but what actually makes it risky?; how do risks obtain, when they do?:

A dialogue:

Not sure where this should go but I am wondering if anyone would be interested in helping me understand how the extreme negative side effects of meditation happen. I posted an article a little while back about a woman who went on a retreat that caused a psychotic break and ended in her suicide. I'd like to understand if this is a possibility with any kind of meditation, or if there is certain practices (which I would like to see described concretely and not reference to their traditional names since I don't have enough background in all of that to understand those names and their relations) that can cause this. And moreover I am wondering if anyone has an explanation for what the exact mechanisms along this causal path are. For example: mentally "normal" woman => spends 10 hours a day several days in a row silently focusing on her bodily sensations => ??? => psychotic break => suicide. Can you help me fill in the blank? For example, what is going on on a neurological level that would cause e.g., focusing on the breath to cause ... what exactly? disassociation? and then somehow you get wild beliefs that weren't previously held?

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/ [Last accessed: 2021-04-11]

one point of reference would be a bad or even just really intense psychedelic trip, if you have experience with those

Meditation practices that involve intense concentration can be sort of like turning your consciousness into a laser that's strong enough to punch holes in the walls of the psyche. And then whatever those walls were doing, gets destabilized. If you're doing a lot of destabilizing, without much time to re-stabilize, to re-integrate, then it's possible to end up really lost, and have a really terrible time.

(That was very brief, happy to elaborate. Also I don't 100% agree with the destabilize -> integrate model, and I think mark's wayfinding concept is a nice corrective to it btw, but it's useful for this explanation)

I'm not sure I understand the analogy. What is the psyche such that holes could be punched in it? I have had intense psychedelic trips ... I don't actually understand by what mechanisms those work either.

Like, maybe one could say they artificially stimulate sensory neurons to induce sensations / hallucinations / thoughts the mind wouldn't naturally have, via some chemical activity in the brain. But how is intense concentration doing that? I am trying to understand on a very mechanistic if simplified level what is actually happening.

Would it be accurate to say another way to say "walls" is like ... important concepts the brain uses to model the world? So if you basically physically disrupt the neural patterns involved in that modeling then things will be a bit scrambled as the brain attempts to rewire on the fly?

Hmm, I don't think I have a real mechanistic model of this. One thing in that direction that might be useful is an analogy from physics, which sees both psychedelics and concentration as "adding energy to the brain", thereby (temporarily) increasing connectivity, and letting things come into contact that normally don't. See https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/.

By "walls" I meant the barriers between things in the psyche that don't normally come into contact. Like for example if you're planning a difficult project, you normally don't want to think about embarrassing memories of failures in the past, and your mind will probably keep them unconscious. Or maybe a friendship where you secretly resent the person but you would never ever let them realize that.

(which overlaps with what you were saying about "walls")

Ooh lol I am not sure I have enough such walls.

hehe. hmm ok when i said walls i actually also meant to include things that are more like, the way people walk through a city, where everyone's coordinating to maintain a certain amount of space & privacy, in this delicate dance of purposeful ignoring. And imagine how that would get destabilized if suddenly everyone's thoughts started being broadcast to every passerby

One kind of thing that happens in some cases I think is something like
X = some complicated phenomenal something or other
(For example, "the world" "exists" "the self")
P(X) = some very important load bearing/keystone belief involving X
("I am the sort of person who is such and such and the entire meaning of my life is wrapped up in this" "there are good things in the world and that's the thing that I strive for" "other people exist, and it is other people that I live for")
Then meditation gives you access to the associated phenomenology of X, and you realize that that semantics of X doesn't quite hold together, or that means that something else is true about X (it is "illusory" or "incoherent" or "nothing could be true about it" or something). This then destabilizes P(X), and so destabilizes this person's entire life

Worse, I think that for many "basic" or "primordial" X, like "self" and "being" especially, there is a sort of "default" conception which breaks down upon phenomenological reflection/meditation

And to beat my dead hobby horse, you either get absurd P(X) statements after going through them ("the self is an illusion" "everything is fake"), or you bracket the whole thing and slowly reconceptualize what X is given the constraints of the phenomenology, and the constraints of all the P(X) it is involved in (the relationship between the X's and P(X)s isn't strictly hierarchical, and also what is changing is often the reflective interpretation of X, or conscious access to X, not so much X itself, which can leave its role in a lot of stuff unchanged)

None of the practices in Mark’s document seem that close to the sort of "focus on the breath" / mindfulness work that you get in beginner-level / mass market meditation courses (except maybe in the aux practices which I confess to not having read in full...). Is there something particular about "mindfulness" meditation that is more likely to cause disassociation, psychotic breaks, etc.? And is it a "dose makes the poison" kind of thing?

