No, they certainly shouldn't... for various reasons I did a vipassana 10 day silent retreat back in 2010, and, ended up triggering a bipolar episode[0]. No, there was no history of that in my family, it was a complete surprise.
This obviously doesn't happen to everyone doing it, but, while my blog is very much buried now, I still get yearly mails from people saying that the same thing happened to them..
I do not recommend vipassana unless you've done a _lot_ of meditation before. 10 days of complete silence is a massive strain. I did it, based on little more than a recommendation like this, and had a bipolar episode (no history of bipolar or serious mental illness before). My story [0]
TLDR: I had a manic psychotic (bipolar) episode triggered on a vipassana course. This was with zero history of mental illness (before or after)
Be quite careful with Vipassana, especially if you're not used to regular meditation. It's not just a "silent" retreat in the sense of not talking. Also, no eye contact, no reading/writing and meditating 10 hours a day. It's a seriously stressful time for your brain.
I did the course, and I had a manic psychotic episode as a direct result. I made some audio and put it on a blog I started while manic [1]. It details what the course was like, what it was like to be manic (totally awesome! ;), what it was like to be depressed (absolutely awful) and getting better.
I'm not saying don't do the course, I'm not saying I didn't do something wrong with the technique, I am saying be very very careful and don't think there can't be downsides. I was off work for a year and it took about 3 years before I felt "normal" again.
Now, admittedly I had done very little meditation before hand, but _please_ don't just jump into this course like I did. And no, there was no history of manic depressive behaviour in my family so this came as quite the shock.
10 days of total silence (no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no nothing) is a really serious stress on your brain. Do not take it lightly.
Ha! I thought it might have been vipassana. My own experience of this (a 10 day silent retreat, not having done meditation before) was a full blown manic-psychotic experience (never having had any such thing before, nor in family history). If you're interested, I made some audio files [0] talking about what happened.
I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them to do a 10 day silent retreat. I honestly think it's like taking a regular person and allowing them to go down a grade 4 or 5 river. They might make it, but they might get seriously hurt too.
I actually raised this point with the local (New Zealand) health and disability ombudsman. I said that vipassana ought to have a psychologist to assess people as they left, or at least _something_ like that. Nothing changed as far as I am aware.
I hope the author continues to get better. It was a long journey for me.
Be quite careful giving advice about meditation. Under your "beginner" heading you suggest Dhamma - the 10 day 9 day silent course (I'm assuming vipassana is an example of this).
I did a vipassana course after a similar suggestion. In me it triggered a full blown manic-psychotic (bipolar) episode. There had been no history of this in my family (or myself) before that point.
If you're interested, I made a bunch of podcasts detailing what it was like to be manic -> depressed -> better here: [0]
While I'm not saying it's necessarily bad advice, I suggest that anyone contemplating a 10 day silent retreat has prepared by doing a _lot_ of meditation before hand and to be aware that there can be consequences.
I was not considered to be someone with a severe mental illness but ended up developing an intense depersonalization + somatoform disorder during a 10 day retreat that I am still struggling to recover from 2 years later. The staff there refused to let me talk to a doctor who was also at the retreat or to call my parents without listening in on the conversation, which made me extremely uncomfortable and caused me to stay there longer than I should have. By the end of it they continued to insist that the Vipassana was the way to fix my problems instead of advocating that I see a doctor.
My experience was an outlier but I feel that for many people an experience like this can do more harm than good. Isolation and sensory deprivation for 10 days is generally not healthy, when we do that to people in prison it can be considered cruel and unusual punishment. I don't think they did a very good job of encouraging those who were having issues to leave and instead made me want to try and 'power' through what I was going through rather than recognizing it as a serious issue.
The way the class is structured is fundamentally depersonalizing- every night they have you watch video lectures that I found to get increasingly bizarre and cult-like, subjecting you over and over to the notion that the Vipassana method is the way to deal with all suffering and eventually talking about how you can manipulate quantum energy in your body and other crazy shit. It was doubly disorienting to be doing this while eating a low-protein vegetarian diet for the first time
There are many, many others who have had negative, damaging experiences like me and the issue is waved away saying "they were already mentally ill and shouldn't have gone" but the fact there are many other ways to get the benefits that meditation offers in a way that doesn't present the risk of manifesting latent mental illnesses.
I really do not believe a 10 day retreat should even be offered to beginners and if so it should be less dogmatic and more sensitive to the possibility that it can be dangerous to certain personalities
Vipassana is an _extremely_ powerful technique.. and not without its dangers - especially if you're not used to meditation. Check out http://livingvipassana.blogspot.com for a first hand account of a manic-depressive (bipolar) episode following it.
While no one knows the triggers to these things I would _not_ recommend just jumping in because you thought it'd be cool! Read up, do your research, and do lots of smaller practice before trying.
> Try vipassana before LSD, it will help. It will kick ur ass, but youll heal some deep seated issues.
Not necessarily. While rare I've seen 2 psychotics breaks (requiring hospitalization) occur on meditation retreats -- 1 a ten-day Vipasana retreat; the other a 7-day Zen retreat.
Obviously meditation and intensive retreats can be effective , much like deep substance induced psychedilc experiences, but there are no guarantees, so blanket statements like, "do X, it worked for me" may unintentionally send one down the road to hell despite your good intentions :)
p.s. meditation, particularly of the <= 1 hour variety, is almost certainly safe for everyone; it's the intensive retreats and large dose induced psychedelic psychosis that impose a much greater risk.
Absolutely, I think it's important to not victim-blame or fall into that "just do it correctly and you'll be fine" trope that the author of the post describes. If you want to try meditation, always ease into it with shorts sessions, listen to your body and take note how you react to it along the way, and do not continue (or at least downscale it) if you find that your mind has a tendency to dissociate or otherwise freak out from it. And frankly, those 10 day silent retreats scare me - as someone who does short sessions once or twice a week, I probably feel the same way about them as someone who microdoses would feel about munching several fistfuls of shrooms.
