Aaron Alexis was looking for something. He started attending a Buddhist temple in Washington and learned to meditate; he hoped it would bring him wisdom and peace. "I want to be a Buddhist monk," he once told a friend from the temple. His friend advised him to keep studying, and Alexis did. He learned Thai and kept going to the temple – chanting, meditating. But other things got in the way.
On 16 September 2013, Alexis drove into Washington's Navy Yard. It was 8am. He'd been working there not long before, and security let him in. Minutes later, the security cameras caught him holding a shotgun, and by 9am, 12 people were dead. Alexis killed randomly, first using his shotgun and, after running out of ammunition, the handgun belonging to a guard he'd just killed. He died after an exchange of gunfire with the police.
It took only 24 hours for a journalist to notice Alexis had been a Buddhist, prompting her to ask: "Can there be a less positive side to meditation?" Western Buddhists immediately reacted: "This man represented the Dharma teachings no more than 9/11 terrorists represented the teachings of Islam," wrote one. Others explained that Alexis had a history of mental illness. However, some noted that meditation, for all its de-stressing and self-development potential, can take you deeper into the recesses of your mind than you may have wished for.
The West is experiencing a rapid growing interest in
meditation and the eastern traditions that developed these methods. The rising
interest has mainly focused on the Buddhist and Yoga traditions which, although
quite distinctive, share much in common. Both originated in the Indian
subcontinent over two thousand years ago. Buddhism began with the life of
Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of a Hindu tribe in what is now Nepal, who lived
around 500 BCE. He gave up his royalty in favor of a contemplative life which
led him to be eventually called the “Buddha” or the “one who is awake”. The
origin of Yoga is much more difficult to trace. Yoga’s origin lays in Hinduism,
but was arguably first systematized in a series of Satras by the Hindu
Philosopher Patanjali who lived around 150BCE.
After the Second World War, Allied soldiers returned home
after serving in the Pacific theatre. Many had close contact with local
cultures. Elements of Japanese culture held appeal for many servicemen and
women, particularly Zen Buddhism and the practice of meditation. Some stayed in
Japan and entered monasteries to learn the unique Zen way of. Those who
subsequently returned home brought Buddhist meditation with them.
Influences from India, China, Tibet and Japan found their
way to the west in late 1950’s. It was the time of the beat generation whose
members initiated the cultural revolutions of the 1960’s. In 1962, a little
known Indian sage named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi published his books on “The
Science of Being” and “The Art of Living”. In these, he introduced the method
he called Transcendental Meditation. By the end of the 1960’s, his followers
included the Beatles and other public figures. This helped raise the profile
and acceptance of meditation to new heights as it entered popular culture.
After this, eastern philosophies and practices spread widely. People like Bruce
Lee captivated the public imagination with displays of skill founded on
meditation combined with rigorous physical training.
After a while meditation has entered the mainstream of
western culture. In academic circles, meditation is now a legitimate object of
investigation by psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychoanalysts,
psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and other health professionals. This
intellectual interest runs in parallel with pragmatic concerns. There are many
kinds of therapies which use meditation and have been found to be effective
treatments for depression, anxiety, stress, and disease-related emotional
distress.
Either within or outside a religious context, meditation
in general can be understood as methods for understanding our self, emotions,
motivations, behavior and our relationships to others. Meditation provides a
person with tools for investigating the whole range of their experience so that
they may, ultimately, better understand why things are the way they are. Of
course, each kind of meditation has its own specific purpose for which has been
created.
Research about the benefits of meditation has grown in
tandem with its popularity in the mainstream culture. Thousands of studies,
most of them conducted over the past decade, have associated the practice of meditation
with a variety of substantial health benefits. Through this research, meditation
is credited with numerous forms of psychological and physiological benefits,
including long-term reductions in anxiety and depression, pain reduction, anger
management, curbing addictions, and emotional well-being.
