What Are the Dangers of Meditation?

Meditation is relaxing, how can there be any dangers to that?

Well, on the scale of things, meditation is less dangerous than taking a walk down a peaceful street. But taking a walk, you know – there is sunburn, dogs, traffic, and just life happening all around.

Meditation is taking a walk in your inner world, and there are challenges, obstacles, hazards and dangers to consider.

Relaxation is Challenging

Oddly enough, it turns out that relaxation is challenging. When you relax deeply, you let go of stress. I know that sounds ridiculously obvious. Think about what happens as you let go of tension, what is this "letting go" process? As your muscles begin to relax, you become aware of what you were tense about: you see mental movies, replay conversations, and feel sensations of tension in your body. And then as you pay attention, these melt away. But you are probably not used to how this feels. The sensations of tension and tension release can be very intense, like rubbing your leg muscles when you have walked or hiked a long ways.

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. If you go in with an approach that is not yours, you'll feel uncomfortable with it, and you won't want to do it.

What happens if you give up in frustration and by far the most likely, is t because you are making meditation feel complicated or unnatural? You do some damage to yourself. If you try on shoes that do not fit and wear them for half an hour, they will make your feet sore. You may get blisters. Then, for some time after, any shoe, even one that fits, will hurt because your skin has been rubbed raw. So you not only lose the time you spent doing the wrong technique, or the right technique in the wrong way. You also spoil yourself for any technique. You have to allow your body and mind time to forget the insult.

But wait – time is precious. You had an inspiration, "Hey, I think I'll explore meditation!" And this is a precious impulse. It was a long time coming. If you fail, then how long will it be before you get up the nerve to go again?

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.

The Challenge of Change, Even Change for the Better

There are challenges and obstacles having to do with just handling the benefits of meditation, the famous clarity and top-of-the-mountain perspective. Change itself is a challenge to deal with – it's a bit like moving, or traveling. And because you are changing, you might benefit from doing a particular type of meditation for three months, and then you have changed, and so what you have been doing is no longer needed, it becomes too much of a good thing.

The Challenge of Ecstasy

When you meditate, if you find a way that matches your body type, personality, lifestyle, and daily routine, you will find yourself slipping into the greatest restfulness and relaxation you have ever known. This is the kind of inner elixir that people take drugs, drink alcohol, have sex, and move to Tahiti to experience, yet you have access to it by sitting in a chair in your living room and closing your eyes. Even if you only meditate for half an hour a day, the impact of this relaxation will undermine the suspicious, guarded aspects of your personality and lead you to be more open to life and to other human beings. When I started meditating, for example, I laughed for about two years, the kind of bubbling laughter that children exhibit when they are delighted by something they see, such as a caterpillar, dog, or a wave. I was laughing because my senses were so open to magic that I was seeing the whole world in a new light, and I was overwhelmed with fondness for whatever I was gazing at. Openness offers its own kind of protection, the kind that comes from being relaxed and alert, but this is a totally different way of moving through the world than being guarded and suspicious. It's a different world, and you will have to learn to navigate in it, day by day.

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. So it is really quite a task to find or create a meditation practice that is designed to be supportive of the life you want to live. If you don't do that, then you won't proceed on to the next obstacle.

The Challenge of Facing Everything

When I began meditating in 1968, I was 18 years old and working my way through college. Each morning when I arose, I would meditate for about 25 minutes, then get something to eat, do some homework, and go off to school or work. Then again in the afternoon or early evening I would find a space somewhere – the university library, my car, an empty classroom, a tree out in the central park, and meditate for half an hour. During those two half-hour sessions, in addition to experiencing great inner peace, I relived every traumatic experience that ever happened to me. Seated there on the chair, the lawn, or in my car, I would see and feel and hear and smell and taste everything painful, everything that made me shudder, every overwhelming event, every conflict, every loss, everything that ever made me hate myself or anyone else. Usually the first memories to come up would be tiny things from that day – the small shock of seeing an angry driver on the road, or worries about a job interview or test coming up. Then, once that door was opened, any memory from any time in life was fair game. All these emotions streamed through me and I witnessed them without resistance, but also without being detached – I felt everything down to the last molecule.

