The Most Dangerous Form Of Meditation

so the more you meditate the longer you meditate the more hardcore you meditate the greater the chances are of some kind of side effect I think that there's a lot about meditation that people don't understand is mindfulness safe is meditation safe well the answer is so today we're going to talk about the Dark Side of meditation I love this topic so like when I started getting into meditation about 21 years ago if you all can believe that I was super skeptical of it so I was I was like a really big skeptic and I'm still

in a sense a skeptic but I I really I so I went to India and I stayed in asham and I was like what is this BS and then people were talking about like energies and stuff and people are talking about manifesting and all this kind of crap and I was like what is this stupid BS dude what are these people talking about and this is scientific so I I practiced meditation for about three months and all kinds of different meditations and Brams and I I really started to like it a lot I was like

okay this is actually there's something here but I was still somewhat skeptical so the first thing that I actually did was join a research lab in India while I was still there so it's cool because the the first asham that I went to had a research division um so I did EEG studies on EEG on meditators and so I was trying to figure out okay like what does the science say and for the first kind of year or two I really focused on practices that had biological plausibility or research support as well as spiritual stuff

so I gravitated away from the spiritual practices and really focused on okay what can science really show is the benefit of meditation and so that kind of ultimately started a journey where I ended up being a research assistant at this place called the oer research center at Harvard which is super cool I was doing somata sensory research uh research on the somata sensory cortex in on taichi so it's very cool so like learning really about the science of it and then you know when I was practicing meditation I encountered and we'll talk about this more

towards the end you know a lot of weird stuff including personal experiences including people that I met with um you know I I had a teacher who was teaching me about Kundalini sadana so Kundalini is like this energy that is seated at the base of your spine and Rises up through your chakras and they were telling me that you know when you do this kind of meditation practice you can't be near people because you'll become hypersexual so you and I so shady you and I need to go out into the woods into a cabin and

then I'm going to do things to you that make you hypersexual and then I'll help you control it and clean out your chakra and stuff like that and it's going to be dangerous for you to be anywhere else and I was like okay and it turned out totally fine it was great all that good stuff um but the problem is that when we look at that kind of stuff right it's like rif for abuse and one of the big dark sides of meditation I know it's sus is that there is a lot of room for

abuse so I I think that there's a lot about meditation that people don't understand I think there are dangers to meditation very real dangers that are scientific I've worked with people who have had negative psychological experiences from meditation you know I've had uh I've seen patients in the emergency room who um are there because they believe they're having a chakra Awakening and they're like acutely psychotic and so you know it's super cool to see this stuff clinically I mean it sucks for the person but I I'm grateful for the experience in terms of my growth

and learning so there are dangers to it so let's kind of start with like kind of a bit of History okay so if we want to understand whether meditation is safe or not we have to understand first of all what has happened to meditation over the last 100 years okay so between let's say 5,000 years ago to about 100 years ago meditation was basically considered a spiritual tradition that was taught within spiritual settings by spiritual Masters so it's like for the spiritual people by the spiritual people spiritual practice about 100 years ago some westerners started

to learn meditation so a big part of this was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi with the explosion of TM Transcendental Meditation in the 60s so Maharishi Mahesh Yogi like shows up and this is like the good old days of like psychedelics and spiritual gurus and Osho and and Maharishi mahash Yogi and so they start teaching meditation and what happens is a group of people start to really benefit from it and these people also have a background in science so they see some beautiful progress with it and they're like we should study this and good job yall so

they started doing a lot of studies on meditation the benefits of meditation a lot of this stuff is is was funded kind of by the the Transcendental Meditation people and then over time we started to explore more and more meditation and then a couple of like really important Milestones uh I think a big part of this was also John kabit Zen so maybe about 20 years ago I'm not sure in apologies to uh John kabadan if if I misre present this but so he sort of uh has runs the center for mindfulness at the University

of Massachusetts and I think there was a big movement to try to figure out okay if we're trying to study meditation how do we do this right because if you look at meditation there's thri meditation there's chakra meditation there's pranayam there's chiong there's Transcendental Meditation there's Mantra meditation there's visualizations there's guided meditations there's Yoga Nidra there's deep relaxation techniques these are all all kinds of different stuff and how do we study this right because these are all different things like doing like a whm Hof style nepes I'm going to be in Sub-Zero temperatures naked and

