We live in the age of meditation’s triumph. Mindfulness apps boast millions of subscribers. Corporate wellness programs offer lunchtime meditation sessions. Therapists prescribe contemplative practice alongside—or instead of—medication. The narrative is nearly universal: meditation heals, calms, clarifies. It is the antidote to our fractured, anxious age.
But what happens when the cure creates its own affliction?
Recent research from Harvard Medical School has revealed what traditional meditation masters have known for centuries but modern practitioners rarely discuss: contemplative practice can lead to profound psychological disturbance. In a study of over 3,000 meditators, 45 percent reported experiencing altered states of consciousness through their practice—states that ranged from mystical and energizing to deeply unsettling. More striking still, 13 percent reported moderate to severe suffering as a result of these experiences.
Matthew Sacchet, director of Harvard’s meditation research program, calls it “an epidemic of subsequent suffering”—one that remains largely hidden in our culture’s enthusiastic embrace of mindfulness as universal panacea.
This is not an argument against contemplative practice. Rather, it is an invitation to approach meditation with the same respect ancient traditions have always demanded: as a powerful technology for transforming consciousness that requires guidance, discernment, and honest acknowledgment of its risks.
The States We Don’t Discuss
The altered states that can arise through meditation defy easy categorization. Meditators report out-of-body experiences, profound shifts in their sense of scale—feeling infinitely large or impossibly small—encounters with what seems to be divine presence, and episodes where the boundary between self and world dissolves entirely. For some, these experiences feel like homecoming, like touching something more real than ordinary consciousness. For others, they trigger confusion, fear, or a destabilizing sense that reality itself has become unmoored.
Traditional meditation manuals describe these territories in detail. Buddhist texts speak of the jhanas—deep absorptive states—and warn of the dukkha nanas, difficult stages on the path where practitioners may experience intense fear, disgust, or a sense that everything is falling apart. Christian mystics wrote of the “dark night of the soul,” periods of spiritual desolation that could last months or years. Sufi teachers cautioned students about hal, overwhelming spiritual states that could unhinge the unprepared practitioner.
These wisdom keepers understood something our modern mindfulness culture has forgotten: the deeper territories of consciousness are not inherently safe. They are transformative precisely because they destabilize our ordinary ways of being. And transformation, by definition, involves the destruction of what came before.
The Predictors of Difficulty
The Harvard research identified several factors that made meditation-related altered states—and subsequent suffering—more likely. The strongest predictors were perhaps unexpected: attempting divine, magical, or occult practices during meditation; previous psychedelic use; and contemplation of mysteries or attempts to access hidden knowledge.
In other words, those who actively tried to “break through” to non-ordinary reality were most likely to succeed—and most likely to encounter difficulty when they did.
Other meditation practices carried different risk profiles. Concentration practices focused on achieving absorption or accessing altered states increased the likelihood of both transcendent experiences and psychological challenges. By contrast, practices like mindfulness of the body and loving-kindness meditation made altered states more common but didn’t disproportionately increase suffering. These findings suggest that the relationship between practice and outcome is far more nuanced than our “meditation is good for you” narrative acknowledges.
Perhaps most intriguing: prayer reduced the likelihood of reality-distorting experiences by 40 percent. This finding might seem puzzling until we remember that traditional prayer—in most contemplative traditions—is fundamentally relational. It assumes the presence of an Other, a divine consciousness that meets the practitioner. Meditation practices aimed at dissolution of self, by contrast, deliberately destabilize the boundaries that prayer maintains. Both are valid spiritual technologies, but they work in fundamentally different ways.
When the Market Meets the Mystery
Much of the suffering arising from meditation practice may stem from a profound mismatch between ancient contemplative technologies and their modern packaging. Buddhist teacher and scholar David Loy coined the term “McMindfulness” to describe the commodification of meditation—its reduction to a stress-reduction technique stripped of ethical context, community support, and traditional safeguards.
When meditation becomes a consumer product, several dangerous distortions occur. First, it gets marketed as universally beneficial, appropriate for everyone, safe under all circumstances. Traditional teachers would never make such claims. They understood that contemplative practice was powerful medicine requiring careful dosing, individual assessment, and ongoing guidance.
Second, the goal shifts from liberation or union with the divine to optimization of the existing self. Modern mindfulness wants to make you a better employee, a calmer parent, a more focused student. Traditional contemplative practice aimed at something far more radical: the dissolution of the very self that wants to be optimized. These are not the same project.
Third—and perhaps most problematically—commodified mindfulness lacks the containing structure that traditional practice provided. In Buddhist monasteries, meditators practiced under close supervision of teachers who understood the stages of the path and could recognize when students were in difficulty. Christian contemplatives had spiritual directors. Sufi students had sheikhs. Modern app users have an algorithm and a generic recording.
This is not to romanticize traditional structures or suggest they were perfect. They had their own problems, their own abuses of power. But they did provide one crucial element that modern mindfulness culture often lacks: the recognition that meditation can be difficult, disorienting, even dangerous, and that practitioners need support when they encounter these territories.
The Spiritual Bypassing Problem
Another shadow side of contemporary meditation culture is what psychologist John Welwood called “spiritual bypassing”—using spiritual practices to avoid rather than engage with psychological material that needs attention. Meditation becomes not a path to liberation but an escape hatch from difficult emotions, unresolved trauma, or necessary life changes.
