Jarring Things

Yesterday I was chatting to someone about how taking a holiday from work can almost be traumatic. For some people at least, especially if that person is a high achiever or for any other reason they are enjoying the distraction that the workplace offers. Being pulled away from that can be quite calamitous.1Physical symptoms that arrive at weekends or on holiday, headache, fatigue, muscle pain and nausea, were recognised by about 3% of a representative Dutch sample, and cases differed from controls on workload, sense of responsibility and inability to relax (Vingerhoets, Van Huijgevoort & Van Heck 2002). People go through withdrawal and disorientation as the homeostasis of a busy life is dislodged.2Retirees who identify strongly with their work role are the more likely to lose wellbeing on leaving it, and adjusting to the loss of that role is named as a task of the transition (Wang & Shi 2014; van Solinge & Henkens 2008).

And yet, funnily enough, yoga and spirituality seek to provoke this change more often, to place the power of schisms in the hands of the individual so that they may get on board with it and willingly participate.3In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, “The wise man chooses the better, indeed, rather than the pleasanter” (Kaṭha 2.2, trans. Hume 1921).

You see, at times people find themselves unsatisfied by normal circumstances.4Materialist values correlated with lower wellbeing at r = −.19 across 259 samples, with poor satisfaction of psychological needs the likely link (Dittmar et al. 2014). Many cultures seem to encourage fixation on material concerns and a lifestyle centred around sensory inputs and sensory outputs. Monologues, dialogues,5Random sampling of waking moments found inner speech in 26% of them, inner seeing in 34%, and wordless, imageless thinking in 22% (Heavey & Hurlburt 2008). consumption, pushing aside daydreams and flights of fancy deemed only suitable for children.

I mean, there are many good things in the sensory package. Perhaps it’s all good things. The simple joys of looking for new adventures, tending to your family, nice times with friends, being productive at work, transforming culture. But when those tangible circumstances feel too serious or banal and the operating mode of life feels restrictive, well, it sounds weird, but you have to die. Literally at times. Or perhaps by waiting out the remaining years, dulling the senses with alcohol, television.6Watching more than two and a half hours of television a day went with lower life satisfaction and higher material aspirations across 42,021 respondents in 22 European countries (Frey, Benesch & Stutzer 2007). Or by the culturally sanctioned act of throwing yourself at your vocation or cultivating obsessions down in the garage.

But another thing you can do, and it’s often framed in the ancient scriptures as a kind of death,7In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad the teaching on the inward turn is given by Death himself, Yama, to the boy Naciketas, and the outward life is “the net of widespread death” (Kaṭha 4.1–4.2, trans. Hume 1921). is close your eyes more often while you are awake. With practice and with the requisite instruction and world view installed, you become less fixated on the material world and increasingly direct attention toward the non-sensory dreamscape that we are all living all the time. We’re talking about tiny adjustments here, going from 0% to 0.1%.8In Killingsworth and Gilbert’s sample the rarest activity, “praying/worshipping/meditating”, took 0.1% of moments (2010, Fig. 1). Ludicrously small adjustments for the typical person that nonetheless make extraordinary changes in day-to-day living.9Four 20-minute sessions of breath-focused training, 80 minutes in all, raised mindfulness scores and lowered fatigue in novices against an active control (Zeidan et al. 2010).

A wonderful word, imagination, captures this practice so well.10Imagery meditation is measurable. After 20 minutes of Tibetan Deity Yoga, practitioners’ visuospatial processing rose sharply, as a temporary state (Kozhevnikov et al. 2009). Meditation is another that often fits the bill. But it really means anything that involves closing the doors of the senses, stopping the sentences in the brain; senses and sentences.11The same study sets Deity Yoga beside Open Presence, whose practitioner uses no imagery at all (Kozhevnikov et al. 2009). The nearest psychology comes to a non-sensory register is the unsymbolised thinking of Heavey and Hurlburt (2008).

