Lessons from Designing for Safety
Peak meditative states can unlock life-changing experiences. However, like all transformative practices, they come with potential risks, including adverse effects. It's essential to balance these benefits and risks.
We previously discussed our innovations to make deep meditative states and personal growth accessible to everyone, and to enhance safety. This post is a deeper look at meditation safety, our specific protocols to mitigate risks, and what we've observed so far.
Much of our thinking has two sources: conversations with a variety of teachers about how often they see and address negative experiences, and what we’ve observed on our own retreats. We hope that by sharing what we’ve heard and seen, we can advance discussion and research around the risks of meditation.
Weighing the Risks and Benefits
All the teachers we’ve spoken with agree that meditation is extremely safe and powerfully transformative, but sometimes negative experiences do occur. These can be similar to the challenges faced in therapy, such as intense emotional distress or lingering negative feelings.
It’s crucial for individuals to evaluate their own experiences and weigh the potential benefits against the risks, just like they would with running, biking, or weight lifting. Each of these has significant upside in physical health, socialization, and mental enjoyment, but come with significant risks such as injuries, broken bones, or death.
Each person has their own risk tolerance and should adjust their activity accordingly. One person may only bike on nature trails to avoid cars, while another might prefer biking to work despite the risks of urban traffic.
The Benefits of Meditation
We teach the jhanas, an ancient and profound meditation technique, which we’ve refined through our modern, evidence-based methods. Students have unlocked profound growth and insights from accessing the jhanas. Nothing illustrates this better than quotes from past participants:
“I just realized since your retreat my inner critic has been gone. Like completely gone. F*%$ing wild.”
“I…should convince all my internet friends to do a Jhourney Jhana retreat. Possible most EV [expected value] thing you can engage in in your LIFE (other than getting married, having kids, etc.)”
“To know there’s this infinite resource within me that’s accessible without external conditions…it’s just crazy. You can’t unsee that.”
“What you are doing here could be the answer I’ve been looking for. I’m going to cry thinking about what this could mean for people.”
Understanding the Risks
Challenging meditation sessions can involve temporary or, in rare cases, ongoing anxiety, emotional disturbances, or insomnia. They can also bring up existing trauma or mental health issues. In extremely rare instances, they can lead to serious issues such as psychotic episodes.
How often does this actually occur? We’ve consulted with dozens of experts, including experienced meditation teachers and mental health professionals (therapists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists).
Risks can be categorized into two main types: temporary emotional disturbances and psychotic episodes.
Temporary Emotional Disturbances
A viewpoint we’ve heard across experts is, “If you’re going to sit in silence for hours on retreat, your psychological stuff is going to come up.”
The time and space provided by a meditation retreat often surfaces hidden internal conflict, unresolved relationship dynamics, or other feelings retreatants have been avoiding or didn’t even know they had. For most teachers, this is a good thing, not a bad thing – working through such challenges can be deeply transformative. But it’s certainly not always pleasant. Before the internal dissonance is reconciled, meditators may grapple with intense negative emotions, like sadness, anxiety, or despair.
After working with hundreds or thousands of students, it’s often difficult for teachers to recall exact rates of these occurrences. Students usually process these experiences, unlock insights, and end up in a better place, having addressed issues they were subconsciously avoiding.
Psychotic Episodes
Meditation teachers report major issues, such as psychotic episodes, as very rare, occurring in fractions of a percent (e.g., 0.0-0.2%). These almost always involve individuals with a prior history of psychotic episodes.
Our Risk Reduction Protocol
“Jhourney's safety plan sets a new standard in the industry. It's the kind of thorough and thoughtful approach I've long hoped to see in the field of meditation.” — David Treleaven, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness
Our top priority is to minimize risks and maximize the likelihood of students having life-changing experiences. We’ve invested significantly in a multi-pronged risk reduction protocol, including four main components:
Screening
We screen all participants for prior mental health episodes and don’t bring anyone on retreat who is at high-risk. We use the Imperial College London’s exclusion criteria for psychedelic research and the latest research into meditation adverse effects.
Monitoring
On retreat, we have protocols to monitor participants' experiences, mood changes, and other criteria to ensure their well-being.
Team of Trusted Experts
We collaborate with a team of experts, including meditation teachers, therapists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists. If a participant needs to speak with a professional, we refer them to an appropriate expert.
Innovating on Format
We’ve engineered our retreat format to focus on the safest forms of meditation. We focus on loving-kindness meditation, which the experts we spoke with all agreed is the safest form of meditation. We incorporate a balance of talking and silence on our retreats, which is safer than purely silent retreats.
We avoid high-risk forms of meditation, such as intense concentration and intense deconstructive practices. While some teachers swear by the value of these methods, many experts we spoke with suggest that relaxed, “peaceful abiding” practices are safer. Similarly, we steer clear of intense noting techniques, which can be linked to abrupt emotional shifts.
We guide our students to relax into stable attention, using meditations that foster a wide, welcoming awareness.
Additionally, we avoid scripting negative experiences. Many experts highlighted how suggestible meditators can be on retreat, noting that discussing experiences like “The Dark Night of the Soul” or the so-called dukkha-nanas can make them more likely to occur.
Our instructions emphasize loving-kindness and similarly heart-opening emotions. Most experts think these techniques are so safe that they often recommend them as treatment for distressing experiences when they do arise.
Our Results
We’ve had no psychotic episodes or similar incidents. These are extremely rare according to other teachers we've consulted and something we’ve focused on with our risk reduction plan.
We’ve seen approximately 1% of students experience difficult emotions lasting hours or a few days from some sort of internal conflict or childhood trauma. In these cases, students back off from meditating, take care to stay within their “window of tolerance,”[1] and take time to process the emotions that emerge. They often find the experience to be positive after processing what came up.
This is on the lower side of the rates we’ve heard from other meditation teachers, although exact rates are often difficult for teachers to recall. That students often find the experience positive in the end supports the idea that even when meditation brings up difficult, repressed feelings, those too can be deeply transformative.
Our data-driven approach enables us to keep refining participants’ experiences. For example, we discovered that participants are more likely to find the later jhanas unsettling if they’ve previously heard that a small percentage of people find them unsettling before learning to enjoy them. This highlights the power of suggestion, and has led us to spend significant time refining how we discuss the jhanas.
If you’re a meditation teacher or mental health professional, please reach out with what you’ve seen and how you approach risk reduction. We’re happy to share our protocols for reducing risk as well. Here’s to learning together to make life-changing meditation safe and accessible to everyone!
Footnotes
[1] The “window of tolerance” is a term used in trauma literature that can help identify when someone is likely reinforcing vs. processing trauma. If they’re relatively comfortable, showing normal physiological responses, and feeling well-resourced while exploring trauma-related memories, they’re likely exploring and reprogramming their trauma response. But if they lose a sense of personal security and/or show abnormal physiological responses (e.g. fast and shallow breathing, racing heart, etc.), they’re likely outside their window of tolerance and exacerbating their trauma response.
