A shattered refuge

why criticism of meditation can be so triggering

by Pierre Lamare

Every now and then I see currents of anti-meditation sentiment whirling through my timeline. You have people cautioning about the risks of meditation, detailing the ways it was bad for them, and even going as far as calling it evil, in this tweet with 50k views:

This is an anti-meditation account. In this house we believe meditation is evil and addictive. We support your right to not deliberately meditate. We resent the packaging of a natural state as mind controlled activity. We are also anti yoga nidra for similar reasons

If you’re unbothered by or have never encountered such posts, you’re welcome to carry on happily with your life. But if you have encountered them and find them surprisingly irritating, this post is for you.

There’s a lot to be said about the benefits and risks of meditation practice, and that’s not what I’ll be talking about here. (This thread is pretty good for the risks, and I’ve written before about the benefits.) Instead I want to explore why criticisms of practice—even when they’re balanced and well-meaning—can feel so threatening, as they did for me when I originally encountered them a few years ago. Over the years, the various flavors of the anti-meditation meme I’ve run into have become a valued opportunity for reflection, and I hope they can become that for you too.

first, it’s reasonable to be upset by this

If you cherish something, it makes sense that you would be upset to see someone calling it “evil” or dangerous. Sometimes meditators hold themselves to (or are held by malicious detractors to) the impossibly high standard of never getting upset about anything, especially not comments from random strangers on the internet. But it’s perfectly reasonable to have a strong reaction when that comment is denigrating something you value deeply, and especially if that comment is coming from someone you respect. Rather than being ashamed of it, it helps to understand where the anger is coming from.

reason for anger #1: existential doubts are uncomfortable

One of the reasons that criticisms of meditation are so jarring is that we almost never run into them. Over the years our culture has become increasingly enthusiastic about meditation, as demonstrated by the proliferation of meditation apps and courses. (Calm was founded in 2012, Headspace in 2010, and the market for these apps is expected to grow to $7.5 billion by 2031.) So when you’re learning to meditate, you’ll probably only run into enthusiasm and support from your peers. Who doesn’t love a little mindfulness? Who could criticize the soothing voice of the Headspace guy?

Then, when you finally do run into people lambasting the practice, you’re thrown for a loop. “Wait, there are people that hate this? Is everything I’ve known untrue? Have I wasted years of my life?” It can feel like the rug has been pulled from under you, especially if your practice has been a source of purpose and identity.

reason for anger #2: we are social beings

We care about what other people think about how we spend our time. So if meditation turns from a socially sanctioned activity to something that only bad people do, that feels bad. Shifting tides of cultural opinion can not only hurt your ego, but they can have practical impacts on your practice and your life. The more widely derided meditation practice is, the harder it will be to find a community to practice with and to learn from. We don’t want the cultural status of things we value to be diminished, so we feel a need to defend them.

At the same time, when we spend a lot of time online, changes in public opinion can seem more dramatic than they really are. One person makes a bold claim you hadn’t seen before, and then a several other people riff off of it with their own experiences, and all of a sudden it seems like everyone agrees that your favorite activity sucks and you’re a loser.

That’s how it felt the first time I saw a torrent of vocal critiques like the above in my feed. It helps to spend more time offline and recognize that the entire culture of contemplative practice is not at risk of being destroyed because of a few tweets. (Not to say that contemplative practices have never been persecuted, because they have, but we are obviously quite far from that.) It especially helps to have a community to practice with that isn’t just your internet friends.

reason for anger #3: a shattered refuge

When I originally got into meditation it served as a refuge at an emotionally volatile time in my life. I would say to myself: “things can get really bad, but at the end of the day, I can come back to the cushion and just sit with the present moment, and it will be okay.” The world “out there” was dangerous, but with careful attention (and Sam Harris’s calm encouragement), the world “in here” was safe.

So when people made the claim that actually, no, the world in here is not safe either, it felt like I was losing the one sanctuary I could rely on. It’s as if you’ve spent years building a sense of comfort in your home, amid lots of volatility in the outside world, and then one night there’s a break-in and now your home is just as vulnerable as everywhere else.

It took a while to slowly come to a more nuanced view. Meditation can serve as a sanctuary, but like all sanctuaries, it is not perfectly safe. Literally nothing is perfectly safe. But we never needed perfect safety to begin with. It’s always the combination of a bunch of different factors (home, friends, health, sacred practices) that bring us a sense of safety, and when one of those factors is damaged, we can seek support and refuge from a different factor. If your apartment is broken into you can spend a few nights crashing with a friend, until you feel better. If you have a bad experience with meditation you can take a break from it and come back to it later, or try a different technique.

(I would also add the blanket reassurance that most of the time, bad things don’t happen in meditation, especially at “low doses”, i.e. if you’re not spending 10 hours a day in a cave for 3 months. The first teacher I went on retreat with said that among the thousand or so students that have sat retreats with him, two of them left in a worse state than they started, and even those two eventually came to view the experience as fruitful. Everything has its risks, be it meditation, therapy, having a conversation, or going for a walk. See this thread for more details.)

two failure modes of practice

Ultimately, I think outsized reactions to criticisms of practice point to an opportunity to—you guessed it—grow in your practice, and also grow as a person. There are two common pitfalls:

failure mode #1: developing a strong attachment to the practice itself and what it says about you as a person.

We’ve all been there—periods of working really hard at meditation because we like the idea of “being a meditator.” These labels are, like every other label we can apply, constructed and contingent. (They are “empty” in meditation-speak.) If you look closely enough, the act of “meditating” isn’t something remarkably different from the rest of your life. You are always paying attention to something. It’s liberating to say instead: I am not a meditator, and I am not a non-meditator. I’m just here. I’m a beginner. I know nothing.

I will also add the completely contradictory point that you can just remain attached to your practice, if you want to. Attachment to practice is nice: it makes you more motivated, it gives you a sense of purpose, and it helps you progress faster. The tradeoff is that you’ll be more upset when people make fun of meditation.

Here’s where the existential doubt comes in again: it’s ultimately up to you whether you want to strongly identify with your practice or not. And it’s also up to you whether you want to practice at all. Fortunately/unfortunately, by virtue of the historical period you live in, you can’t just rely on the outside world to give you the right answer for what to do with your time, because everyone is trying to sell you on a slightly different answer. (This would not have been a problem about 500 years ago.)

failure mode #2: viewing the practice in an objective-driven, utilitarian frame

It can be limiting if you meditate explicitly in order to get somewhere. For example, meditating because you want to be enlightened really bad, or meditating so you can focus better and thus make more money. Past a certain point this will be a hindrance to practice. Like sleep, many of the states that meditators strive for are best achieved by not trying too hard to achieve them. As I wrote in that tweet won’t save you, if every waking moment of your life is subservient to a vague, all-consuming desire for “betterment”, including your meditation time, at some point you will burn out. It helps to loosen up sometimes and just sit in the quiet for no particular reason at all.