Adverse Effects of Meditation
When meditation makes me feel worse
“… if during sitting [in meditation] you become extremely weary, or tormented by disease, or overcome by drowsiness, or if internal or external obstacles intrude upon and displace correct [concentrated] mindfulness so that you are not able to dispel [these distractions], then you should singularly chant the name of a single Buddha, and with humility and repentance trust in the Buddha as if your life depends on it. [Singularly chanting the name of one Buddha] is equal in merit to chanting the names of the Buddhas of [all] ten directions.
Why is this so? It is as when people who are choked up with grief or joy are uplifted when they [voice their emotions and] cry out in sorrow or sing with laughter. It is the same for one who practices [contemplation]. When the [inner] wind [of breath] encounters the seven places [of the body], the physical act [for producing a verbal sound] is completed, and when the voice vibrates [echoes] and emerges from the lips, the vocal act is completed. These two [actions] can assist in mentally perfecting your capacity [for enlightenment and provide the opportunity] to experience the Buddha, who has “bent down” and “descended” [to our level].
[Singularly chanting a Buddha’s name] is like someone pulling a heavy load who is unable to advance by one's own power; by provisionally engaging the help and assistance of a bystander the load can be lifted easily. [The situation] is the same for one who practices [contemplation]. When you are mentally weak and not able to banish the obstacles [to contemplation], chanting the name [of a Buddha] and soliciting their protection keeps evil conditions [such as those listed above] from destroying your concentration.”
Zhiyi, Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight: T'ien-t'ai Chih-i's Mo-ho chih-kuan, trans. Paul L. Swanson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018), 249 (Four Samadhis, "Speech," 11b9).
The conversation about meditation has changed over the past decade. The research and reporting on adverse effects show that the news that practice can go wrong is no longer news. The reality is that sometimes there are adverse effects of meditation.
Most of us who teach say some version of the same thing. Practice isn't a cure-all. Sometimes it's the wrong technique for the person in front of us. And please tell me if something happens.
Zhiyi, the sixth-century Chinese master, wrote the manual on silent sitting. His Great Calming and Contemplation is among the most thorough treatments of contemplative practice in any tradition, and much of East Asian Buddhism still uses the methods he systematized. He gives meditation illness its own chapter in the shorter companion volume, differentiating its causes and prescribing differently for each.
When a student comes to me agitated, unable to sleep, or flooded by emotions that meditation has opened, I do my best to help them sort out what they're experiencing and how they might manage it. Options include varying the method, changing the point of focus, even pushing through it. Sometimes I gently suggest discussing their experience with a therapist.
There's another option, and it's older than most of us reach for. In the Great Calming and Contemplation's section on the four samadhis, discussing speech, Zhiyi tells the practitioner that silent contemplation does carry potential adverse effects: extreme weariness, illness, drowsiness that will not lift, obstacles from within or without that intrude on concentrated mindfulness so that the practitioner cannot dispel them. For these he prescribed chanting. This is a specific intervention for a specific condition, not a lesser practice for people who can't manage the real thing.
Zhiyi's explanation has resonated with me for years. The first part is the analogy to grief and joy, which do not resolve until they are voiced. Something with no outlet finds one. The second is the seven places, which are simply the organs of speech: lungs, throat, palate, teeth, tongue, lips, nose. He's describing an anatomical event, not a metaphor.
I love his metaphor of a person pulling a heavy load for another reason. Awakening happens in movement and relationship, not in some imagined emptiness that dissolves both. Practice is never as solitary as it feels amidst the difficulty. This is an affirmation of interdependence and sangha.
Researchers have sorted contemplative practices into three families: attentional, constructive, and deconstructive. Deconstructive practices work by taking apart the felt solidity of objects and the continuity of experience, and with them the sense of being a stable, permanent someone. They're powerful techniques, central to understanding Buddhism's teaching of emptiness, and I believe they're where the dissociative adverse effects cluster. Here's the tricky part. Those effects aren't a malfunction. They're what the practice does. In someone who wasn't prepared for them, they can be harmful.
I've long been disappointed that nobody studies chanting. The adverse-effects research is built entirely around silent attentional and deconstructive practice, while the vocal practices half the Buddhist world actually does go unexamined. So I can't tell you chanting is safer. I can tell you Zhiyi prescribed it for exactly the situation we now find ourselves unable to answer.
Chanting isn't a deconstructive practice. It's embodied in an active rather than a passive way, and it requires someone to do it: lungs to draw breath, a throat to vibrate, a sound that resonates out into an actual room. You cannot chant your way out of having a body, because the practice needs the body to happen at all.
Silent practice asks us to observe what arises. Chanting asks us to make something happen, and it employs our whole body to do it. We hear the sound. We feel it in the chest and the throat and the bones of the skull. We smell the fragrance of incense. Our eyes are open gazing at the focus of devotion. Our minds ride the rhythm into deeper and deeper levels of calming and insight. Chanting engages with what is happening rather than watching it pass. The Lotus Sutra devotes a chapter to the purification of the six senses. I have always felt chanting is that purification in practice because it engages all our senses at the same time.
One of chanting's most powerful benefits happens within the sangha. Chanting together entrains our breathing and makes us feel connected. The sound never stops, because each person's breathing supports the others. As one person inhales the others carry it. Someone having a hard time is held inside the sound the group is making, rather than alone within their own mind in a silent hall. It's almost impossible to feel adrift in a hall that's vibrating and resonant with a group chanting. The same thing happens when we sing, which is part of why singing shows up in so many wisdom traditions. Sound just makes us feel better.
Zhiyi and the old masters gave us the guidance in the sutras, suttas, and commentaries. But it’s up to us to learn to implement it inside our own lives.
This isn't just theory for me. I've lived with anxiety and depression my whole life, which can manifest as OCD. In my practice it appears as fixating on doctrine, then on the quality and length of my sitting. I begin to question whether I'm doing it correctly and whether I'm doing enough. The doubts follow. Left unattended, this sequence has more than once brought me to the edge of stopping altogether. What a lifetime of practice has taught me is to recognize the pattern, to see that I'm pushing too hard and have lost my balance. The fix for me is to back off the duration and intensity before it becomes a problem.
My own practice, and the practice of the community I teach, moves between silence and voice: a period of silent calming, a period of chanting Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, a period of settled contemplation. Silent sitting is an act of being and chanting is an act of doing, and each is stronger with the other.
The Western meditation movement focused on the silent practices and left the vocal ones behind. Zhiyi's instruction came with the tradition. We just stopped using it. When the sitting turns difficult, chanting is what he prescribed, and it's something we can offer the student when they need it. Not as a consolation, and not as a lesser path, but because the voice can carry what the mind has lost hold of.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo
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