Spirituality and Sadistic Teachers

When someone invites you to come to a “spiritual” lecture, you never know what kind of a trap you are walking into. There are so many different types of cons.

In 1978 I was in graduate school at the University of California, Irvine. I was studying the language of ecstasy and peace – the way people speak when they are in the midst of experiences of meditative rapture, bliss, and transformation. I was interviewing meditators of all kinds, all traditions, all religions, and making notes.

Probably in 1979, a woman moved into an office two doors down from mine, let’s call her Bobbie. She kept inviting me to go to her Tibetan Buddhist lectures, and I kept refusing. I was traveling a lot, teaching meditation workshops around the United States and Canada, and also doing a lot of interviews.

One reason I was not interested was because this woman had no aura. She looked dead inside, just a walking husk of a person, with no vitality at all. Her forehead was perpetually wrinkled in exhaustion from her self-hatred. There was no meditation in her aura whatsoever, no vitality, so I did not want whatever she was up to. And I had already interviewed hundreds of people who had failed at meditation. I was very interested in people who were thriving in meditation and were healthy in their approach to this ancient practice – people who instinctively knew how to customize the classic teachings to fit their individual nature.

But one evening, I happened to be done working, and Bobbie was lurking in the hall when I walked out. “Come on, my teacher is in town. Come meet him. He is a very important lineage holder at Naropa, the Buddhist University in Boulder.” This was the first I had ever heard of Naropa.

So I said Okay.

I never thought about it at the time, but in the 70’s and 80’s, I walked around looking impossibly naive and enthusiastic, because I was doing two or three hours a day of meditation, yoga and pranayama. One of the side-effects of being born again is that you look like you were born yesterday. You feel like you were freshly born. If you do a yoga practice that suits your body type, you are suffused with prana. To some people, that made me look like an easy mark, ignorant and gullible .

I don’t have a photo of me in 1979. This was me four years later, in 1983. Still looking enthusiastic and, maybe to some people, gullible.

The location of the Buddhist lecture was near John Wayne Airport, just a few miles from UCI. Conveniently, the lecture room was right next to the airport bar. The man giving the talk droned on and on about Buddhist theology for a long time. It was an incredibly boring lecture. But I listened attentively.

After the lecture was over, Bobbie asked me if I would like to join her and the teacher in the bar.

We found a table and the teacher ordered a tall drink – Long Island Iced Tea, which I remembered because it was such a weird thing to order. The woman ordered a martini, and I got a beer. They settled in, started drinking and started to smile and loosen up. They started out with a grey pallor, but as they drank, color came into their faces.

The man drank for awhile, thirstily. Then he gave me a meaningful look. He looked me right in the eyes for a minute.
"So," he said, "Are you just a spiritual vampire that goes from group to group?”
Another deep, meaningful look.
“Are you a dilettante, just dabbling?”

This wasn’t what I was expecting – I had a slight hope that after giving the boring lecture the guy would open up. So I let that go, fortunately very quickly, less than a heartbeat. For a fraction of a second, I thought about protesting, saying something like, your girlfriend here has been after me for half a year to come to one of your events. I came here just to honor her and you. Then I realized this would be lame, and would also play into whatever game they were setting up. So I rode that little impulse and turned it into something else. I went completely, utterly still, and just watched the two of them.

Actually, taking his attack and examining the possibility – it had never occurred to me that there were spiritual vampires. I knew that often, people who meditate have a lot of energy – they shimmer. Meditation is feeding on infinity. The thought never crossed my mind that instead of going to the source and feeding from infinity, some people would just feed on the meditators. Hmmm. Why not just meditate?

Hmm. I also knew, from many years of training, that if a spiritual teacher accuses you of something, it is most likely a distraction technique. The teacher himself is doing that very thing, and the attack is to put you on the defensive. This is a well-known, and very effective technique.

So I took a breath. So far we are a couple of seconds into the encounter.

I let time slow down a little, and glanced at Bobbie. She snuggled closer to the guy, and spread her legs a little, and her nostrils flared. She was getting ready to enjoy watching someone get roasted and devoured (game on, let’s murder this guy and then go get a room and have sex.)

This was slightly interesting. Something is going on here, in this little booth in an airport bar.

I looked at him, and he was waiting for me to have a response, and was already gloating. Why is he gloating? I asked myself – oh, he had this moment rehearsed. He thought his little attack would stun me.

I kept on being silent, not moving, just studying, decoding their racket. This is why she has been pestering me to come to a lecture for months. In her mind, she thinks she is the bait, the honey trap, the seductive female that leads the fresh recruits to the predator-male so that he can feed. The situation and alcohol has made her feel beautiful, powerful.

I just looked at the two of them, staying at ease and yet studying their moves.

“What’s the matter, can’t you handle my scrutiny?” he finally said.

SCRUTINY. I had heard that word before, from people describing what their cult leaders had said as they tried to destroy whatever spirit of independence, rebellion, or self-worth was left in the member of their meditation cult. This was starting to be funny. These two deluded souls thought they were scrutinizing me! The boring, droning evening was starting to get interesting.

I just let his attack sail right on by, and kept gazing at him with amused interest. I realized that I was supposed to be shocked by what he said and by his “deep, meaningful gaze.” This must have worked for him in the past. People come to his lectures, sincerely wanting to learn about Tibetan Buddhism and spiritual practices, and they get HIM, and he gets to beat them up and stand there, dominant, howling, drinking their blood.

