0:01 [Music] wishing for the object of your met that these things happen to them so you'll repeat this thought may this person be happy may this person be free and may this person be at peace [Music]
1:00 I [Music] oh [Music]
2:00 so what we want to do is cultivate the compa cultivate a capacity for kindness So Close Your Eyes take a few moments to breathe in and breathe out [Music]
2:58 h oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] all righty chat let's get started welcome to another healthy gamer GG stream my name is Dr Alo kenoa just a reminder that although I am a doctor
3:44 nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice oh we can try to turn this up a little bit I think everything we discussed today is uh intended to be for educational and entertainment purposes only maybe I should open a window a bit if y'all have a medical concern or question please go see a licensed professional hello everyone so I have been sick AF chat um and I don't mean sick AF as in I am like oh yeah I'm sick I mean like I was actually sick like pretty sick for a while uh I'm finally feeling somewhat better um but uh yeah um so it's been a while so I was supposed to stream quite a bit last week but I couldn't talk I hopefully I can make it through today's
4:30 stream but uh yeah so like I I couldn't speak and was coughing a lot and things like that and that's the joy of having children in the house because they are often times oh wait this is why there we go they are prone to illness um and then I am prone to illness as a result so sorry about that uh we're going to try to make up some of those streams we'll see what we kind of have time for um but yeah sorry about that chat couple of things let me just get this stuff oh no work what is wrong with you let's reload there we go um so we're going to do a couple of things R quack before we hop into today's stream
5:16 um and got a couple things set up so hopefully y'all have been well I missed y'all okay we're getting this set up getting this set up and um yeah so a couple of quick announcements before we jump in uh and today we're going to be talking about the Dark Side of meditation so um super super interesting topic super important topic because everyone is like oh meditate meditation will fix all of your problems but it turns out that you have to be a little bit careful um and so we're going to review some of the scientific literature on the dangers of meditation as well as try to understand kind of from a spiritual tradition because they've been saying that for thousands of years that meditation is not been nine that you are transforming the energies of the
6:03 internal transforming your internal energies which should be done with a lot of care and caution so we're going to be talking about that today couple of quick announcements the first is that um we do have uh coaching spots open for like the first time in like two years over the last like couple months um so if yall are interested in coaching definitely check it out um and so we continue to make iterations into the program based on client feedback things are generally speaking going pretty well I know sometimes we'll see a post on on the subreddit about people having a negative experience happens with some people um but the majority of people tend to really enjoy and appreciate their experience so if yall are interested in in you know really focusing on making changes in a set amount of time I think that's really the big advantage of working with a person
6:51 um if yall have more of a mental health concerns so I'd say if you all have more of a concern that's like clinical in nature like depression or anxiety I think working with a therapist or psychiatrist is much more appropriate but a lot of the things that we see in our community about motivation life purpose Direction you know accountability responsibility those are the kinds of things that coaching specializes in so if yall are interested check it out um so one thing I wanted to uh talk about real quick was um the we had an Autism stream we had a deep dive into autism and uh we um got a lot of feedback about it and so I think I think some of the terminology and stuff that I used I think a lot of people in the in the neurode Divergent Community were very unhappy with we've tried to correct
7:37 that um in the description in the video we're still learning about some of this stuff um and you know it's kind of like an ongoing process and we don't get everything right all the time so we're always grateful for the uh feedback for those of you all that felt alienated or misunderstood we really apologize for that it was not my intention at all um we're also uh working really hard at at really making everyone feel safe and included here so we have actually started the process of collaborating with more people to bring in more diverse perspectives um which I I think is really important so we're working on all that stuff um and so we're always working to bridge the gap between lived experience and sort of like clinical
8:23 expertise and I'm maybe somewhere on the ADHD Spectrum in terms of neurode Divergence but I I think it's really important to try to bridge that Gap and it's something we're very actively working on um I think there was also a really good post about um you know don't call psychos don't call Pot psychosomatic and and that was a really that that really sunk in with me I I totally get where that person is coming from so we're still continuing to improve the work that we do as best as we can we're really grateful to youall for all of the feedback that youall provide and we're committed to doing better um yeah so today we're going to talk about the Dark Side of meditation and I'll give you all a couple of choices today um in
9:09 terms of how we approach this so there are a bunch of different top talking points that I have and basically I'm trying to figure out what y'all would prefer in terms of order so we can kind of do this like one of two or three different ways so today we're going to talk about the science of the dangers of meditation we're going to talk about about more like practical um more like lived experience meditation dangers of meditation so what do meditators say are the dangers of meditation what does science say is the dangers of meditation and then we're going to dig into a couple of things like mechanisms so this is like super cool where we now may understand why some of these things happen and like what's going on in the brain and then we're going to talk about
9:55 a couple of other like topics like when we're talking about the dark side we can't just restrict things to science we also have to talk about some of these things like gurus and stuff like that and abuses of power and how that happens and why that happens so what do y'all want to start with do you guys want to start with um uh oh yeah scrap the birthday stream so oh before we get into that um I I understand that people made hold on y'all made a a bunch of birthday things for me and I want to express my gratitude thank you so much for reminding me let's take a look at this chat so I had a birthday and um I guess there was some Community event where people were like uploading stuff so I'm thank you so much
10:42 chat um okay start by clicking here and let it play in the background Okay cool so people did portraits thank you very much hun I have my tea can you turn on the air conditioner I like wearing a little blush yeah oh a little blush okay um so yeah thank you guys so much for the birthday messages like I feel um as a spiritual Dark Souls 2 character let's go uh yeah oh my God this is great so I got to do this for y'all and give y'all more um I I have to upload I wonder if I have a recording of me playing DOTA and flaming my teammates so when I play DotA sometimes I flame my teammates um so yeah thank you so much