not getting frostbite meditation is very different from do a guided meditation about let's take a walk through your safe space in the forest these are different things neurologically psychologically consciously physiologically these are different things right so there's some techniques of meditation for example that can can increase the peripheral body temperature by up to 9° F okay about 5° C 4 5° C that's very different from a guided visualization of walking through the woods so uh John kiden did something super cool so he tried to Define mindfulness so what he tried to do I think um

you know I met the guy many years ago when I was doing research at Harvard um because we collaborated some or collaborated some with my pis but uh you know here's what I see as the Brilliance of what he did he tried to take all of these different spiritual traditions and boil them down to the most basic component which is what he calls mindfulness now the cool thing about doing that is this standardizes what we're studying so now we're studying mindfulness which is these four things like attention in the present non-judgmental awareness like a couple

of these different things that constitute mindfulness but this is not meditation this in Sanskrit is called sakshi bav which is the very first step of meditation so a couple of important things happened there the first is that we're now able to standardize it we're now able to study it because we're talking about the same thing so that's good but we lose a lot of the spiritual power and a lot of the esoteric practices because there's nothing about mantras in mindfulness meditation right mindfulness is not about mons there's nothing about energy or shaky or accumulating or

manifesting or anything like that it's just the basics of understanding your mind and so now what's started to happen is we've had a division Within this idea of meditation we have the secularized sterilized protocolized denuded of gurus tradition of mindfulness this is predominantly what we find in apps then on the flip side we have these more esoteric meditative Traditions that do more hardcore meditation and these things are not all the same they're apples and oranges and as we'll discover there are many different types of meditation which we're now beginning to categorize so now we get

to the issue of safety because is mindfulness safe is meditation safe well the answer is it depends what kind of meditation are you doing what kind of mindfulness are you doing because the kind of practice that you do will correlate with how safe or unsafe it is okay so let's take a look at some really interesting articles that are talking about that so this I think is what we're going to start with so unwanted effects is there a negative side of of meditation a multicenter study so the first thing that I want to point out

to youall is that this is starting to happen where people are starting to break apart the different kinds of meditation so one is something called focused attention one is open monitoring one is Imagination one is body awareness one is compassion and one is some kind of informal practice okay so we talk about this a lot in Dr K's guide to meditation we talk about dhana right which is very different from just an open monitoring which is like like a mindfulness based practice so just to let you all know this is about sometimes when I meditate

I'm just sitting there with my eyes closed and I'm just chilling right just monitoring just observing whatever comes this is mindfulness and there are other times where we're doing practices like charging the laser beam so I'm putting all of my attention into this point right kind of over here slightly above the eyebrows in the source of the brahmani or I'm doing a focused attention practice on something like the mulad chakra and then I can add something like mulha which is a contraction of my perenium which is also part of a meditative practice so the perenium

is the area between your scrotum and your anus if you're a man it's somewhere you know around the vagina and it's kind of inside the vagina kind of near the G-spot for women so there's a keal exercises when you contract that that's a different kind of practice and in the meditative tradition the benefits of meditation and the risks of meditation correlate with the intensity of the practice so the hypersexuality inducing practice that I I did was a muladar chakra practice so this is the the root chakra this is where our Sexual Energy resides and so

as you activate this through meditation all kinds of things will start to happen and so even the safety of the practice depends so doing contraction of the muladhara chakra is generally speaking pretty safe uh gynecologists will teach this in their office right as kull exercises but when we combine that with certain breathing practices when we combine it with Consciousness practices where we're focusing our attention plus contraction plus pronam when we're lowering our respiratory rate or we're hyperventilating we're doing all kinds of different things that will vastly alter the benefits of the practice The Awakening of

the chakra as well as the safety concerns so the first thing that we have to understand about meditation is that it's not all the same okay so here are a couple of this is just one categorization there are other ways to kind of categorize it and then they'll also look at things like years of practice right so there are other issues like how veteran of a meditator are you is hiking dangerous or is it safe well it depends on where you go how competent you are what your experience is how prepared you are that determines

whether activity is safe or not so now what we can do is they looked at un un wanted effects so this is a sample size pretty small it's 87 people so 25% 1/4 of people reported some kind of thing that they didn't enjoy the majority of people who had an unwanted effect are not majority the plurality of people are individual practice and this is what's really interesting is that um focused attention actually has the highest likelihood so 177% of people who had an unpleasant experience were doing focused attention and 8% to people we doing body

scan so body scan seems to be the safest focused attention is the most dangerous and we'll talk about why that is once we get to the meditative Theory because yogis will tell you the same thing hey all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health and so we start by understanding what literally is meditation how does experience shape us as human beings how do we strengthen the Mind itself as an organ and so by understanding our mind

we understand a very very simple tool a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today the other thing that we tend to see is that a higher duration of practice correlates with more adverse effects and I don't know if yall have heard me talk about this but usually what I'll say is that we should meditate for about 20 minutes right so I've said this so when I if you yall watch

