Natural Freedom

Well, there are some posts here and there, but I wanted to go deeper, because IT CONCERNS YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING. You can clearly see the articles are from New Age websites, and a christian site.

Wether you're doing any form of meditation, or N.G.

The Dangers of Meditation

Sadly almost no one warn about the dangers of meditation. Since it’s too long to post it all here, here are some excerpts,(Although the whole articles are very interesting, have a lot of insights and are very entertaining as well)so please consider the next articles: http://www.lorinroche.com/page8/page8.html

Lorin Roche, Ph.D.

a zesty life-affirming approach to meditation

"In the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself." – The Dalai Lama, quoted in Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French http://www.amazon.com/Tibet-Personal-Hi ... 597&sr=8-3

TM=Transcendental Meditation (aka Traditional Meditation)

By 1975, there were, I seem to recall, 15,000 TM teachers in the United States, and about a million people doing TM. Just in Los Angeles, there were hundreds of TM teachers and tens of thousands of people who had been initiated into the practice. Of the teachers that were coming to me, many had been meditating for 5 to 7 years, and were now in their twenties or thirties. They were mostly doing intense daily practice – often two hours of asana, pranayama, and meditation in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon or evening. They were on weird diets, and living according to all kinds of yogic rules they had adopted. And they were having problems and did not know what was wrong.

I did not know what I was doing, and I knew that I did not know. I had been trained as a TM teacher, but we had no training in how to deal with the kinds of issues these people were dealing with – weird health problems, life issues, trouble adapting to life in the city, and a feeling of being lost. I was just beginning to study individuality, the way that a meditation technique is as personal and individual to each person as their fingerprints or voice. So I did not say anything, or give any advice. I just listened to people.

I set aside at least two hours for each session, and at the beginning would say something like, “What brings you here?” And then simply listen with total focus until they ran out of steam. Until it was all said. Most of these meditators could talk straight through for 60 to 90 minutes. Sometimes a bit longer. I did not care how long it took, I just wanted the person to be able to tell her story and know she was heard. Then, at some point, if you are loving them steadily, they will just go silent. And that silence becomes SILENCE, vibrating and It becomes a teacher, a powerful presence. And that vibrating silence has the answers the person is seeking. After awhile we would usually close our eyes and be there in this silence-after-everything-has-been-said, which is a particularly rich experience. We’d sit there for twenty minutes or half an hour, and since I didn’t know anything, I would ask another question, such as, “Do you have any hunches about what to do?” In that moment, they would usually say something that was obviously wise and perfect for them. Common-sense, and also almost always taboo according to the TM way of thinking. Typical things they would say:

“I feel like I should stop meditating altogether for awhile, I don’t know how long, and just go live on my grandparent’s farm and help them.”
“I think I should start eating meat. This tofu and bean-sprout diet is not working for me. My digestion is terrible.”
“This whole life is just wrong for me. I’m a Jewish kid from the Bronx. What am I doing pretending to be a Hindu? I should start a business!”
“I don’t think Maharishi is my Master. I love him. I have benefitted from knowing him. But I just do not fit into this whole true-believer thing. I’m a rebel.” “Deep in my heart, I am a Christian. I love to meditate, the technique is incredible, but I just do not like Hinduism and Gurus.”
“I am meditating too much. They told us to do this long practice – the asanas, then pranayama, then meditation, then Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras – the Siddhis – but this is just too much. My life has been going downhill since I started practicing the Siddhis.”
“I found a woman I love. I think I should just drop everything and build a life around her and I being together. Being married. Just drop this whole idea that we are TM missionaries.”

In this manner, usually there was one simple insight that the person needed to get, in order to get healthy and move on. Sometimes they needed me to say it. They would give me the hint, but they needed an external authority to say it, to validate their intuition. Over the next couple of years, seeing hundreds of meditators in this way, I developed a book of knowledge. My notes were about a thousand pages (double-spaced, typed) and I called it “The Hazards of Meditation.” What I was seeing was that people would get derailed on their path, sidetracked, and lose years because of the lack of one bit of knowledge. This bit was different for everyone – maybe there were 200 or 300 different elements or principles that needed including.

It was a good book! I couldn’t get it published in 1977. But for the next fifteen years, I worked from that book – meditators were coming to me and I would listen for an hour, and then simply quote one page from the book. That was the bit of information they needed in order to get back in balance and move on with their lives.

What Are the Dangers of Meditation?

