Meditation as My Hell and Savior
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In 2017, I found myself pleading with the fifth doctor in as many months to diagnose the chest pains I’d been having. This one, an aging black man with a crown of gray hair, had the same suspicious look the others had when I told him the feeling comes and goes, and I can reduce the pains by simply rearranging my posture.
At this point, I was grasping at straws. I’d had all the requisite tests done for a patient with chest pains, and nothing came back as alarming to this doctor (or to any of the others that came before him).
Maybe now, I thought, I should ask the uncomfortable question on the tip of my tongue, finally unafraid to bear itself. And I blurted out, “is it possible I’m feeling something that’s not really there?”
“I started meditating not long ago. Maybe that’s it?”
To my astonishment, he agreed. He assured me that meditation can increase the awareness of bodily sensations, and that having acute awareness of new sensations can be alarming to an inexperienced meditator.
A powerful sense of relief enveloped me in that moment.
Oddly, I didn’t think to stop meditating, not in that moment, and not in the days and weeks that followed. I didn’t even consider it. Instead, I held my doctor’s relieving words close to me, and continued with my daily practice, expecting at some point for the sensations to fade now that I knew what to expect. Maybe, at some point in the future, I’d even be able to turn this fear on its head and be grateful for the fluttering of life enrapturing me.
Years later, I reflected on what motivated me to continue with my mindfulness practice. This pang above my breast bone was not the only side-effect I discovered in my process to seek enlightenment. Why would I be so inclined to persist with something that had such palpable drawbacks?
Hyperawareness of my bodily sensations was only the first “issue” I worked through. Sometimes, instead of a concentrated phantom pain, I would feel an electric, buzzy tingle in waves atop the surface of my skin. All at once, my body felt on fire with life; I would sense the particles of air and light, the faintest nudge of wind and the slightest change in temperature.
When I resolved to deal with that, I began noticing that during my morning meditation sessions, I would close my eyes and completely lose awareness of my body. Shapes and colors caromed about, jiving and convulsing in my limited visual field. I tried to imagine my legs crossed under me, my arms stretched outward, bent at the elbow, and my fingertips resting gently on my kneecaps. The certainty of these ordinarily familiar images evaporated after a few seconds with every try, collapsing again into a rough sea of shapeshifting visuals. Stilling them only came when I opened my eyes.
And still, I was too committed to meditation to give up on it in the heat of battle.
Even when, months afterward, my emotions became so diluted that I lacked the thrill of joy and the pain of suffering, I stuck with it. My engine in pursuit of wellness never stopped humming; I never stopped meditating.
I’ve meditated every single day for the last four years.
Meditation has stretched the valleys deeper and the peaks higher of my emotional state. It’s brightened color and intensified sound. Through hell and back, I made a daily appointment with myself to sink into it, allow it to overwhelm me and, at times, to destabilize me.
And now, my foundation is sound. Steadier than I’ve felt at any time in the last decade, I now sit and breathe and do nothing else, inviting anxiety to do its worst, only to watch it leave just as it came.
. . .
The experiences I had with meditation aren’t unique.
It’s common to discuss only the merits of the life-changing effects of meditation. It quiets the mind. It cures the dark thoughts. It helps with focus. While these all ring true for me now, it’s not foolproof and without risk.
I first heard about other people experiencing side-effects from meditation while listening to a podcast discussion between Sam Harris, Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindhal. Britton and Lindhal, a married couple of neuroscientists studying the adverse effects of meditation, debated Harris on the root causes of the issues meditators had been reporting. What they all agreed on was that there seemed to be a level of intensity at which some people aren’t prepared to upend their attention, occasionally resulting in varying degrees of psychosis.
Britton’s primary aim is to inform would-be practitioners that mindfulness might be “too much of a good thing”. Through her work, she’s found that about 70% of the people who report harmful reactions to meditation come from intensive work during extended (typically silent) retreats. That leaves 30%, a small, but not insignificant group of people, feeling ill as a result of short bursts of personal mindfulness practices done in the comfort of their own homes.
This is a refreshing, albeit unnerving perspective. Treating meditation in a holistic way, weighing the benefits and the consequences of intentionally altering the state of my mind, is exactly what I wished I’d done at the beginning.