11:29 for all the positive wishes oh this is super cool um this is kind of scary but this is cool um oh it looks like there's a video playing here this is neat what is this birthday calligraphy very cool um and then there's something about there's a spoiler about Middle Earth okay there's lots of videos [Music] okay this is intense what frustrates you so much about ayur vtic medicine it leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of healthcare for a large percentage of
12:16 patients I'm not talking to someone who has an open mind CU I I think I'm right and if I don't try really hard to catch myself then I will start arguing this pretty hype you guys want to watch this let's go but at this point I do feel confident that I can help you some or at least that's my hope my hope is that I can take those years of experience helping Gamers I I I I like connecting with people yeah right is doesn't that feel
13:02 good yeah an allopathic physician oh that's your deal I'm an osteopathic [Music] physician in a world everyone is looking out for themselves imagine what it's like if you meet someone who actually cares about other people is this weakness is what we're doing weakness you should also accept that like you weren't perfect a year ago or 2 years ago or 3 years ago or 4 years ago shockingly you're not perfect now feels
13:47 good to connect yeah yeah you guys haven't seen the DOTA flaming video Gamers and helping parents of Gamers and helping spouses of Gamers so young chat in my years of training as a psychiatrist and to be able to put those two together and to to help you in some way and and I really hope that I can have we learned our lesson yet chat is
14:34 that the [Music] quote wow that's a good quote dude can't believe I said all right okay I don't think okay we're GNA have to there's too many of these so we're gonna have to keep go oh God I don't think okay yeah I I I don't know if we have time to watch all this stuff but this is amazing y'all thank you all so much this is such a kind birthday gift oh a
15:19 cake all right chat [Laughter] GG hopefully you guys did okay that's the last one where on this okay GG Get Wrecked Get Wrecked gooner oh man so seriously this is awesome thank you all so much um for all all the love and positive well wishes I'm incredibly grateful it it's awesome you know people will say things like I don't understand the impact that I have it I think honestly I probably don't I don't know if I can um and you know that's this is uncomfortable for me too so just like we talk a lot about you know oh like is it uncomfortable for people to give you
16:06 praise like can you sit with that it's really hard that was really hard for me to sit through um because I I I really don't understand I think um because there was just so much uh love in what I saw there and um you know I sometimes get it when I run into people in the street and uh but yeah I'm I'm just glad that you know what we're doing here has some positive impact I don't really think about it much I I'm really here for the memes to be honest so I I think it's important I don't know I just I do this because it's fun I don't I don't do this to try to you know make a difference like I know it sounds kind of weird but I mean I guess I kind of do but it it's not I don't know anyway it's
16:53 affecting me emotionally so I'm not able to speak clearly so thank you guys so much for all the all the positive well- wishes um it's awesome to be supported by all I I can't there are times where it matters a lot um and and so in those times I it's hard for me to describe how important it is to have your support so it it's hard maybe one day we'll talk about it but not today in enough of the self-serving birthday wishes and focus on me as a human some good tea honey lemon okay let's get to what we're here for right so enough of the circle jerks
17:39 chat let's get started so today we're going to talk about the Dark Side of meditation so I love this topic so like when I started getting into meditation about 21 years ago if you all can believe that I was super skeptical of it um so I was I was like a really big skeptic and I'm still in a sense a skeptic but I really so I went to India and I stayed at in asham and I was like what is this BS and then people were talking about like energies and stuff and people are talking about manifesting and all this kind of crap and I was like what is this stupid BS dude what are these people talking about and this is scientific so I I practiced meditation for about 3 months and all kinds of
18:25 different meditations and Brams and I I really started to like it a lot I was like okay this is actually there's something here but I was still somewhat skeptical so the first thing that I actually did was join a research lab in India while I was still there so it's cool because the the first asham that I went to had a research division um so I did EEG studies on EEG on meditators and so I was trying to figure out okay like what does the science say and for the first kind of year or two I really focused on practices that had biological plausibility or research support as well as spiritual stuff so I gravitated away from the spiritual practices and really focused on okay what can science really show is the benefit of meditation um and so that kind of
19:12 ultimately started a journey where I ended up being a research assistant at this place called the OSHA Research Center at Harvard which is super cool I was doing somata sensory research uh research on the soat sensory cortex in on taichi um so it's very cool so like learning really about the science of it and then you know when I was practicing meditation I encountered and we'll talk about this more towards the end you know a lot of weird stuff including personal experiences including people that I met with um you know I I had a teacher who was uh teaching me about Kundalini sadana so Kundalini is like this energy that is seated at the base of your spine and Rises up through your chakras and they were telling me that you know when you do this kind of meditation practice
19:58 you can't be near people because you'll become hypersexual so you and I so [ __ ] shady you and I need to go out into the woods into a cabin and then I'm going to do things to you that make you hypersexual and then I'll help you control it and clean out your chuckas and stuff like that and it's going to be dangerous for you to be anywhere else and I was like okay and it turned out totally fine it was great all that good stuff um but the problem is that when we look at that kind of stuff right it's like R for abuse and one of the big dark sides of meditation I know it's sus is that there is a lot of room for abuse so we we have some of these things I don't know if youall have seen like wild wild country um so this is a a Netflix documentary
20:45 about R Nish or Osho and he had like this cult that had this like Ranch out somewhere and they were like poisoning the water supply and they were like on an FBI like most wanted list or something and they started like arming themselves and things like that so we have these kinds of things there was a there was a temple near me uh growing up in Texas so I I went to the University of Texas and there was a temple there asham near there where one of the gurus got in trouble for you know putting his we we where it didn't belong um and there there are stories like this all over the place so one of my favorite institutions is actually a place called Calo which is in Massachusetts and Calo is another one of these awesome ashrams that ended up having a guru who was doing
