Despite all of the possible benefits of meditation, it’s entirely possible for it to topple you into psychosis, especially if you push yourself too much.
By John Author
For centuries, Zen teachers have told us that practice is about the Great Matter—life and death. Don’t take that as hyperbole and gloss over it with typical Western conceit. Meditation can save lives… it can also end them.
Out of all the articles I’ve written, this one might be the most deficient in giggle-worthy material. It might also be the most important. This was written with the intent to spread awareness and save lives.
Megan Vogt lept from a catwalk under the Norman Wood Bridge, fell through a 120-foot void and met the rocks below. Megan developed psychosis after enduring a 10-day S.N. Goenka Vipassana retreat. Megan was 25 years old.
Megan accidentally fell 10 feet while trying to climb onto the catwalk. She got up, maybe dusting herself off, and tried again. She made it up there the second time.
That’s like if you’re planning to shoot yourself in the head, but the pistol goes off before you get the gun to your temple; you feel a whoosh as the bullet whizzes past your nose and slams into the wall. That’d be a thoughtful moment, wouldn’t it? There’d be the potential for clarity and hesitation. Imagine the state of mind required for you to raise that gun up again.
Before I go any further, I’d like to ask everyone who’s reading this to pause for a moment and offer metta to Megan’s friends and family. Let’s pause and ponder all the sadness in the world and vow to do our best to alleviate it, or at least not add to it.
Meditation is often sold as a wellness tool, a way to lift our spirits and calm our minds. I’ve never known this to be the case. Except for Samatha and a few other techniques, Buddhist meditations tend to be… invasive. They’re designed to combat delusion and affliction by exposing them to us firsthand.
We get to see how ignorant and lost we are, we get to sit naked in front of a full-length mental mirror that shows us how pathetic we really are. Then, while maintaining a cool clarity, we’re asked to accept everything that we see. When we accept it, we can see the true nature of delusion and affliction—which is none other than enlightenment.
Vipassana is one of the most in-depth and analytic meditations around. You will see every vulnerable inch of yourself. I’ve met a few people who’ve attended S.N. Goenka retreats. Most of them got a lot out of the experience, but they all say that it’s pretty freaking rough at times. It’s a 10-day retreat in which you meditate most of the day, and you can only speak to volunteer guides as needed; otherwise, you’re supposed to remain silent. The tradition has your doctor fill out some paperwork if you have any mental health issues.
Megan was being treated for anxiety, but she had no history of depression or psychosis. Her parents didn’t even find anything sorrowful in her diary. Megan’s doctor cleared her so, chipper and hopeful, she embarked on her last adventure.
When the retreat was done, the center’s volunteers had to call Megan’s parents to pick her up because she was in no state to drive. When they arrived, Megan didn’t believe that they were there; she believed that her sister was a projection. As a huge Yogacara fan, which could be called the projection-only school, it pains me so much to hear that word used in this context.
This is what can happen when the methods and teachings are unskillfully force-fed to someone by non-credentialed volunteers and a television set.
I’m not explicitly blaming the S.N. Goenka movement for this, but even though I don’t blame them, I can’t let them slide when anyone who’s attended a single retreat can then immediately become a facilitator.
That’s like making a toddler a track coach after they’ve their first step, or giving a pilot trainee a fully loaded passenger jet after one hour of flight time.
It takes a lot more than a 10-day crash course in something to have the know-how to guide others. I mean, I could be wrong: “The people running the center provided no explanation and shuffled Megan into her parents’ car,” shows a vast amount of empathy and skillfulness doesn’t it?
Megan’s suicide attempts began the minute her family escorted her from the center. First, she tried to dash back in to seek Refuge from a knife. In the car, she tried to jump out in order bash herself against the road. She was immediately taken to a psychiatric ward.
Megan had what one researcher is calling “self-induced depersonalization syndrome.” Nothing seemed real to her, and she felt haunted by whatever realizations she had while suffering through the retreat.