As great as meditation was, I would never have found time for it if I did not experience an improvement in my ability to function after meditation. For example, for days before taking a test, my mind would be filled with planning for the test, during what seemed like the entire meditation. It would be breath, breath, a thought of the test, mantra, mantra, another thought of the test, along with a tense feeling in my body. In this way I released the worry about tests and actually started to do better on tests than I did at home. I started to be so relaxed about taking tests that I became a clutch-hitter, someone a bit too relaxed who was actually improved by adding the tension of performance of record. In every arena of my life, work, play, love, and sex, I found myself functioning way above anything I had experienced before. And because of this, I got the sense that in addition to meditation giving a shape and an impetus to my life, I also felt that my daily life contributed to meditation. If I would go out and really go for it in life, then I would have much better, deeper, more entertaining meditations at the end of the day.

There was always pain of some sort: the pain in the muscles of fatigue, the slight pain of visualizing a test or job situation and worrying about whether I was prepared for it, and then the kind of pain you feel when you think about a conversation that went awry, the pain of entering the body fully, entering the heart, entering the senses, inhabiting the skin fully. The most consistent pain was from the myriad little ouches that came with realizing that I could have done better here or there – Oh, I see now, aha, I see the big picture now and if I had seen that then, I could have acted differently. A kind of after-action debriefing, a review of the previous day's actions, with the silent awareness part of the mind acting as a coach, firm but not mean. Ruthless and also gentle.

After facing the pain, relaxing into the tension, surrendering to the attacks of my conscience, and witnessing the many thoughts zooming around, there always would come a gush of relaxation, a sense of relief and peace and acceptance. This inner quiet always seemed to come at unexpected moments, often just after the tension seemed unendurable, after I looked at my watch for the third time in three minutes wondering, "Is this over yet? Can I get up out of this tedious waste of time?"

I learned that this process was self-regulating to an amazing extent. The catalyst inviting the emotional and physical release to happen was that I was relaxing, opening up to myself, and being willing to feel. This seems obvious if you think about it, that if you relax, you let go of tension. And when you let go of tension, you become aware of what you were tense about. You feel it, see it, hear it, and your body asks you repeatedly if you really want to let go of that tension. That's the process. There does not seem to be any way to relax on a deep level without consciously letting go of your holding pattern. And if you ever tense up and distrust the process of release, or feel that you can't handle it, this very act of tensing cancels the meditation process.

This is a profoundly healthy process. You get a chance, each day, to get perspective on your life as if you were sitting on a mountain top, or just had a near-death experience. And then ding, it's dinner time and you are sitting in a chair in the den, stretching. Meditation is always a challenge, always a surprise, and always rewarding.

My general experience of meditation, from the beginning, has been that it is a time and a situation in which you remember everything you have forgotten, you feel everything that is in your heart and body, you face everything and confront everything. Your own inner essence calls you to pay attention and to not turn away from being with whatever comes up. This whole process occurs because you invite it and allow it, and relax into it. There is a self-regulating quality to the confrontation, because if you tense against a thought or an emotion, you won't feel it – your repression will be activated.

So the rhythm of relaxing and releasing stress happens because you let down your guard. Why have you let down your guard? Because you have come home to yourself, and when you are at home, you are at ease, and if anyone in the house wants to talk to you, you listen.

The only way to avoid this process would be to never let down your guard, and to make meditation into something other than being at home in the self. Some people, it turns out, do just that – they make meditation a very complicated affair so that they never have to pay attention to their real experience. If for example, you don't want to feel your real pain, which could be the pain of loneliness, the pain of not living your creativity, or the pain of losing someone you love, you could go out of your way to make meditation artificially painful, by sitting in an uncomfortable cross-legged position that hurts your knees. In this way, you could meditate a little but be distracted by a self-induced pain.

So it turns out that if you make meditation a sort of unnatural process, and impose the wrong kind of rules on yourself – if you try, in other words, to do someone else's meditation, then you will never relax utterly and therefore never allow your deepest tensions and fears to come to the surface and be released. Books on "how to meditate" are full of instructions that will drive you crazy and make it impossible for you to meditate. For example, Patanjali begins his famous Yoga Sutras with the line, "Yoga chitta vritti nirodha," which is often translated as, "Yoga is suppression of the wave motion of the mind," or "Yoga is making your mind blank." Yeah, right.

