Zen sickness: side effects of meditation

Shayla Love, The Side Effects of Meditation No One Talks About (vice.com); Wisdom Quarterly

I'm going off the rails! - Calm down. Let go.

...It’s been well-documented that meditation can lead to troubling sensations. Buddhist traditions have often referred to the varying effects of meditation.

“The term nyams refers to a wide range of ‘meditation experiences’ — from bliss and visions to intense bodily pain, physiological disorders, paranoia, sadness, anger and fear,” Willoughby Britton writes in a 2017 paper.

"Zen traditions have also long acknowledged the possibility for certain practice approaches to lead to a prolonged illness-like condition known as 'Zen sickness' or 'meditation sickness.'"

U.S. Meditation Master Shinzen Young

Some meditators refer to it as “The Dark Night,” though the phrase is co-opted from the Roman Catholic meditative tradition, wrote Shinzen Young (shinzen.org), a mindfulness teacher and neuroscience consultant who works with universities.

“It is certainly the case that almost everyone who gets anywhere with meditation will pass through periods of negative emotion, confusion, disorientation, and heightened sensitivity to internal and external arisings,” he wrote on his blog in 2011.

“This phenomenon within the Buddhist tradition is sometimes referred to as 'falling into the Pit of the Void.' It entails an authentic and irreversible insight into Emptiness and No Self.

“What makes it problematic is that the person interprets it as a bad trip. Instead of being empowering and fulfilling, the way Buddhist literature claims it will be, it turns into the opposite. In a sense, it's Enlightenment's Evil Twin.”

Young argues that for most people, the experience is manageable through guidance from a competent teacher, and though it might take months or years to get through, the end result is “almost always highly positive.”

But for those who pick up the practice casually, "falling into the Pit of the Void" isn't necessarily what they signed up for. More