I already knew that meditation was not a one-stop shop for all my emotional needs. What I didn’t know was that the benefits of the practice I so desperately clung to were bound to be met by obstacles, and had all the potential to make matters worse.
. . .
So I return to the question: why did I persist? I think I might now have the answer.
As an introvert, I’ve always loved my time alone. Growing up, I was a morning person...and I was a night owl, too; before everyone else woke up and after everyone else went to bed were times of respite and personal joy.
I like everything about quiet. I like thinking for myself. I like dreaming. I like reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing.
I’ve done enough work in therapy to know this isn’t entirely harmless. Solitude provided me value, but as with everything, it has its price. Until recently, I couldn’t recognize what I was avoiding, why I felt the need to disengage from the world around me. I didn’t even know necessarily that that’s what I’d been doing. What I wanted, it turns out, was to avoid the criticism and judgment that I suspected (often wrongly) came from friends and family and strangers alike. I wanted to have the freedom to act like my weird self, which is to say: to not act at all.
What I thought was comfort in solitude was actually discomfort in connection.
And so as time went along and I found more freedom, I opted to radically avoid discomfort. This led me into a dark place of rumination, as a single mind lacking connection will do. Anxiety took root, spawning ever-expanding branches as the ratio of my inputs and outputs became laughably imbalanced.
It was in this dark place that I first learned of meditation. It was a welcome suitor, and I was instantly hooked.
I fell headfirst into a subculture of self-improvement by way of rediscovered ancestral wisdom. Many of the modern intellectuals I admired had been gushing over this new-old “discovery” they claimed had transformed their lives for the better. It was meditation. It was journaling. It was waking with the sun and sleeping around a campfire.
It was the hopeful bliss of simplicity. And it called to me in my time of need.
It led me into a trap that Tyler Cowen elucidated for me, sometimes referred to as the “talisman effect”.
Every silverish bullet has its own life span, and with recirculated ancient practices, they often have many, moving from one hotspot to the next as time goes on and interest piques and contracts.
Meditation can be one such talisman. Strengthened by a sense of community and the testimonials of my idols, I dove in with abandon, hoping “this will be the thing that finally solves my problems”.
This talisman effect sustained my effort. Even if meditation never worked as promised, it’s such a vast umbrella of techniques that I could tweak my practice for decades without ever knowing that the benefits were in the distraction, the community, or simply the ritual. Some might even wisely call these parts of the spiritual nature of a mindfulness practice.
The truth is, regardless of the efficacy of my practice (which I believe has resulted in real, lasting effects), meditation might have had a more substantial placebo effect than I care to admit. From the perspective of addressing my pain, though, that’s a triviality I don’t care to fuss about. It was this brand of determined ignorance and instinctual desire to connect that kept me going.
Meditation, even throughout the trials, was never the root cause of my suffering. Upon initiating my practice, and the many years after, the positive effects felt (and still feel) very real to me. Whether these came directly from meditating, sitting quietly in the morning sun effortlessly counting my breaths, or simply from the idea of it, it doesn’t matter much to me.
. . .
So, should you meditate? Maybe. Maybe not. If you’re set on it, try to first identify one of these goals as your predominant reason:
Do you want to reduce emotional intensity or reactivity?
Do you want to focus more and be more present?
Do you want to be more aware of yourself and your body?
Keep in mind that the other two might occur as a byproduct of seeking your goal.
If meditation is ever painful or uncomfortable for you, try lessening the time and your expectations, try a different app or modality or guide, and if nothing improves, don’t be afraid to discard it altogether. As my therapist wisely suggested, “there are plenty of mentally healthy people who’ve not meditated a day in their lives.”
What keeps me coming back to meditation each day is that I enjoy sitting alone, in silence, and allowing myself to just be. I still use Headspace for guided meditations, but I’m much less ritualistic about it. I still do body scans, but I’m much less concerned about it.
Meditation was my savior.
It was also my hell.
But continuing meditation helped make sense of my hell, and to ultimately find more peace with the fires burning fierce all around me.
Thanks for reading!
N.b. - If you are experiencing significant difficulty as a result of meditation, Cheetah House has some really great and helpful resources for you. Willoughby Britton founded the company to help those struggling with the unintended consequences of their mindfulness practices.
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