with meditation) can be mitigated by a teacher who can keep a student focused on the long-term positive outcomes that will arise from the shift in perspective. They also suggest that people feeling alienated by their practice might be encouraged to more intentionally develop a friend-group of likeminded contemplative aspirants. Essentially, the teacher needs to be aware of these challenges, have experience with them, and know how to provide possible solutions to the challenges of a contemplative life style. I couldn’t agree more.

This study had some limitations, as most studies do. It was a qualitative study, exploring in depth a contextual phenomenon. As such, no experimentation was conducted; therefore, scientifically, causation of these benefits and drawbacks cannot be assumed to be the direct result of meditation. That doesn’t mean this article doesn’t have relevance; it means we must carefully consider these findings with other evidence. It was the first-of-a kind study and was not meant to be an exhaustive exploration or definitive determination. The participants were from a non-representative sample of the whole population, so it may not be appropriate to apply these findings to other populations of people. Participants were sourced from a potentially biased population (well-off Redditers), and this was a snapshot in time. A long-term study, which explores how these benefits and drawbacks change over time, would be significantly informative. Indeed, Anderson and Co. are currently working on such a study. They are sending follow-up emails, “indefinitely”, to a group of meditators asking questions derived from the meditation benefits and drawback framework they have developed in this current study. All that being said, this is an important article for meditators and teachers.

In summation, meditation isn’t a practice to be taken up lightly. It has arrived here, in the 21^st century, after 1000s of years of R&D in the Eastern traditions. Buddhist meditation, particularly mindfulness, arose from a sophisticated, introspective map of the human mind, as a technology to be used to deconstruct, what Buddhists think, is the delusion of an inherent, permanent, essential self. In a sense, mindfulness has been hijacked, washed of its spirituality, stripped of its psychological map, and presented as a kind of whimsical remedy for work related stress. It has the potential to be so much more for you.

According to the Buddhists, wisdom, ethical behaviour, and meditation are the three disciplines needed on the path to sustainable happiness. Therefore, we can view this article as an attempt to establish, in some meaningful way, the discipline of wisdom. The long and winding road to freedom from stress and trauma is riddled with obstacles and challenges. This was known by the ancients, and it is known by anyone trudging the path. Nonetheless, because we are scientifically minded people, we need evidence. Here is a little bit. If you want to start meditation because you have hit a wall, or a bottom, or anything else of the sort, find a trained guide, not an app. Then you might actually start reaping the rewards of meditation and continue the practice, despite the drawbacks.

Anderson, T., Suresh, M., & Farb, N. A. (2019). Meditation Benefits and Drawbacks: Empirical Codebook and Implications for Teaching. Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, 3(2), 207–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-018-00119-y

Kabat-zin, J., Lipworth, L., & Burney, R. (1985). The Clinical Use of Mindfulness Meditation for the Self-Regulation of Chronic Pain. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 8(2).

Radlab's Website:  https://www.radlab.zone/