BG 231: The Dark Side of Dharma

BG 231: The Dark Side of Dharma

by Willoughby Britton

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Episode Description:

We’re joined this week by Brown University neuroscience researcher Willougbhy Britton. In this episode Dr. Britton shares some of the details of a research project that she’s working on called, “The Difficult Stages of the Contemplative Path.” She goes into the purpose of the research project and also some of the research methods she’s using to establish a helpful subjective phenomenology for these difficult stages.

She also speaks about how she has collaborated with both meditation teachers and Buddhist scholars to help determine what the common experiences are for practitioners, and whether they have textual references in the Buddhist canons. And to make matters even more interesting, she shares what her personal experiences have been like, as she’s a committed meditation practitioner herself.

This is part 1 of a two-part series. Listen to part 2 (airing next week).

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Transcript:

Vincent: Hello, Buddhist Geeks. This is Vincent Horn and I’m thrilled to be on Skype today with a very special guest. I’m joined today by Willoughby Britton. Willoughby, thanks again for taking the time to geek out with us today. I really appreciate it.

Willoughby: Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Vincent: And I’ll just say a little bit about your background to kind of give the geeks a sense of your uber-geekiness because you’ve definitely bring in a high number on the geek scale, and we always love that. So you are a trained clinical psychologist and neuroscience researcher. What does that mean exactly? It sounds like you’re in the lab most days looking at weird charts of brain patterns or something. What does it mean to be a neuroscience researcher?

Willoughby: It means that I can do neuroscience researcher in a wide range of settings. So I can study, I could study animals if I wanted to. I could also study humans and humans that have all kinds of variations in their mental states, so clinical populations. The clinical degree gives me a lot of possibility. And when the funding dries up from NIH I also have a job because the clinical end I can also see patients if I need to.

Vincent: So you’re kind of recession proof that way.

Willoughby: Hopefully.

Vincent: We’ll see.

Willoughby: Yeah. Yeah.

Vincent: And you’re currently at Brown University where you’re doing research and that’s actually a big part of what we wanted to explore with you today on Buddhist Geeks. Because the research you’re doing is really relevant to the topics that we explore on the show. And the project that you’re working on right now is called the difficult stages of the contemplative path. And I was wondering could you just start off with giving us a brief description of the purpose of this research project and also maybe sharing your methodologies for how you’re doing it.

Willoughby: Yeah. So the end purpose, which I think is easy to lose sight of, is to create an adequate support structure for yogis who are encountering difficulties in practice. So that’s really where we’re trying to focus our efforts, but in order to do that we need to create subjective phenomenology–so really document all the difficulties that do arise. So there’s a couple of different ways that we’ve done that. One is to talk to really established teachers. People like Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, people in the IMS and Spirit Rock communities. We’re just starting to branch out into other tradition too. And really ask teachers that have seen lots of students come through their centers just a very open ended question, “What kinds of difficulties have you seen?” And so that’s the first question. And then we also ask them “Why did it happen in your opinion and then what do you do about them?”

So that sort of naturally turned into a description of a lot of students. They would tell these stories. And sometimes they would tell stories about themselves and then we’d say, “Hey do you want to give us an interview about that?” And then sometimes they would tell stories about their students and we said, “Well do you think any of these people would be willing to talk to us and sort of tell their own stories in their own words?” And that’s how we started getting in touch with a number of practitioners that have run into broadly defined difficulties. That the way that we got the phenomenologies, the subjective reports of what is actually happening.

And then the second stage was after interviewing a number of teachers and practitioners, we had sort of a laundry of, I used to call them symptoms, but I’ll just say experiences. Then we send them out to a number of Buddhist scholars in all the different kind of traditions: Tibetan scholars, Pali scholars, all different kinds of Buddhist scholars and we said, “Have you ever seen anything like this before in any of the texts that you study, are any of these experiences showing up?” We wanted to know whether this was something that was sort of known and expected within the range of contemplative practice and development or whether this might be something that’s new in America and maybe Americans are just meditating their way into insanity or states that just aren’t relevant. So we didn’t know. That was sort the second stage of the project was to get feedback from text experts. So that’s sort of an overview and the questions are very very simple.

