In this episode of Dharma Lab, Cortland Dahl and Richard Davidson are joined by Center for Healthy Minds researchers Simon Goldberg, Polina Beloborodova, and Matt Hirshberg to examine the “shadow side” of meditation. When people report anxiety or other difficult experiences during practice, how can we tell whether meditation caused them? The group discusses what studies of meditation apps and mindfulness programs reveal, why intensive retreats are a different question, and how loneliness, support, and our expectations of practice shape what happens when we sit down to meditate. Enjoy!
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Referenced in this episode:
Healthy Minds Program app — The free meditation app studied in the research discussed in this conversation.
Beloborodova, P., et al. (2026). Prevalence and predictors of self-reported adverse experiences in digital meditation training: 2 randomized controlled trials. JMIR Mental Health, 13, e90602. https://doi.org/10.2196/90602
Hirshberg, M. J., Goldberg, S. B., Rosenkranz, M., & Davidson, R. J. (2022). Prevalence of harm in mindfulness-based stress reduction. Psychological Medicine, 52(6), 1080–1088. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720002834
Baer, R. A. (2003). Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 125–143. https://doi.org/10.1093/clipsy.bpg015
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In This Episode:
00:00 Intro - The Shadow Side of Meditation
01:32 Meet the Researchers
03:17 Why Study Meditation’s Side Effects?
06:12 Difficult Experiences vs. Harmful Effects
14:48 More Anxiety, or More Awareness?
15:55 Loneliness and Social Support
19:26 When Difficult Practice Can Be Helpful
22:19 How Common Are Negative Experiences?
26:40 What Controlled Studies Reveal
30:24 Is Meditation Right for Everyone?
34:07 What the Research May Be Missing
35:51 When Practice Feels Like It’s Going Backwards
39:55 Self-Compassion and Knowing When to Step Back
41:00 How Expectations Shape Meditation
Written transcript for those who prefer to read
Lightly edited for readability from the supplied edited transcript. Chapter timestamps follow the edited recording, including the opening teaser. Spoken claims and figures are retained as stated.
00:00 Intro - The Shadow Side of Meditation
Cort: There have been a lot of headlines coming out of a lot of the research that’s happened over the years about a supposed dark side to meditation. Does meditation put us at risk for difficult mental, emotional, perhaps even physical experiences?
Polina: We found in this paper that about 30% of the participants across both of our studies did have some sort of negative experiences during their meditation training. Again, these may not have been caused by meditation training, but have been subjectively attributed by participants to the meditation training.
Matt: What’s the view that people bring to meditation? What’s the conceptual understanding of what meditation is supposed to do? Because if your motivation is to not feel sad, and you believe meditation should be the absence of sadness, and you experience sadness in meditation, then your subjective experience of that is going to be very different than someone who feels like, “Well, my motivation is to train the mind and develop equanimity. And I expect that anything that can arise will arise in meditation.”
And so when sadness arises, then, like you said, Cort, like people have just reflected, that actually might be an invitation to develop that equanimity.
01:32 Meet the Researchers
Cort: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, your co-host, along with world-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson, who many of you probably know. We are here to have a really important and what I think will be a very interesting discussion about the shadow side of meditation.
There have been a lot of headlines coming out of a lot of the research that’s happened over the years about a supposed dark side to meditation. Does meditation put us at risk for difficult mental, emotional, perhaps even physical experiences?
This has been a major topic of research, including the research that we’ve done at the Center for Healthy Minds. So we’re going to unpack that a little bit. What does the science really say? There are actually some very surprising and even counterintuitive findings here, and we have an all-star panel to have this discussion.
Here joining Richie and me are Polina Beloborodova, who is a social psychologist and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Healthy Minds. We’ve also got Simon Goldberg. He’s an associate professor in counseling psychology at UW–Madison, also one of our colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds. And finally, Matt Hirshberg, another colleague from the Center for Healthy Minds and a research assistant professor at the Center.
