Mindfulness Done Wrong

Brooks Agnew – Since mindfulness is something you can practice at home for free, it often sounds like the perfect tonic for stress and mental health issues. Mindfulness is a type of Buddhist-based meditation in which you focus on being aware of what you’re sensing, thinking, and feeling in the present moment.

The first recorded evidence for this, found in India, is over 1,500 years old. The Dharmatrāta Meditation Scripture, written by a community of Buddhists, describes various practices and includes reports of symptoms of depression and anxiety that can occur after meditation.

It also details cognitive anomalies associated with episodes of psychosis, dissociation, and depersonalisation (when people feel the world is “unreal”).

In the past eight years there has been a surge of scientific research in this area. These studies show that adverse effects are not rare.

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects which had a significant negative impact on their everyday life and lasted for at least one month.

According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression. These are followed by psychotic or delusional symptoms, dissociation or depersonalization, and fear.

People who have experienced a level of ascension will call into question everything they are doing. They may question their own marriage or career. 90% of people will make changes that will improve their life and often improve their health. They will lose weight, return to school, get married, or choose to relocate to a better area. 10% of the people apparently become so focused on their own personal feelings that they develop paranoia or an unfounded distrust in the roundness of the planet itself.

Research also found that adverse effects can happen to people without previous mental health problems, to those who have only had a moderate exposure to meditation and they can lead to long-lasting symptoms.

The western world has also had evidence about these adverse effects for a long time.

In 1976, Arnold Lazarus, a key figure in the cognitive-behavioural science movement, said that meditation, when used indiscriminately, could induce “serious psychiatric problems such as depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation”.

There is evidence that mindfulness can benefit people’s wellbeing. The problem is that mindfulness coaches, videos, apps and books rarely warn people about the potential adverse effects.

Professor of management and ordained Buddhist teacher Ronald Purser wrote in his 2023 book McMindfulness that mindfulness has become a kind of “capitalist spirituality”.

In the US alone, meditation is worth US$2.2 billion (£1.7 billion). And the senior figures in the mindfulness industry should be aware of the problems with meditation. There are new life coaches popping up every day, and they are younger and younger every year.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a key figure behind the mindfulness movement, admitted in a 2017 interview with the Guardian that “90 percent of the research [into the positive impacts] is subpar”. There are hundreds of books that are filled with word salad and fake advice. They remove or mimic science and lead people astray. They claim to teach Akashic Records, the writings of Toth, or reveal teachings from the Pleiadeans.

In his foreword to the 2015 UK Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Report, Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that mindfulness meditation can and will eventually transform “who we are as human beings and individual citizens, as communities and societies, as nations, and as a species”.

This is the whole point. Teaching people that their minds are much more than the glob of gray matter in their skull, and that their ability to affect the universe is profound and powerful, is the point of mindfulness. Putting them to sleep, just because 10% of the people can’t handle being immortal is the reason why the human race is doomed to extinction.

If you want to learn more, read the book https://RememberingtheFutureBook.com

SF Source Brooks Agnew Jul 2024