A recent article in the Atlantic, "The Dark Side of Mindfulness," follows the clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton through two decades of research into meditation's adverse effects. While meditation has a large scientific body of evidence supporting positive effects for both physical health and mental wellbeing, the potential for harm is much less researched. Yet a number of studies estimate about 10 percent of all meditators experience negative effects, from passing anxiety to sleep changes to more lasting dissociation. It’s important to note that much of the context for the potential harmful effects of meditation was in those who meditate everyday for one, two, three hours a day or those who attend weeklong or longer retreats.
Rod Stryker and Betsy Brandl Rippentrop, PhD, sat down to talk it through.
The Conversation Partners
Betsy Brandl Rippentrop, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma. She is also a longtime meditator and yoga teacher. Her work integrates modern clinical science with the more ancient teachings of contemplative practice.
Rod Stryker is a leading and widely respected yoga, Tantra, and meditation teacher. He has taught for more than 45 years. Rod is one of a small number of American teachers transmitting an ancient tradition passed from teacher to student for thousands of years. Mentor to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers worldwide, Rod is the creator of Luminous Coherence, a meditation protocol that comes up in the conversation.
Why This Conversation
Both Rod and Betsy are daily meditators and believe the practice is indispensable. They both agree that meditation is not just a way to ease the difficult conditions of life, but also as a way to step into higher levels of self-actualization. They both have taught meditation for decades and have interfaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of students. They believe that this research on adverse effects raises questions every practitioner and teacher should consider.
What happens to emotions and memories we have not fully processed when the mind goes quiet? Why might a practice meant to ease anxiety and depression, for some, deepen them? And how does mindfulness in particular, with its practice of observing experience from a distance, relate to unprocessed feelings and even dissociation?
These questions are relevant to all levels of meditators, beginners who deserve to know what practice can surface. They matter to advanced practitioners, who may mistake a subtle withdrawal from life for progress. And they matter to psychotherapists weighing which modalities serve which clients.
Initial Impressions from the Article
Rod S.: Let me be clear up front. It is not my perspective that meditation is bad. What struck me about the article is that it is important to consider that there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all. No meditation practice, no drug, no protocol, plant medicine, cold baths included, is good for everybody under all conditions.
Betsy R., PhD: For me, the striking thing about this piece was that people find it shocking that hard things come up in meditation. Of course they do. Yes, there's a large body of research on the benefits, and we can't overlook that. But if you've meditated long enough, you know the point of meditation is to bump you into your stuff. To help you see the dysfunctional patterns in your own life. Meditation isn't supposed to always make us feel good. It's supposed to show us who we are. And we all have shadow.
What Rises When the Mind Goes Still
Betsy R., PhD: This is where I think psychotherapy and meditation, and yoga, come together perfectly. Collectively they are designed to lift your stuff to the surface. Whether you have the skills to deal with it once it's there is another question. That's when you might need a professional to help. All the people in the research who said they had no mental health issues before meditating? I don't believe it. They might not have known they had problems. But there was something under the surface, and the meditation tapped into it.
Rod S.: Here's how I'd put it: by stilling a little of our conscious mental activity, meditation exposes the deeper pool of thought and emotion stored below the surface. Normally we're too distracted to be aware of it. Put someone in a retreat atmosphere, steady the conscious mind, and the unconscious starts to surface. Unresolved material. Material we've consciously or unconsciously not processed or even pushed down.
When Watching Becomes Dissociating
Rod S.: That was the other thing I couldn't stop thinking about as I read the exposé. The problem is rooted in mindfulness as it is commonly taught. The method itself leans toward the borderline of dissociative orientation. This gives rise to a potential perfect storm. Material is coming up, and rather than learning to move toward it, you hold it at a distance. This is often described as open-field awareness. You aspire to remaining wholly objective to whatever arises. Be completely impartial, from whatever surfaces, as if it weren't you it was coming from.
Worth nothing was the description of the cognitive neuroscientist quoted in the article who points out how the brain builds a sense of self which, in part, is by predicting the future. Now tell it, over and over, "This isn't me. This is only a passing perception arising in the moment." Keep reorienting attention to the moment. Over time you become skilled at disconnecting from all sense of identity, what is meant to be your through line across all experiences. Oddly enough, this can be destabilizing. It gives rise to dissociation.
Betsy R., PhD: That connects to something I heard recently. Andrew Huberman interviewed Dr. David Spiegel, who has studied hypnosis his whole career at Stanford. I've done some training with him. His point was this. When we're traumatized, we automatically dissociate to keep ourselves safe. When you put yourself back into a dissociative state, you have more access to the memories formed while you were dissociating. That's why people who can't remember a trauma sometimes begin to remember details under hypnosis.