All three of our colleagues, in addition, of course, to Richie, are some of the leading researchers on this topic. So, Richie, why don’t I turn it over to you? Maybe you could provide a little bit of context. Why is this even on the map of scientific research? And then we can dive into the specific paper that was published recently and some of what we’ve learned.
03:17 Why Study Meditation’s Side Effects?
Richie: Meditation and related practices today are being used in a wide range of contexts, one of which is with individuals with elevated rates of depression and anxiety and other kinds of psychiatric issues. Whenever we are dealing with interventions, particularly when they’re applied to patient populations, in addition to looking at the beneficial outcomes, we always want to monitor for side effects, if you will.
This is something that is true of really all areas of clinical science, whether it’s a medication trial for a physical disease or a behavioral intervention for a psychiatric problem. We really need to, as researchers, be attentive to the possibility that, of course, although our motivation in utilizing these interventions is to benefit people, there are times when the interventions that we’re working with can actually either not have much effect or potentially even produce harm.
It’s our obligation and responsibility to carefully and honestly characterize these potential side effects and publish them so that we can be alert to these possible dangers. Of course, one of the most important issues is: Can we predict who might be likely to have a possible negative effect and, in that way, ameliorate the possibility up front, if you will, so that we can tailor the interventions more specifically to those who are most likely to actually have benefit?
So that’s the broad framing. In the area of meditation, there have been a number of scientists at very respectable institutions who have published some observations about possible negative side effects. It underscores the importance of taking this seriously, and this is something that we at the Center for Healthy Minds have been doing for quite some time. We really have the all-star team here.
I’d like to first turn it over to Polina, who has published a very recent paper. She’s the first author of this paper on potential adverse experiences associated with digital forms of meditation training, something that has not been extensively examined in the past. So, Polina, please tell us what you found and give us some insights about this.
06:12 Difficult Experiences vs. Harmful Effects
Polina: Thank you, Richie. Indeed, previous research has examined this question in meditation programs that are either very intense, like meditation retreats, or longer-term programs like the standard eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. In this paper, we were interested in whether people have some negative experiences during their engagement with digital meditation programs.
In this paper, we looked at the program that has been developed at CHM. It’s called the Healthy Minds Program app, and anybody can download it on the internet.
First, in this paper, we make a distinction between adverse effects, the term that has been used in the literature previously, and adverse experiences. The way we distinguish between these two variables is that we say adverse effects are the negative experiences that have been caused by meditation. Adverse experiences are just negative experiences that happened while a person was engaged with a meditation program.
To call some experience an effect, we need some strong evidence that it was caused by meditation. We first start with a literature review where we say that, in previous research, the majority of the previous studies didn’t apply the scientific techniques to distinguish between effects and experiences. Many of them claim from the observational data that people had adverse effects that were caused by meditation, although the evidence doesn’t support that.
Cort: This is a super interesting one. In fact, I was a subject in one of the first papers published on this by one of our colleagues at another university, Willoughby Britton. I was interviewed as part of that study many, many years ago. So I’ve been on the other side of the microscope, so to speak, of this particular study.
This whole point about adverse effects and adverse experiences is a really important one. I just want to ask a grounding question to see if this way of thinking about this is helpful or useful, and how we might understand it.
When I think about meditating or really any kind of mental training, it seems to me to be quite similar to the way you might look at physical exercise. If you take a thousand people and put them in some exercise paradigm for a month, a number of them are probably going to get injured.
But the question, and it seems like what you’re saying, Polina, is that that injury may or may not be due to their exercise regimen. If you just took a thousand people and you didn’t have them exercise, some of them would just get injured because people get injured as part of their daily life.
So it’s whether or not people will get injured. And then the question is: Are more people getting injured because they’re doing the exercise program? Or it could be the opposite. It could be protective. There’s still people getting injured, but it’s actually fewer people than you would expect by virtue of the exercise program.
