Meditation is promoted for its ability to bring calm, peace and balance, with benefits for mental health and wellbeing. While it’s helpful for most people, it’s not for everyone. Find out what happens when meditation goes bad, with Rachel Williamson. This article was originally published in the Cosmos Print Magazine in December 2024.
On a clear Autumn evening in the hills above Edinburgh in 2022, Scottish writer Ross Howieson’s life took a strange, frightening turn.
Howieson had paused a bike ride for a sunset meditation session. Almost immediately he was overcome with anxiety.
“I began to feel sad and think badly of myself. As it got darker, these feelings only intensified,” he told Cosmos.
“I couldn’t sleep at all that night. When the sun came up, my body felt terrible. I tried to feel better by doing breathing exercises, simple workouts, and yoga. Around lunchtime, I finally fell asleep.
“I woke up in the evening feeling incredibly hungry – more hungry than I had ever felt before. The whole experience was new and frightening to me, even though I had been meditating for years.”
Terrified, Howieson saw his GP but physically he was fine. When he tried to meditate again anxiety flooded his body.
Howieson’s experience of what’s known as a negative effect from meditation, the intentional focusing of intention, is not unusual.
But it’s an effect that is hushed up, denied or otherwise ignored by many practitioners. To the point where despite months of calls and emails, only Howieson and one Australian teacher were prepared to talk about it with Cosmos.
Adverse events
For 16.2% of Australians, adverse events from meditation aren’t just a passing phenomenon of a few seconds, but change how that person functions in day-to-day life. And not in a good way.
This is a finding from of the “State of Meditation” study at the Contemplative Studies Centre (CSC) at the University of Melbourne, a first attempt in Australia to quantify just how big the problem might be in this country.
The survey of 2,072 Australians found that nearly a third had practised meditation in the prior 12 months, and of those, just over 1 in 5 had a negative experience.
The study suggests that as many as 1.4 million Australians are trying to live with some kind of lasting negative effect from meditation.
A 2022, study of 953 people in the US on the prevalence of meditation-related adverse effects, found that half had endured a negative experience, with the most common being anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing, and emotional sensitivity. That survey showed 101 people were “functionally impaired” and for 11 people, the impairment lasted longer than a month.
The resistance to discussing these findings comes partly from a wish not to speak ill of a practice that multiple people told Cosmos had changed their lives; partly because those who do “put their heads above the parapet tend to have some arrows shot at us”, said another source; and partly because if you alert a person to a possible negative effect they might go looking for it.
“If the informed consent process itself actually might be harming some people, is it ethical to tell people about this?” says emergency care doctor and meditation researcher Dr Daniel Ingram.
“And then there’s the other side to it, which is, people crash into the stuff blind and didn’t get told what it could do, and it can wreck your life or kill you.”
Yet, a small corner of academia is focused on building better quality data on meditation and that includes negative effects.
Not without risk
Cheetah House, an organisation set up to help people recover from the worst effects of meditation, lists 59 different experiences that can leave a person unable to function on a daily basis.
These include an inability to experience pleasure, the loss of having a sense of existing, feeling disembodied, hallucinations, physical pain, diarrhoea, and paranormal or irrational beliefs – such as being the messiah.
Over the course of a decade the founder of Cheetah House, Dr Willoughby Britton, led the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study. She built a catalogue of what can go wrong and how to remedy it, reporting those findings in papers from 2014 onwards.
Britton is an oft-maligned face of a push to highlight in modern academia versions of what has been documented by different religions for centuries.
In Christianity, the 16th century Spanish poet and mystic San Juan de la Cruz described the “dark night of the soul”: the final stage of purification which comes with a profound sense of hopelessness, a loss of willpower, and a sense that God has withdrawn.
In 1757, Japanese Zen master Hakuin Ekaku described the “zen sickness” he experienced in his 20s and how he overcame it.
And in Buddhist texts there are allusions to risk: a canonical story attributed to the Buddha or his disciples tells of 30 monks who become so disturbed after meditating on a comment by their leader about the unattractiveness of the body, they commit suicide.
Dr Julieta Galante, medical doctor and CSC deputy director, says not all people who report a lasting negative effect are at this extreme. For most it will be a “memory of a bad thing that popped up and lasted a minute”.
Galante’s work includes a randomised controlled trial – the gold standard of clinical trials – of 670 people which indicated a year of formal and informal mindfulness practice led to a change in the way the “self” is perceived and more disembodiment, such as a floating sensation.
“This makes me actually think more strongly that mindfulness actually can cause states such as disembodiment and unity, which are not necessarily negative at all, like mostly positive. But some people can actually experience, particularly disembodiment, as quite an unsettling experience, if you feel you have no body or your body is different,” she says.