There is an obvious hype in media and it is almost
impossible to find complete and realistic description of meditation. Scholarly
and popular media discussions of meditation tend to be far too unbalanced. Negative
findings in research studies and potential detriments of meditation are often
swept under the rug. Simply put, meditation is depicted as omnipotent tool for
wide range of problem with miraculous positive effects. If anything goes wrong,
blame falls on the practitioner not on the method. Let’s see what science has
to say about meditation as well as some long term meditators and teachers.
Studies on meditation have documented clear changes in
the EEG that are distinct from sleep and typical wake, as well as a variety of
other physiological changes . The most dramatic and immediate change in the EEG
is the dominance of alpha waves (8-12 Hz) across much of the cortex . Although
this ordinarily occurs with simple eyes-closed resting behavior, the magnitude
of this change is greater during meditation. Furthermore, theta bursts appear
more commonly during meditation. While meditation and eyes closed resting are
not a state of sleep, the dominance of alpha waves has some superficial
similarities to the dominance of delta waves (0.5-4 Hz) that occurs during deep
non-REM sleep (relatively high voltage, synchronous waves). While a dominance
of alpha or delta waves are generated by very different neural systems, they
both reflect, ultimately, an increased synchronous firing pattern in cortical
neurons as measured by the EEG . The state effects of meditation appear to
include decreased electrocortical arousal. There is also evidence that
meditators more readily demonstrate alpha and theta activity than non meditators,
even when not meditating. It is not clear whether prospective meditators as a
group already possessed this characteristic, or whether the state effects of
meditation practice eventually generalize to become traits. However, certain
individuals, namely the psychologically "healthy" and those with a
capacity for relaxed absorbed attention, appear to be more favorably disposed
to meditation. Meditators appear to show both stronger orienting and recovery
responses to stressors while meditating than controls. Meditation practice may
begin with left hemisphere type activity, which gives way to functioning more
characteristic of the right hemisphere. However, it appears that during
advanced meditation ("no thought") both left and right hemisphere
activity are largely inhibited or suspended. Depending on the individual,
inexperienced meditators may report sleep, hypnogogic reverie, trance or
abreaction during practice. The evidence to date does not support the notion of
unique state effects associated with the practice of meditation.
In a survey of the EEG characteristics of persons practicing
the Transcendental Meditation technique, 21 of 78 people demonstrated
intermittent prominent bursts of frontally dominant theta activity. On the
average across subjects, the theta bursts occurred about every 2 min, had an
average duration of 1.8 sec, and an average maximal amplitude of 135 muV. Typically,
the bursts were preceded and followed by alpha rhythm. Subject reports elicited
during theta bursts indicated pleasant states with intact situational
orientation and no subjective experiences related to sleep. Fifty-four
non-meditating controls showed no theta bursts during relaxation and sleep
onset. It is hypothesized that theta burst may be the manifestation of a state
adjustment mechanism which comes into play during prolonged low-arousal states,
and which may be related to EEG patterns of relaxation in certain behavioral
conditions.
In 2011, Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard found that
mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight
weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was found to increase
cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and
in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and
self-referential processing. There were also decreases in brain cell volume in
the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress – and these
changes matched the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels,
indicating that meditation not only changes the brain, but it changes our
subjective perception and feelings
As we can see,
medical research clearly show that meditation has influence and cause changes
in endocrine system, neurological changes and psychological changes.
Before we continue it is important to note that
meditation has strong bond with religion no matter whether it is practiced with
or without religious content. Meditation is not invented to resolve people’s
problems, make them happy or healthy. These benefits are secondary effects of
meditation. Main purpose of meditation depends of the source ( Hindu, Buddhist
or Taoist) . It is also important to say that until very recent times, people
on the East didn’t practice meditation widely, that practice was confined to
monasteries and even today, people on the East practice meditation in
significantly smaller number comparing the West .It is still mostly part of
religious practice reserved for dedicated believers, mostly monks, while
general population do not engage meditation practice in significant number and
there is a good reason for that. On the
east, meditation still kept its religious purpose and it is reserved for
specific group of people
Having in mind that main purpose of meditation is not to
make people better and that health benefits are only a secondary effects of
that practice while main goal is to radically change our sense of self and
perception of the world in order to achieve specific religious goals it is to
be expected that some side effects will appear. These side effects are the
reason why meditation is reserved only for specific group of people on the east.