Meditation is relaxing, how can there be any dangers to that?
Well, on the scale of things, meditation about as dangerous as taking a walk down a peaceful street. But taking a walk, you know – sunburn, dogs, traffic, and just life happening all around. Meditation is taking a walk in your inner world, and there are a few challenges, obstacles, hazards and dangers to consider.
The dangers of meditation proceed from the fact that it works so well that you let your guard down and stop using your common sense.

During meditation, the relaxation is so intense that the body enters a rest deeper than deep sleep, and a lot happens in a few minutes. Twenty minutes of meditation is a lot.

There are millions of people in the modern West practicing meditation each day, but there is little information about how to deal with the challenges and avoid the dangers.

By comparison with meditation, running is a very honest sport. There is good, accurate information about the types of injuries that occur, how to prevent them, and the best treatments to explore if you do get hurt. There is easy access to realistic information on what the dangers are and how to prevent them. Runners love their sport. They are passionate about it and want to minimize the time they spend sidelined by injuries. So why are yoga and meditation so dishonest?

The Taboo Against Honesty in Meditation

I don't know why meditation is such a deceptive field, so full of lies. Maybe it is because yoga and meditation come from Hinduism, and Yoga is "by definition" a perfect system, therefore if you get hurt, it's your bad karma. You must have been thinking impure thoughts. Perhaps you were criticizing the teacher in your mind, or not being respectful to the guru.

This quote by the Dalai Lama is the type of honest observation that is incredibly rare in meditation: "In the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself." – The Dalai Lama, quoted in Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French.

Many of my friends are sort of homeless within their hearts, because they have been meditating in a Buddhist or Hindu tradition for the last twenty, thirty or more years. They seem lost. Meditators are always getting injured in subtle ways. It usually takes longer to come on than the sunburn or Achilles tendonitis runners get. Because meditation is powerful, it affects your body, nerves, muscles and senses. There are strong tendencies to be healthy and self-regulating in meditation. But any theory you have will probably throw you off balance. To stay in balance, you have to pay close attention to your senses. And to the extent you practice meditation in a religious mood, you will tend to not attend to your senses, and will override your inner wisdom.

For some reason or set of reasons, there is almost no information about the dangers of meditation. It is taboo to even think about it. Meditation is presented as an omni-beneficial activity. We are in the odd situation that the field that is supposed to be about truth, is presented in a deceptive manner. Discussion of the real obstacles and hazards of meditation is met with denial.

Runners get shin splints, sore knees and blisters; swimmers get shoulder injuries and ear infections; soccer players get head and neck injuries; volleyball players, tennis players, skiiers, weight lifters, and golfers all have their characteristic injuries. Coaches and sports doctors study these injuries, figure out how they happened, and how to prevent them. Then they revise the training to minimize injury and publish articles, and the information eventually gets out so that everyone can benefit from it.

This process of studying what works, where things break, and then modifying the training to make it better, is not going on in the field of meditation. It's not that people are lying. The lack of skill, and lack of observation demonstrated by meditation teachers is a manifestation of how denial itself is one of their main techniques.

..... yoga injuries are similar to sports injuries and have to do with the joints and soft tissue. People know it when they are limping around, and get woken up by pain. They are motivated to go to a doctor.

Meditation injuries are usually very gradual and almost invisible, so they are harder to detect, impossible to x-ray, and difficult to gather data on. As a meditation teacher, it was not until after five years of teaching full-time that I began to see these injuries, because before that I wasn't experienced enough to be perceptive.

The Dilation Syndrome

In sports, injuries can result from being too flexible, or more flexible than you are strong. In meditation, a crucial balance seems to be sensitivity and strength. Meditation does tend to make you more sensitive, and if you meditate just the right amount for your daily activity, just living your life will make you stronger. But if you meditate too much, you may become too sensitive too fast. I am thinking of calling this The Dilation Syndrome, because it may be related to the chakras opening too rapidly. The analogy I am making is that opening the chakras is like learning to dilate your pupils – if they are too wide open, then they will not adapt to the light levels, and bright lights will hurt your eyes. You may then become afraid of the light or think "the light is hurting me."

Relaxation is Challenging

Every night you go through a process of letting go of tension – it's called sleep, and your body relaxes and rests. But the thing is, nature conks you out. You are unconscious. This means you can't resist the rejuvenation process. In meditation, you are conscious, so you can resist. And because you are conscious, you feel everything. The skill of meditation is learning how to not resist, how to cooperate consciously with this natural process.