21:31 things that gurus shouldn't be doing so they did something super cool they kicked out the guru and they kind of secularized the asham they they kept the Dee rooted spiritual work without the figure head of a guru um which is super challenging so we'll talk about gurus and stuff so I I think that there's a lot about meditation that people don't understand I think there are dangers to meditation very real dangers that are scientific I've worked with people who have had negative psychological experiences from meditation um you know I've had uh I've seen patients in the emergency room who um are there because they believe they're having a chakra Awakening and they're like acutely psychotic um and so you know it's super
22:16 cool to see this stuff clinically I mean it sucks for the person but I I'm grateful for the experience in terms of my growth and learning um so there are dangers to it and I think what's going on with meditation is that so let's kind of start with like kind of a bit of History okay and by the way this is going to be a little bit more classic Dr K where it I'm going to just kind of talk at yall for a little while okay so if we want to understand whether meditation is safe or not we have to understand first of all what has happened to meditation over the last 100 years okay so between let's say five 5,000 years ago to about 100 years
23:03 ago meditation was basically considered a spiritual tradition that was taught within spiritual settings by spiritual Masters so it's like for the spiritual people by the spiritual people spiritual practice about a hundred years ago some westerners started to learn meditation so a big part of this was Maharishi maheshi Yogi with the explosion of TM Transcendental Meditation in the' 60s so Maharishi Mahesh Yogi like shows up and this is like the good old days of like psychedelics and spiritual gurus and Osho and and Maharishi mahashi Yogi and so they start teaching meditation and what happens is a group of people start to really benefit from it and these
23:48 people also have a background in science so they see some beautiful progress with it and they're like we should study this and good job y'all so they started doing a lot of studies on meditation the benefits of meditation a lot of this stuff is is was funded kind of by the the Transcendental Meditation people and then over time we started to explore more and more meditation um and then a couple of like really important Milestones uh I I think a big part of this was also John kaben so maybe about 20 years ago I'm not sure and apologies to uh John kabadan if if I misrepresent this but um so he sort of uh has runs the center for mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts and I think
24:34 there was a big movement to try to figure out okay if we're trying to study meditation how do we do this right because if you look at meditation there's thric meditation there's chakra meditation there's pranam there's chiong there's Transcendental Meditation there's Mantra meditation there's visualizations there's guided meditations there's yoga NRA there's deep relaxation Tech techniques these are all all kinds of different stuff and how do we study this right because these are all different things like doing like a whm Hoff style nepes I'm going to be in Sub-Zero temperatures naked and not getting frostbite meditation is very different from do a guided meditation about let's take a
25:19 walk through your safe space in the forest these are different things neurologically psychologically consciously physiologically these are are different things right so there's some techniques of meditation for example that can increase the peripheral body temperature by up to 9° Fahrenheit okay about 5 degrees celsi four or five degrees cels that's very different from a guided visualization of walking through the woods so uh John kin Zen did something super cool so he tried to Define mindfulness so what he tried to do I think um you know I met the guy many years ago when I was doing research at Harvard um because we collaborated some collaborated some with my pis but uh you know here's what I see as the Brilliance of what he did he tried to take all of these different spiritual
26:06 traditions and boil them down to the most basic component which is what he calls mindfulness now the cool thing about doing that is this standardizes what we're studying so now we're studying mindfulness which is these four things like attention in the present non-judgmental awareness like a couple of these different things that constitute mindfulness but this is not meditation this inkit is called sakshi bav which is the very first step of meditation so a couple of important things happened there the first is that we're now able to standardize it we're now able to study it because we're talking about the same thing so that's good but we lose a lot of the spiritual power and a lot of the esoteric
26:52 practices because there's nothing about mantras in mindfulness meditation right mindfulness is not about mons there's nothing about energy or shaki or accumulating or manifesting or anything like that it's just the basics of understanding your mind and so now what started to happen is we've had a division within this idea of meditation we have the secularized sterilized protocolized denuded of gurus tradition of mindfulness this is predominantly what we find in apps then on the flip side we have these more esoteric meditative Traditions that do more hardcore meditation and these things are not all the same they're apples and oranges and as we'll discover
27:39 there are many different types of meditation which we're now beginning to categorize so now we get to the issue of safety because is mindfulness safe is meditation safe well the answer is it depends what kind of meditation are you doing what kind of mindfulness are you doing because the kind of practice that you do will correlate with how safe or unsafe it is okay so let's take a look at some really interesting articles that are talking about that okay so this I think is what we're going to start with so unwanted effects is there a negative side of meditation a multicenter study okay so what we're
28:25 going to do this is a really cool study that looked at a lot of different uh no this is maybe mean of 87 so this is not a metaanalysis so the first thing that I want to point out to you all is that this is starting to happen where people are starting to break apart the different kinds of meditation so one is something called focused attention one is open monitoring one is Imagination one is body awareness one is compassion and one is some kind of informal practice okay so we talk about this a lot in Dr K's guide to meditation we talk about about d right which is very different from just an open monitoring which is like a mindfulness based practice so just to let youall know this is about you know sometimes when I meditate I'm just
29:10 sitting there with my eyes closed and I'm just chilling right just monitoring just observing whatever comes this is mindfulness and there are other times where we're doing practices like charging the laser beam so I'm putting all of my attention into this point right kind of over here slightly above the eyebrow brows in the source of the Brahma nari or I'm doing a focused attention practice on something like the muladar chakra and then I can add something like mulab bandha which is a contraction of my perenium which is also part of a meditative practice so the perenium is the area between your scrotum and your anus if you're a man it's somewhere you know around the vagina and it's kind of inside the vagina kind of near the