Then there’s yet another question, which is: How do people relate to that when it happens? Whether or not it was caused by the training intervention itself, how do people tend to relate to that? Do they stop exercising if they got injured because they view exercise as problematic, or does it teach them something important about how to exercise effectively?
There’s all sorts of interesting questions that I think go beyond the headline of just, “It does or does not create these challenging experiences.”
But maybe, Simon, do you want to jump in here and share your own thoughts? First, is that parallel with physical exercise way off, or is there something similar that might be helpful in terms of how we might think about this and understand it?
Simon: Yeah, I think that’s a really nice one. I know it’s one our group has talked about. To put maybe a fine point on the causality issue, in scientific research we’re fortunate to have the randomized trial, which has at least historically been a gold standard for establishing causality. If you’re going to get FDA approval for a drug, you run a randomized trial and show that it outperforms placebo.
In those same trials, they’ll look at adverse effects and see if it increases the likelihood of certain side effects. That’s, of course, the fine print that you get on the medications and things like that. We can use a design like that to make the same evaluations of meditation. You could do the same thing with exercise if you compared it to a control group.
So I think there’s an analogy to meditation, where there’s all sorts of experiences that people can have. As Polina found in the paper, certain mental proclivities, if you will, might predispose people to have those experiences when they meditate.
I’m hoping today we can talk some about the different outcomes that can be assessed and the range of different experiences that people can have, because I think that’s quite important for understanding what meditation may or may not do in those areas.
Cort: Super helpful. Let’s dive into some of the details. Maybe before we get there, Matt, I’d love to bring you into the conversation. I remember personally some of the first conversations I’ve had about this were around some earlier work you had published. You’ve published really interesting work and obviously been very, very involved, both as a practitioner, as a meditator yourself, but also as one of the leading figures studying this.
What are your opening thoughts, just to help give some context and what the science is showing in this whole area?
Matt: I think Polina and Simon covered a lot of it. I think maybe a little more historical context would be helpful. To some extent, the initial studies looking at trying to understand whether and to what extent there were difficult experiences in meditators were a response to, I would say more than the scientific literature, the public presentation of meditation or mindfulness as a panacea for all ills.
People who had had some challenging experiences meditating took a step back and said, “I’m not sure meditation, all types of meditation, really intensive meditation, is good all the time for everybody, and we should try to get a handle on that.”
To some extent, that’s where this started. That narrative became quite powerful in the public sphere, which led us to ask the questions that we’ve been asking: If we look at data, and causal data in particular, where people are randomly assigned and we can actually make a statement that meditation caused X, Y, or Z, do we see evidence that people who, for example, do mindfulness-based stress reduction, or in the case of this current paper, do a digital meditation training, have higher rates of anxiety or depression or negative experiences than people who don’t do it?
That’s where we ended up here. I think Polina and Simon described that there’s a technical issue here, which is causality. From the meditator’s point of view, you might have an experience and associate that or attribute that to meditation. That’s not necessarily causal in the way that we talk about the word in science. What we really need to do is, where there’s randomization, see if that leads to more of one sort of experience than another.
Then, Cort, you pointed to this: The other side of this that’s really important, that we’ve paid less attention to, is people may have negative experiences during meditation, or they attribute it to meditation, but what do they make of those?
People have negative experiences every day just doing the things they do in their life. In a way, almost more important is: How do they make sense of it? How do they evaluate the meaning of that experience?
In the case of meditation trainings like the things that we’re studying, in this study we asked people, “Are you happy that you learned to meditate? Are you happy that you had exposure to this training?”
Those are some of the more interesting findings from my point of view, because some of those people are reporting negative experiences and are also saying, “Yeah, I had some difficult experiences, but I’m still really happy that I learned.” Actually, it’s the vast majority of people who fall into that category.
14:48 More Anxiety, or More Awareness?
Richie: I want to bring up one other issue very briefly, which I know you guys have all touched on in one way or another, and anyone who wants to comment on this, please do. One of the other important insights from this work is that there’s reason to believe that at least certain kinds of meditation can increase a person’s sensitivity to anxiety or to certain kinds of experiences that they have in their mind and/or their body.