Meditation is different from sleep in that you are awake inside AND you are resting more deeply than sleep. This takes getting used to, and for the first couple of months it is best to have a trained teacher you are in communication with and can get in touch with immediately, whenever a question arises. If you don't get an answer to your question by the end of the day, you will probably stop meditating soon. You won't know why – you just won't seem to find time to do it anymore. This happens to most people who start meditating. There was some key aspect of how to cooperate with their own process they did not learn in time, so they quit.
Losing Time

The odds are you won't find the right technique immediately. There are thousands of different techniques. This is because people are so different in their inner lives. Meditation is being intimate with your inner being, and you want to be respectful above all. Tender, gentle, respectful, and honest. If you do a technique that feels dishonest to you, you will probably fail. Learning to Distrust Yourself This will happen if you try to make yourself do a kind of technique that is not suited to your nature – it feels like trying on shoes that do not fit. Most meditation teachings, and self-improvement techniques in general seem to have about a 5% success rate. Maybe one person in twenty gets with the program, and the others try the process and say, "This isn't for me," or "I couldn't get into it." The 95% of people are right – that techique isn't for them.

The senses, the body, heart and mind are profoundly affected by meditation, and you need to be doing it in a way that these effects fit into your life and help you to thrive. Many meditation teachings are not designed to help you thrive, just the opposite. They want to break you down, break your ego, and train you to be disgusted or detached from daily life, so that the desire builds in you to give yourself to a nunnery or a monastery. The sacred traditions are looking for new recruits. If this is your dharma, great. If not, then you are like a healthy person who thought they were taking vitamins, but the pills turned out to cause brain damage.

Damage to Your Sexuality

This is covered it its own section. One of the problems of studying with gurus and spiritual teachers is that they usually have very strange and often diseased ideas about human sexuality. You absorb their way of thinking just by being around them, even if they don't talk about sex.

Damage to Your Ability to Bond

Many spiritual teachers whine continually about "attachments." Decoded, this is an attack on your attachment or bonding to anything or anyone other than the teacher.

This is actually a brilliant stratagem, because if a guru can get his followers to become alienated from their families and non-cult friends, they will become more and more dependent upon the guru and his circle. The term "detached" is beginning come into popular American idiom associated with spirituality.

Another damaging aspect of meditation teachers is that they do not have peer relationships. No one is their equal. This is true of many workshop leaders and spiritual leaders: they have one or two people "above" them, that they bow down to. Then everyone else is supposed to bow down to them. In the modern West, our whole experiment is with equality, and Asian systems and attitudes can poison us on deep levels, because they pretend to be deep truths.

There are thousands of different types of meditation, and many of them were designed to shape specific changes in your body, emotions, neural pathways, and belief systems. The medtation traditions are strongly influenced by India, so some were designed to help you adapt to the cold in the mountains, others to loneliness, some are to help you become aloof and detached so you don't need anyone, and are in fact incapable of forming close relationships. Some are to help you to adapt to a life of total poverty, others to make you a compliant and unquestioning obeyer-of-orders, some are to help you to lose interest in life so all you want to do is sit in a cave and slowly die.

Not Getting the Help You Need

Over the next couple of years, through the late 60's, I met many people who were meditating and noticed that some of them were afraid to face what was coming up during meditation – they did not seem to trust their inner process, or were not getting the coaching or supervision they needed. Some of these people quit meditating, and others continued, but meditation was a bit of a struggle. So in general, my sense of meditation is that if you do it, you will have to face everything inside yourself. If you aren't willing to do that, then you are going to have problems meditating.

In every meditation, you will have to sort through all the stuff in your mind and heart, and if anything is out of balance, you will feel it intensely. If you have wronged someone, or left an important conversation unfinished, you will find your attention going to it again and again. If you want to go any deeper in meditation, you will have to bring some resolution to your outer situations, otherwise your meditation will start to feel stalemated. So you'll find yourself adjusting your behavior in daily life to be more ethical, to minimize the amount of your meditation time that is taken up by processing the residue of the day. In other words, in meditation every day you will have a small degree of the insight people have on their deathbed, where they wish they had lived their lives differently.