29:56 G-spot for women so there there's a keegle exercises when you contract that that's a different kind of practice and in the meditative tradition the benefits of meditation and the risks of meditation correlate with the intensity of the practice so the hypersexuality inducing practice that I I did was a muladhara chakra practice so this is the the root chakra this is where our Sexual Energy resides and so as you activate this through medit a all kinds of things will start to happen and so even the safety of the practice depends so doing contraction of the muladhara chakra is generally speaking pretty safe uh gynecologists will teach this in their
30:42 office right as keegle exercises but when we combine that with certain breathing practices when we combine it with Consciousness practices where we're focusing our attention plus contraction plus pronam when we're lowering our respiratory rate or we're High ventilating we're doing all kinds of different things that will vastly alter the benefits of the practice The Awakening of the chakra as well as the safety concerns so the first thing that we have to understand about meditation is that it's not all the same okay so here are a couple of this is just one categorization there are other ways to kind of categorize it what is this what did I just do okay here we go um so and then we'll look
31:31 at a little bit more because this will this will actually change hold on a second I screwed something up okay so here are the different kinds of things okay and then they'll also look at things like years of practice right so there are other issues like how veteran of a meditator are you is hiking dangerous or is it safe well it depends on where you go how competent you are what your experience is how prepared you are that determines whether an activity is safe or not so now what we can do is they looked at un unwanted effects so this is a sample size pretty small it's 87 people so 25% 1/4 of people reported some kind of thing that they didn't
32:17 enjoy the majority of people who had an unwanted effect are not majority the plurality of people are individual practice and this is what's really interesting is that um focused attention actually has the highest likelihood so 17% of people who had an unpleasant experience were doing focused attention and 8% of people were doing body scan so body scan seems to be the safest focused attention is the most dangerous and we'll talk about why that is once we get to the meditative Theory because yogis will tell you the same thing the other thing that we tend to see is that a higher duration of practice correlates with more adverse effects and
33:02 I don't know if yall have heard me talk about this but usually what I'll say is that we should meditate for about 20 minutes right so I've said this so when I if you yall watch Dr K's guide to meditation about 18 minutes is how long it takes to trigger um inhibition of cortisol production from the hypothalamus so meditating under 20 minutes is basically quite safe and the longer that you meditate greater than 4 minutes we see an increase in risk of side effects let's look at the kinds of side effects people get so people will get anxiety including panic attacks so I think some of this is like physiologic in nature um depersonalization or derealization experiences are also quite common right so 10% of people have some sense of disconnection or disconnection
33:48 from the self and then but half of the people don't report any kind of details about what is unpleasant um the good news is that very few uh continuous symptoms are quite rare right so when we advise people about meditation we say you know if something weird is happening stop first of all and then go see a doctor those are the two things that you should do if you have an adverse experience in meditation and people may Wonder okay what is a doctor going to do if they don't understand the meditation You' be surprised at how decent they are right so we're trained in a lot of like basically simple clinical reasoning which is is like if you're doing something and it's hurting you stop doing it and let's evaluate you for
34:33 other things that could be going wrong right let's just do a thorough diagnostic workup for psychosis for panic attacks let's just see what's kind of going on here so we have systems even if a doctor may not be sufficiently trained in meditation we are generally trained in the things that are dangerous right so we know how to detect schizophrenia we know how to detect Mania and we're good at picking up that stuff so we can just make sure that something else isn't going on and that you can be safe good news is that the majority of people don't have continuous problems for meditation um it looks like discontinued meditation yes that's kind of scary right very few people discontinued um and very few people sought care from a medical professional
35:20 which I think makes a lot of sense which is why we try to encourage you to do that right so don't be like these people so once again we're starting to see some basic issues about or basic understanding of side effects from meditation and then we're going to go on even a little bit more so now the paper what it really does is looks into a lot of different specifics of what kind of adverse effect people have right and we see some of this stuff in our community so 66% of people experience some degree of lack of interest in their surroundings this is arguably a benefit of meditation right that we become a little bit more detached lack of interest in other people's conversations ID GF chat I'm just not
36:08 interested in other people we start to feel bored by other people right this is a percentage of people who have some kind of minimum scoring of yes and the good news is that this is the percentage of people who experience maximal symptoms of this and this is very low right so it's not like people have a 10 out of 10 great emotional pain but 52% of people experience some degree of emotional pain 45% of people experience some degree of self-criticism 59% of experience uh people experience some degree of more fear anxiety or depression 68% of people experience a lack of orientation less motivation in life right and so now the question becomes is this an unwanted side effect
36:53 or is this part of the benefit of meditation um so these are kind of reported negatively but I think this is important for yall to understand is that there could be changes if yall meditate in all of these different dimensions and this is why it's important when you learn meditation to learn from someone who is like a competent practitioner or a medical professional because they can help you navigate through these things which we'll talk about in a little bit okay so now what we're going to do is take a look at a couple of the conclusions of this study um uh okay so first thing is most reported um unwanted effects are mild and do not
37:39 lead to discontinued meditation or the need for medical assistance so that's pretty good right so even if something happens I think yall should stop but they don't lead to long-term consequences okay um so in fact uh uh What do e use can be related to changes in detached perspective of the self different stages of insight or the use of meditation in participants with previous pathological disorders that have not been correctly diagnosed okay so what this kind of is talking about is that some of these can be psychologically challenging they can lead to a detached perspective of self they can lead to changes in the way that you see the world okay so study also confirmed the second hypothesis that a