Oh, I finally got it. The plan was that the two of them would gloat as they tore me apart, and after it was over, they would walk away laughing then go to his hotel room and have sex.

Duh, I felt a bit stupid. I was slow on the uptake here. This was clearly a well-practiced routine they had developed. The reason the woman had been so persistent in inviting me was not just to be another body in the lecture room – she wanted to see me being dominated, beaten up by her man, and then maybe I would become a submissive member of their cult. At the very least I would be fresh meat for him to conquer while she watched and got turned on. Stupid for me to have fallen for their game so far – to get me there in the room, then in the booth with them, outnumbered.

So I kept on being still and silent and watching as they tried to discern the moment when they could strike. In that moment, they were both predators ready to pounce. They were looking at me and their venom glands were secreting what they thought of was just the exact chemical to paralyze me. He was very cool and she was almost salivating. They were enjoying the fact that I seemed to be shocked into silence by the "penetrating insight" of what they guy had just said to me.

So I just gazed at the guy peacefully. Then I started laughing.

He was as shocked as if I had slapped him. His mouth dropped open. This was not going according to plan.

I kept on laughing for awhile and then I said, “I am sorry,” I said, “I just can’t play your sadistic little alcoholic game. It is so grandiose, and so sad.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” I continued, “but if I had just the last few minutes to go by, I would say that you have modeled yourself on an alcoholic spiritual teacher, who has been playing the domination-submission game successfully and getting away with it. Maybe he is really clever. But wherever you are from, it is a sick system.” I did not know at the time that this was exactly the kind of group he was from, a Tibetan meditation group with a brilliant alcoholic lama. The group later became famous, and infamous, for the depth of insanity and degradation they sank to.

"Look at you two. LOOK AT YOU. What are you, 40? Already you're a couple of dried-up old alcoholics, playing sadistic drinking games that you call spirituality. There is no vitality here, in your bodies or your teaching. You have a debased notion of what the dharma is."

They were still shocked into silence – I had turned the tables on them temporarily.

I realized, I need to get out of here, so I put some money on the table and walked away from my tiny victory while they were still speechless. The woman was mad and was trying to generate some venom for a next attack.

I walked away because I know that I am not street smart enough to stay in such a fight – I'm not mean enough. I have too much sympathy for the Devil. I tend to feel compassion for people, even if they are out for my blood, and that slows me down. That booth was their turf.

Also, I do not believe in the “humiliation process” in the first place – the forced breakdown of someone's identity. I’d been through it, years before these two dufus dharma vamps had ever heart of meditation, and wasn’t impressed with the outcomes, in anyone - the teachers or students. This breakdown process does have a role in basic training for the military, and in the induction phase to a monastery or ashram. It also has a role in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, in which it is essential to more or less murder the person's addictive ego so they can be reborn as a new person who has a chance at recovery. The military is probably the most skilled at it – they tear you down and then rebuild you as a proud member of your unit. Cults and thought-control groups use the breakdown method to dominate their members emotionally, mentally, and financially. You can get people to sign away their life savings to you. That’s how churches and spiritual centers have such good buildings.

I don’t judge the military for using the humiliation process. But in my experience, therapy groups and meditation groups that used it are always sick. Get away. Now. I had seen this again and again since the 60’s.

Fortunately for me, these were not very skilled predators. Usually spiritual predators are not so obvious and not so clueless. He was not thinking fast enough to come up with something that would “hook” me.

Walk Away

If you ever find yourself in such a situation, you might consider just walking away without saying a word, within seconds, and not looking back. You can't win. You are bringing a knife to a gunfight. You are outgunned and outnumbered before you even begin. It’s an ambush. The only possible way to win is to not be there, and if you are there, get out of Dodge right now.

One of my martial arts teachers was asked, “What strikes would you use if you were attacked in a dark alley?” The teacher laughed and said, “First of all, I would NOT go into a dark alley!”

Just by being in that bar with those two, I was kind of in a dark alley. It was a dumb move.

There were a couple of reasons why, that night, I had the relaxation and responsiveness to catch on quickly to what Bobbie and her boyfriend were doing and walk out, before they wounded and weakened me. Mainly, they weren’t very good and what they had to offer was sort of pathetic pseudo-Tibetan-Buddhism. Also, neither of them had really meditated in their lives – I could see from their dead, grey auras. They had chanted maybe, maybe played some mental games, and had some wonderful alcohol-inspired insights of grandiose emotions, but actual meditation? No, there was no evidence at all that they knew the way to rest in the self.

If I had been seeking to learn about meditation, I might have been vulnerable to them. My life was so rich and my meditations were so rewarding that I had no holes for them to fill. Another was that for ten years, I had already been around innumerable cult come-ons and cons, and had developed some degree of immunity, and had survived much more cunning and dangerous “spiritual” predators than these two. Southern California in the 1960’s and 70’s was totally infected with therapy cults, meditation cults, yoga cults, Christian cults, and workshop cults. They all wanted to “break you down’” “rip your face off,” “rip you a new asshole” “slay you spiritually,” “reduce the primary ego,” and then get you to drop your defenses and give them your credit card number or write a check. Most of them made millions of dollars and then self-destructed. The cult leader left town with a huge wad of cash and the followers staggered around and tried to get over it and move on. This had happened over and over and over and over and over. You can research it for yourself.