The Total Lack of Useful Information

The next biggest danger is that no one thinks there are or can be any dangers to meditation, so there is almost no discussion and information-gathering on the subject. Everyone is just going blah blah about the benefits. As a consequence, meditators are constantly being blindsided and derailed by things that should be trivial hazards, easily dismissed or bypassed. If we compare meditation to a day at the beach, it is as if people are saying, "Oh, don't worry, you can never get enough direct sunlight. Just soak it up. You don't even need a hat. And swim out in the ocean as far as you want. It's a lake. With dolphins that will love you."

Almost all teachings on meditation are slanted toward the needs of the monks who lived long, long ago in places far, far away. The traditional teachings are slanted toward how to adapt to life in 500 BC, IF you are a male, IF you are a Hindu, or Buddhist, IF you are a male-Hindu or Buddhist who wants to be celibate. Or how to adapt to life in a Tibetan lamasery in 1500 AD.

Furthermore, because the knowledge of how to meditate has been preserved by the sacred Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India, Tibet, China, and so on, they have framed the knowledge as part of religion. It's not a science in the Western sense, although it pretends to be. Western science is about questioning everything, and always searching for better formulations of principles. To religious thinkers, such questioning is iconoclasm, a breaking of idols, and as such is almost like murder. Ordinary mortals are not allowed to change a religion, or the meditation practices that go with a religion. From a religious outlook, it is forbidden, a great heresy, the deepest kind of treachery and betrayal to modify the teachings to suit the very different needs of all those low-lifes out there who have the bad karma to be born in the United States or Europe. People who are so degraded that they have not taken vows to abandon their families, to abandon working for money, and abandon their individuality. As a consequence, we have a huge literature on "meditation techniques to suit the needs of monks living in monasteries, if they are Hindu or Buddhist," but not much at all about how to meditateif you live in the modern West and have a family and job that you really don't want to abandon.

Many of the best, most brillant and articulate teachers working in the West are from Hindu and Buddhist lineages, and even when they are talking to women who have families, they tend to use language and techniques that were designed only for monks, such as: detachment, renunciation, silencing the mind.

These attitudes are harmful to people who are not monks, because they injure one's ability to be intimate with another human being. You can see how monks need to learn techniques for killing off their sexual desire and creating distance, so they don't become too intimate with the monk in the next cell.

It is very strange that such brilliant people have little sense of how to talk to the people who are actually there in front of them. Just because recluses and renunciates by definition have a sour grapes attitude toward the world, does not mean this is a universal truth. There is not much going on in the world of meditation that is aimed at how people really live now.

Overview of Meditation Dangers

If we take a brief tour of the Dangers, Hazards, Challenges, Obstacles, Enchantments, and Traps on the path of meditation, we see something like this:

The Dangers of Meditation Itself

The challenge of finding the right kind of meditation. The challenge of learning to face every thought and emotion.
Dangers of doing the wrong type of meditation for your body and personality.
Dangers of over-meditating.
Predictable crises in the life of a meditator.
Dangers of abandoning meditation because you are in a crisis.
Dangers of opening the chakras.
Enchantments and beguilements from opening the senses.
Dangers of stress release.

There definitely are dangers or hazards to meditating, because you are opening a door to your inner life. It's good to know what these hazards are. And at the same time, the hazards of meditating have to be compared to the hazards of NOT meditating. What is the cost to you in your life of just jumping up and running out the door in the morning every day, without fully waking up? What is the hazard to you of walking in the door every day after work and NOT meditating, not fully relaxing and letting go of the stress of the day? The cost of not meditating can be really significant. The denial doesn't always work – often you just get people who are dead inside, and kind of drift around chanting and pretending to be spiritual. But sometimes there is a good match of inner and outer, and the denial serves to redirect the life force of the individual into the blossoming of special gifts.

...and throughout history, it looks like more than 99% of all meditation teachers have been males on the path of denial. They took some sort of vow of renunciation, poverty, celibacy, and obedience. And they created the language and the images we use to think about meditation.

Also, it is forbidden to ever question anything they said, because it is holy, and they are better than you can ever hope to be. This is why meditation teaching remains stuck in the past – they are determined to preserve their traditions, that's their job. And tradition means no innovation. None. You keep saying the same chant, wearing the same robes, and reading the same books.

The Keepers of the Traditions may have no interest in adapting meditation so that it is appropriate for your circumstance.
They are totally unconcerned that you fail at meditation because they are giving you the wrong teachings for your type. The mental tools to even know what is good teaching barely exist in the meditation traditions.

They are in total denial about the dangers of meditating. the real challenges that Westerners face.

