What Could be Wrong with Meditation?
By Abi Millar
This is an excerpt of The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age by Abi Millar. It has been slightly edited for AMZ, removing references to information found elsewhere in the book or inserting a few words in brackets to give needed context.
‘It’s an often overlooked fact that mindfulness, the way that it’s taught in all of these apps, is a practice that derives originally from Buddhism,’ says C. Pierce Salguero, transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities at Abington College, Penn State University, when we talk.[1] ‘But it has also undergone a pretty thorough transformation, to be turned from a more religious or spiritual practice into a secularised medical or mental health practice.’
As an expert in Buddhism and medicine (although, interestingly, not a Buddhist himself), Salguero has a lot to say about how mindfulness-for-health fits into its historical context. In his book Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (2022), he explains how Buddhism itself has been reimagined in the West, laying the groundwork for the present mindfulness boom. Historically speaking, Buddhism has involved a rich tapestry of traditions, some of which are flagrantly religious or magical in hue. By contrast, the Buddhism many of us in the West recognise, in which the Buddha was something like an ancient psychologist, designing an empirical ‘science of mind’, emerged little more than a century ago.
‘At the time, European discourse was talking about how backward the Asians were, and Buddhism was held up by colonial authorities as a prime example of superstition,’ says Salguero, echoing what Shreena Gandhi told me about yoga. ‘Buddhist authorities all over Asia engaged in a project of reimagining Buddhism in a more secular and scientific way, moving away from magical practices and rituals and emphasising the practice of meditation as a psychology and a philosophy.’
European and North American intellectuals, drawn to this rejigged form of Buddhism, started promoting meditative practices at home. Meditation became widespread, and with it, the perception of Buddhism as somehow more objective or empirical than other religions. When [Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the modern MBSR mindfulness protocol] set to work on making mindfulness ‘commonsensical’, the earlier colonial push to secularise Buddhism surely helped him along the way.
It isn’t clear, though, that the endgame of a Buddhist mindfulness practice is quite the same as the endgame for MBSR. As Salguero explains in his book: ‘Buddhist trainings that emphasize concentration often focus on generating what in the Pali language is called jhana, advanced states of absorption in which you become so concentrated on the object of meditation that the rest of the world melts away … Trainings emphasizing insight, on the other hand, focus on perceiving your chosen object of meditation as a manifestation of suffering, impermanence, and non-self.’[2] In either case, the idea is to deconstruct our usual habits of mind and see ‘reality as it is’, as opposed to reducing anxiety or fostering calm.
‘In general, the idea that Buddhist meditation is going to lead to inner peace is a misunderstanding,’ says Salguero. ‘What it does give you is the tools to be able to deal with a whole range of different kinds of experiences in a more detached and neutral way.’
At the bare minimum, he adds, you’re going to experience sore knees and a sore back. People might also experience latent traumas and other kinds of negative emotions. ‘If there’s any inner peace to be had, it takes the form of your being able to sit there with equanimity while the emotional and physical pain pass through your body and mind.’
Salguero’s description resonated with me, and even felt somewhat validating. Unlike the other routine self-care practices I am somehow not too busy for (exercise, taking a bath, brushing my teeth), meditation strikes me as an unknown quantity, and that’s why I’m often reluctant to go there. For me at least, the benefits have never emerged in anything like a linear, predictable way.
Sure, sometimes it’s relaxing, as the apps would have it. Sometimes I can see that it’s helping train my concentration and focus, as any corporate mindfulness programme would have it. Other times, though, the experience is more complicated and confronting. I may find myself crying. I may find myself racked with existential confusion. I may find old issues resurfacing or new aggravations arising, or I may just sit there feeling frustrated and bored.
I’ve had powerful meditations too, in which new insights have bubbled up prolifically, or long-buried emotions have found release. On one occasion, I was trying to ‘be present’ with an overwhelming feeling of rage. Rather than getting lost in my thoughts about the rage, I tried to pay attention to the original feeling and how it hunkered in my body. I noticed my heartbeat, more emphatic than normal, and the coiled spring of my muscles primed for action. The feeling in its distilled form was not purely negative. It was powerful. It reminded me of fire — raw, amoral, magnificent, full of destructive potential. Afterwards, I felt something toxic had left my system for good.