38:25 higher frequency of practice May generate more unwanted effects especially in terms of duration of the uh session so the more you meditate the longer you meditate the more hardcore you meditate the greater the chances are of some kind of side effect this is why we generally speaking advocate for 20 minutes a day three to five times a week or even every day is okay um so there this is also really important uh confirmed our initial hypothesis that some types of meditation practices May interact to influence the prevalence of unwanted effects focused attention is associated with unwanted effects I.E the most dangerous whereas body awareness practices are are associated with fewer
39:12 unwanted effects so let's talk about this for a second why is this so if we look at the clinical use of meditation when we use meditation in a Clin setting not all meditations are the same so if you look at something like dialectical behavioral therapy dialectical behavioral therapy is a therapy that has a lot of grounding techniques so these are people this is usually used for people who have uh things like Borderline Personality Disorder so intense amounts of emotional disregulation when things are bad a sense people with BPD can also have a tendency to experience
39:58 derealization or depersonalization they feel untethered from their sense of self they can have a lot of negative thoughts so we want to use meditations that ground them in their experience of self so when someone is having a borderline personality disorder crisis they're catastrophizing they think they're a terrible person they're also activating some hemispheric lateralization which means that their brain is actually activating a dissociative protective mechanism okay this is all in Dr K's guide to trauma if y'all are interested so what happens when we experience too much is our
40:44 brain just like tech support is like you know what this is busted why don't we try turning it off and turning it on again so if you have some problem in your computer what do you do you turn it off and you turn it on again we'll see if that fix is the problem works in the brain too the brain is a computer so the brain is like you know what I'm going to do I'm a dissociate for a little bit I'm going let this physiology calm down and then I'll plug back in tomorrow this is what a dissociative episode is gets triggered by trauma we even know that the Neuroscience of this is we have our right hemisphere Which experiences a lot of emotion we have our left hemisphere Which experiences a lot of analysis and literally what happens is the traffic between the two hemispheres
41:30 starts to get reduced traffic ac across the Corpus colossum gets reduced Bessel Vander kulk made some did some amazing studies on this and when that traffic gets reduced we basically block off our emotions we don't experience them anymore when we dissociate and we become depersonalized our analytical mind is working but our emotions aren't active at all so when people talk about trauma right they can talk talk about it in a very very numb way because they're just thinking about it very dispassionately because the emotions are too much to handle the brain is trying to protect you from it so the body will release natural endorphins to protect you from the sensation of pain right that's why pain gets better over time when I have an acute injury it hurts a lot and then
42:17 over time it starts to hurt less that's because endorphins are kicking in our psychology our neurology has the same kind of protective mechanisms so body awareness practices makes perfect sense that they do not lead to negative experiences because these are the exper these are the practices that we use to ground people in their body now focused attention is a different category and open awareness is also a different category so one of the things that we have to be careful about for open awareness meditations is this is when I'm just sitting there and I'm going to observe non-judgmentally whatever comes up in my mind now this works great if there isn't a lot of toxic stuff lying dormant in your
43:06 mind so remember that our mind has psychological defense mechanisms what is that so our mind in order to stay safe blocks off certain negative experiences so you all will know this if you've ever talked to someone who's in denial right you try to tell them hey your drinking is a problem bro and he's like no it isn't it's fine I'm not as bad as this person it'll be a problem when I'm as bad as this person that's when it's a problem it's not a problem right now it's not my problem you can have a narcissistic defense which is like you know I'm great and you're wrong you're bad they they it's a very black and white way of thinking you're doing
43:51 everything bad I'm doing everything right right because why why does the n nistic defense exists it exists because if you screwed up and you acknowledge how bad you screwed up the guilt from that could be so overwhelming that it would [ __ ] you right so this is why we have defense mechanisms and defense mechanisms are there for a reason to protect ourselves so when we do some open awareness meditations we have to be very careful if you have a history of trauma or something like that because as we non-judgmentally you know observe things the problem is that the non- judgmentalness is a
44:36 skill if you just stop for a second and close your eyes and You observe whatever comes up the basic problem of being human is that we are not non-judgmental as a thought comes up I'm a loser we don't we can't view that thought non-judgmentally as a thought comes up oh my friends from high school are doing so much better than I am we can't view that non-judgmentally we may be able to view some negative aspects of oursel non-judgmentally but there's basically a difficulty curve right it's like there's a level one mob there's a level 99 mob and these things have very different hit point pools very different damage very different armor ratings very different move sets and so the thoughts in our mind have different levels of difficulty
45:22 different strengths for us to be detached from so open awareness medit I do not recommend if you're keeping a lot of stuff bottled up so if you engage in a lot of avoidance strategies video games pornography drugs whatever oh I'm feeling bad let me go distract myself from my mind what is that that's another defense mechanism so open awareness is the process of opening that up letting whatever comes up it can be useful it can be good right because we want to level that up eventually but it can be very dangerous so so I think open awareness meditation for example I'll do that with patients with a history of trauma if I'm there with them because then whatever comes up then we work through that
46:09 right so you have to be careful about open awareness now we get to focus attention now why is focused attention the most dangerous because focused attention is the stuff that is activating all the chakras okay so now we have to like understand this very clearly see all the weird esoteric techniques are not body scans they're not open awareness they're focusing your energy into a particular chakra so the ones that are more powerful the ones that are more dangerous are the ones that involve focused attention because it is a meditative goal that you are trying to achieve so there are easier versions of
46:54 this and harder versions of this or more more powerful and less powerful let's put it that way right so and I'm defining power as like there's more powerful explosions and less powerful explosions that's neither good nor bad it's just if we're talking about fireworks like great we want a less powerful explosion that does the job if we're talking about nuclear Fus fion Fusion cold fusion nuclear fision right we can't do Fusion yet that's a whole different ball game so with the more powerful meditation comes more just like the difference between a firecracker and a nuclear reaction and all of the techniques that are more esoteric in nature usually involve focused awareness so that makes