Dr K's guide to meditation about 18 minutes is how long it takes to trigger inhibition of cortisol production from the hypothalamus so meditating under 20 minutes is basically quite safe and the longer that you meditate greater than 40 minutes we see an increase in risk of side effects let's look at the kinds of side effects people get so people will get anxiety including panic attacks so I think some of this is like physiologic in nature um depersonalization or derealization experiences are also quite common right so 10% of people have some sense of disconnection or disconnection

from the self and then but half of the people don't report any kind of details about what is unpleasant the good news is that continuous symptoms are quite rare right so when we advise people about meditation we say you know if something weird is happening stop first of all and then go see a doctor those are the two things that you should do if you have an adverse experience in meditation and people may Wonder okay what is a doctor going to do if they don't understand the meditation You' be surprised at how decent they are

right so we're trained in a lot of like basically simple clinical reing which is like if you're doing something and it's hurting you stop doing it and let's evaluate you for other things that could be going wrong right let's just do a thorough diagnostic workup for psychosis for panic attacks let's just see what's kind of going on here so we have systems even if a doctor may not be sufficiently trained in meditation we are generally trained in the things that are dangerous right so we know how to detect schizophrenia we know how to detect Mania

and we're good at picking up that stuff so we can just make sure that something else isn't going on and that you can be safe good news is that the majority of people don't have continuous problems for meditation um it looks like discontinued meditation yes that's kind of scary right very few people discontinued and very few people sought care from a medical professional which I think makes a lot of sense which is why we try to encourage you to do that right so don't be like these people so once again we're starting to see some

basic issues about our basic understanding of side effects from meditation and then we're going to go on even a little bit more so now the paper what it really does is looks into a lot of different specifics of what kind of adverse effect people have right and we see some of this stuff in our community so 66% of people experience some degree of lack of interest in their surroundings this is arguably a benefit of meditation right that we become a little bit more detached lack of interest in other people's conversations I GF I'm just not

interested in other people we start to feel bored by other people right this is a percentage of people who have some kind of minimum scoring of yes and the good news is that this is the percentage of people who experience maximal symptoms of this and this is very low right so it's not like people have a 10 out of 10 great emotional pain but 52% of people experience some degree of emotional pain 45% of people experience some degree of self-criticism 59% of experience uh people experience some degree of more fear anxiety or depression 68% of

people experience a lack of orientation less motivation in life right and so now the question becomes is this an unwanted side effect or is this part of the benefit of meditation so these are kind of reported negatively but I think this is important for yall to understand is that there could be changes if yall meditate in all of these different dimensions and this is why it's important when you learn meditation to learn from someone who is like a competent practitioner or a medical professional because they can help you navigate through these things which we'll talk

about in a little bit okay so now what we're going to do is take a look at a couple the conclusions of this study so first thing is most reported unwanted effects are mild and do not lead to discontinued meditation or the need for medical assistance so that's pretty good right so even if something happens I think yall should stop but they don't lead to long-term consequences in fact uh can be related to changes in detached perspective of the self different stages of insight or the use of meditation and participants with previous pathological disorders that

have not been correctly diagnosed okay so what this kind of is talking about is that some of these can be psychologically challenging they can lead to a detached perspective of self they can lead to changes in the way that you see the world okay so study also confirmed the second hypothesis that a higher frequency of practice May generate more unwanted effects especially in terms of duration of this uh session so the more you meditate the longer you meditate the more hardcore you meditate the greater the chances are of some kind of side effect this is