Experiences of this nature have left me in a conflicted place. On one hand, I’m intrigued by meditation. I’ve tasted some of the possibilities on offer. I like a challenge, and there’s a swashbuckling part of me that’s fully on board with a quest through the gnarlier regions of the mind. On the other hand, if I’ve got ten minutes to spare for mental and spiritual maintenance, I’m going to default to something that reliably makes me feel safe or calm or connected. If you’ve ever tried meditating and felt less than beatific, it’s easy to conclude that you’re failing at it, or that the concept has been mis-sold.
‘Maybe some strategic misinformation is being promoted about mindfulness, that it’s just going to make you happy,’ says Salguero. ‘But if you practice mindfulness seriously, it’s going to make you experience all your suffering in a way that is much rawer. You’ll develop a lot more equanimity, maybe more bravery, because you’re not fighting those forms of suffering as they come up. But it’s certainly not going to make those kinds of things go away.’
In more recent years, the ‘underbelly of the mindfulness movement’, as Salguero described it to me, has attracted more attention. One powerful critique comes from Ronald Purser, an ordained Buddhist teacher and management professor at San Francisco State University. In his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality(2019), he makes the case that mindfulness has been hijacked by consumerist culture. It has been reduced, he thinks, to an individual coping mechanism, engendering a passive acceptance of the systems that have caused our stress in the first place. This is particularly the case when corporations get involved, offering up mindfulness to their workers as opposed to improving their working conditions. For instance, Starbucks attracted ire in 2020 when it gifted its overstretched employees a Headspace subscription.[3]
As for the ways that mindfulness has taken off in Silicon Valley, there is clearly a stark contradiction in executives using a Buddhist-derived practice to get ahead in business. In Purser’s view, practices like MSBR are being used to uphold the neoliberal status quo, masking the revolutionary potential of Buddhist teachings.
‘Mindfulness has been oversold and commodified, reduced to a technique for just about any instrumental purpose,’ he writes. ‘It can give inner-city kids a calming time-out, or hedge fund tracers a mental edge, or reduce the stress of military drone pilots. Void of a moral compass or ethical commitments, unmoored from a vision of the social good, the commodification of mindfulness keeps it anchored in the ethos of the market.’[4]
Purser’s tone is trenchant. After attending an MBSR programme, he does concede that ‘MBSR is a saving grace for many people … The course was accomplishing exactly what it was intended to do: teach people how to reduce their stress and anxiety, cope with pain, and live a more mindful life.’[5] But nevertheless, he contends, mindfulness stands to make us ‘better adjusted cogs’, docile in the face of exploitation.
His book is a bracing read and I found myself nodding along in places. That said, I sensed he didn’t give the average Western meditator enough credit. Sure, meditating tech bros are a thing — microdosing, biohacking and breath-working their way towards corporate dominance. At the same time, there are many people whose inner explorations will lead them far off the beaten path of capitalism. To my mind, just sitting and being and doing ‘nothing’ is an inherently anti-capitalist practice, the antidote to our obsession with chasing future rewards. It is very likely to bleed into something spiritual too, even if that isn’t always the terminology the practitioner would choose.
‘Ron is articulating one response that Buddhists have had to the mindfulness movement, but the Asian Buddhist communities that I’ve been involved with have actually had a different response to Ron’s,’ Salguero says. ‘The one I’ve heard most frequently is: the more people who practice mindfulness, the more wellbeing we’ll have on the planet. The more people who practice mindfulness, the less suffering there will be across humanity. And moreover, the more people who practise mindfulness, the more people might be exposed to Buddhist ideas. For me, I think there’s truth in both these responses.’
Jiva Masheder goes further, remarking that Purser has fundamentally misunderstood MBSR. As she sees it, his mistake is to conflate acceptance with resignation, which mindfulness teachers have never promoted. If there’s any truth in his argument, she thinks it lies in his observation that mindfulness has been reduced to an individual coping mechanism. Traditionally, Buddhism would have been practised in a community setting (the Sangha) with a teacher, and MBSR courses are based on the same model. She thinks you’re unlikely to get the full measure of mindfulness if you’re doing it at home on your own.
A different kind of critique comes from Willoughby Britton, who made a splash in 2017 with a paper on the potential negative effects of meditation. Britton, who is a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown University, was interested in experiences that could be ‘described as challenging, difficult, distressing, functionally impairing, and/or requiring additional support’. Her team interviewed ninety-two Western Buddhist meditators who had reported these kinds of outcomes.