Perspective on The Hazards of Meditation

All human activities have their hazards and negative side-effects. Even if you just take a walk down the street, there may be dangers and obstacles such as dogs defending their turf or drivers distracted by their cell phones. If you walk for hours, there is sunburn to consider, and dehydration. It's good to know what the potential hazards are, and then go ahead anyway, well informed. Being knowledgable does not mean you are worried, scared, or overly cautious, it just means you have a a bit of an idea in advance of what you are getting into.

But you are investing your time in an activity that is supposed to have an influence on your mind and body. And in its own way, meditation is powerful. So let's look at some of the things that can go wrong, and some of the challenges you will face even when things go right.

A Depressing Sense of Failure

A corollary hazard to simply wasting time is that your sense of yourself is somewhat lowered. You have added some judgments against yourself. I have spent years interviewing both those who continue and those who quit, and they tend to feel bad about themselves. Almost universally, they feel that there is something wrong with them.

Some people go into meditation wanting to develop inner peace and perspective, and instead, get involved in the cult mentality that pervades most meditations schools.

Years later, they realize that they learned a lot about the kinds of abuse gurus perpetuate, and how toxic a feudal system can be, but they didn't really get anywhere with their meditation.
The next most common hazard is that you do meditate for awhile, and what you do inside is conduct a war on yourself. Meditation books are full of negative judgments that monks and nuns have against householders: "You are doo materialistic, you move too fast, you think too many thoughts, you have passions, you are independent, you are rebellious, you are sexual, you have an identity, you love yourself and love your life."

Traditional meditation teachings have elements in them that are mildly harmful, by design – it is necessary to break the spirit of nuns and monks and make them submissive, kill their wildness.

Monks and nuns are called renunciates, because they take vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience: I renounce the desire to own anything, I renounce sex, I renounce my ego and independence and vow to obey whoever my superior is. These vows can be very liberating to someone whose destiny it is to be a monk or nun. The individual can even glow with an inner luminosity. But they also become radioactive in a way, and if you study with them you may get radiation poisoning, as if you got too many x-rays.
Monks and nuns tend to see everyday life as a disease.

They suggest you internalize toxic attitudes toward yourself as medicine. Slow down, kill out your passion, become submissive, cultivate disgust instead of attraction, and dissolve your identity.
If you do not have a disease, they just weaken you. This weakening takes three forms, which are all by design:

Weakening of ambition and passion

Weakening of healthy desire and consequent weakening of the ability to form close relationships and attachments.
Weakening of the individual ego and will and of the ability to tolerate the uncertainty of following your individual path.

Anything you do in meditation that interferes with the simple joys of living, or with the flow of desire into action, is going to have vast and far-reaching implications for your life. If you spend a year practicing detachment in meditation, it may take you five years to recover your sense of zest and spontaneity in life.

In general, if you practice meditation as a war on the self, you will tend toward becoming broke, lonely, and weak. This is actually good from the point of view of the cult-like meditation schools: it means you are ready to take vows as a monk or nun.

This is a fantastic wealth of information, and the monks and nuns in the traditions are like walking museums. There is a dark side, though, because of this sheer brilliance of the ancient scholars and yogis. They make their way of life extremely appealing. Even the ancient, oppressive system of Masters and Slaves seem beautiful, necessary and inevitable. All of the meditative traditions over the millennia, until recently, lived in the open-air prison of the Feudal System, where people had very little choice in life. You couldn't move, change jobs, choose who to marry, or exercise much control over your life at all. Everything was karma, and everything that happened was karma. An attitude of total resignation and surrender was adaptive.

When meditation is conducted in the spirit of the feudal system, it is about killing individuality, killing out the creative impulse, and creating a submissive, dependent, pliant individual who always obeys. This is very good for nuns and monks, to help them adapt to life in a nunnery or monastery. But if you do not live in a religous order, cultivating surrender and resignation is about as beneficial as cutting off your hands.

Over the last 30 years that I have been doing in-depth interviews with meditators, I have met many who meditate regularly and have become depressed. When I ask them about their practice, they often reveal that they have interpreted the Buddhist or Hindu teachings they are studying in such a way as to detach themselves from their desires, their ego, their loves, and their passion. In other words, they have cut themselves off from everything interesting and thrilling in life.