Despite all of the possible benefits of meditation, it’s entirely possible for it to topple you into psychosis, especially if you push yourself too much. If you haven’t meditated daily for at least 2 years, and attended a few 3-day retreats in that time, I definitely wouldn’t recommend a 10-day Vipassana sit-fest; it could break you—both your body and your mind.
Even if you have mental health issues and your PCP or counselor says, “I don’t see how meditation could be harmful,” remember that they’ve probably never meditated before, and if they have, it probably wasn’t an explicitly Buddhist meditation. If you decide to try out a Buddhist meditation, with our without their go ahead, be aware of your breaking point.
The Dharma is all about taking the Middle Way between extremes.
A little pain is fine, just sit through it; a lot of pain isn’t. A little restlessness, confusion, or anxiety is fine; a lot isn’t. Meditation is a balancing act; it’s like sitting poised on a pinhead. Neither too tight nor too loose; neither too intense or too mellow—you have to find and maintain equilibrium at all times. If you lose it, gently try to get it back again. If you can’t, then stop and try again tomorrow. Be kind to yourself.
Just because I like to sit as if there’s a sword dangling above my head that’ll slice me in half if I drift off or slouch doesn’t mean you have to meditate like that. I wouldn’t recommend most of the things I do to anyone else; I wouldn’t even recommend Zen if you have any other options available. It’s the most fulfilling endeavor of my life, but also the most challenging. If there were any other way, I would have taken it.
As Buddhists, it’s our responsibility to share this information with people. We can’t decorate the practice or sell it like a drugstore romance novel. It’s our duty to give people accurate information and earnest warnings. If we’re presiding over a retreat, it’s our obligation to know when someone needs to take a break or call it quits altogether.
Your students having aching knees is only a tiny portion of the potential hazards you could encounter. I recommend checking out this site and printing out pamphlets as needed.
This article is dedicated to Megan Vogt and those who love her.
Photos: Norman Wood Bridge/LancasterOnline, Megan Vogt/Legacy.com
Feature Image: (source)
Editor: Dana Gornall
Comments
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1. Vipassana is actually an advanced practice. In the Visuddhimagga it is supposed to be practiced (fruitfully?) after the fourth jhana (!).
2. As much I respect SNG, I feel he made a mistake by teaching Vipassana to anyone out there. This is like giving anyone a driver’s license. You can’t go out handing red pill to everyone.
3. The west, with its trivial formula based thinking, just saw vipassana as the next cool thing to surf on. The western “therapists” are mainly to blame for this “mindfulness” mindlessness. They confused their own desire to see the human mind as a technical contraption with Vipassana. Actually Buddhist teachings are meaningless without an extremely strong moral basis.
4. The proper way to proceed is morality, concentration and then wisdom. These are not completely linear, however the moral basis is essential. Then the concentration (samatha). Then the wisdom (prajna, which arises via vipassana).
5. Bottom line, do not practice vipassana till you have reached samatha (jhana), do not practice samatha till you practice morality.
6. There is a safety feature built into nature that it will not let you achieve concentration necessary for vipassana till you practice morality. For a few (un) fortunate ones, there are short cuts.
7. The warnings about amateur meditation are abundantly clear in the yoga tradition and Indian culture.
I first feel sorry for the young lady who passed away and all my condolences. I am writing as I have experienced the same things in Asia about 5 years ago. Like Megan, I was innocent and thought this meditation would help me. Instead, I almost passed away myself and the scariest thing was not able to control my mind and emotions. I have written to the center over one year to warn them about the danger of their practises but they did seem to say that it was entirely due to my condition.
The staff was definitely not trained properly as I remember many faults afterwards.
I was really fearing to find an incident like this when I type on google “vipassana” and “death”. but after my experience, I knew that any innocent person who has some naive thoughts about meditation could have his/her personality deeply troubled.
My concern is that this centre does not seem to take responsabilities to have right support in place.
I really feel sorry for this family but after tiring myself to get even some answers from this centre while fighting with my own mind, I can fully understand what Megan has been through trying to find answers with an erratic mind.