Being able to meditate requires a skillful connection to yourself. If you simply take to heart the often-heard connection of meditation=slowing down the mind, you will probably become unable to meditate and enjoy it. The mind does not move slowly. Maybe the minds of ancient people living in tiny villages in rural India moved slowly. But if you think you are supposed to slow down, you are going to wind up at war with nature.

(By the way, I am just writing all this now, early July 2005, and posting it to the web unedited. I wrote this book originally in 1978, and submitted it for publication, but did not know enough about the publishing business then to get it out. Then I lost the manuscript, and accompanying notes, about 1000 pages of typing I did in the late 70's. So let me know if you see typos, or want to give feedback. My first drafts of stuff are sometimes hard to read.)

The Rhythm of Meditative Experience

I noticed a pattern to my meditation experience, a rhythm to the adventure of each 20 or 25-minute sitting. I meditate because I need something, a beetter perspective on my life, more energy and focus to carry out my plans, and to attune my senses so I am more alert. So I am on a quest. Then all kinds of obstacles show up: I need to find a quiet place to meditate, I need to make time for it, and then as soon as I close my eyes, I have to face all the noise in my head about my to-do list, and anything I forgot to put on it or attend to. Then the individual items on my to-do list play musical chairs and have a struggle about who gets which position on the list, each one shouting, "No, I'M more important than the other!" After sorting through this noise, which feels like a chore or a task, then there would be a reward, an intitial relaxation and a gush of pleasure, a sense of Ah, I am on my way. But then deeper pains would come to the surface to be felt.

The general pattern of any one meditation was something like this:

– 0 to 5 minutes: settling in, catching up with myself, relaxing and sinking into the seat, feeling my fatigue, noticing the thoughts coming and going.

– 5 to 10 minutes: Feeling in to the deeper worries, struggles, energies and dynamics of my life. Letting go of the muscle tension involved in "guarding myself" or blocking out experience. Settling in, settling in, and confronting everything that made me feel unsettled. Occasional sublime moments of pure transcendence, no thoughts at all, just pure serene expansiveness, feeling at one with the whole world. These would be so intense that their delight would permeate every area of my life, even though I immediately forgot about them.

– 10 to 15 minutes: A descent into some deep dark hell where I would face my worst fears, often things I had lived through, sometimes images of people I had terrible experiences with, sometimes vague feelings of fear of darkness, death, or being torn apart somehow. Five minutes of this can feel eternal, let me tell you. And then almost always, the intensity of this darkness would resolve itself into something else entirely – relief or rejoicing or quiet ecstasy. Opening up the floodgates of joy to just be alive. But this only happened after facing the fears without resisting, just letting it all wash through me.

– 15 to 20 minutes: A sense of relief, the emotional equivalent of sweeping up the garage floor, just cleaning up the debris left over from the descent, paying attention to any remaining feelings of unease or fear or tension, starting to get excited about the day ahead of me, beginning to plan where I was going to go and what I was going to do, savoring a sense of deep peacefulness and pleasure.

Then somewhere around 25 minutes I would slowly open my eyes.

That Unfinished Feeling

Once in awhile, perhaps once a month or so, the "facing my fears" process would not be finished at the 20 minute or 25 minute mark, and I would be completely unready to jump up and zoom off to work or class. I would have to sit there for another 5 or 10 minutes to allow the feelings to finish themselves. If I did not, then the "unfinished" feeling would persist, and I would be in a bad mood for most of the rest of the day. So I learned to just stay there until I was done, and at the same time knowing that there really would be hell to pay if I didn't show up at the golf course to mow the greens of the first 9 holes before dawn, or show up at the EEG lab to wire up the day's subjects.

