The Dark Side of Mindfulness
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
There's a new article in The Atlantic on some of the negative effects meditation has had on people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/meditation-willoughby-britton-downsides/688474/?gift=WUeIUHSFKauOwPXVhMCqa12g-b_Z0bJCXq1c6qabN7s
In another meditation adjacent forum I'm on its gotten a bit of discussion. I appreciated one commentor pointing out that the possible dark complications of meditation have been long known about I'll paste one of her paragraphs rather than making it seem like my own.
These warnings aren’t new though. Buddhist texts identify “sloth and torpor” as a hindrance, Zen has explicitly warned against “Zen sickness” (dizziness, trembling, hallucinations), and “cold ashes and dry wood,” mistaking quietism for awakening. There are old warnings against reading emptiness or nonduality as nihilism fairly extensively as well. Dissociation isn’t nonduality, psychological deadening isn’t realization, unusual states aren’t enlightenment; traditions have been trying to tease these apart for a long time. What’s newer is the systematic clinical documentation of it in the modern West, and that part I do think Britton’s added something valuable for other psychologists or teachers who push more than they should.
My feeling is that meditation is just one aspect of the 8 fold path. Stripping it of its context for modern sensibilities and a wider appeal also removes much of the guiderails and support keeping one on the beneficial path. There's also the element in the article of teachers and groups being resistant to notions that practice can be anything but beneficial. I think this is another aspect of bringing something to a new environment. People want to be positive and sort of evangelical to spread the benefits, negative talk removes some of that and also cuts into the cultish behavior groups can fall into.
I think we'll eventually have fully functioning western style meditation practices, but it'll take time to get it completely right.
Comments
Well, the article certainly is thorough in terms of gathering commentary. A lot of prominent members of the American Buddhist teacher community pass the review. But I’m still detecting a lack of acceptance that meditation could be anything but good. For myself, I long since determined that long stretches of meditation put unnecessary stress on my mind, and I started limiting meditation time to sessions of not more than twenty minutes.
The thing is, these negative symptoms that meditation brings up could be hidden problems within the mind that are just surfacing. Osho warned about this back in the seventies, that the mind of modern man contained too much junk to just start meditating in a vipassana style. He advised a cathartic meditation called “the Dynamic” to be done for 3 to 6 months first. Perhaps he was ahead of his time.
What I find surprising is the amount of negative effects being cited; in some studies seven to thirteen percent of participants, in other studies a quarter. These are not minor numbers. That’s a lot of people.
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Or he just understood tradition. These things have been known about, its more that they've been forgotten or swept away in the transition to a secular, modern meditation.
In the more traditional circles I'm familiar with they don't just drop people into meditation. There's lots of study to understand the view, lots of preliminary practices. And to do long, solo retreats its way more of that.
In the modern context, when I've looked at 3-10 day retreats they usually do mention caution around pre existing mental health issues.
ty person for addressing this. the western world have to take the whole practice.without the foundation of ethics and wise seeing our mind body needs a sure ground of being of right intention to insee the mind body complex. without sila/ethics and prajna/wisdom doing effort mindfulness and concentration or western meditation leads to a mind crack.
that is why step 6 to 8 is for prepared mind to focus on the path of sila and wisdom. if people dont have their mind body prepared psychosis may fracture reality;
the buddha in his wisdom prapared his followers on the grounds of reality to be less dukkha in how you live the steps 1 to 5 , right view, right intention, right speech, right action and right livelyhood before you refine your mind to nirvana.
its a caution you cant bypass the steps in the buddha dharma , foundation first then mind studying of 6to 8 noble path.
Yes, when I was studying at the Tibetan Gelug temple near my home I also heard that they had a long preparatory trajectory before they would encourage people to learn meditation. This was with the Dalai Lama’s school of Buddhism, not all Tibetan schools share this approach as you probably know with your background in Tibetan Buddhism.
That’s true, but the article goes further than that. They say people with high degrees of anxiety (not even clinically diagnosed), large amounts of neuroticism and so on need to be aware. It’s an attempt to classify people into at-risk groups using ordinary behaviour as a pointer to what might emerge during a meditation retreat, but not in a scientifically sound manner.
I think it’s more that people view meditation as a “health hack” for improved calmness, mental resilience and so on. It is marketed that way, in the States especially, with as a consequence that people buy a book and start experimenting at home. Which is harmless and beneficial for short stretches of half an hour, but when you go over the top and do three hours multiple times a week you might run into some of these unexpected side effects.
Then you are essentially stuck because you have no support, no knowledgeable teacher to call a halt to your experimentation. Although it has to be said that even if you had a teacher you might run into the “the cure for bad meditation is more meditation” attitude, which is so prevalent that they even mention it in the article.
Yeah, they aren't all the same in approach, but they all have some degree of preliminary practice like study or prostrations. And the lay population doesn't really meditate at all.
Zen is fairly meditation forward. But my overall point was that the way meditation is treated in the west today is a new development, different from how it has been treated traditionally.
Yeah, I think that's kind of where we are today. Its oversold, it lacks the traditional support framing and personal guidance.
I felt for Willoughby's experience of rejection and denial from some in the community for speaking up.
Very true. A lot of people seem to be following the advice of teachers like Ram Das to “turn inwards”, and many alternative practitioners believe that meditation will eventually save the world. It is a large inwards turn of mankind’s spiritual energy.
I’m discounting the traditional religions here, because most of them seem to exist for the benefit of the priests. Last I heard an edict came out of the Catholic Church that forbade communicating directly with God, how crazy can you get. I don’t count their practices as spiritual anymore.
It’s the overwhelming popularity that makes that lack of a support framework apparent. Our society is very good at disseminating information, leading to growths of movements and trends that would otherwise take hundreds of years now suddenly appear in six months.
In my experience with depression I have found walking meditation a little better than sitting when I am having symptoms.
During psychosis sometimes I stop meditating altogether out of worry to make the mind that is already having to much energy to increase. During these I cease meditating and then restart when my symptoms cease.