Mark

Whew this is a complex topic. Some general things come to mind (and it’s a really good question that I personally haven’t tried to mechanistically answer, yet, anywhere):

(1)

Just like we typically don’t over-extend our musculoskeletal joints, like hyperextend our elbows, on a whim, the mind sort of learns, over an entire lifetime, "what not to do." (Sometimes this is too conservative, as in, analogously, a physical trainer will sometimes positively encourage someone do something they thought they couldn’t do, with a healthy, safe outcome.)

Additionally, different people’s systems are more and less "precariously arranged." For some people, if they’re somehow poked in the wrong way (whatever that might mean), nothing much happens, and the person’s system will sort of return to some equilibrium (like a ball in the bottom of a bowl). For other people, one small poke could set off a long cascade of further destabilizing and dysregulating effects. (Over a very long period of time, meditation helps a person’s mind to be more like the first example.)

(People’s minds become more like the latter, precariously arranged, when things have happened that are too fast, too surprising, too painful, too confusing, too adversarially perverse, etc., combined with not having a life situation where they can patiently work through all those sorts of things having happened. And, usually, there are internal and external vicious feedback loops, where some of those things beget more of those things.)

Meditation can be the one small poke. If meditation instructions are "sufficiently different" from what a person normally does with their (body)mind, they might not realize that what they’re about to do will have a potentially destabilizing effect (and it can escalate quite suddenly, very worst case).

I think it’s not TOOOOOOOOO uncommon for people to have "full blown delusions and psychosis" somewhere latent in their system, sort of carefully walled off, even unknown to them, sometimes in a precarious way. Where did this come from? It could be a sort of combination of childhood fantasy crashing into some sort of traumatic event, and that sorts of gets "avoided" and self mixes under the surface for a long time. Also, a person might encounter genuinely invasive nonverbal/coercive/"psychic" stuff from a "dark wizard-y" type person, and a childhood or religious part of them interprets what happened, earnestly (and understandably), as magic or aliens, etc. The adult mind recoils from this and walls it off, but then this "latent stuff" doesn’t get metabolized, processed, integrated, grown up, healed, etc. Then, if the person gets poked in the wrong way, all that stuff comes up and sort of (at least temporarily) "takes over," because it happens to be so traumatically intense or immersive (as if it had just happened or was still happening, because it never got fully metabolized).

(Meditation, properly done, slowly creates a sort of "complex cradle" or "complementary space" for dream, delusion, psychosis, and then slowly titrates those things in, over days, weeks, months, and years, so it can safely metabolized, helped, listened to, accepted, etc. Even then, it can get harrowing.)

(2)

Another thing that can happen is that a person assumes that meditation instructions should be executed in a stereotyped manner and that the effect of meditation is purely good.

Then, if ANYTHING AT ALL BAD happens, the person assumes the right thing to do is MORE OF THE SAME MEDITATION they were doing.

Worst case, this can produce colossal feedback loop escalations and amplifications of bad things.

(3)

Further, there’s a way in which most people don’t start out with a "general undo." They can undo mistakes that are sort of a common type, for them.. But if they’ve just done something new, or a bunch of new things in a row, the bodymind system may have no easy way at all to reverse what’s happened, and, counterintuitively, worst case, learning how to reverse a new, unwanted thing can sometimes take weeks, months, or even years. And, a destabilized person may not be "well resourced" enough to be able to start figuring out how to work through or undo something, for a very long time. And this can contribute to chronic stuff in addition to the acute possibilities mentioned in (1) and (2).

(4)

(As to why some bad states can have similar features between people ("I broke the universe," "everyone is fake"), there are only so many degrees of freedom of the system. And just like in "normal operatng mode" people arrive at similar conclusions (I am a person; I have a body), when the system is pushed to stereotyped extremes, a different people will come to similar conclusions, even if those conclusions seems strange or impossible to a person in "normal mode," e.g. "I am god, jesus, etc.")