They may not actually have increased, for example, anxiety. They may have increased sensitivity to anxiety, which they report as increased anxiety, but what’s really occurred is that they simply have become more aware. That may be an important early benefit and a marker that a person is indeed engaged in this practice in the correct way, if you will. So I wonder how that adds to this mix.
15:55 Loneliness and Social Support
Polina: In this study, we did look at what we call in science the predictors of adverse experiences, or what are the characteristics of people who are more likely to report these experiences. One of our studies that went into this paper showed that people who had a higher level of baseline anxiety and depression were more likely to report adverse experiences.
One of the themes that goes through the series of three studies included in this paper shows that one of the characteristics that does predispose people to have these experiences is loneliness, which we found out in study one and study two, as well as study three, which was a qualitative study. That means we actually asked the participants in the training what was protective when they had some negative experiences during meditations.
One of the themes that showed up again and again in their answers was that social support was important for them. Being able to speak with their friends and their family and receive support from these people, as well as support from their therapist, was helpful for them to deal with these experiences.
People showed remarkable resilience when we allowed them to speak about their experience and how they related, and what was helpful for them in dealing with these experiences.
Matt: Can I add something, Cort?
Matt: This isn’t in the current paper, but we’ve been doing some other analyses that Polina’s also been leading, looking at trajectories during a meditation training. For example, you introduce somebody to a meditation training, and what does it look like over the first week, the second week, the third week, the fourth week?
What we’re finding across different samples and also different types of training is that, on some outcomes, you actually see pretty consistently the meditation group is getting worse. I think this is to Richie’s point. But that worsening, so to speak, recovers, and then by the end of the training, they’ve done much better than the control groups. In the Tibetan tradition, there’s this analogy for meditation, for mind training, of the waterfall.
The first phase of meditation training is sometimes described as becoming aware of the flood, so to speak, of your thoughts, emotions, sensations. It can even be overwhelming, not because the meditation is causing thoughts, emotions, sensations, but because it’s training awareness to recognize everything that’s already going on in the mind.
Just becoming aware of what’s going on, in and of itself, can be overwhelming. But over time, as you increase your training, the mind starts to settle down and settle more and settle more. We’re seeing some evidence in other analyses that we’re running that that general trajectory does seem to be happening.
I think, related to the question, this is an interesting intersection with harm, because some people may have that initial experience and then stop meditation training. I think it’s an important question what that means for their ultimate outcomes.
19:26 When Difficult Practice Can Be Helpful
Cort: I think it’s important to disentangle a difficult experience from a harmful experience, one that is a negative outcome. Because, actually, in many ways meditation is just training you to deal with life. That’s one way to think about meditation.
What happens in life? You ruminate, you have emotional outbursts, you have bad habits that you’re trying to work on, you have good habits you’re trying to build. What meditation is doing is helping you relate to all of that, hopefully in a more effective, balanced way.
If you were able to meditate without ever having any challenging thoughts, for example, any kind of toxic rumination or any emotional upheaval, how could you do that training? Of course, if it’s always challenging, then meditation is just a grind. There needs to be something uplifting and energizing about it.
But for me, if I look back over my meditation, especially early on when I had a lot of social anxiety, it was precisely because I felt anxiety during my meditation that allowed me in the real world to actually not be totally overpowered by the anxiety. In fact, that was the biggest benefit of my practice, I would say, in my early years: I was more grounded when things happened in real life.
If you had asked me questions, I would say, “Yeah, I had anxiety during my meditation practice. I was ruminating during meditation,” and those would be adverse experiences. But that was the training. That was why I was doing it.
So there’s something a little interesting. “Are we detecting the right signal?” is the question. When I see the headlines about this, I always feel like, “Okay, we’re missing something here,” because it can be so misleading.
Polina: In one of the studies, we actually asked people how they rated the specific adverse, “adverse” in quotations here, experiences that they had. They rated some of the experiences as actually positive.