If I had kept on talking to these Tibet-oholics, I would eventually have given them something to beat me up with. I was in their arena, and this was a well-practiced con game. They had an entire tradition behind them – they were not just going to break me down and get sexually turned on by it, but they felt the inner applause of their Tibetan teacher, who had done this kind of thing to them. I could tell that their teacher had to be an alcoholic, and later I found out that he was. And they felt they were acting with THE FULL AUTHORITY OF TRADITION. They had no doubt that what they were doing was part of their tradition. There was no guilt, no remorse, any more than drunken frat boys hazing the new members felt guilt. The whole thing was sanctioned by tradition.

Years later I found out that their teacher was indeed an alcoholic, and that the system he set up was very sick indeed. He was also brilliant and gave many wonderful insights. He died quite young, age 50 or so, of alcoholism. The successor he appointed was advertised widely as THE FIRST ENLIGHTENED WESTERNER. In whatever the equivalent of YOGA JOURNAL was, in the early 80’s there were ads and articles about him. How exciting. The first enlightened Westerner, recognized by this Tibetan as his successor. Over the next couple of years, this successor gave AIDS to many of his students before he too died. On meditation courses, he invited men and women into his room, fucked them in the ass, and gave them HIV. When asked about it, he said, print, “Because I am enlightened, having AIDS will be good for their evolution.” When I read this, I said, Spiritual Fascism has come to America - again. His meditation center should be burned to the ground, a fence put around it, and a gravestone placed in the ashes saying, “This is the death of the notion of enlightenment in America.”

There are many variations on the sadism game, and it has many names, for example "Rip your face off," "Bust the ego," or "Break through the character armor." Versions of the game are adapted for each type of workshop, self-improvement seminar, spiritual training program, ashram, and even some yoga and meditation schools. This is immensely successful because if a person stays there and takes it, they become weakened and are more susceptible to the next con, which is to give your credit card number and sign up for more groups.

In some workshop programs, such as those held at hotels near airports, you should expect that before you walk into the room, the “assistants” will already have your credit report and an estimate of how much money they can soak you for. Many workshop and seminar businesses hope to get $50,000 or so out of each person over a period of several years. All charged to your credit card.

To understand why and how "spiritual" groups fall into using such tools, it helps to understand gang initiation rituals and kinky sex. You can look them both up on the internet.

The Ritual Beat-Down

In some gangs, it is traditional to give a newcomer a beating. Ten guys or girls will circle the new member, and beat and kick them to a pulp. This is the price of admission. Military training does it differently – you are broken down by lack of sleep and intense workouts. Milder forms of this are in fraternity hazing. The general pattern is, dominant members of the group inflict humiliation and emotional and/or physical pain on the plebe. This forms a certain type of bond. Human beings are social animals, and for better or worse, we have an instinct to bond with the abuser. We also have an instinct to try to establish our place in the pecking order. When you submit to a beating, physical or emotional, you are at least PART of the pecking order. You may be at the bottom now, but eventually, if you survive, you will be able to inflict beatings on other people. In gangs, the beatings are physical. In workshops and spiritual training, the beatings are mental and emotional. You attack the person's basic identity.

Dominance and Submission Games

Type dominance submission guru into a search engine. Look at what you get. This is another essential element to appreciate when encountering any spiritual group or self-improvement seminar. You will find people who become sexually aroused by mental or emotional spanking. They require someone to be humiliated in order to get lubricated to have sex. It's a form of foreplay, and someone has to be the Master, and someone else, or a group, has to be the Slaves. In the back of free newspapers, and probably in many places online, you will see ads for people wanting to match up – a dominant seeking a submissive, or a slave seeking a master. There are many codes, indicating what type of foreplay, what type of sexual position, what kind of a theme is being sought. If you ever are around organized spirituality, you should develop your own "field guide" to the types of predators and prey in the church, ashram, yoga center, seminar, or meditation school.

Probably all spiritual groups, meditation schools, and seminar businesses are run by cartels of dominants and submissives, who use the pretext of teaching to have an endless supply of fresh blood. People who enjoy their work can be good at it. Just because the teacher or the teacher's assistant get off on humiliating someone or busting them, does not mean they are not good at what they do. The problem is that whatever the group is called – this workshop series, that guru, something something meditation, that is just the name of the nightclub. The theme of the party. The words are bait to get people to come, and a kind of camouflage so that society does not catch on. This is great for people who are matched, sexually and emotionally, to the type of abuse and sexual slavery that the group specializes in and seeks to train you for. But if you actually just want to learn some skills, learn how to meditate, you are in trouble.

The problem is that many people actually want the teaching that is advertised, as opposed to what is delivered. Most people who come to take a workshop have a job, a life, friends, ambitions, a love life, bills, relatives, a spouse, children. They don't need to be spanked. The last thing they need is their ego reduced or broken. They don't need to run up huge credit card debt in the name of "Success!" Life is spanking them enough as it is. Anyone who loves, anyone whose heart is open, gets plenty of pain just by witnessing the world.

The Dominatrix

A friend of mine had been going to a workshop series for a year, the kind that has free introductory evenings, then an expensive weekend intensive, then really expensive week-long seminars in gorgeous locations in Hawaii and the Bahamas. He had racked up $55,000 in credit card debt and was about to declare bankruptcy, because the cult's promise that his "investment" in these workshops would soon pay off in extra business was not working out. So I went to one of their free seminars, held at a local hotel. It was really good. They had devised a series of nifty exercises based on hypnosis, NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), and the general format developed by Mind Dynamics in the 60's, EST and LifeSpring in the 70's, and The Forum in the 80's. Their timing was superb and the trainers were funny.