And an unravelling occurs when people do this.12Interviewed three months after an eight-week mindfulness course, 83% of 96 participants reported at least one meditation-related effect (Britton et al. 2021). In a course for the general public, about two-thirds reported unpleasant experiences linked to practice (Baer et al. 2021). Sometimes it is enough to scare them and provoke a flight back to the normal world or to a mild version of spirituality like secular mindfulness.13Kabat-Zinn says the secular framing was chosen so the program would avoid “being seen as Buddhist” (Kabat-Zinn 2011); Purser’s McMindfulness argues the result is a diluted technique (Purser 2019). But the full path, the path to completeness, is sometimes jarring.14In a representative sample of 886 US meditators, 96.6% reported an unusual experience, 58.4% at least one adverse effect, and 9.1% functional impairment (Van Dam et al. 2025). Perhaps it needs to be so.15The research instrument asks whether each experience had a positive, negative, or no impact, because one person may take crying or traumatic re-experiencing as destabilising and another “as part of healing” (Britton et al. 2021). Rarely is it perfectly smooth and linear all the way. There are stops and starts as those clusters of neuroses, those habits of mental activity known as saṃskāras, break apart.16Varieties of Contemplative Experience study found 59 categories of meditation-related experience across seven domains, from very positive to very negative and from transient to enduring (Lindahl et al. 2017). It’s similar as with the physical body in your flexibility practices when you need to break open a joint in the skeleton that’s become stuck. Well, it needs a bit of effort to unstick and sometimes it even feels a bit like an injury. This is where teachers are helpful, people who have done it before, elders, sometimes even health professionals. In the traditions from which they came, these practices required stable and years-long behavioural and physical training, even the presumption of good genetics and a naturally sound ethical state of mind before even starting on such an intense practice.17Roots of Yoga gathers the texts’ conditions on the practitioner, place, diet and guru, and their warning that wrong practice brings disease and death (Mallinson & Singleton 2017).

I’m listening now to the ABC All in the Mind episode that talks about adverse effects of meditation.18A two-part special, When meditation goes wrong, on ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind, presented by Sana Qadar with reporter Fiona Pepper, 28 August and 4 September 2026, and an ABC News article of 6 September (Qadar & Pepper 2026a, 2026b; Pepper 2026). It strikes me like a magazine. It presents an alarming headline, a bit of a sound bite. A promise to come back to that later. A different person’s tale, more thought fragments. Not much of a meditation, to be honest. But news outlets make content packages like this.

Anyway, they say that half of all meditators have had an adverse effect. The survey they referred to asked 434 people whether they have ever had any of eleven things happen as a result of meditation.19The survey put eleven items to 434 US adults under the stem “Have you ever had any of the following occur as a result of meditation?”. Endorsement of at least one was 50.0%, effects lasting a month or more 10.4%, some functional impairment 10.6%, impairment lasting a month or more 1.2%, and those reporting adverse effects were as glad to have practised as everyone else, about 88% in each group (Goldberg et al. 2022). Things like “I felt anxious” or “I felt distant”. If you say yes to any one of those, for any duration memorable ever, then you are in that half of people suffering from meditation. Days to a week was the most common period of lingering after-effect, plummeting to 1.2% for people who still felt impaired after a month. And even though it’s reported as adverse, 88% of people are still glad that they had practised. Confusing?20Whether an experience counts as adverse depends on how it is asked. A review of 83 studies found adverse events in 8.3% of participants overall, 3.7% in experimental and 33.2% in observational studies (Farias et al. 2020). In two trials from Goldberg’s own group, distressed adults reported such experiences at the same rate whether or not they completed the guided meditations (Beloborodova et al. 2026). Painting it as the dark side, as The Atlantic did, is a little salacious.21The phrase headed The Atlantic’s piece on Britton’s work, “The Dark Side of Mindfulness” (Khazan 2026).