why we generally speaking advocate for 20 minutes a day three to five times a week or even every day is okay there this is also really important uh confirmed our initial hypothesis that some types of meditation practices May interact to influence the prevalence of unwanted effects focused attention is associated with unwanted effects I.E the most dangerous whereas body awareness practices are are associated with fewer unwanted effects so let's talk about this for a second why is this so if we look at the clinical use of meditation when we use meditation in a clinical setting not

all meditations are the same so if you look at something like dialectical behavioral therapy dialectical behavioral therapy is a therapy that has a lot of grounding techniques so these are people this is usually used for people who have uh things like Borderline Personality Disorder so intense amounts of emotional disregulation when things are bad people with BPD can also have a tendency to experience derealization or depersonalization they feel untethered from their sense of self they can have a lot of negative thoughts so we want to use meditations that ground them in their experience of self so

when someone is having a borderline personality disorder crisis they're catastrophizing they think they're a terrible person they're also activating some hemispheric lateralization which means that their brain is actually activating a dissociative protective mechanism okay this is all in Dr K's guide to trauma if y'all are interested so what happens when we experience too much is our brain just like tech support is like you know what this is busted why don't we try turning it off and turning it on again so if you have some problem in your computer what do you do you turn it

off and you turn it on again we see if that fixes the problem works in the brain too the brain is a computer so the brain is like you know what I'm going to do I'm a dissociate for a little bit I'm going let this physiology calm down and then I'll plug back in tomorrow this is what a dissociative episode is gets triggered by trauma we even know that the Neuroscience of this is we have our right hemisphere Which experiences a lot of emotion we have our left hemisphere Which experiences a lot of analysis and

literally what happens is the traffic between the two hemispheres starts to get reduced traffic ac across the Corpus kosum gets reduced Bessel Vander kulk made some did some amazing studies on this and when that traffic gets reduced we basically block off our emotions we don't experience them anymore when we dissociate and we become depersonalized our analytical mind is working but our emotions aren't active at all so when people talk about trauma right they can talk about it in a very very numb way because they're just thinking about it very dispassionately the emotions are too much

to handle the brain is trying to protect you from it so the body will release natural endorphins to protect you from the sensation of pain right that's why pain gets better over time when I have an acute injury it hurts a lot and then over time it starts to hurt less that's because endorphins are kicking in our psychology our neurology has the same kind of protective mechanisms so body awareness practices makes perfect sense that they do not lead to negative experiences because these are the exper these are the practices that we use to ground people

in their body now focused attention is a different category and open awareness is also a different category so one of the things that we have to be careful about for open awareness meditations is this is when I'm just sitting there and I'm going to observe non-judgmentally whatever comes up in my mind now this works great if there isn't a lot of toxic stuff lying dormant in your mind so remember that our mind has psychological defense mechanisms what is that so our mind in order to stay safe blocks off certain negative experiences so you all will

know this if you've ever talked to someone who's in denial right you try to tell them hey your drinking is a problem bro and he's like no it isn't it's fine I'm not as bad as this person it'll be a problem when I'm as bad as this person that's when it's a problem it's not our problem right now it's not my problem you can have narcissistic defense which is like I'm great and you're wrong you're bad they they it's a very black and white way of thinking you're doing everything bad I'm doing everything right right

because why why does the narcissistic defense exist it exists because if you screwed up and you acknowledge how bad you screwed up the guilt from that could be so overwhelming that it would you right so this is why why we have defense mechanisms and defense mechanisms are there for a reason to protect ourselves so when we do some open awareness meditations we have to be very careful if you have a history of trauma or something like that because as we non-judgmentally observe things the problem is that the non- judgmentalness is a skill if you just

stop for a second and close your eyes and You observe whatever comes up the basic problem of being human is that we are not non-judgmental as a thought comes up I'm a loser we don't we can't view that thought non-judgmentally as a thought comes up oh my friends from high school are doing so much better than I am we can't view that non-judgmentally we may be able to view some negative aspects of oursel non-judgmentally but there's basically a difficulty curve right it's like there's a level one mob there's a level 99 mob and these things

have very different hit point pools very different damage very different armor ratings very different move sets and so the thoughts in our mind have different levels of ulty different strengths for us to be detached from so open awareness meditation I do not recommend if you're keeping a lot of stuff bottled up so if you engage in a lot of avoidance strategies video games pornography drugs whatever oh I'm feeling bad let me go distract myself from my mind what is that that's another defense mechanism so open awareness is the process of opening that up letting whatever

