The Dangers of Wrong Meditation Practices

It is very possible for a person to have such a good meditation that the physical body becomes disconnected for the astral-, mental-, or soul-level bodies. This is a common byproduct of meditation. If you feel dizzy, lightheaded, disconnected, or experience a rocking motion during or after meditation, you may have started the process of out-of-the-body travel.

Brook wrote:[center][b]Wrong....

Meditation is Opening the mind

(Imagine me trying to empty my mind...LOL)

Research is filling the mind with second hand information if it is derived from someone else.

Prayer....Well prayer is different things to different people...depending upon the prayer.  It certainly is NOT always begging God for whatever....

example: Praise be to God....

For that glorious cup of

  

mudra wrote: You are not saying exactly what you did wrong with your meditation Sanicle.

They didn't tell you at the introductory lectures that unpleasant things may result from the practice of TM? This was yet another mental reservation "for your own good." They didn't want to scare you off which would keep you from gaining the "benefits" of TM. They meant well.

But this is the point at which some people do indeed began to experience significant negative effects from the practice of TM. This is because all of this dissociation turns out not to be a normal or "natural" thing at all.

These negative effects can take the form of lingering dissociation after meditation, or after coming home from a residence course. You may have trouble getting out of that "spacey" condition. In fact, as you increase your TM dosage and frequency you may reach a stage where you never get out of the "spacey" state at all, i.e. you may experience chronic dissociation. Chronic dissociation is the most dangerous effect of TM, and can become very very serious.

TM can also actually significantly increase anxiety in some people. This is a well-known phenomenon called "relaxation induced anxiety."

Another very common negative effect is to have "headaches in meditation". This can happen even doing just "twenty minutes twice a day", but it is especially common during and after periods of toxically increased "dissociation dosage" such as at a residence course.

The negative effects can also take the form of unpleasant physical sensations or involuntary twitching of large muscle groups.

On a long course, such as a Teacher Training Course (TTC), "heavy unstressing" is a major fact of life for many people. My TTC was the "Mallorca/Fiuggi Fonte Course" in the early 70's. It is infamous for the "heavy unstressing" that went on.

At one point we were "rounding" for 14 hours a day! A "round" is a period of meditation followed by a period of yoga postures or "asanas." Meditation, asanas, meditation, asanas, etc. etc. etc. for 14 hours a day, day after day. At other points in the course we rounded fewer hours a day which gave us time for hours and hours of indoctrination sessions. This went on for a minimum of three months for everyone, but there were people like me there for six months and even longer doing this.

It was very common for people to acquire major tics of large muscle groups, most commonly in the form of very noticeable head jerks. I'm talking about sudden jerks of the head to right or left of about 45 degrees. In addition there were people with major emotional problems. Mahesh had to establish "heavy unstressing clinics." At attempt was made to help people at these clinics by application of physical therapies including body massage and foot massage.

Several people were not able to become TM teachers at this course because they were not able to free themselves of the major body tics before it was time to "receive their mantras." Mahesh could not send people back to their communities as official "Exponents of Reality" when they had been so conspicuously damaged by the TTC experience.

There was a great deal of psychological suffering. One course participant went home and was hospitalized for mental difficulties by his father, a psychiatrist. Mahesh was quite disturbed by this event (he particularly wanted the endorsement of psychiatrists) and he discussed this negative turn of events in an open meeting. He was angry that such a "weak person" had been allowed to come to the TTC. He showed no concern about the person involved. At all.

17 Ways mindfulness meditation can cause you emotional harm

Mindfulness meditation is about clinging to the story: Emotions aren’t real. Aren’t accurate. Will pass.

When you dissociate from your negative emotions, an integral part of who you are, seventeen of many unintended negative consequences may result:

You start to judge uncomfortable thoughts and feelings as inferior, unreal, or bad. Which gets in your way of actually learning from them, experiencing and healing them, growing from them, and integrating them.

You get good at stuffing anger and other negative emotions. Which might make them go away — temporarily. But hasn’t shown to be very effective.

If and when a traumatic or emotionally painful experience occurs, you don’t fully process it, and cut your grieving process dangerously short.

You have low tolerance for processing grief. So if you start to remember something traumatic, you stuff it down, potentially re-traumatizing yourself.

You expect meditation to fix your problems for you, resolve your relationship conflicts, and make you happy. Each of those things requires hard work, commitment, and realistically, some discomfort. When you look to meditation to save you, you stop putting in the hard work and commitment, and evade the discomfort. Which makes it harder to effectively work toward your goals.

You detach yourself from conflicts in your life, expecting that meditation will get rid of the negative emotions — and fix the problem altogether. The emotions just signal the problem. Even if you ignore the emotions, the problem is still there.