It really makes me upset to read this article and even more comments such as above that are completely missing the point.
It needs fully qualified psychologists to run such centre and careful selection and strong support. Buddha was meditating under a tree and not in a room full of people whose energy for sure might have been interfered with others’ meditation.
A truly tragic story, and I appreciate very much your having told it, John Pendall. Suicide is generally what I would consider a panic-induced reaction to existential fear and self-hatred. That this young woman had such an obliteratingly violent shock-reaction after a few days of Vipassana meditation is flat-out stunning to me, and shows that one never really knows what’s “just below the surface” in a person, or how someone may react to any non-trivial disturbance to the laminated inner self.
Meditation is a powerful mechanism, Vipassana in particular. Anyone contemplating a 10-day Goenka-style course, precisely because it’s such a no-bullshit technique, should have a clue about her ability to manage and navigate such a “deep operation of the mind,” as Goenka calls it. And leaving a course early, even with the extraordinary approval of the assistant teachers, means that a volatile mind is now going back to her world to fend for itself. In this case, there may have been no alternative, and again, the tragedy of this story speaks for itself.
I participated in my first Vipassana course after having begun and quickly ended a dalliance with TM, then a Rinzai Zen course that led to a three-year-long residence in a Rinzai Zen center, which by any measure is a much more intense, scary, and extreme practice. It’s based, as are all authentic Buddhist practices, on Vipassana techniques, albeit with a heavy dollop of Chinese Confucian ethics and medieval Japanese martial culture. After Zen practice in California, Korea, and Japan, I found the Goenka-style Vipassana courses remarkably free of “religion” and almost chatty in the way the logic of the practice is explained.
So I’m not pleased to see the apparent implication that this young woman’s tragic suicide is somehow the responsibility of “amateur” volunteers giving their time to help the 10s of thousands of students who attend courses all over the world. Every student applying for a course is made to answer pages of questions about their physical and mental health fitness to attend and to _complete_ a course, They are warned that they must remain for the full 10-days for their own benefit, and that there will be strict promises they’ll be required to make to behave to a moral code of conduct, which is continually emphasized throughout the application as well as during the induction talk at the beginning of the course.
The impulse that led Megan to seek out a meditation course in the first place betrayed something deeply held and led to this very real psychotic episode lurking just below the surface. She was essentially taken by a rogue wave, as so happens along the coast of Oregon.
Again, I want to express my gratitude for your telling this story and expressing the compassion felt for this young woman’s horrific end. It is truly a warning to anyone (like me) who has urged friends and family to attend Zen or Vipassana retreats. People are attracted to meditation practices, especially the rather intense sort, because they are themselves in need of a deeper understanding of their lives and how things work for themselves. Beginners may be enlisted to help process applications for a course or help in the kitchen or be a course manager who helps students who need a blanket or an aspirin or more toilet paper. These people themselves may be working on their own deeply-rooted neurotic habits, anger, depression… you name it.
None of the teachers are all-knowing, all-seeing, or even morally beyond reproach. My Zen teacher was a genius at teaching Zen… at least he was for me… and I’m deeply grateful I backed into a retreat one summer. But he was also reviled in the pages of The NY Times for having been handsy with some women students, with decades-old complaints flowing forth as he turned 106, just before his death. So… yes… students must be cautious and have their eyes wide open when beginning a meditation practice of any kind. Or a yoga practice. Or beginning therapy. Or going to university. Or driving a car…
Life is conditioned and unfree, yet the strict timetable and enforced moral precepts, silence, lack of eye contact, and physical discomfort suddenly required in a retreat is a genuine shock to anyone not accustomed to life as a monk or nun. Even without the activity of meditation, which is powerful and sometimes disturbing, a 10-day course is rigorous and disorienting. Any sane person would think twice about considering such a thing… and yet I’ve done at least 40 over the past 4 decades and will again. They’re still surprising, and occasionally hair-raising.