I think part of the problem here is also the mysticism that this is steeped in. Hallucination, out-of-body-experiences, dissociation - none of these are ok, or signs that you're "transcending" or any bullshit like that. The "end goal" here isn't to dissolve your brain and merge it with the universe - in fact there is no end goal, just like there is no end goal for going to the gym (and it's absolutely possible to over-train there too, cf. rhabdomyolysis).
> That is why during serious meditation retreats (like 10 days vipassana) some people freak out and they aren't able to finish the retreat. It's perfectly normal and usually has positive effects in the long run.
To be fair the vast majority of people who leave (Goenka) Vipassana retreats leave on days 2 and 6 (Goenka himself mentioned this in one of the prerecorded talks). It's extremely unlikely that first timers get concentrated enough to start experiencing negative effects (such as 'bhanga jnana' or dissociation) in 1-5 days of meditation. Anyone familiar with those retreats would guess they couldn't take the boot camp schedule and not being allowed to speak or to peruse any kind of diversion such as book or smartphone.
Vipassana changed my life for the best.
Since my first course, I did a few more, some 10 days, and some 3-day courses which are available only for people who already did the 10 day course.
It made me a better entrepreneur, better father, better spouse.
Like the commenter above stated, there are people who have psychiatric breakdowns following or during such courses.
I don't think the Vipassana organization is doing a good job making this information transparent. But, from my anecdotal experience of over 20 years of courses, these cases are very few and far between.
> I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them to do a 10 day silent retreat.
I did a Vipassana 12 day retreat (years ago) but I didn't find it to be that wild.
The hardest part for me was actually sitting down 15? hours a day. Had I known what I was going to do I would have prepared by doing exercises to strengthen my back.
> Probably not the first people to go a little crazy attempting that in Buddhist history
During the signup process for a 10 day Vipassana retreat, they ask for a lot of details about your psychological health. Even warning against doing the retreat if you’re not in a good mental place. So I’m sure you’re right.
I'd definitely recommend doing a 1 day retreat before diving into something longer - some people suffer psychotic breaks and other challenging meditation experiences.
This should come with a warning. Vipassana and other meditation retreats have also caused profound psychosis in people. Be warned about an irreversible mental breakdown. Your mind is unnaturally put in a hyper insensitive environment that it is not meant to be in, nor is it designed to from an evolutionary standpoint. It is designed to stay alert with its environment and defend you from threats, seek mate/food. There were a bunch of posts about this on HN.
An intensive Vipassana retreat is just that, an INTENSIVE retreat. I've meditated for ~10 years. I don't think anyone's FIRST meditation experience should be a 10-day Vipassana retreat. I don't think anyone's first silence experience should be a 10-day Vipassana retreat. That's like going to a Navy Seal bootcamp when you've never exercised in your life.
A lot of Buddhist or meditative practices also have close student-teacher relationships. You should have an active human coach guiding you through the process, because shit comes up, people have different mental health setups (just like a physical therapist has different workout plans for people with injuries and physical conditions) and if it's just DIY experimenting, you can encounter something and get screwed.
A good example of this is the Tim Ferris podcast where he did a 10-day Vipassana retreat and decided to fast for a certain number of days to amplify the effect and almost had a complete mental breakdown. It worked out and led to a very vulnerable podcast down the line (https://tim.blog/2020/09/14/how-to-heal-trauma/), but these are things to keep in mind when going into deep waters.
I have been doing intensive meditation retreats 20 years, and I never recommend them to anyone. People go to them when they really want to. No need to advertise or hype them.
I have witnessed maybe 5-7 cases of psychosis, 3 of them requiring immediate hospitalization one requiring police presence. Some people have been hospitalized after getting home. It's rare but it definitely happens.
Some random things related to mediation and mental problems:
- Goenka's Vipassana is famous from just taking random Joes from the street into 10 day intensive Vipassana mediation retreats. Most other traditions like to do prescreening and gradual increase in insensitivity. First establish daily practice, then take day or weekend retreats before doing longer terms. I'm not saying its not a good tradition, it's just that they do this differently.
- Meditation retreat is where things happen in your mind. If you repress something successfully in the normal life, it probably does not work in the retreat. If you are depressed but did not notice it before, you probably notice it in the retreat. If you are predisposed to psychosis, meditation retreat is the place where it manifests. What is caused by meditation and what is revealed by meditation is not clear.
- People seek to treat their mental problems with mediation. In principle that's OK when combined with other treatments, but if you use it as alternative for medication or professional health care you get random outcomes.
- Mindfulness as a therapy (like what Jon Kabat-Zinn does) is different. You have a therapist connection with the mindfulness meditation.
- Many long term practitioners who do intensive meditation have mental problems but can successfully deal with them. Their secret is that they go to therapy when they need it or use medication when they need it just like everyone else.
- Ancient meditation literature (sutras and such) are full of descriptions of people having mental problems. Experiences with devils, monsters and hell realms during meditation. One great example is Japanese Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1768). He describes the mental problems plainly. He sought help. He had to take break of several years from his zen training to recover before he could continue.
- If you want to find where the line is, you have to go both sides of the line. Even if you are healthy and grounded individual sometimes you find scary mental states. The difference between 'crazy' temporary mental state versus clinical psychosis or mental problem is that you recover quickly after taking a little break or sleeping over it.
This obviously doesn't happen to everyone doing it, but, while my blog is very much buried now, I still get yearly mails from people saying that the same thing happened to them..
[0]. http://livingvipassana.blogspot.com/2010/02/bipolar-chronicl...
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