Almost always, the cycle of experience in meditation would resolve itself and I would emerge refreshed and good to go, ready for whatever was up that day – work, love, play, rest, travel, study, – in any combination and permutation. Over the months during 1968 and 1969 I picked up a variety of tricks to help make the transition from the inner world of meditation to the outer world. My girlfriend was very savvy about this, and from her I learned about painting mandalas – you just draw a circle, or circular shape such as a flower, and start painting. She would also sometimes soak in a hot bath before meditating, a habit I adopted. Sometimes I would do a few minutes of Tai Chi, other times I would pick up a paintbrush and work on a mandala-like image, or I might go for a swim in the ocean, or go to the garage and take a hammer and break pieces of wood. There always seemed to be a way to take the energy, however rough, and shape it into something useful. Necessity is the mother of invention, and my necessity was I had to make a living, I needed to heal myself, and I wanted to get a B+ or A- average. Those were my demands on myself, so I just figured out a way to make it all work, the way that people everywhere do. And I had a lot of coaching, teaching, workshops, therapy and mentoring to help me integrate my experiences and take them in stride.

Anyone who meditates has to learn to deal with this kind of thing, and there is some fine balancing of priorities involved. When my friends dropped one of the balls they were juggling, I could tell at a glance from 50 feet away, and I am sure they could tell the same about me.

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. By and large, those who don't get the feeling of how to ride their rhythms will quit meditating, and the inner uproar fades into the background.

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. The other thing I have noticed is that just regular people are totally capable of facing everything that comes up in meditation. Everyone who is not an addict has to do this anyway. If you love anyone, if you want to get married, if you have children, if you have friends, you will have to face every feeling in the world, just because of the intimacy of your relationships. Even if you live a charmed life, people you know and love will suffer from various vicissitudes.

In meditation, you pay attention, and this sometimes has the feeling tone of paying bills, it hurts a little. Or a lot, then you feel much better when you have done it. The debts we pay in meditation are our debts to the body, to the nervous system, and to life. Anything we ever said, "I'll deal with that later. I will feel that later. I will think about that later," will come up in meditation, because by meditating you are saying to life, "OK, later is NOW. Bring it on."

For one thing, meditation is in no way separate from anything you do during the day, all your relationships, and your whole purpose on Earth. 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."

For something so powerful, meditation has relatively few truly negative side effects. This is because meditation is not a drug, it is a way of accessing your body's own built-in healing response. Your body, your nerves, your organs, your entire system has immense inner resources of adapting. Human being have adapted to environments from the humit tropics to the frozen Artic. Our bodies are geniuses at adapting to and mastering the world. When you meditate, you give life permission to fine-tune your adaptation to the world.

But there is a weird set of problems here, having to do with the meditation traditions themselves, and what a good job they have done of preserving the teachings that were given in 100 BC, 500 BC, 100 AD, 1300 AD, and so on. 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 meditate if 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. But men and women who are married should no more internalize these attitudes than they should inject themselves with chemotherapy toxins.

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. In fact, cultivating monk-like disgust toward bodies, the senses, sensual enjoyment, is very damaging to non-monks. It's like studying cooking with someone with an eating disorder, who conveys a conflicted, problem-laden attitude toward food with every look and word.

If meditation teachers were doctors, they would be prescribing that everyone take antibiotics all the time, because life is a disease. They would give healthy people massive doses of x-rays, just because tradition says that it is good to have a clear, ruthless view of the inside of the body, and to develop contempt for it.

To put things in perspective, many millions of people have meditated, over the past several thousand of years. Many of these And written about it extensively – there is a vast literature. If you look at this history as a vast trial run of a new drug, there are remarkably few negative side effects for such a powerful process.

Since meditation usually comes wrapped up in a religion and a traditional culture, we have to distinguish the dangers of meditation itself from the dangers of say, converting to Buddhism if you are a woman living in the midwest United States in 2005. There is not much going on in the world of meditation that is aimed at how people really live now. There are thousands of varieties of Buddhism-flavored meditation, Hindu-flavored meditation, and so on. So we have to distinguish the dangers of meditation itself, even if a woman could find a woman-friendly form to practice, from all the extra cultural baggage meditation tends to come with.

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.

The Dangers of Yoga

Yoga injuries to knees, back, feet, shoulders.

Yoga diets that weaken your health.

Yoga breath techniques with unexpected side-effects.

Yoga attitudes that resemble an eating disorder.

The Dangers of Religion

Orthodoxy. Fanaticism.