But please don’t deter people from embarking on a journey of genuine, powerful, authentic meditation because some aren’t suited for it. There is absolutely a possibility that such a practice could trigger a psychotic break such as Megan had, and it’s vital to keep that in mind with inexperienced practitioner wannabes, but I would encourage you to remember the life-changing possibility for all those for whom the opposite is true.
I myself would surely have done myself in without the insights and resilience I’ve gained from these teachings. My experiences at Zen and Vipassana courses have been arduous, difficult, frightening, and amazing, transformative, life-affirming, and joyous. I know for a fact that this is true for countless others. There are bad teachers, bad assistant teachers (bad, meaning, not qualified to help at the moment a student needs them to be qualified for _them_), bad instructors, bad therapists, bad professors, bad drivers… and a person must be made to understand that encountering such a “bad” person is possible in their training and to not let it throw them off.
Some humans, like Megan, had problems nobody including she herself, apparently, didn’t realize. My heart goes out to her family and anyone who makes an attempt to live a more conscious life and doesn’t have reserves enough to escape the gravity of their suffering.
John, respectfully, reading one of the two comments here before mine, which references dissenting views… and seeing none, I realize you’re likely to delete it… but just between the two of us (unless I’m happily proven wrong and you allow this comment on your public post) wanted to point to this line in your post, which prompted my screed:
“This is what can happen when the methods and teachings are unskillfully force-fed to someone by non-credentialed volunteers and a television set.”
Have you done a 10-day retreat at a Goenka center yourself? I find it to be the most gentle, friendly, humorous, and un-cult-like presentation imaginable for such a technical and powerful meditation technique, and am frankly surprised that an experienced meditator such as yourself would describe it as you did.
That one sentence undoes any “leavening” your other less-condemning impressions might make on a reader.
“Unskillfully force-fed,” how, exactly? I’ve attended these retreats in Japan and North America since they were audio cassettes and VHS tapes, and have never felt indoctrinated or told to believe or have faith in anything Goenka says. I was asked to give the technique a try, asked to follow the instructions carefully, and let it begin to work… to see for myself. No force-feeding or haranguing of any sort, ever, and very skillfully and articulately explained so that even I could understand it.
“By a television set.” Cheap-shot, period. Goenka was no “living master,” and he went to lengths to say so, but he’s a very, very good teacher of the technique of Vipassana. The recordings preserve his teaching and frankly short-circuit the dangers of guru-worship that infect nearly every scene I’ve ever experienced… and that’s a lot of them. Those recordings assure that nobody can muddy them up by mixing them with psychological theories (Hello, IMS) or other practices like Zen or Tibetan techniques.
And credentialed by _whom_ did you mean? A university psychology department? A medical school? Perhaps they could have a mental-health facility on standby for any truly unmanageable episodes like poor Megan, but… really? It’s an organization staffed, as far as I can see, volunteers with experience in the technique, but definitely includes many therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who volunteer. But it’s NOT therapy.
I don’t know the source of your hostility toward the Goenka scene, and I have my own issues with the way courses are held all the time, but this seems a bit gratuitous… like blaming a bar that served a customer a single drink and then had an allergic reaction to the alcohol in her car and crashed driving home. Absolutely tragic, but it’s not the bar’s fault.
I find it highly irresponsible that you link her death to a 2,500 year old meditation technique that’s benefited millions of people, without noting the careful application and screening process, and for that matter, say nothing about the psychiatrist/therapist/counselor whom she was seeing professionally and also thought she’d be fine doing a retreat. There’s your credentialed party, I guess.
Anyway, I’ve had both my feet on this path since the mid 1970s. I met Goenka a few times briefly, but also Joshu Sasaki, Jack and Joseph, Ruth Denison, Ram Dass, Manindra-ji, and many of their senior students and teachers, monks and nuns are my friends.
In any case, no dissenting comments allowed to remain on the page speaks volumes.
Sincerely and smilingly written, with respect,
Zino D.