You detach from your partner or loved one when they’re upset or experiencing an emotion you see as undesirable. You wish they’d just meditate it away, calm down, take a walk, get a grip — do whatever it takes to get rid of the emotion. When you invalidate your partner’s negative emotions, you cause serious wounds to both of you, harming trust and intimacy.

You find it difficult to connect to your feelings when you want to be emotionally honest with yourself and others. Because you’ve trained yourself to avoid them. This impairs your ability to be emotionally intimate with anyone.

Your relationships deteriorate, because you lose touch with what interpersonal conflict really means. After all, no one is really experiencing hurt feelings, right? Those feelings aren’t really real; just dissociate from them. Or, “observe” them.

You struggle to empathize with others, or understand their pain. If you don’t feel your own pain — you can’t expect to have compassion for another’s pain.

You lose your ability to naturally feel upset, sad, or concerned when there’s an issue in your life that you need to address. This puts a damper on healthy discernment.

Your ability to feel positive emotions is also affected. Because you don’t allow experience of the negative. The positive cannot exist without the negative. Get rid of the negative, the positive has no meaning.

Your passion and drive in life start to fade, or shift away from those things that are truly special to you. Which may be a good thing, if you don’t want to cling to such things. But a bad thing if you give up pursuits that once gave you meaning and reward.

You start to feel dissatisfied with your life, and alone. But because of the nature of mindfulness meditation, you compound the problem by meditating, dissociating, and numbing even more.

You become fixated, obsessed, attached to abstract, man-made, escapist concepts like enlightenment and transcendence. This distracts you from attending to your actual life, here on Earth, as a mortal human being.

You subconsciously seek a guru or teacher to show you the way to “better” enlightenment and transcendence. You have no idea how this person deals with their interpersonal relationships, not to mention conflict. You have no idea if this person could manage the mundane responsibilities you struggle to balance in life. Yet you put this person on a pedestal, and potentially take a advice that’s really not suited for your lifestyle.

You get it in your head that humans are so imperfect. This may come from the spiritual beliefs surrounding the practice, or just hanging around others who practice. (“Perfect” is a human construct by the way.) You then judge your human-ness. And seek to quiet (or kill) your ego, or self concept. Which puts you in ultimate conflict with yourself.

Source: http://mindfulconstruct.com/2011/02/04/17-ways-mindfulness-meditation-can-cause-you-emotional-harm/

mudra wrote:
We all know that meditation is a very powerful tool for altering the energy flows in our bodies, minds and emotions, for great good if done correctly, obviously.  But as with any other powerful tool, if misused great harm can be done as well.  It truly isn't something to play around with, just following some method read on the Internet or even following some well meaning teacher who doesn't know the ins and outs of your being.  What may have worked well for him or her may not work for you.  There are so many different methods out there and courses are not always run for the most altruistic reasons.  We may not all have the wisdom to know which one is best for us at a particular point in time.

mudra wrote:That thing hits you in the Heart and you know grace has opened up for you and you enter there with heart and soul. One could say Heart and soul bring you to that threshold. Its inspiration guiding you , the compass of Know/Now and it transforms your perceptions with great love , no harm.

orthodoxymoron wrote:I choose to research -- for better or worse -- till death opens my mind to new horizons (or whatever). It is my way of 'meditating and praying' -- but what do I know?? It seems as if I'm always wrong. I guess we all have our crosses to bear. I've frankly been extremely disappointed with those who are involved in a lot of esoteric mental and spiritual practices. That's all I'm going to say.

orthodoxymoron wrote:I choose to research -- for better or worse -- till death opens my mind to new horizons (or whatever). It is my way of 'meditating and praying' -- but what do I know?? It seems as if I'm always wrong. I guess we all have our crosses to bear. I've frankly been extremely disappointed with those who are involved in a lot of esoteric mental and spiritual practices. That's all I'm going to say.

Sanicle wrote:

mudra wrote:That thing hits you in the Heart and you know grace has opened up for you and you enter there with heart and soul. One could say Heart and soul bring you to that threshold. Its inspiration guiding you , the compass of Know/Now and it  transforms your perceptions with great love , no harm.

I agree with you Mudra and I'm not saying here that meditation is something we shouldn't do.  I followed my heart in meditating and doing so made my life far, far richer than I'm sure it would have been otherwise.  The lessons I learned about myself were more emphatically bought home to me by delving into this rich landscape and meeting the beings I did there and thus doing things to learn the truth of them that can't be done here.  I do not regret any of it.  Far from it.  

And now not meditating has taught me something else about life in these bodies of ours that I probably wouldn't have discovered otherwise.........just how powerfully it can effect us in ways that we are generally not made aware of by those in this 'business'.  And I truly think these warnings need to be taken heed of so that people can make more discerning decisions than I, for one, made when I began the practice.  You could almost say that being aware of these effects just go to prove how powerful the practice truly is.   