The list of these experiences that has been developed by previous researchers includes things like increased sensitivity to sound, which participants rated as more positive than negative. But then it includes experiences that are more universally negative, like feeling isolated from people and disturbances in sleep and things like that.
But even those experiences that we would say do sound pretty negative didn’t get a universally negative rating from all participants. It was what we call in science a distribution. Some participants rated them as more negative, some participants rated them as more positive, but we didn’t see a uniformly negative rating across any of these experiences.
22:19 How Common Are Negative Experiences?
Cort: Just to get some numbers here, how many people have these so-called adverse experiences, leaving whether or not it’s an effect of the meditation to maybe the follow-up? How common is it when people do these kinds of interventions?
Polina: I would say that it is pretty common to have negative experiences during meditation training. If I look at the statistics that we found in this paper, we found out that about 30% of the participants across both of our studies did have some sort of negative experiences during their meditation training. Again, these may not have been caused by meditation training, but have been subjectively attributed by participants to the meditation training.
In one study, 6%, and in the other study, 3% of the participants had what we call functional impairment. Again, that was subjectively attributed to meditation, which means that they reported that their meditation experience interfered with their ability to function in daily life.
We unfortunately don’t have more detailed information on these people who’ve reported these experiences. But just to give some context to our conversation here, there is this small percentage of people who do report some stronger negative experiences that they had during their training.
Cort: How does that compare? Because this is with the Healthy Minds app, so it’s a digital intervention.
Polina: Yes.
Cort: I don’t know if Matt or Simon, you have memory from previous research. How does what Polina just shared compare to in-person interventions, for example, things like MBSR? Is it similar? Is it more people because those are more intensive interventions? What do you tend to see in those interventions?
Simon: Matt, what did you find? Do you remember from...
Matt: The way that study was sampled, we didn’t just look at how frequent this sort of thing is. I think actually your cross sectional study is probably the best data to speak to this.
Simon: I do think it’s important. Two thoughts, and I promise I’ll answer your question, Cort. One is that clearly people do have really challenging, disruptive experiences. For me, reading the paper that you alluded to before, Cort, where you mentioned being a participant, people can have extremely disruptive experiences that can cause the sort of functional impairment that Polina’s talking about, that can last for years.
I’d actually love, if we have time today, to hear some of how that’s talked about in the traditions, because my understanding is that that’s been acknowledged across a number of different Buddhist traditions, that that can be something that can happen and can be part of the meditative process.
Cort: Yeah, it’s part of the training, I would say. It’s very much part of the training.
Simon: In our cross-sectional work, and this has been replicated more recently almost to the exact percent, about 50% of people who have lifetime exposure to meditation report what they describe as an adverse experience. The phrase that’s often used is “challenging, distressing.” There’s another adjective in there, but it’s this quality, and we’ve modified that term because keeping your attention on your breath is challenging for most of us, but isn’t necessarily what we would want to characterize as an adverse experience.
But we do see that these experiences are very common. When you look at these checklists of specific things, like Polina mentioned the sensitivity to hearing, there’s feeling cut off from other people. There’s a whole number of them that have been identified and actually selected from other symptom measures.
People do report those sorts of things, and they’re reporting it in our context with the Healthy Minds Program. But the causal evidence, and I know we alluded to this earlier, in all of the studies that we’ve run, all of our Healthy Minds Program trials, our reanalysis of MBSR data, some recent reanalysis that we’ve done from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in a randomized context, to my knowledge, we haven’t found any evidence that there’s increased likelihood of symptom worsening, which is a way that we’re able to measure harm more consistently across these randomized trials.
Matt, I don’t know if you want to say more about that.
26:40 What Controlled Studies Reveal
Richie: Also, can you guys speak to, in one of the papers, wasn’t there some evidence actually for protective effects compared to a control group?
Cort: Yeah, I was going to ask about that too.