But admitting these risks exist – on the record, to a journalist – was difficult for the Australian and New Zealand teachers and students contacted over a 7-month period. Just one would go into detail, Sally Kellett, owner of the Mirosuna studio in Melbourne.
“What I’ve seen people experience, whether it’s in their personal practice or somewhere else… just a lot of emotion arising. Could be lots of tears, happy tears or not so happy tears,” she says.
“A whole lot of anger. People have a lot of built-up anger that they don’t process. And when it’s not processed, it can come out in meditation without them expecting it. There could be pain. People can experience physical pain… it could be linked to their emotions, it could be linked to things that they’re suppressing. That the body’s trying to tell them.
“And grief is a huge one that people actually have unresolved.”
The edges of what we know
Why lasting, negative effects occur is still hiding at the edges of what we know about meditation.
“When we talk about adverse experiences in general, we can’t reliably predict for everybody whether that’ll happen to you in 20 years or in 5 minutes,” says CSC director and associate professor Nicholas Van Dam.
“Some people already have kind of loose, weird perceptual experiences and they’re just not fully aware of them. And then they go into meditation and these things emerge. Some people have no history of this whatsoever and they go into meditation and have these experiences.
“Other people try for years and years and years to have these experiences and can never get there.”
Van Dam says part of the problem is that once we clear our busy minds of ever-present to-do lists and the daily mental load, there is space for bigger thoughts to emerge iceberg-like into our consciousness.
And then there is the quirky fact that the brain is a lot weirder than we give it credit for. The 1999 paper ‘Measurement of Delusional Ideation in the Normal Population’ found certain kinds of behaviour, messianic complexes or the fervent belief one has telepathy, for example, are actually nearly as common in normal populations as it is in people hospitalised with psychosis.
“The problem I think is when you’re in meditation, you have one of those experiences and you’re really engaged with your experiences… and then you go, what does that mean? Am I losing my mind? You really start to engage with it,” Van Dam says.
Inside the brain
Then there is what we can see happening inside the brain. US-based Ingram is currently raising funding for MRI studies to show what is going on in the brain – his brain, in fact – when it enters the ‘dark night’ state.
One study using Ingram’s brain that has already been published is on cessation, or a moment when a meditator loses consciousness. It was led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Harvard Medical School.
Ingram says the MRI showed brain connectivity suddenly started dropping: the 8–13 hertz alpha wave, the main rhythm of the brain that connects many parts of it together, decouples from the front backwards. Then after about 20–40 seconds it reconnects.
“It’s still very, very early days from a neuroscience point of view of the dark stuff. I talk about the dark stuff being a problem, the really high stuff could be a problem too,” Ingram says.
“They’re not sleeping for weeks. They think they’re the next Buddha, Christ, saviour of the universe. They write their manifesto, and everyone’s going to follow them into the great land of consciousness. Saying that they have gotten the download from the luminous Goddess also doesn’t necessarily always go well. And I’ve talked to hundreds of those people who have had that happen to them.”
The commodification of meditation also plays a role.
This includes apps that take clinically-trialled Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for major depressive disorder and say it can also work to reduce low-level daily stress – which it’s never been tested for. Or AI chatbots that don’t provide the guidance of an experienced teacher who can identify when a person is struggling. It’s a long way from the traditional practice of meditation where a small handful of monks in each monastery were perceived as having the highest likelihood of achieving enlightenment.
“How traditional Buddhists and monasteries and tiny villages in the Himalayan mountains go about their lives and how they practise meditation, looks nothing like what your corporate executive does when he takes up a meditation practice,” says Van Dam.
Meditation as medicine
People like Ingram want to turn meditation into a dosed form of medicine. Good quality studies are showing it can work for some clinical forms of mental illness. These include a randomised controlled trial published last year that showed MBCT is not worse than the antidepressant escitalopram.
But doing so will require a maturing of an area that is showing potential as a mental health aide. Galante’s work alone last year showed meditation can reduce psychological stress for up to 6 months.
An editorial in Nature Mental Health noted last year that the overall quality of research has to improve dramatically. Ingram believes it needs to include informed consent of the risks.
Yet clinical psychiatry doesn’t see a difference between a psychotic break and a mystical experience, pathologising all changes in the way a person perceives the world, wrote researchers Christina and Stanislav Grof in 2017.
“So what [sufferers] actually need is someone to kind of acknowledge and recognise that they’ve had a fundamental shift in how they think about the world,” Van Dam says.
“Let’s try to figure out a way of structuring the experience that you’ve had such that we can bring you back in a way that you can actually delineate who you are again.”
And Howieson? He was able to meditate again after 2 months of psychotherapy.
“This experience taught me that meditation can sometimes bring unexpected feelings, both good and bad.”