Passivity and the idea of karma.

Dangers of making meditation a work against nature.

Dangers of being a recent convert. vs. second or more generation.

Dangers of the Guru system with its master/slave dynamic.

Dangers of practicing repression of sexual desire.

Dangers of detachment, alienation, dissociation.

Dangers of developing a nauseous attitude toward money.

Dangers of New Age thinking.

The Hazards of Not Meditating

At the same time that meditation can be an intrinsically healthy process, there are many places to get stuck. In our outer life, each of us is always getting stuck, and then getting unstuck. The inner life has some parallels. Getting good information is hard, because almost all books were written for a different kind of person than you are. T

here 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.

How to Deny Everything

The meditation traditions are OLD – like thousands of years old. You can't study meditation for long without being exposed to the way cultures were organized way back when. And thousands of years ago, in the ant-like organization of the Feudal system, everyone was specialized: there were farmer ants, warrior ants, breeder ants, and priest ants. Meditation was conceived of something that only specialized meditation-ants do. In the Feudal system, the deal was: "OK, if you promise to give up sex, and give up owning property, we will let you just sit in your room or cave and meditate, and we will bring you food and honor you, but otherwise leave you alone."

So back then, the fundamental stance of meditation was that you start out by denying everything. You deny the world, you turn your back on everything and every obligation. You deny your family. You abandon your family if you have one, like Buddha did. You deny your desire for sex. You deny your desire to have a home. You deny your desire for innovation or creativity, and take an oath to just accept things as they are. You deny your desire to be an individual, and surrender your will to whover is your superior in the religious order you have committed to.

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. This is similar to what people do when they cultivate roses – they prune away at the bush so that there will be just a few big flowers, so that the rose bush will have no choice but to put all its vitality into a few big flowers, instead of many small ones.

When denial works, you get these brilliant, world-class blossoms of spiritual genius who seem to hold the world in the palm of their hand. Vyasa, Shukadeva, Gaudapada, Govinda, Shankara. Buddha, Padmasambhava. These are the people everyone reads about, 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 traditional nature of meditation teaching has several implications for modern people in the West who want to include meditation in their daily lives.

1. They have no interest in adapting meditation so that it is appropriate for your circumstance. Within their own traditions, any teacher who did this would be despised for polluting the teachings.

2. 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.

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

4. In general, the meditation traditions are

Perspective

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.

Meditation is not dangerous in the way that, say, commuting to work or school each day has its dangers. Meditation is in general safer than just sitting and watching television for half an hour twice a day. Think about it - TV is a commercial medium and large corporations spend billions of dollars on the best hypnotic material the human mind can contrive, all of it cunningly designed to get inside your head and manipulate your beliefs and behaviors.

The Seduction of Asia

When you sit and meditate, it is as if you are watching your inner television, and you will also be exposed to innumerable commercials, devised by some of the most psychologically clever people who have ever lived, the meditation masters of Asia over the last 2500 years or so. You will to some extent be exposed to the thinking and energy patterns of these meditators and meditation teachers of the past. These were almost exclusively males who existed within the feudal systems and caste structure of ancient Asia. So you will be seeing and feeling powerful suggestions that you worship and adore these meditation masters, and imitate their path, bow down to them, and give them all your money. The general propaganda they are espousing is that if you want to get enlightened, you should become like them – a celibate male who lives within a religious organization of a Buddhist or Hindu persuasion. Buddha abandoned his wife and newborn son to go off into the forest and meditate. Shouldn't you?

Wasting Time

By far the most common "hazard" is that you waste your time – you spend time studying and practicing meditation and you don't find a technique that works for you, so you give up, feeling defeated. This happens to probably 90% or more of the people who go to a meditation class, buy a CD, or read a book. Almost every day, I talk to people who have had this experience.

These kinds of numbers are not specific to meditation – in almost any program, where daily practice is the aim, the follow-through rate – the percentage of people staying with it for a year – is often 5 to 10%.

One American Buddhist nun, observing people who come for introductory teachings and then noticing who was still coming a year later, estimated that the dropout rate in her meditation center is more than 95%. But such observations are rare – it is hardly even discussed in the meditation community.