Toward the end of the day, one of the good-looking women assistants came over to me and started trying to seduce me into signing up for their intensive. She ran game after game on me, in a very charming way. I kept having a curious image in my mind when I was looking at her, and especially when I would look away.

Finally, I said, "I have this image of you with a whip. Maybe wearing high heels. And something about black leather."

"That's me. You got me," she said.

"What?" I said, genuinely puzzled. I had no idea what my image meant.

"I am a dominatrix. Or I used to be. I worked as one," she said, cheerfully.

"What is a dominatrix?" I asked. Still clueless. I had never heard the term.

She explained the concept to me a bit, and I was amazed again that I had gotten to be 40 without ever knowing that there was a whole profession, a type of prostitute who specialize in dominating, inflicting pain and humiliation. And furthermore, that dominatrixes are especially popular in Washington, D.C. The politicians go to these prostitutes to be spanked and whipped for being such bad boys, taking bribes and selling out the country. Then they lick the boots of the dominatrix and get to come.

Without the dominatrix, she said, America would be run by corrupt, lying men who are also sexually frustrated. A dangerous combination. When the politician grovels at the feet of his Mistress and confesses, "YES, I am nothing but a lying whore, taking money from corporations," this is the ONLY time he ever is telling the truth.

Anyway, that workshop business was very successful for a few years, mainly because the teacher had a dozen really good-looking women, most of them lesbians, all of them shameless about using their skills and attractiveness to recruit people of both sexes to come and play with them. It slowly faded away because the founder made enough millions to go into real estate investing and he retired. This was a relatively benevolent cult because the people running it were happily rejoicing in their power, money and sex. They weren't mean, at heart. Consequently, after a year of being involved with this cult, the typical member would be broke and somewhat tired, but well-fucked, and by damn, they had a wild year of adventures. Now it is time to declare bankruptcy and get back to work.

This also shows the value of hiring a professional. At least one of the girls had actually worked as a dominatrix, and she enjoyed it and knew how to do it right. In the workshops, she would abuse someone just the right amount to get an effect, then stop. She knew how to observe. If you go to one of the many workshops that proliferate across the United States in which the group leader attacks the students or "busts" them, you will often see what amounts to an unskilled person practicing medicine. The leader does not have the observational skills and training to criticize the person accurately, and in any case, a large group situation is rarely a good context for humiliating someone.

The only lasting damage from this workshop cult was probably their transmission of eating disorders. The founder of the group seemed to have a Doctor Strangelove - type food fanaticism, in which he was obsessed with colonics and food purity. Food purity is a weird name for the set of ideas which basically says that all food is disgusting and toxic except for these, approved ones. Whatever they are – green algae and sushi, or zucchini and wheat grass juice that has been put in a blender. These ideas are addictive and the practices are damaging to the body. Once you start messing with your digestion, the main result is often bad digestion, with all that implies. You lose the ability to eat what you like and not be troubled by it. And the weaker your digestion gets, the more you feel that food actually IS toxic because you can't digest it. A certain percentage of people who are exposed to the ideas of food purity will develop lasting borderline eating disorders. By the way, a very funny movie about food fanaticism is The Road To Wellville. Starring Dana Carvey, Bridget Fonda, Matthew Broderick, John Cusak and Anthony Hopkins. The story is based loosely on the life of John Kellogg, the guy who invented corn flakes.

One great thing about the movie is that it is basically true, and it takes some of the guilt off of California for being the center of health food wackiness. When you learn about Kellogg, you realize that people were being insane about colonics and fantasizing about "magic foods" such as graham crackers way back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, in Michigan. California, and especially Los Angeles, is not to blame. At least not alone.

The movie is based on the very funny book by T. Coraghessan Boyle.


I only learned about all this because I became friendly with several of the girls. There is no such thing as real friendship in such groups, because all relationships exist to be exploited in service to the cult. And everything is subject to change depending on each person's rise and fall in terms of status, money, and the favor of the leader. For example, the group leader would break up some of the lesbian couples by inviting one of them to travel with him for a year and be his special assistant. But the girls liked to be seen by me and we would run into each other at the same dance clubs. I was just seeing them on the various dimensions they lived on, not judging.

Every cult is different, and each person taking their workshop or training has different weaknesses and strengths and responds to the manipulations in unique ways. That being said, some organizations do really deep damage to people, leaving them emotionally scarred for life and deeply depleted.

Los Angeles, where I live, is full of people who have had the emotional/spiritual equivalent of a bad facelift. Have you ever talked to someone who has had a face lift, and can't make any expressions? Their face looks smooth because the nerves have been cut or injected with Botox. An analogous process happens to people who have had their "ego" operated on by the workshop leader or guru. When they "rip the person's face off" they also rip all the connective tissue and millions of nerve connections, that never really grow back.

An opposite, but equally damaging, result is the spiritual equivalent of a chemical face peel. The pink skin underneath is unprotected, vulnerable to infection, and easily burned by the sun. Some people have both: they are numb and unable to express themselves properly, and also oversensitive. This is actually a very common result of being involved in mind/body workshops, especially ones in which the doctrine involves ego-busting. Women in particular are vulnerable to this.