The resulting study, called The Varieties of Contemplative Experience, identified fifty-nine categories of negative experience, ranging from ‘loss of the basic sense of self’ to ‘changes in motivation’, ‘the re-experiencing of traumatic memories’ and even ‘gastrointestinal distress’. A whopping 88 per cent of the meditators said their challenging experiences had spilled over into their everyday life. Shockingly, 17 per cent had felt suicidal and another 17 per cent had required inpatient hospitalisation. [6]
As the paper explains, many Buddhist traditions ‘acknowledge periods of challenge or difficulty associated with the practice of meditation’. It adds that: ‘Given that some of these effects might even run counter to the dominant paradigm of health and well-being, it is critical that the range of effects associated with Buddhist meditation be investigated in the modern Western context.’
For sure, these study participants aren’t representative of the average person who downloads the Calm app. They were serious meditators, who had been selected for the study precisely because they’d had a tough time. Such experiences might be extraordinarily rare — the functionally impaired exception that proves the happy, healthy rule. But for researchers like Britton, they’re too important to be ignored. Today, she offers trauma-informed mindfulness trainings called ‘First Do No Harm’, and provides support services to people who’ve run into meditation-related difficulties. As she remarked in a 2014 Atlantic article: ‘As much as I want to investigate and promote contemplative practices and contribute to the well-being of humanity through that, I feel a deeper commitment to what’s actually true.’[7]
Britton is not the only researcher to probe the dark side of meditation practice. As I have argued, there is a tension between mindfulness as a spiritual practice, and mindfulness as a tool for personal thriving. According to Salguero, this very tension can sometimes cause people harm.
‘A small minority of people are interested in meditation for health and wellbeing purposes, who do some intensive practice or go on a retreat,’ he says. ‘They don’t know about the Buddhist concept of non-self and they don’t know that this is a practice designed to trigger those kinds of realisations. So, when they experience some of these effects, they don’t have the context to understand what they’re experiencing.’
It seems there are documented cases of people who have practised secular meditation and inadvertently ‘cracked open the fiction of self’. We’re talking about the kind of ego death experience we explored with the neuroscientist, Dr James Cooke, earlier in this book. For Cooke, this was a positive occurrence, but others are more panicked or perturbed by it. In some cases, they might call on a mental health professional, who is no more schooled in Buddhist frameworks than they are.
‘They’re diagnosed in many cases with serious psychiatric diagnoses like depersonalisation and derealisation,’ Salguero remarks. ‘If you read the symptoms, this sounds exactly like what Buddhists are going for with loss of self.’
Back to that Trojan horse: might someone who innocently downloads a meditation app independently reach some Buddhist realisations? After all, these apps have been stripped bare of any theoretical underpinnings. They don’t purport to explain why you’re calm, why you’re relaxed (or as the case may be, why you’ve wound up re-evaluating your basic concept of personal identity). Any explanations you might find will likely be couched in physiological terms: you are calm because meditation calms your nervous system, not because you’ve happened across a truthful and spiritual insight.
Buddhist meditations, by contrast, are meant to guide you towards a particular way of seeing the world. It is intriguing to consider that the practical techniques adopted by MBSR might succeed in doing the same thing, even minus the supporting philosophy.
For that reason, Salguero thinks that meditators, however secular their inclinations, should be aware of the possible outcomes. In common with Britton, who came up with the idea, he thinks meditation ought to ‘carry a warning label’.
‘You can take the practice out of the temple, and you can secularise it, reinterpret it and put it into the hospital setting,’ he says. ‘But the practice was designed to produce these kinds of experiences. If you don’t know anything about emptiness or non-self, then these experiences can be really disorienting.’
[1] Interview with C. Pierce Salguero, conducted by author — Over Zoom, 8 May 2023
[2] Salguero, C. Pierce, Buddhish (Beacon Press, Boston, 2022), p. 64. Kindle Edition.
[3] Kaori Gurley, Lauren, ‘Starbucks Workers Want More Hours. Instead They Got a Meditation App’, Vice (8 January 2020), https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3bxn3/starbucks-workers-want-more-hours-instead-they-got-a-meditation-app.
[4] Purser, Ronald E., McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Watkins Media, London, 2019), p. 17. Kindle Edition.
[5] Ibid p104
[6] Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K., & Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLOS ONE, 12(5), e0176239.
[7] Rocha, Tomas, ‘The Dark Knight of the Soul’, The Atlantic (25 June 2014), https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/.