It would be taboo to even consider the idea that the meditation teachers are inept in their methods of instrution. Instead, the emphasis is on tradition – transmitting the "purity" of whatever lineage is being reprsented. Purity demands that you not adapt your teaching to the students you have – you try to get them to adapt to you.

So, in the name of a sacred lineage, conditions are set up that attract students and then guarantee that 95% or more of them will fail, meaning, a year after taking a course, less than one in twenty of the students will still be meditating.

When I was a TM teacher in the early 1970's, the dropout rate after a year was about 50%, meaning that after a year, half of the students would still be meditating every day. I thought this was was a failure on my part, that the dropout rate was so high. Then one day in 1973, an educational consultant who had learned meditation from me several years earlier came to a group meditation and recognized half a dozen of the people he had started meditating with. He went around and spoke with them and was astonished to discover that most of them were still meditating daily and were happy with it. Then he came over to me and said, "It looks like a bit more than half of the people I started with are still meditating." I hung my head and said, "Yeah, I know." He said, "You don't understand. This is extraordinary. In general with a program where people have to do something every day, the follow-through rate is more likely 5, 10, maybe in exceptional cases, 15%. 50% is unheard of."

A Depressing Sense of Failure

What is the effect on a person of sincerely wanting to meditate, and investing time in learning, but failing? It's like a failed relationship – it hurts. There is loss, grief, and maybe some lasting damage. You do learn something – you learn you are "undisciplined" and that your self is defective.

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, that they can't meditate. Most feel bad that they can't make their minds blank.

I think this is like feeling bad that your feet can't fit into size 4 shoes, or that your eyes are not blue. It's a kind of shame that you have learned, and it was unintentionally taught you. Meditation teachers, to the extent that they have been influenced by orthodox religion, whether it be Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity, tend to be disease carriers of bad attitudes toward life.

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.

A War on the Self

Let's do a thought-journey, what physicists call a gedanken experiment. Let's pretend you are a 18-year old male, whose parents have donated him to a Hindu or Buddhist monastery. The oldest son inherited the farm, and there is nowhere for you to live. So there you are. And there is no escape at all, ever. You are part of the Feudal system. If you leave the monastery, you will simply discredit yourself and your parents and will forever be known as a renegade or fallen monk. So really, there is no escape. There you are, a healthy 20-year old male, whose testicles produce five hundred million sperm each and every day, and who gets an erection at the slightest thought of sex, gets aroused just from the brushing of the cloth of the robe against his penis. Around you in the monastery is a range of males, aged 16 to 60, half of whom are sizing you up as a sexual partner or slave.

Your situation as a monk is probably that you are not there by choice. It is as if you have been drafted into the army. And even if you are there by choice, what is the choice? What would be going on in the mind of an 18-year old if he says, "I forever renounce sex. I renounce ever finding a mate. I renounce all personal relationship, forever. I swear to be in poverty for the rest of my life. I swear to completely and unquestioningly obey every monk who is senior to me, for the rest of my life, no matter what they say. I swear total and unquestioning obedience to my lineage." You may have just wanted to get out of town, get out of the house, and to do that, you entered a monastery.

So there you are, and guess what? All your life energies, that could go to doing work, starting a family, developing a craft, having friends, building a life for yourself, all these energies have to be redirected. You actually have to kill them off. Any impulse you might have, when given an insane order to comply with, to say, "Shove it," has to be broken utterly. And any desire you have for women has to be killed out, entirely. Say you are driven wild by lust and seduce a village girl, either taking her virginity or making her pregnant. She will be ruined – there is no possibilty of marrying her. She may commit suicide, her family will be totally dishonored, and her father and brothers will come and burn down the monastery, even though it has been there for hundreds of years. So you have to, at all costs, kill your sexual desire.

Meditation in such circumstances is part of a war on the self. The need is almost medical, in which amputation is called for. You need to amputate your desires, ambition, individuality.

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 too 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."

If you want some examples, you might read A Tale of Two Paths.

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. These are medicinal attitudes that monks and nuns cultivate in themselves. However, if you are not a monk, these attitudes are simply toxic, like taking antibiotics if you do not have an infection, or drinking radioactive iodine to kill your thyroid gland. 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.