So when you meditate for hours at a time on retreat and enter these dissociative states, the likelihood of trauma or memory coming up rises. We're actually setting people up to have difficult memories surface. In itself, that's a great thing. You can't overcome something until it rises up and you see it and relate to it differently. But as I understand it, mindfulness retreats do not necessarily give people tools for that. So some go into psychotic breaks. Of course they do. They're having a flood of traumatic memory.
What gets reinforced is dissociation. That's already the problem. Someone had a trauma. The brain naturally dissociated them from the experience to keep them alive. So dissociation is already their pattern. Then they learn to meditate, and they dissociate even more. Then the hard stuff, including disorientation, starts to come up, and the instruction is: you are doing something right, or go back and meditate more so that you get through it. Return to your mantra. Go back to just watching all of it. We're re-engaging that deep pattern of dissociation. Instead of saying, "All right, something is coming up. Congratulations! Your psyche is ready to heal something. This is a good thing. Let's work with this."
Rod S.: And so often the instruction is overly simplistic and general: keep going. As if continuing will, without fail, resolve everything.
Betsy R., PhD: Another issue is that many meditation teachers haven’t been trained to know how to deal with potential trauma that arises. They may be scared of it or they may not understand it.
Rod S.: It's a different skill set. A higher-grade skill set. It's one thing to teach the basics of a meditation practice. Walking someone else through into a more therapeutic or individualized process requires a higher level of skill, nuance, and understanding. It also doesn’t lend itself to group teaching. To be frank, it's far more nuanced, and one could even say, treacherous. You’re dealing with someone’s psyche where the self meets the unconscious.
Degrees of Harm
Rod S.: The article spends a lot time on the instances of significant harm. This is the struggle that arises in the somewhere between what they brought to the practice and then what has surface as a result of practicing. Let's acknowledge, it's not the majority of practitioners, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%. Acute depression, dissociative disorders, psychosis. But I kept wondering about the gradients –– the instances where it isn't psychosis, not significant enough to be something you could diagnose, but nonetheless there’s mild dissociation from one's own life. If not clinical depression, a quiet malaise, a life of self-doubt, self-criticism, stagnation.
Betsy R., PhD: That's a really important point. Of the 10% who report some kind of harm, how much is deep clinical harm that lasts for weeks and months on end? And how much is "I was really uncomfortable, I felt panicky, it was upsetting"? Are we including both in the 10%?
Rod S.: And there's a larger assumption underneath it. People don't turn to meditation only to ease their fears and anxieties. They turn to it for self-actualization, in Maslow's terms. There's an assumption that if you meditate, you are without doubt optimizing yourself: creatively, romantically, relationally, in every way. That was the gnawing discomfort I felt reading it. Perhaps we have to acknowledge that meditating doesn't necessarily mean you're optimizing every other part of life.
Betsy R., PhD: Absolutely. Meditation can be used as a form of medication. Another form of numbing. But when the hard stuff comes up, to me that means the meditation is working. Great that you're having a trigger. Because to truly optimize, we have to deal with our shadow material –– consciously working with what what has surface from the unconscious.
Rod S.: I keep coming back to what I've learned about disconfirming predictions. When a memory arises, the brain has already formed a strong enough impression to predict how it should respond. Then a cascade follows: emotional, mental, physiological. The only way we really retrain our reactivity, unravel trauma, is to cultivate disconfirming experiences. And that we do it again and again, until the brain has a different association. This does not happen if we wait passively. It requires that we deliberately give space to what is discomforting. We feel it. We embrace it. We exercise compassion to ourselves and that already begins to change our relationship to our past.
Betsy R., PhD: All the treatments come down to that. You have to see the trauma, come face to face with it again, but have a different experience of it. That's traditional exposure therapy. You have to expose yourself to it, or you'll never get past it. Which is again why these hard things coming up are great. You have a chance to move through them.
Rod S.: I'd like to unpack that. As mindfulness practice extends to longer periods, three, five, eight hours a day for consecutive days, the unconscious inevitably begins to unveil what has otherwise been hidden. That is the crux. When that happens it’s possible to go in two different directions one, toward dissociation from your memories and patterns; the other is you become further identified with them, in which the trauma or unconstructive memory becomes even more solidified.
Exposure and response prevention, the classic approach, starts by producing a profound sense of safety. A skilled therapist becomes an anchor of safety and acceptance. Now, when a memory or experience is brought into that environment, there's a frame of reference for responding to it differently. That isn't dissociating from it. It's reconditioning the brain.