Sanicle wrote:This thread was begun to make readers aware of the potential problems that can occur in our physical (in particular), emotional and mental bodies, due to practicing meditation………….dangers which are not often spelled out by those who recommend the practice and, as such, many seem unaware of, as was I.  The thread is NOT intended to delve into what (or who) may come through to us from other sources from participating in any of the various forms of this practice.  There are plenty of threads and info on the net that discuss this already.


I've started this thread because reading the material I'm going to post links to have given an answer to why a health issue I've had for years now - that of vertigo or dizziness - has suddenly disappeared, so naturally I'm hoping this information I've found may help others with this or other problems that are listed below that can occur from wrong meditation practices.  You see I stopped meditating for some weeks and vaguely noticed that I hadn't been having so many dizzy spells, but the other night I did a healing meditation for another health issue I've developed.  During this meditation I suddenly had quite a strong episode of vertigo again so it was easy enough to put two and two together.  I got googling and came up with not only the reason behind the most outward expression of the vertigo spells but further reading revealed the underlying issue that allowed that to occur.

The first clue ...........

It is very possible for a person to have such a good meditation that the physical body becomes disconnected for the astral-, mental-, or soul-level bodies. This is a common byproduct of meditation. If you feel dizzy, lightheaded, disconnected, or experience a rocking motion during or after meditation, you may have started the process of out-of-the-body travel.

There are other problems listed at this website also, but they don't tell you how to 'fix' these issues.  Plus I don't see vertigo as a desirable effect of meditating, especially when it occurs when one in not meditating as well.  Read more here: http://www.dailyom.com/library/000/000/000000260.html

Another website revealed why it is that I would have such a weak link between my physical and etheric bodies, the underlying cause.  I was already aware what I learned might be an issue but now I know it is.  You've probably guessed also .......... weak lower chakras, not well grounded.

So that's my issue explained but there are further problems that can be experienced listed below.


   Dizziness or loss of balance
   Spontaneous urges to move or take unusual postures or positions
   Localized pain that begins and ends abruptly with no external cause
   Abrupt changes in heart rate, including tachycardia (rapid heart rate), and bradycardia (slow heart rate), and other kinds of heart arrhythmia
   Unusually abrupt and intense sexual sensations, pains, and urges
   Temporary blindness
   Uticaria and rashes
   Allergies
   Anxiety attacks
   Confusion
   Intense emotions, particularly intense emotional swings
   Psychotic symptoms, including ideation
   Spontaneous speeding and slowing of thoughts
   Spontaneous trance states, where awareness of external surroundings and conscious control are very limited
   Unwanted and uncontrolled paranormal experiences such as psychic or clairvoyant activity
   Suicidal and homicidal thoughts
   Urges to self-mutilate
   Inability to talk
   Difficulty concentrating
   Insomnia
   A sense of one’s own thoughts and emotions being foreign and invasive.

As can be seen, some of these are far more serious.  The good thing is that a .pdf is attached that goes into more detail and also explain how these problems can be overcome.  I'm giving the link to the introduction page as the questions by readers and answers given below are well worth reading.  That link is: http://www.iam-u.org/index.php/how-to-avoid-the-dangers-of-meditation

The link to the most helpful .pdf is http://iam-u.org/media/kundalini_syndrome.pdf   It is 25 pages long, but in reality it's more like 25 paragraphs as the pages are quite short.

Hopefully someone out there will find this info as useful as I have.   

About
A 2-year program in heart-centered meditation and philosophy. Our mission is to share with you the tools which contribute to humanity's shift from mind to heart. Learn more at www.IAM-U.org
Mission
To share with you the tools which contribute to humanity's shift from mind to heart
Company Overview
The IAM University of the Heart is a 2-year program in heart-based meditation, founded by Puran and Susanna Bair, co-authors of "Living from the Heart" http://www.livingfromtheheart.com/ and "Energize Your Heart" http://www.energizeyourheart.com/ Unless otherwise noted, all the status updates for this page are written by Asatar Bair, President of the IAM University of the Heart. His page is https://www.facebook.com/asatar.bair

I'd like to think the pain is gone and they're up there sharing a good laugh

Sanicle wrote:I feel it’s necessary to clarify that this thread was begun to make readers aware of the potential problems that can occur in our physical (in particular), emotional and mental bodies, due to practising meditation………….dangers which are not often spelled out by those who recommend the practice and, as such, many seem unaware of, as was I.  The thread is NOT intended to delve into what (or who) may come through to us from other sources from participating in any of the various forms of this practise.  There are plenty of threads and info on the net that discuss this already.

I’ve added this clarification in the first post.