The first question for our practitioners, that is somebody that’s been sort of identified as having some difficulties, we just ask them, “What happened?” And we want their language to be as plan as possible. We asked them not to use any jargon or lingo, stay out of the Pali and Sanskrit if possible; please don’t use words like Kundalini. We even try to not have them not use the word energy, but that’s a tough one. That’s the first question. Just really really simple language that we would be able to use in a scientific article, plain language, no spiritual language if possible.

And then the second question is, “How did you interpret this?” And their interpretation may have gone through many different iterations depending on how long they were experiencing different things. And so an interpretation might be, ‘boy I thought I was going crazy’, ‘I thought I have having a nervous breakdown.’ That’s a pretty common one. And then of course if they sought help through typical western medicine channels, a lot of them get diagnosis like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. Those are pretty common ones. And then there’s a number of other types of interpretation within the Buddhist tradition that are also available that we can talk about. So that was the second question is the interpretation. And I think that’s actually a really really important question.

And then the third question was, “What did you do, what was helpful and what wasn’t helpful?” There’s a lot of advice out there, and not all of it is actually that useful. And we want to know what people are actually doing in this day and age and what was actually helpful. So the idea is to have like pretty much a giant manual. It’s almost like a wiki to have a manual of a description, a very plain description, a sort of array, a buffet of different types of interpretations because there’s a lot of them and they don’t always agree. And then a really practical manual for how to navigate these states and stages.

Vincent: Okay. Cool. That’s really interesting. And as you’re describing that the question that came to mind is what got you interested in this line of research and part of me because I don’t really know academia very well I just think how did they let you do this. How did you get a chance to research this?

Willoughby: Yeah. There are a couple different things that came up. One was when I was doing my residency in psych I worked, actually, I still work at an in-patient psych hospital. And while I was there, we had two admissions from people coming off a Goenka retreat and I thought, “What are they doing up there?” This hardly ever happens but this was two in one year. So I thought this was interesting. And then, ironically, I went on a retreat. When I finished my residency I went on a retreat at the Forest Refuge, and actually had all kinds of difficult challenging states come up. And it was years before I ever realized, before I learned what they actually were. And I had a lot of the same reactions that I’d mentioned.

I thought that I had gone crazy. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I mean I really had no idea why I was suddenly having all these, like terror was big symptom of mine. And I found out much later that these were actually classic stages of meditation and I was woefully uninformed. Which I think is actually pretty representative of a lot of people. So we’re trying to sort of correct the lack of education.

Vincent: And it’s interesting cause we kind of have an interesting connection in that I know that a couple of the folks you’ve been collaborating with and I know had been very helpful are some teachers named Daniel Ingram and Kenneth Folk. And these are long time teachers and friends of mine and I also have heard them make similar critiques of mainstream Buddhist culture and I found a lot of them to be very accurate in my own experience. And part of their approach is to speak very openly about states and stages and to share things they’ve learned.

And I know that where you’re coming from with this is quite different in that you’re research methodologies are very much more in the sort of academic arena and the types of questions and types of methods you use are established. Whereas these are people they are just speaking from their own experience and some, you know, smattering of folks they know. But still there’s a kind of connection there. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the stuff that you found from Daniel and Kenneth and also from the other teachers you’ve bee in contact with. What things have been helpful from those interactions in terms of moving your research forward and creating this manual.

