At first, when I went on meditation retreats, I would experience tremendous feelings of rapture, delight and euphoria.

After a few retreats, I started to practice meditation at home and study buddhist texts. I had finally found meaning and purpose in my life.

But then things took a very negative turn. I started to experience intense manic/depressive modes that were triggered by my meditation practice. I had never had any serious mental illness prior to practicing meditation. I am in my 40s.

Over the last few years I have had to be hospitalized on several occasions for psychotic episodes during my manic phases. These manic episodes were then followed by bipolar depression where I became suicidally depressed for months at a time.

Somehow the states of deep concentration I entered altered my brain chemistry.

I currently live in Thailand. I am under the treatment of a Thai psychiatrist here.

He has communicated to me the fact that over his years of practice he has treated many Thai patients including monks and nuns who have suffered hallucinations and other psychotic episodes as a result of intensive meditation practice.

Unfortunately, in the West, there is no discussion regarding the dangers of meditation practice.

While I do believe that mindfulness practice (dry insight) can benefit many people I am wary of recommending intensive concentration practice to anyone.

A lot of Buddhists are approaching meditation with this entirely wrong attitude, and later wonder why it’s not working, or (worse) pretend that it is! Not many of them are aware that we meditate not to forget our problems, but to understand them. The instruction given by the Buddha in Dhamma Wheel Turning discourse (his inaugural discourse) is “This noble truth of suffering is to be fully understood.” That would include seeing the cause and effect of it, so that the origin of suffering is abandoned by that understanding, so that liberation from it is attained.

http://downthecrookedpath-meditation.blogspot.com/

Also this information can also be found here:

http://srfblacklist.yuku.com/directory/default/t/yuku-community.html?new_community=true

I just came across this post because of a strange experience I have had.

I read the book “The Mindful Way Through Depression” by Jon Kabat Zin 3/4 months ago and followed the course of meditations he recommends. I continued afterwards and found it useful and powerful to understand my mind better, and see that my thoughts are just thoughts, not reality.

It has felt like I have been making progress, coming to see more who I really am. I have also stopped drinking for a few weeks in an effort to be more in control.

But today I had a bad experience. After meditating in the morning, I was in a great, confident mood all day.

But then I had a coffee date with a girl this afternoon, and all my calmness just disappeared with the girl. I was nervous, not calm and after saying goodbye to her I just felt awful. All these old fears and insecurities arose. It has made me disheartened with Mindfulness meditation.

I feel like I have overriding issues related to self confidence and insecurities which meditation has perhaps been hiding rather than solving.

It actually feels good just to write about it.

Thanks for this post, it has confirmed to a certain extent what I was starting to think, meditating perhaps isn’t in and of itself the magic bullet for me.

Here is a link to my blog if it is permitted.

Whoops – I guess I just paraphrased you, Dr. Goldstein! Thanks for this post.