What to do if you find yourself in an acute negative experience
After speaking with other teachers and supporting our students through their brief periods of acute distress, the solution is always more or less the same:
- Stop meditating
- Use non-meditation activities to get back to a safe and comfortable place (e.g., exercise, eating heavy foods, getting out in nature, calling a friend or loved one, etc.)
- If you choose to return to meditation, go slower, practice more forgiveness meditation, altruism, and loving-kindness
Why Does This Work?
This solution may sound like common sense. It’s also inspired by Western clinical knowledge, meditation teachers we’ve interviewed, and our experience.
The Window of Tolerance
First, we want people to return and stay within their “window of tolerance.” The window of tolerance is an idea from trauma literature that can help identify when someone is likely reinforcing vs. processing trauma. If they’re relatively comfortable, showing normal physiological responses, and feeling well-resourced while exploring trauma-related memories, they’re likely exploring and reprogramming their trauma response. But if they lose a sense of personal security and/or show abnormal physiological responses (e.g., fast and shallow breathing, racing heart, etc.), they’re likely outside their window of tolerance and reinforcing their trauma response. So if anyone encounters a negative emotion so strong it dysregulates them, step one is to stop meditating and do what’s necessary to return to a more regulated place.
Gradual Progression Through Jhanas
Second, we want people to really “steep, soak, saturate, and suffuse” in the positive emotions of earlier jhanas before progressing to later jhanas. As one teacher put it, “I’ve seen students move too fast and then have an experience like a bad trip.” If you launch yourself into the later jhanas, for example, where a sense of space and self can begin to break down, you can experience a sudden sense of fear or anxiety. You’re in the void! But if you go slowly, progressing through the jhanas through a process of sequential relaxation rather than intentional “jhana jumping,” the subconscious can learn to associate each new step-change of letting go with more bliss and relief. When you finally discover how to relax your sense of space and self too, you’ll find the void that once was scary, a place of exquisite peace and relaxation. You want to experience the later jhanas like slipping into a hot tub, not jumping off a cliff.
Processing Emotions as You Go
Third, we want people to go slow in order to process emotions as they go. It’s very common for emotional experiences to come up as we meditate. Some people appear to keep their emotional experiences at bay by keeping their attention on purely physical sensations. Sometimes, this only defers the inevitable, and strong anxiety or other negativity may be likelier to set on suddenly. Instead, we suggest students learn the jhanas as wide-open, relaxed, emotional meditations in part because we want emotional processing to happen from the start. (We also think it makes jhanas easier to learn and more valuable off-the-cushion.) If you discover, learn about, and welcome rather than suppress emotions as you go, using tools like forgiveness meditation alongside your jhana practice, it seems less likely you’ll have a sudden and overwhelming emotional release.
Using Loving-Kindness Meditation
Last, we want people to use loving-kindness meditation because we’ve interviewed dozens of meditation teachers about safety, and they all agreed loving-kindness meditation is the safest of meditations. So safe, in fact, that traditional wisdom sometimes prescribes it as an antidote to the negative side effects of other kinds of meditation. (With the possible exception of students with abuse trauma in their background.) We also think it can improve the experience in the jhanas. Anecdotally, a loving-kindness approach to the sixth jhana, for example, appears much more likely to move people to tears of joy than other approaches.
For any questions or additional information, please contact us at retreats@jhourney.io