Almost all groups are beneficial to a certain extent. Just know when to leave. And remember the story about the frog in water. If you drop a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you gradually increase the heat, he will stay there and adapt, until by the time he is alarmed and wants to jump out, he is too weak to move. I would say about half the people I started meditating with in the 60's, who have joined various guru cults, are now too weak to leave. It has been too long, and they have done too much that undermines their ability to live independently.

This is why I am really grateful to Maharishi for giving us advance notice in 1974, saying basically, "It's been nice, having all you free spirits running around teaching Transcendental Meditation. But the party's over. I want the movement to be an army, marching in step. I want people to be able to walk into a TM center anywhere in the world and the same words, exactly, are being spoken." Because he had said this so blatantly, and turned the TM movement so quickly from a lively creative institution to a militaristic one, I was able to jump out.When someone invites you to come to a “spiritual” lecture, you never know what kind of a trap you are walking into. There are so many different types of cons.

Photo by Lubo Minar on Unsplash

A War on The Self

Let's do a thought-journey, what physicists call a gedanken experiment. Let's pretend you are a 18-year old male, whose parents have donated him to a Hindu or Buddhist monastery. The oldest son inherited the farm, and there is nowhere for you to live. So there you are. And there is no escape at all, ever. You are part of the Feudal system. If you leave the monastery, you will simply discredit yourself and your parents and will forever be known as a renegade or fallen monk. So really, there is no escape. There you are, a healthy 20-year old male, whose testicles produce five hundred million sperm each and every day, and who gets an erection at the slightest thought of sex, gets aroused just from the brushing of the cloth of the robe against his penis. Around you in the monastery is a range of males, aged 16 to 60, half of whom are sizing you up as a sexual partner or slave.

Your situation as a monk is probably that you are not there by choice. It is as if you have been drafted into the army. And even if you are there by choice, what is the choice? What would be going on in the mind of an 18-year old if he says, "I forever renounce sex. I renounce ever finding a mate. I renounce all personal relationship, forever. I swear to be in poverty for the rest of my life. I swear to completely and unquestioningly obey every monk who is senior to me, for the rest of my life, no matter what they say. I swear total and unquestioning obedience to my lineage." You may have just wanted to get out of town, get out of the house, and to do that, you entered a monastery.

So there you are, and guess what? All your life energies, that could go to doing work, starting a family, developing a craft, having friends, building a life for yourself, all these energies have to be redirected. You actually have to kill them off. Any impulse you might have, when given an insane order to comply with, to say, "Shove it," has to be broken utterly. And any desire you have for women has to be killed out, entirely. Say you are driven wild by lust and seduce a village girl, either taking her virginity or making her pregnant. She will be ruined – there is no possibilty of marrying her. She may commit suicide, her family will be totally dishonored, and her father and brothers will come and burn down the monastery, even though it has been there for hundreds of years. So you have to, at all costs, kill your sexual desire.

Meditation in such circumstances is part of a war on the self. The need is almost medical, in which amputation is called for. You need to amputate your desires, ambition, individuality.

The next most common hazard is that you do meditate for awhile, and what you do inside is conduct a war on yourself. Meditation books are full of negative judgments that monks and nuns have against householders: "You are doo materialistic, you move too fast, you think too many thoughts, you have passions, you are independent, you are rebellious, you are sexual, you have an identity, you love yourself and love your life."

Traditional meditation teachings have elements in them that are mildly harmful, by design – it is necessary to break the spirit of nuns and monks and make them submissive, kill their wildness.

If you want some examples, you might read A Tale of Two Paths.

Monks and nuns are called renunciates, because they take vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience: I renounce the desire to own anything, I renounce sex, I renounce my ego and independence and vow to obey whoever my superior is. These vows can be very liberating to someone whose destiny it is to be a monk or nun. The individual can even glow with an inner luminosity. But they also become radioactive in a way, and if you study with them you may get radiation poisoning, as if you got too many x-rays.

Monks and nuns tend to see everyday life as a disease. They suggest you internalize toxic attitudes toward yourself as medicine. Slow down, kill out your passion, become submissive, cultivate disgust instead of attraction, and dissolve your identity. These are medicinal attitudes that monks and nuns cultivate in themselves. However, if you are not a monk, these attitudes are simply toxic, like taking antibiotics if you do not have an infection, or drinking radioactive iodine to kill your thyroid gland. If you do not have a disease, they just weaken you. This weakening takes three forms, which are all by design:

The Total Lack of Useful Information

The next biggest danger is that no one thinks there are or can be any dangers to meditation, so there is almost no discussion and information-gathering on the subject. Everyone is just going blah blah about the benefits. As a consequence, meditators are constantly being blindsided and derailed by things that should be trivial hazards, easily dismissed or bypassed. If we compare meditation to a day at the beach, it is as if people are saying, "Oh, don't worry, you can never get enough direct sunlight. Just soak it up. You don't even need a hat. And swim out in the ocean as far as you want. It's a lake. With dolphins that will love you."

For something so powerful, meditation has relatively few truly negative side effects. This is because meditation is not a drug, it is a way of accessing your body's own built-in healing response. Your body, your nerves, your organs, your entire system has immense inner resources of adapting. Human beings have adapted to environments from the humid tropics to the frozen Arctic. Our bodies are geniuses at adapting to and mastering the world. When you meditate, you give life permission to fine-tune your adaptation to the world.