A 1992 study by David Shapiro, a professor at the
University of California, Irvine, found that 63% of the group studied, who had
varying degrees of experience in meditation and had each tried mindfulness, had
suffered at least one negative effect from meditation retreats, while 7%
reported profoundly adverse effects.
Another study from 2009 conducted by the team led by
psychologist Kathleen Lustyk provided an in-depth review of meditation practice
studies that reported adverse side effects to participants. There is a whole list
of psychological and physical effects in the paper. These included reports of
depersonalization (feeling detached from one’s mental processes or body),
psychosis (loss of contact with reality) with delusions, hallucinations, and
disorganized speech, feelings of anxiety, an increased risk of seizures, loss
of appetite, and insomnia. The authors especially cautioned vulnerable people
such as those with PTSD to be particularly careful when undertaking any kind of
meditation practice. Their main point
was that participants should be screened carefully for their suitability before
undertaking this practice, and its teachers should be properly trained and
supervised.
Kate Williams, a PhD researcher in psychiatry at the
University of Manchester and a mindfulness teacher, says negative experiences
generally fall into one of two categories. The first is seen as a natural
emotional reaction to self-exploration. “What we learn through meditation is to
explore our experiences with an open and nonjudgmental attitude, whether the
experience that arises is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral,” she says.
The second, Williams says, is more severe and
disconcerting: “Experiences can be quite extreme, to the extent of inducing
paranoia, delusions, confusion, mania or depression.” Also there are danger of
forming false memories After years of
training, research and practice, her own personal meditation has included some
of these negative experiences. “Longer periods of meditation have at times led
me to feel a loss of identity and left me feeling extremely vulnerable, almost
like an open wound,” Williams says.
The negative effects of meditation happen because memories, images, or emotional responses from prior
abuse, and/or trauma can surface with meditation. These can be disturbing and
seemingly unbearable—not only in the meditation but while one is living their
life. For those at risk of psychiatric
disease, meditation can increase the issues, and for those already mentally
ill, meditation can create psychosis. Genetically based potentials of anxiety,
depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, etc can be increased tremendously with
meditation and people who under normal circumstances would never have any
problems can become seriously ill. Unfortunately it is difficult to evaluate in
advance who will or will not suffer these side effects, since those factors
might often have drawn the person to learn to meditate in the first place.
Negative effects does not stop on psychological level,
there are a vast array of somatic changes refer to meditation-related changes
in observable bodily sensations. Commonly reported changes were alterations in
sleep patterns, parasomnia (resulting in vivid dreaming, lucid dreaming, or
nightmares), changes in appetite, and thermal changes. Some respondents spoke
of feeling pressure, tension, or pain. These feelings would sometimes be
described as growing more acute and releasing in session, a sensation that was
oftentimes experienced pleasantly, yet other times alongside a re-experiencing
of traumatic memories associated with negative affect.
Also, meditation can cause perceptual experiences include
changes to the five senses. A common change reported was hypersensitivity to
light, sound, or sensation. In some cases, cessation of visual perception was
reported in addition to instances involving the general dissolution of
perceptual objects. Vision-related distortions of time and space, and a general
“derealization” were described, in addition to experiences of illusions and
hallucinations that occurred both independently from and in conjunction with
“delusional beliefs.”
At the end meditation can cause social changes, which
included changes in interpersonal activities and functioning also ranged in
terms of diversity of experiences. While some reported estrangement, others
reported increased extraversion and valuing of relationships. At times,
respondents experienced a social destabilization, especially if they were
transitioning between a practice context and a non-practice context.
Participants also spoke about the widespread changes they experienced regarding
their relationship to their meditation community. Taken together, the
researchers found that “The vast majority (88%) of participants reported that
challenging or difficult meditation experiences bled over into daily life or
had an impact on their life beyond a meditation retreat or beyond a formal
practice session. The term “symptoms” is used here to denote the subset of
experiences that were experienced as challenging, difficult or functionally
impairing.”
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5584749/