Two Kinds of Meditation
Rod S.: I've learned and taught hundreds of meditation practices. Many of the things we call meditation can differ significantly. It’ll be helpful to think about all meditation practices as fitting into one or two categories: viyoga and samyoga.
Viyoga means to separate, to distinguish. These are the type of practices where you are oriented toward separating yourself from your mind's less than constructive patterns or, if nothing else, its general spinning. Mindfulness falls into this category. I'm oversimplifying, here but it more or less describes the terrain. You position yourself as the observer of your mind. It's like sitting at the edge of the ocean, watching waves come in and go out. The waves are your own thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness (most accurately, described as “recollective awareness”) means remembering that you are the observer of the waves, not the waves.
Normally we're identified. I say, "I'm angry." I don't say, "I'm watching a wave of anger arise, and now I'm watching it go back out." The cornerstone of viyoga is: I am not my experience. I am not my thoughts. A good therapist serves that role too. They are distinct from your trials and tribulations, your worries and doubts. Their anchoring, safe, aware presence gives you a foothold from which to see your own experience objectively.
Samyoga means union. Here you deliberately identify with the most positive aspects of the mind. Just as the unconscious holds what's hidden, some of the mind's most positive qualities are hidden too. You connect through a mantra, a symbol, or a feeling. For the duration of the meditation, your intent is to repattern the mind to identify with what is light-filled, affirmative, unified, whole.
I see both as required in order to be a whole person. In open-field awareness, you deliberately don't connect even to the positive aspects of your own mind. "That's just my mind being happy. That's just my mind remembering I'm in love. That's just the luminous part of my being that's inherently free. No, it's just a thought. Another wave, like the anger wave. I'm not going to get involved." But there are no legitimate panaceas, whether ice baths or meditation or mindfulness. There are times when identifying with the most constructive, inherent qualities of the mind may be exactly what someone needs most.
Betsy R., PhD: So would you say Luminous Coherence is a combination of viyoga and samyoga?
Rod S.: Yes. It's both. When I developed it, I realized coherence (unified awareness) is not limited to transcendence of life experience. To be truly unified, it is to include your life experiences –– good and bad and everything between. This is why the practice asks one to deliberately bring our unconstructive responses into the field of coherence. Coherence is not a turning away from but rather it serves as a safe anchor. Established in it we can then move into the practice of exposure and non-response. This is how it is similar to the disconfirming phenomenon I talked about earlier. It is in fact meditative approach to exposure response-prevention (ERP) methodology.
One way to see it: I honor the unified version of who I am, the recognition that I am greater than the sum of my parts, greater than my history. And with the same importance, I honor that I'm a human being who has had these experiences. Some theories describe trauma as a kind of hyper-focus, a hypervigilant holding on to your memories until they become who you are. What if you were to neither dismiss those experiences, nor hyper-focus on them? What if you honored them as fully as you honor the most constructive, luminous part of who you are, invite them into that field, and see how they change?
Some of the neuroscience supports this. Some researchers suggest the physiological surge of an emotion, left alone, passes in about 90 seconds. And memory isn't retrieval. It's reconstruction. We rebuild our memories from the present moment, shaped in part by the brain's predictive mechanism. So nothing in the human experience gets dismissed as lower or merely temporal. When there's an experience of acceptance, there's a level of integration that just doesn't happen otherwise.
Betsy R., PhD: And you're establishing coherence first. I think that's a big key. As a therapist, before I do any depth work with someone's trauma, we establish safety, sometimes for sessions at a time. A safe place in themselves, through imagining one, or through co-regulating with me. That work is the key piece before you ever wade into the challenge. I feel that's what you're doing with Luminous Coherence. You establish coherence first and get used to it, like a faithful friend, before you even invite the other material in.
Alone on the Cushion
Rod S.: Think about the person at a silent retreat. Without a sense of deep safety, real change isn't possible. In fact, exposure to any trauma or painful memory while not feeling safe can actually further embed it.
Betsy R., PhD: Absolutely. And if you think about it, Rod, there's not even co-regulation. According to polyvagal theory, one of the first things our nervous system does when we feel unsafe is try to connect to other people. Even eye contact helps us co-regulate. Now think about silent retreats. What do we tell people? Don't look at anyone. Don't interact with anyone. Don't talk to anyone. So someone has all this coming up, and there's no one to co-regulate with. Not even their roommate, because that's against the rules. I'm realizing we're setting up such potential for people to be retraumatized and then have nowhere for it to go. The silence itself becomes another signal to push it away. If you don't have the resources to deal with it, you do what you've always done. You push it away.