Modern medicine tends to tally tremors, energetic surges, and temporary dissociations as adverse events because it presupposes that Western lifestyle norms are favourable for the human being: forty hours a week for forty years, high-density living, and the promise of universal oversight and gradual reduction in suffering. When meditation fractures identity and dislodges attachment to the workplace or social units, psychiatric surveys often score that disorientation as an adverse effect.22The current clinical review puts functional impairment at 3 to 37% of those who meditate, and adds: “It remains unclear to what extent AEs reflect transitory discomfort vs. lasting harm” (Matko & Van Dam 2026). On the ABC, Britton describes impairment where “some people were hospitalised, some people became suicidal, many people had to take time off work, or were fired or had to take time off school” (Pepper 2026). Interviewed after an eight-week course, 30 of 81 participants assessed (37%) were counted as having an effect with a negative impact on functioning, with work first among the domains the interview names (Britton et al. 2021). The standing critique of definitions built on distress and disability is Wakefield’s: they cannot tell a dysfunction from a valued response (Wakefield 1992). Economic homeostasis is not to be threatened.

Indian texts talk about the physical identity structure, that ego, being similar to a jar, a small pot in the much vaster ocean of self, bound by the walls of the vessel, thick or thin as they may be.23The figure is Gauḍapāda’s, on the Māṇḍūkya: the self is like space, the embodied selves like space enclosed in pots, and when the pot breaks the space within merges with the whole (Māṇḍūkya Kārikā 3.3–3.7, trans. Nikhilananda 1949). And there’s a lid on the spout, of course. The point of spirituality is to rattle and open the lid,24The tradition names the loosening of the self as the aim, and the research records that it hurts. In a sample recruited for meditation-related challenges, 55% of those reporting changes in sense of self reported distress and 45% impairment (Lindahl & Britton 2019). expose that brain, that sentence-making distraction factory that we so easily identify with, to the vast consciousness that would nourish and envelop it instantly.

We do this through meditation: concentrated, alert daydream, focused, positive direction of attention. Spirituality itself is really just positive thinking, to stretch and encompass other points of view, to empathise and entertain ideas beyond those you currently possess.25Perspective-taking reduced stereotyping and increased the overlap between people’s representations of themselves and of the other group (Galinsky & Moskowitz 2000). It is yoga, it is union, whereas negative thinking is narrowing, separating, fixating,26Worry and rumination, taken together as repetitive negative thinking, appear across disorders and help maintain them whatever their content (Ehring & Watkins 2008; Moulds & McEvoy 2025), and went with unpleasant meditation experiences in 1,370 regular meditators (Pauly et al. 2022). until you become so bored that you wish for something completely different.

Indeed, we must remember that even the very notion of positive thinking can be turned into a negative. And it has been by various circuses over the years, coining the phrase toxic positivity. Surely not everything can be positive. Surely there is some demon out there, some bad person, some objective badness, some justifiable cause to gossip and gripe and feel hard done by. That is the environment that popularises the idea that fear is necessary. Fear is some sort of responsible behaviour.27In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, “Assuredly it is from a second that fear arises” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 1.4.2, trans. Hume 1921). Asked why they worry, college students rated motivation, preparation for the worst, and the avoidance or prevention of negative outcomes as the most typical reasons (Borkovec & Roemer 1995).

There will always be seemingly good reasons to stay stuck, complacent, and anxious. There will always be invitations to assert or accept victimhood, to hand over your agency and cash to someone who’s offering a way out, an escape, an excuse to not empathise, to not push yourself to recognise that what you currently believe is just one of many perfectly valid, equally valuable, and seemingly contradictory beliefs.28The Ṛgveda says: “To what is One, sages give many a title” (Ṛgveda 1.164.46, trans. Griffith 1896).