This pattern is particularly seductive because meditation does offer genuine relief from suffering. But there’s a crucial difference between the temporary peace that comes from suppressing difficult material and the lasting freedom that comes from fully metabolizing it. Traditional teachers understood this distinction. They knew that certain psychological work had to happen before—or alongside—deep meditation practice.
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition speaks of “near enemies”—states that resemble spiritual attainment but are actually subtle forms of avoidance. Equanimity can be a near enemy for indifference. Calm can be a near enemy for dissociation. When meditation practices produce states that look like peace but are actually numbness, practitioners can mistake spiritual bypassing for spiritual progress.
What the Traditions Offer
If modern mindfulness culture has forgotten the risks of contemplative practice, traditional wisdom has much to teach us about meeting these challenges skillfully. Several principles emerge across traditions:
The necessity of guidance. Nearly every contemplative tradition emphasizes the teacher-student relationship. Not because ancient teachers were trying to maintain power (though some surely were), but because navigating non-ordinary states of consciousness benefits immensely from the perspective of someone who has traveled that territory before. A skilled teacher can help distinguish between experiences that are part of the path and those that signal a practitioner has veered into difficulty.
The importance of ethical foundation. Buddhist practice begins with sila, ethical conduct. Christian contemplatives spoke of purgation before illumination. The Sufi path emphasizes adab, spiritual courtesy and proper conduct. These aren’t moralistic constraints but protective factors. A life aligned with compassion and integrity provides ballast when meditation practice destabilizes ordinary consciousness.
Community as container. Traditional practice happened in community—monasteries, churches, sanghas. This wasn’t incidental but essential. Community provides reality-testing when practitioners’ perceptions become unreliable. It offers support when practice becomes difficult. It reminds us that spiritual transformation is not a solitary hero’s journey but a shared human endeavor.
Integration, not just experience. Authentic contemplative traditions emphasize that altered states, however profound, are not the goal. The goal is transformation of character, deepening of compassion, freedom from suffering. An experience that doesn’t lead to these fruits—no matter how dramatic or “spiritual” it feels—is at best a distraction and at worst evidence of having gone astray.
Holding the Complexity
So where does this leave us? Not, I hope, with the conclusion that meditation is dangerous and should be avoided. Contemplative practice remains one of humanity’s most valuable technologies for cultivating wisdom, compassion, and freedom. But we need a more mature relationship with these practices—one that acknowledges both their profound gifts and their genuine risks.
This means being honest about the fact that meditation is not right for everyone, not appropriate at all times. Someone in acute psychological crisis may need therapy, medication, or simply human connection more than they need meditation. Someone dealing with unprocessed trauma may need somatic work or EMDR before deep contemplative practice is advisable.
It means recognizing that different practices carry different risk profiles and that individual practitioners vary in their vulnerability to meditation-related difficulties. The concentrated absorption practices that lead one person to profound insight might destabilize another. The open awareness practices that gently expand one person’s consciousness might leave another feeling ungrounded and overwhelmed.
It means creating space—in our mindfulness apps, our meditation centers, our wellness programs—to talk about the difficulties that can arise in practice. When 13 percent of practitioners report significant suffering from meditation-related altered states, we need to normalize these experiences rather than treating them as shameful failures or signs of doing something wrong.
Most fundamentally, it means recovering the wisdom that contemplative practice is not self-improvement but self-transformation—and transformation is never entirely safe, never fully predictable, never reducible to an eight-week curriculum or a 10-minute daily app session.
An Invitation to Discernment
If you maintain a meditation practice, or are considering beginning one, these reflections offer an invitation to discernment rather than a cause for alarm. Ask yourself: Why am I practicing? What am I hoping to find? Do I have support if practice becomes difficult? Am I approaching meditation as a consumer product or as a transformative discipline?
If you’ve experienced difficulties in your practice—altered states that frightened rather than enlightened you, periods when meditation seemed to increase rather than decrease suffering—know that you are not alone and you are not failing. These experiences have been part of the contemplative path for as long as humans have been exploring consciousness. What matters is how we meet them: with honesty, with support, and with the understanding that even—especially—the difficult passages can be doorways to deeper freedom.
The contemplative traditions teach us that the spiritual path is not a smooth ascent to ever-greater peace and clarity. It is a journey through varied terrain: some stretches gentle and flowering, others steep and rocky, still others shrouded in fog where we can barely see the path ahead. All of this is part of the journey. All of it has something to teach us.
The question is not whether meditation is safe, but whether we are willing to engage with it as the powerful, transformative, sometimes difficult practice it truly is. Not a pill for stress, not an app for optimization, but a path that has the potential to change us in ways we cannot predict or control—if we approach it with the seriousness, humility, and support it requires.
The stillness holds more than peace. It holds everything we’ve been avoiding, everything we don’t yet understand about ourselves, everything that wants to be transformed. Sometimes that transformation comes gently. Sometimes it comes like a storm. The wisdom is not in avoiding the storm but in learning how to navigate it—together, with guidance, with honesty about both the gifts and the challenges of traveling these ancient, essential paths into consciousness itself.