Matt: This goes to Cort’s original point, which is that it’s not uncommon for people to experience difficulties during meditation that they will frequently attribute to meditation. But when we look at causal evidence, we basically have never found evidence that a meditation condition leads to higher rates of whatever it is, anxiety, depression, et cetera.
In many instances, we’ve seen the opposite, which is people in the meditation condition actually have lower rates of increased symptoms. So it seems that meditation may be protective against the increase of symptoms over time.
The third thing that we see, that Polina spoke to at the beginning, but I think the importance of the finding makes more sense in the context of this conversation, is: What are the characteristics that predict difficult experiences during meditation training? The things that are robust are difficult experiences. People who have higher levels of anxiety, loneliness, et cetera, going into a meditation training are more likely to report anxiety, stress, loneliness, et cetera, throughout the meditation training. This is another way of distinguishing causality from experience, right?
I think about it like people who don’t meditate walk around in the world and they get depressed and they have anxiety disorders, of course. It’s difficult to be alive. We experience difficulties. The question is really: Is there evidence that meditation increases the rates of those sorts of experiences? I think the overwhelming evidence to date is that it does not.
But I also think there’s a nuance that we need to attend to, which is there are different types of meditation. The early work, like the study that you were a participant in, Cort, was talking to people who did very intensive meditation, long-term retreat. That’s qualitatively different. That’s a different question than: Do people who do a meditation app that they download from the Apple Store have higher rates of X, Y, or Z after doing it? Or a program like MBSR that, relatively speaking, is still pretty light touch.
All the data that we’re talking about is from these sorts of interventions, meditation programs that a regular person walking about the world is likely to do.
It’s a different question to ask if you take somebody who’s never meditated and you say, “Go do a one-month intensive meditation retreat.” That’s a different scenario. There’s a lot of things that would need to be considered where you would feel good about putting somebody into a situation like that. Do they have the proper pre-training? Is it the right context? Is there a good teacher? What are the practices that they’re going to do? Et cetera.
I think sometimes these two things get conflated, because the anecdotal evidence of real harm, where people are really suffering debilitating psychological and other sorts of difficulties that they attribute to meditation, those are almost always from people who have done very intensive forms of meditation, not the sorts of programs that, frankly, almost everybody who’s been touched by meditation in some way is doing.
30:24 Is Meditation Right for Everyone?
Cort: It’s a hugely important point.
Richie: I would like to ask a follow-up question. Given the thrust of the recent work that you guys have done that’s focused on what probably is the most prevalent kind of meditation that large numbers of people are exploring through apps and so forth, and light touches, are there any individuals, from the work that you’ve done, for whom you would say meditation is contraindicated?
I know, Simon, you are a licensed clinical psychologist in addition to being a psychological scientist. Are there any individuals for whom you would recommend, as either a scientist or a clinician, that they not explore meditation based on your current understanding?
Simon: Twenty years ago, I think an answer to that would have been someone with psychosis or experiencing psychotic symptoms. But now there’s a literature of meditation for psychosis. There’s some amazing work that’s come out around that, showing that it can be quite helpful. They modify the practices.
Cort: Just to be clear, showing what? That it can be beneficial? Okay. So even in those very extreme cases, it can still be helpful.
Simon: The same around trauma. There’s a whole trauma-informed mindfulness movement, and there’s good evidence that it can be helpful for PTSD. We see evidence in our own data that people who have adverse childhood experiences can even benefit more in some cases than those without.
So, Richie, I don’t think there’s a category of people that I would say, blanket, “Don’t try this. This won’t be safe for you.” I do think it’s important to pay attention to the experience and to connect with teachers and support.
One of the findings that’s threaded through many of these papers that Polina mentioned is this loneliness piece, which I think is quite fascinating. A lack of a sense of connection with others does seem to be a consistent predisposing factor. It really, to me, speaks to where these practices came from. Sangha, the spiritual community, has been a huge part of these traditions, often passed down with teachers, and we have these maybe less embodied ways of accessing them.