Willoughby: Well the way that I found Daniel Ingram is actually pretty funny so I’ll tell the story. So I had a student working for me, Zach Schlosser. He’s a religious study student here, and he was in charge of sending out all these experiences to the Buddhist scholars and looking for textual references for them. So that was his job. You know we got a lot of Visuddhimagga references but he kept saying, ‘Oh I found this guy on the internet. His name is Dan Ingram. You should really check out. He wrote a book and it’s on the website. It’s a PDF.’ So I checked it out and I saw the cover of his book that has like lightning going out of this Buddha and you know the Arahat designation. And I thought, no way. And my student kept talking and I was just like you’re young, you don’t know. Like you don’t know anything and I just wouldn’t listen to him anymore. And then he started sending me these incredibly accurate descriptions of my own experience and also of the interviews that I’ve been doing of these practitioners. I mean it was just so accurate. And I was like where did they get this. And he’s like ‘yup, that guy Dan Ingram.’ So I thought okay he might actually know something. So we actually called him up and invited him up and invited him out here and did a day long interview which you’ve probably seen. It’s a very popular set of videos now where he went through all the stages of insight on video which is pretty interesting.

Vincent: Yeah. We’ll put a link in the episode notes too so that people can check it out.

Willoughby: Yeah. You know it some way it’s been interesting because I sort of assumed that this sort of dark side of dharma or whatever you want to call it was a secret. But most teachers will have just hours and hours and hours of things to say about it, I’ve never had a problem with a teacher not wanting to take an interview. I mean we’ve interviewed more than 40 teachers now. Jack [Kornfield] is really really vocal and engaged on this topic. He actually wrote a dissertation on the phenomenology of intensive Vipassana practice, insight practice. So this is really something he knows a lot about and is also passionate about. And I think he’s seen a lot of out coming out of his center. So the different teachers that I’ve interviewed had played different roles. Jack for sure has been sort of my cheerleader and champion.

He’s really encouraged me that the research is really important, that there are a lot of people that are struggling and need some guidance and to be transparent about my own experience. That this happens, it’s part of the path and if I don’t start talking about it then it’s still going to stay really hidden. So that’s been Jack’s role and we’re actually going to be writing some papers together. We’ve been working on a variety of different book chapters in papers. It’ slow going but that will be sort of a collaboration that we’re working on. Kenneth and Daniel are just fantastic examples of really embodying this openness. And I’ve spent a lot of time with both of them. It’s just so refreshing to be able to talk about experiences, any experiences. And I know that some of the hesitation about talking about meditation experiences, had to do with talking about attainments and about ‘how great I am that I’ve had this experience’. And I think one of the unfortunate trickle down effect of that hesitancy is that the really really difficult experiences don’t get talked about either. And I seen that all changing now. That people are all over the place talking about these different experiences and really helping people through this dark night phase much much faster than would have happened on their own. And a lot of people at least the first round of it went through it on their own and it lasted years. And I don’t think that’s necessary. I think that with new technology and with all this communication that this can be done much more communally and much more quickly.

23 Responses to “BG 231: The Dark Side of Dharma”

  1. Bud Reply September 19, 2011 at 10:31 am

    Great interview! When can we look forward to seeing some of the results of this research, and the collaborative papers mentioned towards the end?

  2. kate Reply September 19, 2011 at 11:38 am

    The interview is a real teaser. I was looking for more examples of the "discomfort".

  3. @Nikolai_Halay Reply September 19, 2011 at 1:55 pm

    Great stuff. Very much needed. Where my parents live is the main goenka vipassana centre in Australia. My dad was a mental health worker for a long time there and while working on the mental health team, which was on call 24/7, he said that the vipassana centre was well known to them for a number of cases of people 'losing the plot'.

    Good to see this getting more public.

    Former dark night yogi
    Nick

  4. Duff McDuffee Reply September 19, 2011 at 1:56 pm

    I like that this research will help distinguish between the difficult stages of the contemplative path from mental illness, but I also wonder whether "mental illness" is ever a useful label. The more I work with clients, learn about how we came to see psychological suffering as a medical problem, and the more I study with people who are very effective psychotherapists, the more I see "mental illness" as an unhelpful category for anyone, whether suffering from a difficult stage of the contemplative path or just a difficult stage of life.