Rod S.: What might have been a meaningful conversation at lunch with a fellow practitioner, a chance to diffuse some of it and feel less alone with your experience, is forbidden. There's no opportunity there. Additionally, there is little in the way of intake in many silent retreats. The teacher has relatively little information given, what may come up for any individual during the silent retreat. You've committed to a communal process but in many ways you are on your own. Perhaps then neither the teacher nor the taught fully understand how stable the ground is that you were on before you arrived, and then how stable with the ground be while you are there, if for the most part you’re on your own?
There's a term in neuroscience, metastability. Think of it as your resilience in the face of your own painful memories. Is your response reactive? Or can you remain in a tranquil state and embrace what surfaces? That capacity is on a sliding scale. No pre-interview tells the teacher who has more of it and who has less. Then put 40, 50, 60 or more people in one room. Even if we can generalize about trauma, is healing it a general process?
Betsy R., PhD: You just don't know. And the stakes go up with that many people. Think about it. You've taught silent retreats. You have no idea what's going on for people. You really don't know what they're processing.
Rod S.: My concern is that the model doesn't pay enough attention to the individual.
Betsy R., PhD: Does it make you want to teach another silent retreat?
Rod S.: honestly, I have mixed feelings. How much you ask people to meditate every day matters. More than three hours a day invites more variables. The more hours a day, the greater the likelihood of material coming up. What sets Luminous Coherence apart is that it isn't dominated by the viyoga approach, the attempt to objectify everything without an anchor. It keeps a sustained point of reference to a unified sense of self, which is inherently rooted in safety. It's an expression of ultimate safety and unity awareness.
Nuance and Openness
Rod S.: I want to say again that we are both meditators. I was excited to see an article like this in the Atlantic. It didn't lean one way or the other. It simply says there's no single approach to meditation that's perfect. There is potential harm. Acknowledging that harm, then trying to reverse engineer it and ask what in the practice can create harm, is a great service.
I was a little disappointed by Jack Kornfield’s response to it. So interesting that his book first inspired Britton, the researcher at the center of the article, to meditate. In another publication, he called her clinic's website "over-the-top fearmongering." For this article, he declined to comment. That's too bad. These conversations remind us that there is nuance in practically everything. There's no black and white. I understand the community of dedicated meditators and meditation and teachers wanting to rally around and dismiss the research as fearmongering. I think that's an opportunity lost. I believe that meditation and real self-awareness should allow us to speak more into nuance. We should appreciate, and even explore, individual differences. It’s also fair to acknowledge, that not all of these methods were intended to taught exclusively in groups nor, necessarily to householders.
Betsy R., PhD: Or in modern times.
Rod S.: True. Mindfulness was at least initially taught to renunciates. Think about that. A community of renunciates doing the same methodology, which in some ways serves as safe ground. And when you read the Buddha's original teachings on mindfulness, sati, the practice was not the simplified or reduction version we see today. Practitioners weren't taught to simply "sit and watch." The methodology involved consciously bringing material to the surface deliberately and inquiring into it.
Betsy R., PhD: Which is why our meditation practices have to evolve. It's why yoga has evolved. Meditation has to evolve because we're evolving as human beings. There's something to the purity of a method. But imagine if psychotherapy hadn't evolved past Freud. We have to keep adding to it. That's what you’ve done with LC. Updating the model of what it means to be healthy and capable and whole. We have to keep meeting people where they are and ultimately, where they want to go.
I'll admit, when I first read the article, I felt some resistance too. And my life doesn't revolve around meditation like some of the people mentioned in the article. So I understand why, for people whose whole lives have been about meditation, this article feels scary. Why they'd want to push the research down. But we have to have the conversation. The more I've sat with the article, and with this conversation, the clearer it is: this isn't a bad thing. People's stuff is coming up. Great. Now let's work with it. Let's not keep dissociating. Let's not keep numbing it or pushing it aside. It's time to talk about the potential problems with meditation.
Rod S.: Agreed. Dismissing bad news, dismissing the news that something we value might not be perfect, does not speak to an enlightened point of view. One line from the article stays with me. Britton says it herself: "When it comes to somebody choosing their religion or your friendship, they will choose their religion every time." The point is that very often our beliefs take possession of us instead of a clear, nonjudgmental point of view. I see it as an invitation, inviting us to challenge our sacred cows.
Again, it appears that the most enlightened view is the middle ground. Acknowledge the value. Acknowledge the risks. Acknowledge what sits in between. Then ask how we get as much value from practice as possible, not by dismissing the risks but by understanding them. And stay ready to update our methods as we learn more about ourselves, our brains, and our place in the world.