So making sure that people are paying attention to their experience. If things are getting strange, talk to someone that you trust, get connected with a teacher. There’s lots of amazing teachers out there, therapists, lots of ways to get support. But I wouldn’t say that it’s contraindicated for a whole class of people, certainly from the data that we’ve seen.
Richie: Thank you.
Matt: Just quickly, the context here again is really important. The studies that Simon is referring to with participants who have psychotic disorders, those are not people going off on their own and just meditating in a room and trying to figure it out, right? Those are done in a place where there is a teacher or a therapist and there’s some structure.
I think that’s also very relevant to this conversation. What’s the context in which somebody is doing meditation and experiencing difficulties, and is there a structure in place to help them work with those difficult experiences? When there’s not, then, yeah, I think there’s, particularly for certain types of people, a risk that things can go off the rails, so to speak.
Just wanted to add that again. This is one of these nuances that I don’t think has been attended to carefully enough in the scientific literature, at least when people talk about meditation and difficult experiences.
34:07 What the Research May Be Missing
Simon: Matt, to your point, in a lot of our big Healthy Minds Program trials, we haven’t been recruiting folks with psychosis because of feeling, just like you’re saying, that there might not be adequate support. I think it’s important to be careful and delicate.
We’re also not studying meditation retreats, which, as you said, is one of those contexts. I’ve heard many stories of a tendency to experience mania when you’re not sleeping in retreat. There are aspects of the retreat context where sleep can get reduced. I have heard stories of people having manic episodes in that context that can be triggered, in a way, by the intensive practice.
I think there is something here to the need to be cautious about this. But in some ways, some of the statements in the literature seem to have swung too far, emphasizing the harms and throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some ways. I’m hoping that our work, especially our randomized trial work, is able to get more in the middle.
One other point, just to not lose it, is to acknowledge that Willoughby Britton, who’s been one of the amazing scientists really leading work in this area, I know has written several places that, from her perspective, randomized trials aren’t a good context for evaluating harm.
I’d love at some point, and I’ve talked to her about that some, to understand more what she sees as the limitations. I know some of it is the measurement, that we’re not measuring the kinds of things that do get disrupted for people in a bad way in our trials. Our symptom worsening is a pretty gross measure of harm. But I think from her perspective, there’s other aspects of the randomized trial that make it not ideal for evaluating this. So just to acknowledge that counterpoint.
35:51 When Practice Feels Like It’s Going Backwards
Cort: Maybe we could end. I realize we’re coming to the close of our session. But I do think, from the point of view of the tradition, there’s a lot of context of how to understand this. If you’re learning how to meditate in a more traditional setting, there’s actually a lot of discussion about the challenging stuff that can and does come up in practice.
It’s viewed as just part of the process. The training, in large part, is how to navigate the highs and lows, which can be, in some cases, even more accentuated.
Mingyur Rinpoche, who I think we probably all know and we’ve had on Dharma Lab a few times, often says that meditating even for a few minutes with a difficult situation is more impactful than meditating for months when you feel like your mind is peaceful and things are going well, precisely because you’re training your mind to deal with the difficult stuff that happens in everyday life, which everybody experiences.
There’s nobody who gets through life... Is there a life without adverse experiences? I’d like to meet that person who went through life without an adverse experience.
Richie: One of the things Rinpoche also says, which I found personally very helpful in my own practice, is that when you have days when your practice just is not so good, it’s distracted, obstacles arise, that may be ultimately just as helpful, maybe even more helpful, than a day when you’re really feeling great.
That instruction has really helped me personally stay engaged and motivated. Inevitably, there are days that are less clear than other days, and I think it’s really helpful to keep that in mind.
Cort: I would even take that a step further and say that in 35 years of meditating, there’s a pattern where I think a lot of the breakthroughs and insights in my practice have often come on the heels of periods where it felt like my practice was going backwards, where my mind was more distracted. There was stuff coming up, and it felt like, “Whoa, what’s going on with my practice?”