Depression is a natural result of loss, and if you internalize teachings that poison you against the world, then you will of course become depressed. Detachment techniques were intended only for monks and nuns. Detachment is the DEFINITION of what defines a monk or nun: they take vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience. In other words, they cut themselves off from the desire to make or acquire money, they cut themselves off from their sexual desire, and they cut themselves off from any rebelliousness and independence. This amputation can be a blessing for a soul who really is a monk or a nun, and needs to just go join an ashram. But if you are not a monk or nun, cutting yourself off from life is as depressing as cutting off your foot. It's a loss, and you will suffer grief over the loss.

Since you are mostly on your own when you do standardized meditation practices – teachers rarely spend the time to work out individual practices – you have to be your own "doctor," and carefully assess the costs and benefits of your approach to meditation. And one of the costs is to notice how much your meditation tradition alienates you from the society you are in. How insular do you get? How much contempt do you develop for your own culture, your family, your ancestors, and your job?

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http://www.allaboutspirituality.org/dan ... on-faq.htm

What are the dangers of meditation?

Before participating in New Age meditation, it is wise to consider the dangers of meditation. This practice seeks to put a person in an altered state of consciousness...

Many people believe that there are no dangers to practicing meditation. However, upon study, you will see that this is untrue. "New Age meditation uses the mind in an abnormal manner to radically restructure a person's perceptions of self and the world in order to support occult New Age philosophy and goals…It seems that when altered states of consciousness are entered for even a short period of time, day after day, month after month, year after year, that some or even many of the same adverse phenomena found in more extensive meditation programs are encountered. Among these are philosophical conversion to the occult, demon possession, and various forms of physical, spiritual, and psychological damage," says the Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs.

Most people who participate in meditation do not realize that most meditation is based in the occult. According to theEncyclopedia of New Age Beliefs, all forms of New Age meditation involve the following occult phenomena:

· the cultivation of altered states of consciousness; · the eventual development of psychic powers;
· the possibility of spirit possession.

Those who practice meditation are taking a risk with their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. There have been cases of meditators loosing bodily awareness, having LSD-like visions, experiencing uncontrollable screaming, encountering restlessness, experiencing horrors, etc.

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http://www.openbuddha.com/2002/09/06/th ... mediation/

The “Dangers of Meditation”
Warning: Meditating may be hazardous to your health

By SANDY BRUNDAGE

Karen Long (a pseudonym), in her mid-20s, turned to meditation as a way to feel connected. “I wanted to experience that ‘oneness with the universe,’” she says. Long spent one to two hours a day meditating over the next three years. “Then I began hearing voices,” she says. “I heard profound messages. The other people thought it was a sign of enlightenment. Some people at the temple told me that I had ‘contacted a spiritual guide.’ During my normal awake hours, I found myself feeling spacey sometimes.”

Unconvinced that aural hallucinations were a sign from God, Long quit meditating. The voices stopped.

Long’s experience isn’t unique. Researchers have known for 30 years that meditating can have adverse health effects on some people, inducing psychological and physical problems ranging from muscle spasms to hallucinations.

“A lot of people do experience negative side effects,” says Dr. Maggie Phillips, the director of the California Institute of Clinical Hypnosis and a licensed psychologist in Oakland who teaches workshops to colleagues around the world on the proper applications of relaxation therapies. “I’ve had people that went to these five- to eight-day-long retreats, and they were practically basket cases when they came out the other end. And they’re told, “You just have to be more patient.’ A lot of spiritual teachers don’t know how to look at the internal dynamics and how they interact with types of relaxation and meditation.”

Just as some people are allergic to penicillin, some people react badly to meditation. Billed as a “one size fits all” technique for self-improvement and even healing, meditation is packaged in a hundred different ways. Mantra meditators chant a phrase with numbing repetition. Others practice walking meditation, or empty-mind meditation, sweeping the mind clean of thought. The harmful effects aren’t limited to one specific technique or even long retreats.

Those effects can include facial tics, insomnia, spacing out, and even psychotic breakdowns. Dr. Margaret Singer, clinical psychologist emeritus at Berkeley, with research partner Dr. Janja Lalich, collected case histories from 70 clients seeking treatment for problems that began during meditation practice. Their research presents several examples of these symptoms and notes that prior to meditating, none of the patients had individual or family histories of mental disorders:

- A 36-year-old business executive now lives off welfare as a result of the relentless anxiety attacks and blackouts he suffered after taking up meditation. “Everything gets in through my senses,” he told Singer.