Most long-term meditators have been damaged to some extent by these monastic attitudes, because they permeate the atmosphere of meditation. To a certain extent, this cancels out the benefits of meditation. Say a person has been meditating for 10 years. When they look back, they often see that for a year or two they were actually devolving, as they hacked away with their mental knifes at their "attachments," before realizing, "Hey, wait a minute, I am a householder, I work with attachments.

Anything you do in meditation that interfers with the simple joys of living, or interfers 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. You may find yourself feeling detached emotionally and get divorced as a consequence, and this may be good or bad, who knows? 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 mediation schools: it means you are ready to take vows as a monk or nun.

Learned Helplessness

The meditation traditions are very old and very well preserved. They have preserved tens of thousands of ancient texts, plus the oral traditions that go with them. In practice this means that you can talk to a Tibetan monk and come into contact with the energy and attitudes of the monasteries of 13th Century Tibet, and going back further, the dynamic and wild 8th Century founders of Tibetan Buddhism, and earlier still, the brilliant 6th and 3rd Century Hindu and Buddhist scholars of India and Nepal, and then on back to Buddha, who was a reformer of Hinduism.

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.

Long-Term Depression

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.

Cultural Poisoning

Another aspect of the damage resulting from the War on the Self and Learned Helplessness is as cultural poisoning. In your outer life you are living one way – you are a citizen of the United States or France or England or Slovakia – and in your inner life, as part of your meditation, you are a low-caste serf in an 15th Century Hindu ashram, struggling to get a little bit of attention from the Master, and begging for permission to exist. It is a very different thing to be living in Tibet in 1120 A.D. and be practicing Tibetan Buddhism, or Japan in 1425 and practicing Zen, than to be living in New York in 2004 and practicing Tibetan Buddhism. There is a different process for fitting your personality and daily life into the teachings.

Consider medicine: almost all medications have a bit of a poisoning effect, no matter how needed they are. What the doctor decides, and perhaps discusses with you, is if the negative side effects of the medication are going to be worth it. This is what good medicine is.

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?

The Powerful Call of the Feudal System

Consider Star Wars and The Lord of The Rings. Part of their charm is that they are set in the Feudal system, with Lords and Knights and Masters and Magicians and Slaves and serfs. I loved them, as did much of the world. In Star Wars, one of the main character was a slave, and then a former slave. Darth Vader, as the child Anakin, was a slave. Then later, when he was the universally feared Lord Darth Vader, he was the slave to his Master, the Emperor.

Groveling is Big

In the Feudal system, groveling was the way to go for just about everything. You got up in the morning and bowed down to your parents. Then you bowed down to the altar with its gods. You went to school and bowed down to the teacher. And like anything else people do all the time, I would imagine that bowing has a whole realm of nuances, things that only people who bow down all the time can see – the speed of bowing, the depth, whether you touch your head to the floor, whether you then crawl on hands and knees to try to touch the toes of the person you are groveling before.

The Vampire-like Nature of Gurus

One reason gurus seem to glow is that they are absorbing the projections of everyone around them, feeding on the energy of the devotion, love and surrender coming their way. The guru sits on his throne (sometimes her throne) and accepts the adoration, money, attention, service, fealty of the people whose good karma it is to be able to kiss his feet. From there things get weird, usually.

By absorbing the life force of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of worshippers, Gurus can glow with supernatural vitality, and then when they look at someone, they can shock and thrill them with the power of their gaze. Actors, rock bands, and performers of all types know how to do this, let the audience give you energy and you accept it and then channel it back to them in a magic co-creation. This is part of the mystery of live performance. The Guru is someone who never steps off the stage, who takes it as his job to be the center of the universe. And it's a lot of work to pretend to be perfect, the living embodiment of the Divine, the Lord of the Universe in human form, 24/7. Gurus go slightly insane from the pressure, I think, and from being continually tempted by money, power, fame, sex, and master/slave games.

The group around a Guru is called an ashram, and ashramic groups are as Machiavellian, sadistic, ruthless, money-obsessed and power-addicted as the court around a king or emperor. The Guru is the ultimate Godfather – imagine a man walking down the street who has the charisma of Brad Pitt, the cunning of a Mafia boss, and who is defined as being greater than Jesus, greater than God. If a guru even hints, "Mr. Smith is causing me grief," that person will get hate mail, anonomyous death threats, and maybe visits from henchmen.