There is a weird set of problems here, having to do with the meditation traditions themselves, and what a good job they have done of preserving the teachings that were given in 100 BC, 500 BC, 100 AD, 1300 AD, and so on. Almost all teachings on meditation are slanted toward the needs of the monks who lived long, long ago in places far, far away. The traditional teachings are slanted toward how to adapt to life in 500 BC, IF you are a male, IF you are a Hindu, or Buddhist, IF you are a male-Hindu or Buddhist who wants to be celibate. Or how to adapt to life in a Tibetan lamasery in 1500 AD.

Furthermore, because the knowledge of how to meditate has been preserved by the sacred Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India, Tibet, China, and so on, they have framed the knowledge as part of religion. It's not a science in the Western sense, although it pretends to be. Western science is about questioning everything, and always searching for better formulations of principles. To religious thinkers, such questioning is iconoclasm, a breaking of idols, and as such is almost like murder. Ordinary mortals are not allowed to change a religion, or the meditation practices that go with a religion. From a religious outlook, it is forbidden, a great heresy, the deepest kind of treachery and betrayal to modify the teachings to suit the very different needs of all those low-lifes out there who have the bad karma to be born in the United States or Europe. People who are so degraded that they have not taken vows to abandon their families, to abandon working for money, and abandon their individuality. As a consequence, we have a huge literature on "meditation techniques to suit the needs of monks living in monasteries, if they are Hindu or Buddhist," but not much at all about how to meditate if you live in the modern West and have a family and job that you really don't want to abandon.

Many of the best, most brillant and articulate teachers working in the West are from Hindu and Buddhist lineages, and even when they are talking to women who have families, they tend to use language and techniques that were designed only for monks, such as: detachment, renunciation, silencing the mind. These attitudes are harmful to people who are not monks, because they injure one's ability to be intimate with another human being. You can see how monks need to learn techniques for killing off their sexual desire and creating distance, so they don't become too intimate with the monk in the next cell. But men and women who are married should no more internalize these attitudes than they should inject themselves with chemotherapy toxins.

It is very strange that such brilliant people have little sense of how to talk to the people who are actually there in front of them. Just because recluses and renunciates by definition have a sour grapes attitude toward the world, does not mean this is a universal truth. In fact, cultivating monk-like disgust toward bodies, the senses, sensual enjoyment, is very damaging to non-monks. It's like studying cooking with someone with an eating disorder, who conveys a conflicted, problem-laden attitude toward food with every look and word.

If meditation teachers were doctors, they would be prescribing that everyone take antibiotics all the time, because life is a disease. They would give healthy people massive doses of x-rays, just because tradition says that it is good to have a clear, ruthless view of the inside of the body, and to develop contempt for it.

To put things in perspective, many millions of people have meditated, over the past several thousand of years, and written about it extensively – there is a vast literature. If you look at this history as a vast trial run of a new drug, there are remarkably few negative side effects for such a powerful process.

Meditation usually comes wrapped up in a religion and a set of superstitions from a traditional culture. So we can make a distinction between "the dangers of meditation itself" and the dangers of say, converting to Buddhism if you are a woman living in the midwest United States in 2006. There is not much going on in the world of meditation that is aimed at how people really live now. There are thousands of varieties of Buddhism-flavored meditation, Hindu-flavored meditation, and so on. So we have to distinguish the dangers of meditation itself, even if a woman could find a woman-friendly form to practice, from all the extra cultural baggage meditation tends to come with.

Relaxation is Challenging

Oddly enough, it turns out that relaxation is challenging. When you relax deeply, you let go of stress. I know that sounds ridiculously obvious. Think about what happens as you let go of tension, what is this "letting go" process? As your muscles begin to relax, you become aware of what you were tense about: you see mental movies, replay conversations, and feel sensations of tension in your body. And then as you pay attention, these melt away. But you are probably not used to how this feels. The sensations of tension and tension release can be very intense, like rubbing your leg muscles when you have walked or hiked a long ways.

Every night you go through a process of letting go of tension – it's called sleep, and your body relaxes and rests. But the thing is, nature conks you out. You are unconscious. This means you can't resist the rejuvenation process. In meditation, you are conscious, so you can resist. And because you are conscious, you feel everything. The skill of meditation is learning how to not resist, how to cooperate consciously with this natural process.

Meditation is different from sleep in that you are awake inside AND you are resting more deeply than sleep. This takes getting used to, and for the first couple of months it is best to have a trained teacher you are in communication with and can get in touch with immediately, whenever a question arises. If you don't get an answer to your question by the end of the day, you will probably stop meditating soon. You won't know why – you just won't seem to find time to do it anymore. This happens to most people who start meditating. There was some key aspect of how to cooperate with their own process they did not learn in time, so they quit.

The Taboo Against Honesty in Meditation

I don't know why meditation is such a deceptive field, so full of lies. Maybe it is because yoga and meditation come from Hinduism, and Yoga is "by definition" a perfect system, therefore if you get hurt, it's your bad karma. You must have been thinking impure thoughts. Perhaps you were criticizing the teacher in your mind, or not being respectful to the guru.

This quote by the Dalai Lama is the type of honest observation that is incredibly rare in meditation: "In the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself." – The Dalai Lama, quoted in Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French.