(5)

(So, in my stuff, as best I currently know how, in case the reader is "1 in N" and their bodymind is precariously arranged (as are most people, at least a tiny bit), or they have latent intense stuff, or they’re predisposed to take instructions very literally and double down on them, that’s why I err on the side of all the warnings and qualifiers. Granted, they may obscure the forest for the trees or even prime people to experience some bad things.)

S, here’s a concrete made-up story that vaguely resembles stuff that has happened to people i know. let’s say you were sexually abused as a child (shockingly common afaict), and it was really bad, and you did a really good job walling off the part of you that experienced that bc it’s too painful to get in touch with, and you sort of gradually develop a bunch of compensations to deal with this, like being really adhd or suddenly getting really sleepy whenever you get near that whole thing. "precariousness"

a way some people meditate can end up repeatedly forcing them to come into contact with material like this before they’re ready, like maybe they double-down on being with some feeling or sensation related to the trauma that is usually being dissociated or distracted away from, and it can sort of spill out into consciousness and be overwhelming in the same way it was when they were a child. it may not come with any explicit memories so it just feels like suddenly everything is terrifying and bad for no reason. and if they don’t have a way of dealing with this they could end up in an excruciating flashback that doesn’t end, that could be bad enough that it feels like suicide is the only way out.

M (not Mark)

S, one experience I've had that didn't lead to destabilization, but easily could have:

Near the end of a period in my life when I'd been doing psychedelics, well, a bit too often, I was sitting with some friends, totally sober, and suddenly "lost track" of which things were alive and which things were dead.

Best I can figure, there is something in me that tracks "alive/not alive" and "person/not person" and "me/not me." After spending a few months having those concepts poked at, dissolved, and relaxed, I suspect that the "trackers" got a little confused and broken for a bit. Luckily I was in a good place with good people and able to laugh at what was happening and commune with my couch for a few hours, but if it had happened under stress, or something else load-bearing had gotten confused at the same time, I can see how it might have been extremely upsetting

Meditation can break or dissolve those load-bearing but surprisingly fragile concepts much like psychedelics can, but you can also do stuff that will help you ride it out with few or zero side effects.

Ok thank you all, I think there are enough commonalities here that I am piecing together a little bit of an idea of what is going on from an inside perspective. Another question I have though is, I can see this happening with psychedelics use, but does anyone have a sense of what exact practices in meditation can lead to this -- some of what some people said sounded like P1 gone terribly overboard. Anyone able to summarize in a bit more detail what practices that lady in that Harper's article was using? Or is it just ANY meditation in general? waves vaguely I imagine different practices would tend to have different risks -- the article made it sound like the mass market mindfulness stuff can lead to not being able to feel feelings. I just find this topic so fascinating and wish there was something like this Cheetah House table but with more mechanism in it https://www.cheetahhouse.org/symptoms

It sounds like this was a [...] retreat, which is a pretty widespread/standardized version of a particular vipassana practice. You sit for an hour to two hours, multiple times a day, and I think mainly practice a body scan? So very granular attention to tiny areas of the body, scanning slowly through your entire body.

It’s seemed sketch because the main teaching is a recorded video, with other teachers around to ask questions. It seems noticeably less flexible/adaptive/responsive than other retreat formats.

The fact that the teacher here just doubled down on practicing through it is not surprising.

another description here: uggcf://fjvff-puevf.zrqvhz.pbz/gur-10-qnl-tbraxn-ivcnffnan-ergerng-n-jneavat-p6np4963sr50 [rot13 encoded by the editor; Last accessed 2021-04-11]

Mechanism-wise it could be something like privileging atoms of bare sensory experience with attention over more gestalt mental objects. For instance, when encountering pain from sitting, trying to notice the individual sensations that comprise the pain and finding that the pain suddenly dissolves. Reinforcing this kind of thing enough presumably will make it happen more easily and perhaps more globally. I don't know what kinds of meditation - I think this is related to your '10K hours of what' question upthread - but I suspect that to the extent that the meditation instruction includes some "attend closely to everything that is happening" line, something like this is bound to crop up eventually. My very crude story is that the thing that differentiates some practices is some method of integrating that stuff in a net enlivening and functional way, rather than blowing up load-bearing cognitive structures and seeing what happens.

For the record, the blowing stuff up approach was really fine for me for a long time. A lot of my stuff really just seemed to be straightforward spandrels that were producing neuroticism and in whose absence it was easy to reorganize. Then later I ran into stuff that wasn't like that, as far as I could tell.

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