47:40 them both more potent and more dangerous okay um so uh let's look at focused awareness was found to be positively hold on what is zoom so focused awareness was found to be positively associated with greater self-criticism and feeling that the time spent not meditating was wasted we're going to talk about that in a second um uh what else did I want to say I think that's it from this one okay so this paper let's just kind of
48:27 recap right so this paper is looking at the different kinds of meditation and recogniz the different kinds of side effects that we can have and we have a couple of like quick tldrs about safe meditation practice first of all if something bad happens stop if something bad happens go seek guidance from a medical professional or a spiritual teacher who's competent next thing is frequency and duration of practice increase the risk and focused attention is more dangerous and also more potent body scanning yourself for 20 minutes a day seems incredibly safe according to this paper right and also as a clinician I've seen very very very few adverse reactions to body scanning I can't none comes to mind I'm not saying that they can't happen but I've never really seen
49:12 one the only thing I can think about for and this will we'll talk about this in a second too is that sometimes if people are already not in a healthy state of mind then body scanning can be problematic so if I'm working with a patient for example with the coach Ard delusion so this is a manifestation often times of schizophrenia the card delusion is the belief that a part of your body is dead or rotting so people just believe they're like my kidney is dead and you'll be like what does that mean and they'll say like my kidney is dead like it's rotting inside me it's no longer alive a part of my body has died and is rotting and it needs to be removed and we check their GFR GL glomular filtration rate seems completely normal their creatinine clearance is normal kidney looks intact
49:59 we can ultrasound that baby looks like it's working fine so the car so sometimes what happens in schizophrenia is we have all of these benign symptoms from our body signals from our body which that get interpreted through the schizophrenic mind as negative right and let's just talk about that for a second because it's cool so the problem with schizophrenia is that there are associations that get made that normally shouldn't get made so if I look up at the sky and I see a cloud and I say that looks like a dog it's not a dog it's a cloud it's a random assortment of water molecules that have been vaporized and are in the atmosphere there's no dog there but our brain has a circuit that generates a pattern out of neutral
50:47 stimuli in schizophrenia this circuit becomes hyperactive so when I'm walking down the street and I see someone walking by me and they nod I'm like like that means something we start seeing patterns where they don't exist then I walk past this past the second person this person smiles and I walk past a third person and this person is on their cell phone and I think to myself hold on a second this is 1 two three and then I look at the door the address of the place next to me and it says 11112 three there are three ones and it's a one two three and then I see a car that that has 02 three because there are too many ones over there and there's 02 three there's an absence of ones so
51:34 this is somehow connected there's someone there's one two three I'm seeing one two three everywhere and this is what happens in schizophrenia so now what we we think about is that sometimes with body signals this can happen so when I worked with people who have things like the cotard delusion I'll ask them what tell me what the sensory stimuli are and usually what happens is they have an old factory stimulus something is smelly something smells like it's rotting I smell something rotting and then everywhere I go I smell the rotting smell therefore what do you conclude it must be some part of me and by the way I feel a twinge over here maybe you got a tiny little kidney stone forming right or you sleep on one side
52:20 or something like that and then they combine these things so body scans we have to be careful if someone has some pre-existing things so if they have an internal hypers sensitivity which we can see in things like panic attacks we can see in things like irritable bowel syndrome then we have to be careful about body scanning okay but generally speaking focused attention is more esoteric more powerful therefore more dangerous now let's take a look at a couple of other things okay so meditation induced psychosis and review and individual patient analysis beautiful beautiful paper let's go straight to the discussion so the first thing that the paper talks about
53:06 is meditation works on neurochemical level and seems to mimic the effects of things like psychedelics and we'll talk about that in a second too actually let's just talk about it now so what's the deal with meditation and psychedelics so often times I'll get asked this question hey I use my psychedelics is that the same is meditation so the answer is yes and no so there are a lot of studies that show that meditation act activates certain neurotransmitters like the release of things like serotonin um this paper talks about DMT and how DMT there's some overlap between how psychedelics work in the brain and how meditation works in the brain we also sort of know that from
53:53 a subjective experience standpoint right because people who have meditate deeply will start to trip and you can trip with psychedelics so there's some overlap there but I don't think that one is a substitute for the other now let's understand why thankfully now we have a good answer to this so if you look at studies on psychedelics for therapeutic value now everyone's saying oh psychedelic can be used to heal right they can treat PTSD they can treat depression ketamine in the US can be used to treat acute depressive episodes psilocybin can be transformative we have to be super careful though because psychedelics just like meditation can lead to mental illness
54:38 they can induce psychosis they can induce panic attacks I've worked with patients who have PTSD from trips their trip was so bad that their physiology wires into a hyperactive State and they're left with PTSD and bad PTSD cripp PTSD the most common things that I see from Bad trips are something like a trauma Spectrum Disorder something like an anxiety disorder and something like uh a panic disorder very rarely do I see things that are like negative mood and stuff like that maybe sometimes but here's what we know so it if it can be healing how can it be healing how can it be harming what's the difference so if you look at the
55:23 healing the situations in which psychedelics are healing they are always done with guard rails so what psychedelics probably do from a neuroscientific mechanism is they induce neuroplasticity so they create alterations in the they they they put your brain out of readon mode now we're in editing mode and this is what's so interesting it is the integration of the the Psychedelic experience through Psychotherapy afterward or when you work with a shaman or someone else who's like familiar with this stuff they integrate the experience for you so if we look at the trials we see things like you know 14- we trial with 14 weeks of Psychotherapy with two