Many of my friends are sort of homeless within their hearts, because they have been meditating in a Buddhist or Hindu tradition for the last twenty, thirty or more years. They seem lost. Meditators are always getting injured in subtle ways. It usually takes longer to come on than the sunburn or Achilles tendonitis runners get. Because meditation is powerful, it affects your body, nerves, muscles and senses. There are strong tendencies to be healthy and self-regulating in meditation. But any theory you have will probably throw you off balance. To stay in balance, you have to pay close attention to your senses. And to the extent you practice meditation in a religious mood, you will tend to not attend to your senses, and will override your inner wisdom.

For some reason or set of reasons, there is almost no information about the dangers of meditation. It is taboo to even think about it. Meditation is presented as an omni-beneficial activity. We are in the odd situation that the field that is supposed to be about truth, is presented in a deceptive manner. Discussion of the real obstacles and hazards of meditation is met with denial.

Runners get shin splints, sore knees and blisters; swimmers get shoulder injuries and ear infections; soccer players get head and neck injuries; volleyball players, tennis players, skiiers, weight lifters, and golfers all have their characteristic injuries. Coaches and sports doctors study these injuries, figure out how they happened, and how to prevent them. Then they revise the training to minimize injury and publish articles, and the information eventually gets out so that everyone can benefit from it.

This process of studying what works, where things break, and then modifying the training to make it better, is not going on in the field of meditation. It's not that people are lying. The lack of skill, and lack of observation demonstrated by meditation teachers is a manifestation of how denial itself is one of their main techniques.

By contrast, the process of noticing injuries and figuring out how to prevent them is going on in yoga. During the early 1970's, I noticed that quite a few of my friends had lower back, shoulder, and neck injuries from asana practice. By the late 70's, about a third of my meditating friends had more or less permanent injuries from yoga. In the early 1990's, I started meeting a lot of people with yoga injuries, and then I started to hear reports that orthopedic surgeon's offices, from Los Angeles to New York, will filled with yoga injuries and that the doctors were thanking the existence of yoga for paying for their Aspen ski condos. Then finally in the early 2000's, there started to be awareness of yoga injuries in the yoga journals and among yoga teachers. The last few years, my impression is that yoga is taught in a much more balanced and responsible way. I don't see as many new yoga injuries, and the students are encouraged to go at their own pace.

Of course, yoga injuries are similar to sports injuries and have to do with the joints and soft tissue. People know it when they are limping around, and get woken up by pain. They are motivated to go to a doctor.

Meditation injuries are usually very gradual and almost invisible, so they are harder to detect, impossible to x-ray, and difficult to gather data on. As a meditation teacher, it was not until after five years of teaching full-time that I began to see these injuries, because before that I wasn't experienced enough to be perceptive.

The Hazards of Meditation

“In the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself.”

— The Dalai Lama, quoted in Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French

There are tens of thousands of different meditation techniques and if you want to benefit from meditation, pick the one or two or three that go with your individual nature and your daily life. You always have to ask, “Is this for me?” and “Was this practice designed for someone like me, a person with a job, a lover, friends, .... and maybe children, relatives, a dog or cat, and the need for a vacation.

The hazards of meditation are intimately connected with the benefits. Both the advocates of meditation and its critics are naive and misinformed about this. They simply do not spend enough time interviewing meditators about what actually happens. For example, when an office worker gets access to deep relaxation from meditation, she may realize that her boss is a bag of tension – abusive, toxic, and hopeless. There is no fix to the situation, no adaptation, because he makes people sick. So she may leave that job, or company, or even that profession. From the perspective of that company, meditation made her a bad employee. Her parents and friends will think she is strange. But the new company she joins, or starts, will think she is brilliant. It all depends on your perspective. As Krishna said in the Bhagavad-Gita, “Karma is unfathomable,” (gahanaa karmanah).

You are entitled to know whether the meditation practice you are doing will render you unable to cope with modern civilization. Many of the techniques out there are actually designed to make you dissociated from your natural desires, disgusted by sex, alienated from everyday life, and in search of a guru to surrender to. Of course they are – these teachings come from gurus, who tend to think that if you want to abandon your children, divorce your husband, quit your job, donate all your wealth to the guru, that this is wonderful and spiritual.

The dangers of meditation proceed from the fact that it works so well that you let your guard down and stop using your common sense. When you approach meditation, you listen to your instincts more than usual – that's why we call our work Instinctive Meditation.

Meditation is powerful. It's a way of tapping into the body's built-in healing and rejuvenation ability. During meditation, the relaxation is so intense that the body enters a rest deeper than deep sleep, and a lot happens in a few minutes. Twenty minutes of meditation is a lot. Meditation is a little like working out, doing athletic training. You are using your body, and that is natural, but you are also using your body in a specially focussed way. Properly done, this will make you healthier and stronger. You will feel better physically, emotionally and mentally.

There are millions of people in the modern West practicing meditation each day, but there is little information about how to deal with the challenges and avoid the dangers. A 2002 study by the CDC found that about 7.6% of adults in the United States practice meditation, and 5% practice yoga.

Everyone who works out, whether they run, swim, walk miles, goes to a gym, or does yoga, is a hair's breadth away from injury at all times. Runners have a long list of minor and major injuries they encounter, including knee and lower back soreness. Swimmers can get shoulder injuries. People who walk can get sore legs. In gyms, people are constantly getting minor injuries on the equipment, especially overtraining injuries. In every sport, there are injuries and many people know what they are. The magazines devoted to the sport talk realistically about injury.

