Meditate with Care
Seven days into a Buddhist retreat, Amanda (not her real name) felt an overwhelming nausea. Suddenly her entire body locked up. She couldn’t feel her head or her hands. She was paralyzed. “I felt total terror,” she recalls. “I started to scream.”
The paralysis passed after thirty minutes, and Amanda left the retreat. But other problems quickly emerged. “For a year, all day every day, I didn’t know who was living in my body,” she says. “When I walked, I didn’t know who was walking. I couldn’t function, and I needed to function because I was supporting myself.”
Desperate to recover, she sought counseling from Willoughby Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown University who researches challenging reactions to Buddhist meditation. Today, with the help of Britton and her support group, Amanda is mostly back to normal and is in graduate school.
Britton and colleagues at Brown University have dozens of stories like this and have tracked reactions in meditation practitioners ranging from feelings of unreality like Amanda’s to outright psychosis and hospitalization. Now they’re presenting their findings in safety trainings called “First Do No Harm” in order to help people who teach, practice, and research meditation to