The Guru archetype is ancient and part of the rich cultural traditions of Asia. We don't have anything like it in the West. The Hindu scriptures define the Guru as greater than God, because he is the intermediary, he is the one who shows you God. Kabir wrote, "Guru and God both appear before me. To whom should I prostrate? I bow before Guru who introduced God to me."

It is highly unfortunate that gurus are associated with meditation, because that is so miniscule a part of what they actually are about. If a modern Westerner wants to learn about meditation from a guru-centered organization, there are so many obstacles in the way.

Imagine that you are walking into a hospital to get a check-up. As you walk down the hallway, all the people in the offices come to their doors and stare at you as you go by. The first person gets an immediate estimate of how much money she will be able to get you to donate to the organization, and starts working on scenarios to bend you to her will. The next person starts working on a way to have you "diagnosed" with something so they can harvest your organs and sell them on the black market. Further along, someone is visualizing how to prep you to become a sex slave to one of the powers around the throne. Someone else is seeing you as competition and plotting how to destroy you. Yet another person sees you as a co-conspiritor to overthrow the others. Years later you walk out of the hospital, minus a kidney, or some eggs, and a lot of blood. And you never got a real check-up, you only got scammed by people with hidden agendas who told you something was wrong with you for the power over you, the leverage this gave them.

I myself have never had a bad experience with a guru, so what I am reporting here is based on the last couple decades of working with people who have left gurus, ashrams, and meditation movements. Since 1975, I've been a person meditators go to and tell their stories, the ones they are ashamed or afraid to tell anyone else. My experience with gurus has been incredibly positive – I totally enjoy the presence of the gurus I have been around, the sense of play and multiplicity of levels of awareness. I am glad they are here in America and Europe, as well as in Asia, doing their thing. But what some gurus do has very little to do with meditation, and a lot to do with cult dynamics as they pertain to founding a religion based on the worship of a living human being as God.

Gurus attract crowds of people, and each person in that crowd can have a completely different experience, and furthermore, that individual's experience can change radically from one moment to the next. This makes it impossible to ever know who a guru truly IS. Even if 10 people swear they had sex with the guru, you will never know unless there is videotape. The Guru is an invisible friend, flying around on the inner level, omnipresent, so some people imagine they are having sex with the Guru. My personal impression is that gurus are usually having sex with their disciples, but not necessarily the ones that are talking about it and claiming the guru abused them.

How any one person interacts with the guru archetype is as complex as predicting how any one individual will respond to a bottle of rum, a drug or medication. Culture, beliefs, early childhood experiences, psychic wounds, belief systems, religion. My impression is that the guru system works a lot better in India than it does in the United States. The problems of gurus in the West are many, but among them is this troubling sense that so many Westerners do not get their energy back from the guru. It's like loving someone who does not reciprocate – it just sucks the life out of you. For every person I know who is radiant because they love their guru, I know three or four for whom the guru is like a bad marriage, something that steals years off your life and leaves you broke, broken and bitter. Years wasted doing the wrong path.



The Dangers of Successful Meditation

When meditation is successful, there is a whole universe of challenges that open up. In general, when you meditate your senses open up and your intuition becomes stronger. But many families and groups are built on denial and have effective mechanisms in place to squash any dissidents. When you get closer to your truth sense, then you will become more uncomfortabe if you betray your integrity.

Then consider the notion of opening the chakras or energy centers, which yogis talk about. Say that you meditate and open up a chakra such as the 4th chakra, called the anahata or heart chakra. What then?

Think about how much trouble it caused in your life when your second chakra opened – the sexual center. It provoked a crisis in your development, the transition from being a child to being a teenager charged with hormones, ready and able to reproduce. You had all kinds of wild sensations you had not known before, and all of a sudden, new concerns, interests and fears.

Each energy center, as it opens, provokes a crisis, a change in life such as that induced by the opening of the second chakra. You enter a kind of "puberty" of development of energy and perception pertaining to that chakra.