56:10 or three doses of psychedelics sprinkled in the middle so let's talk about who you are let's understand what your issues are now we're going to use a psychedelic now we're going to you know see how things go the environment is very controlled many of these studies often times have a male female diad of therapists who will sit with you for 8 hours and guide you and keep you safe through the experience afterward now your brain is in edit mode and then when you do Psychotherapy after that you are shaping things in a very healthy and safe way so the trip itself doesn't transform you and both the spiritual traditions and the Psychotherapy tradition have found that healing through psychedelics requires not just
56:55 the activation of the neuroplasticity we're putting it into edit mode but then what happens afterward what are we actually writing in once it's in edit mode and what we see from negative experiences of psychedelics is people will trip and they have no guard rails so what gets put in there who the [ __ ] knows okay and it turns out that meditation is the same so when you have adverse experiences or similar I should say in meditation the guidance of a guru becomes very important because they can help you work through those negative experiences and get you to the other side meditation also induces neuroplasticity the good news is that
57:40 meditation the process of meditation also trains you mentally right so you practice this for days and days and days and days and days weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks until you have a psychedelic experience through meditation or spiritual experience right but during that time what is happening the Neuroscience of meditation shows us that your frontal loes are strengthening very important they're the parts that can put breaks on other parts of our brain our emotional regulation skills are improving we're getting increased connections to things like the amydala we also are increasing our capacity for attentional control that's literally what meditation is doing I'm sitting down I'm focusing on this my mind wants to wander over there no I'm going to focus on this now
58:26 now when you're having a bad trip and you have no attentional control and some Demon is sitting in front of you and you cannot control your mind to return to the breath and ignore the demon then you're going to get caught up in the demon the Demon's going and then you get caught up in it and it traumatizes you so meditation in this way trains your brain in a way that psychedelics doesn't right because it's an artificial substance that is just board the roller coaster and it goes wherever the [ __ ] it goes but we also see a very similar kind of takeaway which we'll show you all in a second so basically intense meditation
59:12 even though meditation can be used for healing and has positive clinical effects it should never be used acutely to treat an acute thing just like psychedelics so for psychedelics if you're in the middle of a depressive episode you should not use psychedelics if you're manic you should not use psychedelics if you're and I've had patients like this who've been acutely in a mixed state really bad mixed state bipolar disorder who are like I want to go to a 10-day silent Meditation Retreat and fix this I'm like no bro you need to be in a hospital not a 10day med I'll help you get to the 10-day Meditation Retreat but a lot of these meditative experiences are very stressful they're very difficult and you need to be stable and healthy another just really interesting tidbit
59:59 which I love so some of these studies on psychedelics psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy fascinating we'll also have something called a a wash out period so before we start the psychedelics we're going to detox you off of your psych psychiatric medications for two weeks in a safe setting sometimes including a hospital because psychedelics work on these neurotransmitters meditation works on these neurotransmitters and so there's certain SA guards around some of these clinical trials which people don't think about when they think about using psychedelics for healing completely different situation do you all understand the significance of a medical wash out period before you do a clinical trial no one does that [ __ ] at home and furthermore it's not even safe to do
1:00:44 that at home if you're on a benzo daene and you just go cold turkey you can have a seizure and die so they do this stuff in medically controlled settings okay so for going back to meditation though we know that there are a lot of these neurotransmitters involved probably somewhat similar to psychedelics um we're not going to go too much into these but okay uh so we also know so it has been suggested that meditation should be contraindicated in people suffering from Psychiatric illnesses such as psychosis however looking at the evidence one could find that meditation combined with yoga has been shown have positive effects on negative symptoms in schizophrenia right but this is also
1:01:29 important because it's not all the same so yoga is a very good practice for schizophrenia but that's not the same as meditation um so metaanalysis showed that mindfulness based practices to be moderately beneficial in treating negative symptoms and can could be used as an adjunct for pharmacotherapy this is a quick aside by the way I know this is about side effects of medit dangers of meditation but so here's this is super cool so schizophrenia has I guess we're talking about schizophrenia classic Dr K so schizophrenia has two kinds of symptoms positive symptoms and negative symptoms so positive symptoms are usually what people know about schizophrenia hallucinations
1:02:16 delusions paranoia but the more crippling stuff in schizophrenia is actually the negative symptoms these are things like a motivation and hedonia the cool thing is that we don't have great medications arguably some third generation anti psychotics are pretty helpful at at negative symptoms but most of our medications for schizophrenia are very good at treating positive symptoms not the best to treating negative symptoms but meditation can help with that and so the really interesting thing for those of you'all that are struggling with oh I'm not motivated things are not fun for me right I just don't enjoy my life I'm kind of like H I have low energy if you're kind of one of these
1:03:02 people that like life just has no zest and you don't really feel like doing anything meditation has been shown in studies to help with that in schizophrenia it invigorates your love and passion for life when done in the right way okay and thank youall in chat for defining things that I'm not defining for people who are newer um [Music] okay so this is different from the meditation practiced by most of the cases where patients would get engrossed in chanting mantras and trying to get into Altered States of Mind indicating
1:03:48 that Transcendental Meditation could be more psychosis prone uh with mindfulness based practice so now we're seeing once again in the literature this idea that not all meditation is the same there's a clear need to delineate between traditional meditation practice and therapist guided meditation practice interventions practice in a clinical setting in order to explore their role of the trajectories of outcome from a patient suffering from psychosis well said right so what that means is like these are not all the same and we need to start being sophisticated with our language so now what we're going to now this is cool most of the patients described in this review who experienced psychotic episode precipitated by medit ation attended intensive meditation Retreats rather than practicing brief brief mindfulness interventions um some of these patients