- A young woman watched rooms fill with orange fog when she “spaced out” at random moments.

- A 26-year-old man was overwhelmed by rage and sexual urges whenever he went out in public, driving him to stay home to avoid these episodes.

The tricks played by the meditating mind are based in physiology. Over the past year Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of eight longtime practitioners of Buddhist meditation, snapping images of blood flow within the brain while they were meditating and comparing them with images taken when they were not. The scans tracked increased blood flow to the frontal lobe — used for concentration and focusing — during meditation. But blood flow to the parietal lobe, which calculates the boundaries of your body in relation to its environment — “You are not the chair, you are sitting on the chair, the chair is on the floor” — decreased. Other parts of the brain also activate during meditation — the limbic system, which is the heart of emotion and memory, and core areas that control heart rate, blood pressure, and arousal.

These results support what other researchers have discovered about the side effects meditation can cause. Dr. Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Canada, found in 1993 that meditation induces epilepsylike brain seizures in some people. His study of 1,081 students showed that the 221 meditators among them had a higher rate of hallucinating floating spots of light, hearing voices, and even feeling the floor shake. Other studies reported that meditators complained of feeling emotionally dead and seeing the environment as unreal, two-dimensional, amorphous. Those results aren’t surprising if meditation reduces blood flow to the parietal lobe. In longtime meditators, unreality can strike spontaneously. Singer describes it as “involuntary meditation.” One of her patients took anti-seizure medication for 25 years after quitting meditative practice to regain control of his mind.

Other side effects fall under the paradoxical umbrella of “relaxation-induced anxiety,” or RIA. Instead of relaxing during meditation, RIA sufferers feel distressed. Psychologists at Virginia Commonwealth University monitored 30 chronically anxious people during guided meditation. Seventeen percent indicated that their anxiety got worse. A previous study led by Dr. Frederick Heide at Pennsylvania State University reported that the same happened to 54 percent of the subjects. Symptoms of RIA include panic attacks, sweating, a pounding heart, spasms, odd tingling sensations, and bursts of uncontrollable laughter or tears. RIA can also aggravate conditions, such as schizophrenia, depression, asthma, and bleeding ulcers, that were previously stable.

In some cases of schizophrenia, an excess of serotonin coupled with meditation can drop-kick someone into psychosis.

Most people, when you’re working with anxiety, the treatment of choice is relaxation,” says the California Institute of Clinical Hypnosis’ Phillips. “But if you have people that get easily overwhelmed and may not even know what it’s about, don’t even have words to go with it, you have to avoid hypnosis, relaxation, meditation until you teach them how to handle what comes up.”

Meditation is a huge industry in San Francisco. We asked 14 Bay Area instructors, chosen at random from different fields of meditation, if they inform students about the possible side effects. Only three of the teachers knew what we were talking about.

Lalich, now a sociologist specializing in psychological manipulation at California State University in Chico, says, “The problem is that everyone thinks that meditation is great for everybody, and people are always surprised to learn that it can cause problems. Certainly there’s plenty of context where it’s completely harmless, but it’s like driving a car — people don’t think, ‘Oh, I’m the one that’s going to have an accident.’”

Lalich hopes that 30 years of research will finally open our eyes. “If you were going to buy a car you’d look at Consumer Reports. It’s the same thing — you’re talking about your body and your mind; you should be as cautious.”

why el-chameleon is not here anymore....

I kicked el-chameleon from the forum, But not because he says meditation might be dangrous. (As you can see I left this post and his other posts on the forum)

The reason I kicked him out was because once he disrespected me on the board and then told me that I couldn't trust him (to not do it again).

So if I can't trust him not to do it again, I don't want to keep him here.

I don't feel like playing cop and to worry about someone disrespecting me while I'm 'not looking' on the board.

El-Chameleon is an ungrateful little brat.
I invited him over to our forum (which is free) and we are not selling anything or going after a specific teacher.

All I asked is to show respect for the forum members and he couldn't even do that or commit to do that in the future....

Now someone told me that he is ranting like a little girl on realm of how I kicked him out because he was saying that meditation is bad
(well as you can see I left his post in it's place so if that was true I would have deleted his post from here)

Anyone who can't show minimum respect for the forum members or commit to do that in the future doesn't have a place here.

criticism is ok as long as it's done with respect

as for el-chameleon, he can always go to the ghost town known as 'Realm'.

_________________
"a sniper is the worst romancer, he never makes the first move"