What to do if you find yourself in an acute negative experience
Like sports, meditation’s benefits for well-being and mental health are well-documented and can be profound, but participating comes with risks. In particular, meditation may surface difficult emotions or experiences. If you’re able to embrace, learn from, and process these emotions using tools like forgiveness and compassion meditation, these experiences can be deeply and positively transformative.
However, if at any point you find yourself feeling unsafe and/or having an abnormal and unwanted physiological response (e.g. increased heart rate, shallow breathing), we ask you to do a few steps:
- Please stop meditating. Think of it like playing a sport. When it’s clear your body is in pain, pushing through it can lead to injury. And just like in sports, only you know what your body (and mind) is capable of.
- Do a non-meditation activity that makes you feel safe, secure and calm. In therapy, it’s well known that if you’ve become dysregulated while working with memories and emotions, it’s possible to reinforce trauma or trauma-like responses, so better to switch to a different activity. If you find yourself dysregulated, choose a non-meditation activity that makes you feel safe and secure, such as exercise or being in nature, or call a friend who will help you feel grounded and comforted.
- Let us know right away. We’ll work with you to ensure your meditation stays within your comfort zone.
Also similar to an athlete preparing to enter sports camp, please don’t hide any relevant parts of your mental health history from us.
- We’re innovating not just to make the jhanas more accessible but to make them even safer than they already are. In addition to the mental health pre-screen you filled out, we’ll be following along with your daily journals and touchpoints. (For more information, you can read about prior case studies here and our overall approach here.)
- Should issues arise, please reach out to the lead facilitator on your retreat, whose contact information will be provided by the end of opening night. You can also reach out to Stephen at +1 (812) 360-4522 or stephen@jhourney.io at any time (or any other staff member or facilitator). On retreat we’re usually pretty quick to respond, but it can help by starting the subject line with “[Urgent]”, and you may need to double-call to get someone to pick up.
- We don’t provide medical support, but we can help connect you to mental health experts. In case of a clinical emergency, please call local emergency support or use the 988 national hotline. (If you’re not in the USA, such as on an online retreat, please take a minute to identify an analogous hotline in your country.)