1:04:35 were higher risk because they had a history of Psych psychiatric illness um adverse effects this is also really important adverse effects of meditation are confounded by factors such as sensory deprivation loss of sleep fasting all of which may serve as uh precipitants for a psychotic episode various other factors include history of substance abuse traumatic life events in the past right we've talked about that um let me find there's one other yeah so I think that's the main thing that I wanted to take away from this paper so what does this paper tell us intense meditation is dangerous fasting for long periods of time is dangerous meditation and I've
1:05:21 done that this stuff okay so like I've done very ended fasts gone 24 hours you know meditating things like this and those things are very hardcore like these 10-day silent vipasana Retreats are very difficult they require a lot of resilience to get through so it's kind of like this more hardcore meditation we're getting further away from the firework and closer to the nuclear bomb and the data suggests that the more hardcore you are about meditation the more dangerous it is and some of these things like monra meditation this Chuck the activating stuff can be more dangerous okay um let me
1:06:08 see so this is a case report okay so I'll just show we'll just kind of um just show you all so meditation induced psychosis trigger and recurrence we're just going to jump to one or two sentences here the patient was maintaining well without medication for about 9 years after a first episode of acute psychosis and then a second psychotic episode recurred on the 16th day of practicing similar intensive meditation okay um so there's also evidence suggesting that meditation alone is not the only causal factor for psychosis but other factors like sleep and sensory deprivation and fasting uh during meditation May precipitate psychotic episodes in our case various components of meditation like sleep deprivation
1:06:55 fasting social isolation long hours of meditation past history of psychotic experiences have been contributing factors an underlined uh by the as underlined by the review about chiong induced mental disorders a psychotic deterioration is the result of meditation that acts as a stressor in vulnerable individuals so much like psychedelics we don't want to do this stuff if we are not in a good headp space um uh okay when meditation is practiced under proper guidance and in moderation meditation can enhance psychological well-being even individuals The psychosis can benefit if the practice of
1:07:40 meditation is tailored accordingly okay so this is kind of our literature review so what's the big tldr at this point tldr is the more hardcore you meditate the greater the risk is so now we're going to talk a little bit about why do people do this kind of stuff so this is where things get wild and then we'll talk about gurus because there's other parts of meditation so I want youall to understand like why do we do all this weird stuff when we meditate so I want youall we got to go back a couple thousand years right there was a guy probably today known as Shiva in the Hindu tradition but I think if we look at it
1:08:26 from a more anthropological perspective if we look at it right this meditation practice started somewhere so one human being had to be the beginning of it right someone had to figure something out and say like hey like look I'm meditating like this is cool and I think what happened with Shiva is someone he sat down presumably it's a he but could be shaki or barvi it's who who knows maybe maybe it was actually two people um sat down and started to try to understand like what is the nature of what is going on inside me and they made a very fundamental discovery that there is a layer of
1:09:13 something Beyond mental activity so most of the time when we're living our life we are living within mental activity I have this thought I have this emotion I have this perception these are all products of the mind and we think this is what reality is but if we look at the most fundamental level of your reality it isn't thoughts or emotions it is actually that you are always the one who experiences your thoughts or emotions you can't experience anyone else's emotions and no one else can experience your emotions you are the one who's always living your life your thoughts change your emotions change your mind changes your body changes your identity changes Everything Changes in your life except
1:09:58 for one thing which is that you are always the one living it so then I believe what Shiva did is tried to get to that so realized okay this is not real this this is not permanent this is not permanent this is not permanent let me get to the source so they figured out some kind of technique to stop the activity of the Mind and in doing so they opened a door people think that this is the goal of meditation is to stop the mind no that's the beginning that's opening the door it's not even walking through so we have brara which is sensory withdrawal this is the practice
1:10:45 of pulling my mind away from where it wants to go so the first step is my mind is scattered all over the place first thing I got to do is restrain it because if I don't restrain it then it'll think about this and it'll think about this and it'll think about this and it'll think about this and I'll never go beyond mind second thing is focus so we're going to pull away and then we're going to concentrate on one point most of the time the energy of our mind is like a light bulb it exudes light in a thousand different directions that same energy can accomplish very different things if it's concentrated into a laser beam this is the practice of dhana focused attention that's step two I'm going to focus my mind on one thing the
1:11:31 breath charging the laser beam the third ey chakra whatever Mantra whatever fundamentally there's focused attention then we get to sakshi bav in the no mind State theond this is step three this is where we have melded our mind with the object of meditation and we move beyond the self and then beyond that is samadi these are higher States Of Consciousness and meditation that's when you start walking through the door now here's what they figured out so if you all have meditated you know this where every time when you sit down to meditate you may not be able to achieve the same state of mind some days your mind is more distracted some days it's
1:12:17 less distracted some days you you achieve a quiet mind and then some days you feel something intense some days it just feels different your conscious is in a different state of mind the problem is that that is inconsistent you can't do something to create that state of mind right because you can't just perform the same action because it's not about action there's physical action then there's mental action I'm trying to tell my mind to concentrate but once the Mind shuts off I can't tell it to do anything does that make sense telling and forcing is a mental activity so how do I get it to move if I can't tell it do anything where even a desire will shatter the state okay this is where the fasting and
1:13:05 sleep deprivation and intensity of practice come in so it's my scientific or medical belief that these more advanced systems of meditation are working on a very physiologic level there's one technique for example you guys know what the average respiratory rate is I'll drink some tea while we're you guys know how many breaths per minute most human beings do I see someone saying 14 it's about right 12 to 15 16 yeah right so we'll we'll breathe every four to six seconds on average so there are some techniques of meditation where you breathe once every
1:13:52 6 minutes and some techniques of meditation where you breathe about 240 times a minute think about it 240 breaths per minute both of these seem
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