    • giannakali Reply September 19, 2011 at 2:15 pm

      I want to say I agree with Duff, completely. I am a mental health advocate and a meditator and I've now seen hundreds of people (mostly outside of meditation circles) who come through crisis that get labeled mental illness who are able to shed the label completely and thrive.

      The way they come through is by resisting conventional psychiatric treatment and finding their own way…often with meditation included, but not always. The fact is though that people come through very dark, scattered states and learn to thrive. If meditation centers can learn to competently help these folks perhaps more would make it rather than get lost to psychiatry. Overmedicating is a sure way to get stuck on the path. And the fact is most people are not able to move on an thrive on their own…we need supports for such people everywhere. I hope that perhaps meditation circles will become a safe place for such.

      For now most of those who get labeled with mental illness are pathologized and become convinced they're sick and then it is for life once on longterm maintenance medications that are hugely neurotoxic. It needn't be that way.

  5. lesleehare Reply September 19, 2011 at 2:57 pm

    I'm a former Mahayana/Vajrayana nun, have been there, spent a week in a hospital, still meditate and still communicate constantly with Enlightened Beings. I also have a full-time job designing shoppIng malls, am raising a teenager with autism, have written several (unpublished) books, and see a therapist regularly. Anti-psychotic meds did not affect me one way or the other – I just needed sleep. Refuge and complete reliance are the answer. The fact is that most people don't have those, nor the guts, renunciation or pure intention to make it through the forest of "demons". Namaste, and may everyone be happy.

  6. JoelG Reply September 20, 2011 at 4:17 am

    This has to have been one of my favorite BG interviews–really interesting stuff! Thanks so much Vince and Willoughby! It's great to have this new generation of scientists/yogis looking into these questions. In light of what this research is revealing, I wonder whether we're being completely honest and unbiased about some of the rosy results that have come out of various studies of meditation and its benefits. Why don't these studies ever reveal the dark night and its effects? Typically, we tick off this litany of proven benefits to meditation practice. I wonder how many of the questionaires given to yogis actually ask them about this "negative" kind of stuff? It's not hard to imagine someone who, at the end of a two-month vipassana retreat, shows dramatic improvements in concentration, but happens to feel that she is perched on the edge of a menaching abyss or that her personal life is a complete wreck and must be fixed posthaste, etc.

    • giannakali Reply September 20, 2011 at 4:32 am

      Agreed, Joel, all the rosy stuff is overhyped, indeed. All serious meditators must at least come in contact with tough stuff and for some it can last a while. Still, ultimately it leads to a more conscious life. The trick? Maybe not everyone wants that and often there is no going back!! Full-disclosure needed before taking on a meditative lifestyle?

      I liked this article by Ed Haliwell

      "Meditation is an emotional rollercoaster" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/20… entitled

      I think what needs to be understood is that meditation allows access to the full-spectrum of our humanity. And insight into all of that as well…that means shadow stuff as well as light stuff. It's a package deal. You can't have one without the other.

  7. Jigme Reply September 20, 2011 at 7:44 am

    this stage of meditation, I find often gets underplayed, I've done a sitting practice on and off and an for around 10 years but I became really involved in it the last couple of years, and I found that all sorts of things were coming up, often realization of the impact of a lot of my negative actions or truths about situations which didn't suit my grasping and various other things that were just unpleasant, but a lot of the books I read were often by teachers that are quite open about these things and sometimes how to deal with the when they arise. Its a common problem for a lot of my friends who start a sitting or even yoga practice, they tell me that they felt overwhelmed, hurt, angry, confused etc, something I read a while back was just sit with it and don't judge but that often seems counter-intuitive, so this study will be helpful to many, nameste

  8. Kathy Reply September 20, 2011 at 7:49 am

    Thank you so much! Loved reading this. As a person meditating by myself in the woods for almost a decade, it is so refreshing to hear some of this articulated.