comes up it can be useful it can be good right because we want to level that up eventually but but it can be very dangerous so I think open awareness meditation for example I'll do that with patients with a history of trauma if I'm there with them because then whatever comes up then we work through that right so you have to be careful about open awareness now we get to focused attention now why is focused attention the most dangerous because focused attention is the stuff that is activating all the chakras okay so now we have

to like understand this very clearly see all the weird esoteric techniques are not body scans they're not open awareness they're focusing your energy into a particular chakra so the ones that are more powerful the ones that are more dangerous are the ones that involve focused attention because it it is a meditative goal that you are trying to achieve so there are easier versions of this and harder versions of this or more D more powerful and less powerful let's put it that way right so and I'm defining power as like there's more power powerful explosions and

less powerful explosions that's neither good nor bad it's just if we're talking about fireworks like great we want a less powerful explosion that does the job if we're talking about nuclear fion that's a whole different ball game so with the more powerful meditation comes more danger just like the difference between a firecracker and a nuclear reaction and all of the techniques that are more esoteric in nature usually involve focused awareness so that makes them both more potent and more dangerous okay so focused awareness was found to be positively associated with greater self-criticism and feeling that

the time spent not meditating was wasted we're going to talk about that in the second so this paper let's just kind of recap right so this paper is looking at the different kinds of meditation and recognizing the different kinds of side effects that we can have and we have a couple of like quick tldrs about safe meditation practice first of all if something bad happens stop if something bad happens go seek guidance from a medical professional or a spiritual teacher who's competent next thing is frequency and duration of practice increase the risk and focused attention

is more dangerous and also more potent body scanning yourself for 20 minutes a day seems incredibly safe according to this paper right and also as a clinician I've seen very very very few adverse reactions to body scanning I can't none comes to mind I'm not saying that they can't happen but I've never really seen one the only thing I can think about for and this will we'll talk about this in a second too is that sometimes the people are already not in a healthy state of mind then body scanning can be problematic so if I'm

working with a patient for example with the cotard delusion so this is a manifestation often times of schizophrenia the kotar delusion is the belief that a part of your body is dead or rotting so people just believe they're like my kidney is dead and you'll be like what does that mean and they'll say like my kidney is dead like it's rotting inside me it's no longer alive a part of my body is died and is rotting and it needs to be removed and we check their GFR glom glomular filtration rate seems completely normal their creatinine

clearance is normal kidney looks intact we can ultrasound that baby looks like it's working fine so sometimes what happens in schizophrenia is we have all of these benign symptoms from our body signals from our body which that get interpreted through the schizophrenic mind as negative right and let's just talk about that for a second because it's cool so the problem with schizophrenia is that there are associations that get made that normally shouldn't get made so if I look up at the sky and I see a cloud and I say that looks like a dog it's

not a dog it's a cloud it's a random assortment of water molecules that have been vaporized and are in the atmosphere there's no dog there but our brain has a circuit that generates a pattern out of neutral stimuli in schizophrenia this circuit becomes hyperactive so when I'm walking down the street and I see someone walking by me and they nod I'm like that means something we start seeing patterns where they don't exist then I walk past this past the second person this person smiles and I walk past the third person and this person is on

their cell phone and I think to myself hold on a second this is 1 two three and then I look at the door the address of the place next to me and it says 111123 there are three ones and it's a one two3 and then I see a car that has zero2 three because there are too many ones over there and there's 0 two three there's an absence of ones so this is somehow connected there's someone there's one 2 three I'm seeing one two three everywhere this is what happens in schizophrenia so now what we

we think about is that sometimes with body signals this can happen so when I worked with people who have things like the cotard delusion I'll ask them what tell me what the sensory stimuli are and usually what happens is they have an old factory stimulus something is smelly something smells like it's rotting and then everywhere I go I smell the rotting smell therefore what do you conclude it must be some part of me and by the way I feel a twinge over here may you've got a tiny little kidney stone forming right or you sleep

on one side or something like that and then they combine these things so body scans we have to be careful if someone has some pre-existing thing so if they have an internal hypers sensitivity which we can see in things like panic attacks we can see in things like irritable bowel syndrome then we have to be careful about body scanning but generally speaking focused attention is more esoteric more powerful therefore more dangerous hey y'all hope you enjoyed today's video we talk about a bunch of topics like this on the channel so be sure to subscribe for

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