Oftentimes, those were periods where, although it wasn’t necessarily as pleasant as times where my mind was really peaceful, really clearly some important psychological, emotional process was going on.
So why don’t we close it out here? We’ve just got a couple minutes left. Maybe any closing thoughts, especially for people who are out there who aren’t scientists, who might be meditating or thinking about meditating, or just broadly interested in this whole area. What would you say are the most important takeaways from the deep dive into the science that you all have done?
Maybe I’ll start on the left of my screen here. Simon, do you want to kick off any closing thoughts that you think it’s important for people to know?
Simon: I think there’s a lot of rich stuff. I think the lack of causal evidence, to me, is important to put out there from the randomized trial work that we’ve done. Also, challenges happen, and people should pay attention and not just barrel ahead thinking that this is a panacea, as folks put it.
One last thought just to put in the air is the metaphor to therapy. We know that when people go to therapy, all sorts of challenges can come up. Exposure therapy for anxiety disorders, in particular, you’re intentionally going in and being but one of the most clearly therapeutic techniques that’s out there, if it’s done skillfully.
Ruth Baer, in some of the early work on the mechanisms of mindfulness, talks about exposure as a mechanism. It’s surely true that that’s one of the main things that happen. I feel so grateful that we’re getting to do this work with this group, and it’s been exciting. There’s more to come that we didn’t touch on today.
Cort: It’s a very cool paper. We’ll share some of these papers in the show notes. Polina, what would you share?
39:55 Self-Compassion and Knowing When to Step Back
Polina: I would say, in addition to what Simon said just now and what has been said throughout our conversation, what stood out for me in this study is the importance of exercising kindness and compassion to oneself while doing these practices, engaging in meditation, in any kind of training for oneself.
To be caring and kind towards yourself. Sometimes when it gets tough, it’s a good idea to continue with the practice and see what this uncovers. But sometimes it could be a good idea to just step away for a few moments to recover and then come back to the practice. This is what we have seen in the open responses from our participants when we allowed them to speak for themselves and what they found helpful.
When I was reading the responses of the participants in the survey, I was overwhelmed by the resilience and the amount of self-kindness and self-compassion that shone through.
Cort: Wonderful. Matt, what about you?
41:00 How Expectations Shape Meditation
Matt: I think there’s two areas for future research investigation that come out of this area of research and were both pointed to in this conversation. The first is, and we’ve paid very little attention to this thus far: Why are people meditating in the first place, and what role does motivation have in the way people interpret the experiences that arise?
Related to that is: What’s the view that people bring to meditation? What’s the conceptual understanding of what meditation is supposed to do? Because if your motivation is to not feel sad, and you believe meditation should be the absence of sadness, and you experience sadness in meditation, then your subjective experience of that is going to be very different than someone who feels like, “Well, my motivation is to train the mind and develop equanimity. And I expect that anything that can arise will arise in meditation.”
And so when sadness arises, then, like you said, Cort, like people have just reflected, that actually might be an invitation to develop that equanimity.
Same experience, but with a different motivation and a different view, it can mean something entirely different. I think we haven’t done very well asking people, “Why are you doing this? What do you think you’re going to get out of it?” That view part is also really important and something that the science is starting to pay more attention to, but historically we haven’t done a great job with.
Cort: Great point. Richie, why don’t you wrap this up for us?
Richie: Just very briefly, I think that the overall pattern of findings which you guys have shared is actually quite encouraging. It’s a message that I often give to people when I give public talks, suggesting that there’s really very few serious adverse effects that are caused by this. The practice is freely available. There’s a lot of work to suggest that it actually is beneficial. So please try it and investigate and explore. If you find it’s beneficial, you can then continue.
Cort: Great way to conclude. Thank you for a great discussion, hopefully the first of many. I imagine we’re going to have many more papers to come on this topic and lots of interesting questions to explore together. Thank you for being here today, and especially thank you for all the important work you are doing.
For everybody listening, thank you for tuning in, and we will hopefully see you soon for another episode of Dharma Lab. Take care, everyone.