  9. Sean Reply September 20, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    Oh Vince your such a tease! I've been waiting for this episode very patiently then BLAM you leave us wanting more haha

  10. Hope Reply September 20, 2011 at 3:33 pm

    As someone who lived with 20 years of undiagnosed bipolar I can say no, I didn't just grow out of it or move beyond it as some posters above who haven't actually experienced mental illness suggest. Nothing helped until I got a proper diagnosis and proper medication – and then suddenly all my symptoms disappeared. To me, bipolar is a biochemical imbalance and in my case is takes something to balance out my biochemistry to remove the symptoms. That's not the experience of all people diagnosed bipolar but it certainly is mine.

    I can also say that for me at least the unhappy states of mental illness are nothing like the ones associated with meditation. Or at least not in my experience. There's a cliche that only sane people worry about being mad. It took me 19 years to seriously consider that I might have a mental illness.

    I'm really glad to see more light being shed on how people can have quite traumatic experiences as a result of meditation. The original texts do make this clear and having read them I expected strong feelings as a result of meditation. I think that made me more resiliant in facing them. Or maybe they were simply less scary than the states that arise out of mental illness ;-) But in any case, the more people know of what may be expected the less they need to fear the unknown.

  11. maxjeffwell Reply September 20, 2011 at 8:59 pm

    This is a fascinating discussion. I am reminded of Professor Robert Thurman's course on the Central Philosophy of Tibet at Columbia during which he addresses the question of "what makes a Buddha different from a psycho?" He addresses this by saying that a Buddha has full awareness of his/her "ontological status" in the sense that he or she is totally conscious of being everyone and everything but him or herself. And then this status should never be understood as "this is it", not only because it neglects the selflessness of phenomena but because it is reifying dogma.

    As a bipolar epileptic with dissociative tendencies I can only speculate as to the "others" I may be or from whose perspective I may have experienced the world at different points in time. Without total knowledge and complete awareness of these things I recognize that my experiences are in fact psychotic. With speculation as my only tool I am forced to attribute these things to mental illness and it is a relief to do so.

    Without experiential knowledge of the relations among altered states of awareness it is incredibly easy to take one of them as being the absolute. This is simply wrong and it is what makes a person a religious schizophrenic. Unfortunately, some of these experiences have been taken to be "the truth" in many of the world's religions as is evident in some of the more dubious and absolutistic scriptures. Any scripture proclaiming that which is in contradiction to logic, reason, and rationality should be rejected. In such a case I am reminded of Blumenthal's commentary on Shantarakshita's Maydhamakalankara in which he explicitly states that reason is for the religous.

    Once reason is dismissed and mystical, subjective states are taken to be the absolute a person has entered the realm of mental illness. This is how nonsense like epilepsy somehow being "communication with the divine" and/or demon possession comes to be established by religious zealots composing utter bs in supposedly sacred scriptures.

    I think that mental illness should be fully taken into consideration especially within the context of meditative and religious practice. We need to be constantly reminded of and drilled with the proper application of logic lest we be overtaken with "the truth" expounded in big books of lies.

  12. Jeff Reply September 21, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    I wonder if these dark side occurences happen to a meditator who is just doing twenty minutes or so daily as a mental health practice like eating right or exercising faithfully and not seeking a transformation of consciousness. If so a warning label needs to be attached to meditation! Has Ms. Britton's research examined this question? Will it be addressed in the next episode? Or are negative experiences due to meditation strictly the province of the serious meditator seeking radical transformation?

    • JoelG Reply September 22, 2011 at 2:14 pm

      That's a fantastic question, Jeff. I think a lot of us assume that, no, this stuff doesn't apply to the 20-minutes-a-day type of an approach. But that's just an assumption. It's precisely the kind of stuff that this research could look into with great potential benefit.