It is in this landscape that Yoga Australia exercises its positive duty29Yoga Australia’s positive duty is set out as strengthening popular practice and protecting it “against reduction to mere exercise or symptom relief” (Pryor 2026). to highlight how wonderful meditation is and how fortunate we are to have these long-developed, well-honed Indic practices, replete with thorough preparatory conditions,30The one experiment located that separates the parts randomised healthy novices to mantra meditation alone, with postural yoga, with weekly teaching on the yama and niyama, or all three. Ethical teaching raised wellbeing most and made meditation feel easier, and meditation alone had the least favourable effect on daily mood (Matko, Sedlmeier & Bringmann 2021, 2022). warnings,31The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā has the breath tamed by slow degrees, as a lion, an elephant or a tiger is tamed, or it kills the practitioner, and lists hiccups, asthma, cough and pain in the head, ears and eyes among the diseases of breath wrongly worked (Haṭhayogapradīpikā 2.15–2.17, GRETIL text). Retreat participation went with adverse effects in a representative sample (Van Dam et al. 2025). and most importantly, the cosmological world view necessary for lasting success. That world view is called many things, non-duality among them. This is the stuff that humanity has been circling for thousands of years, including right now in our most esteemed Western institutions, the priesthood of the West, theoretical physics, also finding it impossible to shirk the reality of many worlds, the multiverse, parallel realities.32Many worlds enters physics with Everett’s relative-state formulation (Everett 1957), and the four-level multiverse is Tegmark’s (2003).

Fundamentally, yoga has long said, you start with awareness of the teaching that all things are true, that all people are coexistent in the past, present, future, and sideways.33The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad says: “The past, the present, the future — everything is just the word Om. And whatever else that transcends threefold time — that, too, is just the word Om” (Māṇḍūkya 1, trans. Hume 1921). The eternal “I am”.34In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka the world begins as ātman alone, who looks around, sees nothing else than himself, and says first: “I am” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 1.4.1, trans. Hume 1921). All of this exists in the same one large moment, one pregnant singularity. You and I are shards, sparks,35The Bṛhadāraṇyaka has the image: “as small sparks come forth from the fire”, so from ātman come all vital energies, all worlds, all gods, and all beings (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 2.1.20, trans. Hume 1921). choosing to enter lives of relative linearity for what it has to offer. The experience of novelty, first times, variety in the form of workplaces, holidays, love affairs, and the eventual universal hug of letting go of rigid points of view. The dawning clarity, fleeting at first but gradually enduring. The awareness that I am you and you are me, and what I do to you, I do to myself.

As you increase your positive behaviours, you naturally embrace the obviousness of healthy activities like stretching, jumping, breathing deeply, closing your eyes and resting in the middle of the day, letting grudges fall, permitting artists to create, honouring the elderly, honouring the poor, the young, the disabled, and assuming the very best of every person in every moment,36The Īśā Upaniṣad says that whoever looks on all beings as in the Self, and on the Self as in all beings, “does not shrink away” (Īśā 6, trans. Hume 1921). Kindness toward oneself tracks mental health closely, self-compassion correlating with psychopathology at r = −0.54 across 20 samples (MacBeth & Gumley 2012). seeing them as alive, perfect, well-lived, capable, and deserving of infinite gratuity. This is health from the yogic point of view.

Yoga would have us know this, that we are all well and truly headed towards something far greater than the promise of material security,37In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Yājñavalkya tells Maitreyī: “Of immortality, however, there is no hope through wealth” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 2.4.2, trans. Hume 1921). safely wrapped inside a familiar jar with a hole poked in the lid. No, folks. We are opening that jar and giving it a tap on the side of the kitchen bench if necessary, so that we may live in a multitude of modes, simultaneously, as it has been foretold.38In the Chāndogya Upaniṣad the seer “sees only the All”, and the verse continues: “is onefold, is threefold, fivefold, sevenfold, and also ninefold” (Chāndogya 7.26.2, trans. Hume 1921).

The traditional context of practice, teacher and community, a sense of the difference between expansion and contraction, and behavioural guidelines baked into society, may mitigate the impact of what are being labelled adverse effects.39The current clinical review says the traditional context of practice differed from today’s, with ethical commitments, a personal teacher or community, and lifestyle requirements, and that “traditional contextual factors such as one-to-one instruction, community support, and expectations/understanding of likely experiences may mitigate the negative impact of meditation-related AEs” (Matko & Van Dam 2026). Perhaps we can offer a passage for yoga teachers summarising crucial information from the sacred texts: