risks; maximally cautious warnings/directives (first-pass, without explanation):
- If you are at risk from sequelae of high blood pressure, intracranial pressure, or intraocular pressure (e.g. stroke, dissection, glaucoma), breathing disturbance, dysautonomia, dystonia, or sleep disturbance then you must not engage with the practices below or you must engage with them with extreme caution. If you have spinal or cervical abnormalities that could lead to spinal cord or nerve root impingement, then you must not engage with the practices below or you must engage with them with extrem caution. If you have other musculoskeletal risks then you must be careful.
- Individuals residing in households with other residents below the age of eighteen or over the age of 65 should not engage in these practices after practice has been initiated, unless there is no one under the age of eighteen in the household and anyone over the age of 65 has consented to your doing these practices in residence after they’ve read this numbered list.
- Women who are pregnant or you might become pregnant before asymptoting in these practices (e.g. 2-10 years, depending) should not engage in these practices.
- If you are at risk for suicide, psychosis, or mania then you should engage with these practices with extreme caution.
- If you have metabolic or cardiovascular disease such that a prolonged, inadvertent sedentary lifestyle (no exercise because of musculoskeletal sequelae) would be dangerous, then you should engage with these practices with caution.
- If your immune system is under- or overactive, then you should engage with these practices with caution.
- If you have experienced abuse, psychological trauma, physical trauma, etc., then you should engage with these practices with caution.
- If you engage with these practices then you must be aware that you could permanently ruin the rest of your life or die (sooner that you would otherwise). You must also be aware that the lives of people around you may be ruined or those people may die sooner as a result of your engaging these practices.
- You have to judge whether you have net enough money, food, shelter, social/relationship capital, "opportunity cost slack" to proceed. Ideally, a person either has "truly nothing to lose" or they have ample resources to last them three to seven years (just in case).
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The stuff below has a mild and transient version all the way up to an extreme and chronic version. I describe sort of the worst-case scenarios below. In the worst case, you might need to drop everything, or as much as you possibly can, for weeks, months, or longer to solve it, on your own or finding a teacher or teachers who can help. This could be very costly to finances and relationships. If you experience flickers of any of the below, and you likely will, it happens, a lot, it certainly doesn’t mean you’re on your way to a worst-case scenario, but you should treat flickers calmly but with great seriousness. Don’t make seeming "progress" at the expense of even a slight uptick in the direction of any of the below. Again, you will likely skirt the faint or even moderate edges of all this stuff, so don’t freak out, and/but this is all very, very serious stuff.
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At the very, very worst, some people will run into extreme 24-7 muscle tension somewhere in their body lasting months if not a couple years. (Some people also have a less terrible version where the muscle tension is only present while actually sitting down to meditate.) That’s fine though super not great at all if it’s in your thigh or something. But, if it’s in your head, then you’ve got significantly increased intracranial pressure or something, which at worst can cause lingering or permanent dysautonomia of some form, depending on how your body downregulates blood pressure or vasodilates or etc.. I imagine this could be really risky for someone who is at risk for stroke. Additionally, if it happens in your neck or spine then you could be a risk for nerve root impingement and permanent structural or neuromuscular impairment or other disc injury sequelae. And your sleep could get really fucked up depending on how skillful you managing weird musculoskeletal stuff with pillows. These are real risks. It can mess up exercise, intimacy, finances, daily life, etc. [...]
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At the very worst, due to weird subtle stuff that you’ll begin experience extreme sensitivity to other people. Like, being around people, working shoulder-to-shoulder with people, being on the phone or video chat with people, sleeping next to someone you care about, will become radically intolerable for some number of weeks or months. This is a real risk. This could destroy relationships both intimate and financial. Due to the same weird subtle stuff, people might come to find being around you to become completely intolerable even if you’re fine being around them. And this as well could destroy relationships both intimate and financial. (To me, this means that meditation and pregnancy or even having kids under eighteen probably don’t mix or mix in risky ways.)
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Whether weird subtle stuff or not, your mind is figuring out how to change itself, and that’s a lot of power for a still-dumb mind to have. So we’ll call this interim magnification of negative traits. There is a (possibly quite long) period where self-deception as well as harm to others can very easily increase, where the meditator is blind to it and also really hurt by all the accusations and doesn’t respond to them in a super-constructive way. This will likely be you, especially if you think of yourself as a person who is generally really careful about this sort of thing and/or who doesn’t have the propensity or desire to hurt other people. For more, see here: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/clickbait-title-you-are-so-bad-real-title-benevolence-subtle-imposition-manipulation-and-control-and-ideology/
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So then, finally, there’s emotional and motivational dysregulation, sometimes extreme, e.g. extreme suffering and can’t do anything, for hours or days or even weeks, or even more. How fucking weird and terrible things can get, in the worse case, cannot be overemphasized. And, it goes without saying that this can be bad for relationships and finances. Interestingly, I currently don’t think "psychosis psychosis" [sic] is much of a risk, even when things are super crazy weird, maybe like little flashes that are rapidly corrected, but there’s probably a non-zero risk.
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Finally, there’s opportunity cost.
Again, this could break you, this could ruin your life, ruin your mind, ruin your relationships, hurt a significant other, hurt your kids in entire-life-affecting subtle and overt ways, etc.
See also these sections:
- environment and subtlety; (more) risks and rabbit holes
- "psychic" and "supernatural" stuff: what/how/how-not [draft]
- human epistemic dynamics and phenomena