    • Joe Bravo Contreras Reply September 29, 2011 at 5:27 pm

      I'm a meditator who practices 20mins or so daily for stress relief and well-being. In the 5 years or so that I've been practicing, I do have to say that I have too experience and I'm currently experience a high peak of this "dark side". One of my teacher, Dr. Francesca A. Jackson from the Art of Living Foundation ( http://us.artofliving.org/hiv ) warns her students about these "dark" tendencies that arise within ones meditation practice. The Buddha states in the Four Noble Truths that one should understand suffering by embracing suffering in order to 'let go' of suffering (the cessation of suffering). so, I see this "dark side" of meditating as the path to embrace suffering in order to cease from it.

      I hope that makes sense. :-P

  13. Matt Reply September 23, 2011 at 2:29 am

    It would be interesting to see someone work to develop a meta-theory that:
    •Sees mystical or religious experiences as a natural part of the spectrum of human experience
    •Looks at the identification process of the human mind rather than identity concepts or self-concepts themselves
    •Recognizes that the human identification process applied to a particular religious or mystical experience is what typically results in new religious movements
    •Sees bipolar, schizophrenia, dissociative disorders, etc. as possibly utilizing the same neurochemical pathways as religious experience
    •Sees schizophrenia not as a pathology, but, much like the Japanese who call schizophrenia “integration disorder”, sees it as a condition that results from the inability to integrate certain experiences
    •Recognizes the necessity and power of logic, whilst understanding the limitations of what logic is and is not designed to do
    •Accounts for an evolutionary basis for how religious and mystical experiences might convey selection/survival advantages at the group or individual level and looks for genetic markers
    •Sees and explores the linkages between the creativity process inherent in the mind, religious & mystical experience, and possible mental “disorders” in Western psychology
    •Accounts for the concept of “chi”, “kundalini energy”, or life force and relates spiritual experience to the activation of a bodily process that activates this energy
    •Uses a similar chi/energy framework to describe how spiritual growth may go haywire and lead to what are seen as pathological states in Western psychology
    •Recognizes the role that psychedelic drugs and other pharmaceutical substances can play in stimulating mystical and religious experience
    •Recognizes that pharmaceutical agents may have a role in stabilizing individuals at certain points of development or that they may be required for life for certain individuals whose neurological systems have gone haywire

    A combined theory that incorporates insight and data from religious traditions, psychology, pharmacology, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, and experiential reports would be quite powerful.

    It seems that the evolutionary biology, pharmacological, and neurobiology components of a possible meta-theory are those that are usually not addressed in spiritual or religious communities.
    Is anyone aware of such type of work going on anywhere?

    Thanks

  14. jim falo Reply October 20, 2011 at 12:27 am

    problems can arise in the stages of insight – and you would expect Sympathy – but the goenka courses are quite hostile to anyone who has had problems at their courses or after their courses – and anyone who has been given medication has a hard time going back for more courses – none of which is told to a person before they enrol – also monks and monasteries can also have similarly off hand ways of dealing with people who have problems – strangely lacking in compassion….

  15. jim falo Reply October 20, 2011 at 8:03 pm

    - it would be interesting to see just how many have had problems with goenka meditation and its relatives. don't get me wrong – "some" of goenkas teaching is very useful – and it was buddha who said "take what works" – not just swallow the whole of it – but that which leads to liberation.. There have been a few "vipassana cult" articles which have outlined similar observances. There was a term for some of the problems of "spiritual emergence" or even "emergencies" – stories of people running of courses early – and being rebuked for "quitting" – interesting stuff "coming up" – part of the "purification" – BUT – why the harsh attitude to the student ??? a monk it was quite common for people who were new to dharma to come up with such problems… -

  16. jim falo Reply October 20, 2011 at 8:04 pm

    a monk told me it was quite common for people who were new to dharma to come up with such problems… -

  17. jim falo Reply October 20, 2011 at 8:20 pm

    Spiritual Emergency
    It is possible to undergo a profound crisis involving non-ordinary experiences and to perceive it as pathological or psychiatric when in fact it may be more accurately and beneficially defined as a spiritual emergency. — Stanislav Grof

    the spritual emergence movement……