Finding your confidence again

Experiencing unexpected challenges in your meditation practice? You're not alone. Have you also found a less than helpful attitude or lack of knowledge and understanding about these challenges by your teachers?  This page offers immediate relief strategies and comprehensive support to help you navigate difficult experiences and find your way back to balance. Help is here, and you are capable of finding your way back from challenge.

Understanding your experience

We're here for individuals experiencing unusual and unwanted effects from meditation that persist beyond practice, interfere with daily life, or heighten negative emotions, and who have been unable to find help or who have experienced less than helpful responses. Our resources are designed to help you understand what's happening and guide you towards well-being.

Your roadmap to support

Discover a range of helpful resources tailored for you. Find advice for safer practice, tools to understand your experiences, a curated list of self-help guides, links to trusted organisations and websites, and pathways to peer and individual care.

Unique support, right here in the UK

Meditators in Distress UK stands as a unique beacon of support. We are the only dedicated resource of our kind in the UK, offering specialised assistance distinct from global general help sites. While our focus is on the UK context, our commitment extends to helping anyone, anywhere, navigate their meditation-related distress.

What is usual in Meditation Practice?

Meditation is not all bliss and calm. In fact mostly its pretty intense concentration with some degree of effort involved. This intense inner focus comes with typical and predictable experiences. You get distracted - usually by thoughts, memories, ideas, plans and time travelling. Yep, the mind is a brilliant time travel machine carrying us into the 'what ifs' of the future as well as rehashing old experiences, recent or long distant.

'Itchy and Scratchy' are familiar friends when sitting to practice, getting antsy, becoming aware of aches and pains, that tickle at the end of the nose....

Feeling a bit spacy or yes, a bit blissed out, not quite connected, and sometimes periods of inner silence, these, and the above, are among the typical experiences people have both as a beginner meditator as well as throughout a meditation journey. In fact some of these effects can be reasons why some of us meditate.

Typical effects may include:

  • feeling calmer, with less mind chatter.
  • some easing of pain or discomfort, usually a result of the relaxation response.
  • The Relaxation Response, lowered BP, heartrate, less muscle tension, a return to rest and digest, (called homeostasis).
  • easing of high emotional arousal (dysregulation) with a return to regulation and ability to manage emotions skilfully.
  • more focus with less effort, becoming more efficient, clearer headed,  with effective decision making and action.
  • spiritual and unitive experiences, connection with ones true essence, mind expansion, connection with an unseen realm/beings.
  • other effects related to the form, type and method of the meditation tradition or school/ashram/lineage one is engaged with.

However, if your experience is something disturbing or worrisome know that help is at hand.

To understand the difference between something to be expected and something you may need help with, please click on What is an MRC in the banner above.

Self-help

Your experiences are not unusual and relief could be obtained by just a few simple tweaks. You may like to try these first and see if they help.

Pendulation

Your activated senses can be calmed during practice by less intense focus. Try changing your anchor, bring attention to something outside yourself (perhaps by opening eyes if they are closed) for a few seconds then return to your usual anchor or focus. Its like the swinging of a clock pendulum, away from then back toward, away from then back toward. Do this several times or until your state settles.

Titration

This refers to the length, type, and intensity of practice. Practice for a shorter time, or consider the type of practice you are engaged with. Perhaps a focus on an object or attitude rather than open awareness for instance. Or try a compassion practice if you are practicing with some kind of issue. Allow yourself to explore and experiment to find out which form of meditation or practice best suits you.

Orienting

If unwanted effects are bothering outside of actual practice, you can orient and ground your experience. Bring attention to where you are, glance round bringing your focus to rest on something that catches your attention. What do you notice about it? Use all of your senses if you can. Describe it to yourself. Does it have a sound? How do you feel while focussed on it. Alternately you can concentrate on FOFBOC - Feet On Floor, Bum on Chair!

1,2,3,4,5!

Again outside of practice itself, you can use this grounding method:

Name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can (or could) touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell and one thing to taste. Imagining these works well too. 

Useful things to try:

Without trivialising the impact of whatever you are experiencing it is still true that often simple measures can help. 

Psychological safety is not the same as not feeling under threat (from, say a wild animal). The kind of safety we need to help us deal with trauma and hurt is sort of like that feeling when we get home from our day and close the door behind us. 

  • A physical space that is familiar.
  • Predictable objects, persons and possibly companion animals here.
  • Furnishings, fittings, and decoration we have chosen or had a hand in choosing.
  • We usually engage with a little ritual, slipping off shoes, placing the keys somewhere, going to the kitchen for a drink...'ordinary things'.
  • There is a difference in the way we are outside of home and the way we are at home, tap into this difference and soak it up.

Whatever your experience it is not only you!

Individual Care Sessions are available. This is not therapy. The Care Team have a lived experience of what it is to experience an MRC as well as training in how to help. Contact:

Support Group: will be held once a fortnight and is free. Attendance will be by invitation once this site is fully operational. An email link will be provided.

Cheetah House offers a range of resources and assistance and comes highly recommended: Cheetah House | Help for Meditators In Distress

It is unfortunate that many meditation teachers and organisations are not trained in how to recognise and assist someone in an MRC experience. If you do go to your teacher, retreat facilitator or leader, be aware that you may be given mis-information or the wrong advice. Basically if it feels off to you and runs counter to your own intuition, look elsewhere for help.

Books, Articles, and Info that may help.

Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness D Treleven. Does what it says on the tin, what TSM is, why we need it and how to practice it.

Open MBSR Mo Edjlali A deconstruction of MBSR, Chapter 3 details all the ways Buddhism is matrix-ed in to MBSR.

Take Back Your Life Janja Lalich. Mainly for those who are survivors of Narcissist relationships or cults (including cult mindfulness).

Conscious Creativity Phillipa Stanton. I found this a great way of looking at the world mindfully then using that as inspiration for creativity.

Journal to the Self - Twenty Two Paths to Personal Growth Kathleen Adams. A great book on the subject.

The Buddha Pill Miguel Farrias and Catherine Winkholm An account of all the ways mindfulness and meditation are messed up! I found it really depressing but was great food for thought.

Anchored Deb Dana (in fact anything by Deb Dana!) Recovery from trauma using Polyvagal Theory. Sensationally effective!

The Meditation Safety Toolbox Cheetah House. Details the research, manifestations of and recovery strategies for Meditation Related Challenges and Adverse Effects.

The Problem With ‘Just Meditate' — critical look at oversimplified mindfulness messaging.

The Dark Side of Dharma — Anna Lutkajtis (2021)

This is the most comprehensive contemporary book focused specifically on meditation-related difficulties. Lutkajtis examines why adverse effects—well known in Buddhist traditions—have been ignored in secular mindfulness and Western psychology. She synthesizes research, historical context, and practitioner accounts, making it one of the few works that treats this topic with academic seriousness.

McMindfulness — Ronald Purser (2023)

While not exclusively about adverse effects, Purser critiques the mindfulness industry and highlights how commercialized mindfulness ignores or conceals potential harms. He situates adverse effects within a broader critique of “capitalist spirituality''.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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