In the field of yoga, over the past ten years, there has developed considerable attention to injuries and to prevention. This happened in part because people with yoga injuries were filling the waiting rooms of sports doctors and physical therapists across the United States. One physical therapist said, in the late 1990's, "Yoga is the best thing for my business since the jogging fad in the 70's."

By comparison with meditation, running is a very honest sport. There is good, accurate information about the types of injuries that occur, how to prevent them, and the best treatments to explore if you do get hurt. There is easy access to realistic information on what the dangers are and how to prevent them. Runners love their sport. They are passionate about it and want to minimize the time they spend sidelined by injuries. So why are yoga and meditation so dishonest?

LOSING TIME

The odds are you won't find the right technique immediately. There are thousands of different techniques. This is because people are so different in their inner lives. Meditation is being intimate with your inner being, and you want to be respectful above all. Tender, gentle, respectful, and honest. If you do a technique that feels dishonest to you, you will probably fail. If you go in with an approach that is not yours, you'll feel uncomfortable with it, and you won't want to do it.

What happens if you give up in frustration and by far the most likely, is t because you are making meditation feel complicated or unnatural? You do some damage to yourself. If you try on shoes that do not fit and wear them for half an hour, they will make your feet sore. You may get blisters. Then, for some time after, any shoe, even one that fits, will hurt because your skin has been rubbed raw. So you not only lose the time you spent doing the wrong technique, or the right technique in the wrong way. You also spoil yourself for any technique. You have to allow your body and mind time to forget the insult.

But wait – time is precious. You had an inspiration, "Hey, I think I'll explore meditation!" And this is a precious impulse. It was a long time coming. If you fail, then how long will it be before you get up the nerve to go again?

LEARNING TO DISTRUST YOURSELF

This will happen if you try to make yourself do a kind of technique that is not suited to your nature – it feels like trying on shoes that do not fit. Most meditation teachings, and self-improvement techniques in general seem to have about a 5% success rate. Maybe one person in twenty gets with the program, and the others try the process and say, "This isn't for me," or "I couldn't get into it." The 95% of people are right – that techique isn't for them.

The senses, the body, heart and mind are profoundly affected by meditation, and you need to be doing it in a way that these effects fit into your life and help you to thrive. Many meditation teachings are not designed to help you thrive, just the opposite. They want to break you down, break your ego, and train you to be disgusted or detached from daily life, so that the desire builds in you to give yourself to a nunnery or a monastery. The sacred traditions are looking for new recruits. If this is your dharma, great. If not, then you are like a healthy person who thought they were taking vitamins, but the pills turned out to cause brain damage.

Damage to Your Sexuality

This is covered it its own section. One of the problems of studying with gurus and spiritual teachers is that they usually have very strange and often diseased ideas about human sexuality. You absorb their way of thinking just by being around them, even if they don't talk about sex.

Damage to Your Ability to Bond

Many spiritual teachers whine continually about "attachments." Decoded, this is an attack on your attachment or bonding to anything or anyone other than the teacher.

This is actually a brilliant stratagem, because if a guru can get his followers to become alienated from their families and non-cult friends, they will become more and more dependent upon the guru and his circle. The term "detached" is beginning come into popular American idiom associated with spirituality.

Another damaging aspect of meditation teachers is that they do not have peer relationships. No one is their equal. This is true of many workshop leaders and spiritual leaders: they have one or two people "above" them, that they bow down to. Then everyone else is supposed to bow down to them. In the modern West, our whole experiment is with equality, and Asian systems and attitudes can poison us on deep levels, because they pretend to be deep truths.

THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE

There are challenges and obstacles having to do with handling the benefits of meditation, even the famous clarity and top-of-the-mountain perspective. Change itself is a challenge to deal with – it's a bit like moving, or traveling. And because you are changing, you might benefit from doing a particular type of meditation for three months, and then you have changed, and so what you have been doing is no longer needed, it becomes too much of a good thing.

THE CHALLENGE OF ECSTASY

When you meditate, if you find a way that matches your body type, personality, lifestyle, and daily routine, you will find yourself slipping into the greatest restfulness and relaxation you have ever known. This is the kind of inner elixir that people take drugs, drink alcohol, have sex, and move to Tahiti to experience, yet you have access to it by sitting in a chair in your living room and closing your eyes. Even if you only meditate for half an hour a day, the impact of this relaxation will undermine the suspicious, guarded aspects of your personality and lead you to be more open to life and to other human beings. When I started meditating, for example, I laughed for about two years, the kind of bubbling laughter that children exhibit when they are delighted by something they see, such as a caterpillar, dog, or a wave. I was laughing because my senses were so open to magic that I was seeing the whole world in a new light, and I was overwhelmed with fondness for whatever I was gazing at. Openness offers its own kind of protection, the kind that comes from being relaxed and alert, but this is a totally different way of moving through the world than being guarded and suspicious. It's a different world, and you will have to learn to navigate in it, day by day.

There are thousands of different types of meditation, and many of them were designed to shape specific changes in your body, emotions, neural pathways, and belief systems. The medtation traditions are strongly influenced by India, so some were designed to help you adapt to the cold in the mountains, others to loneliness, some are to help you become aloof and detached so you don't need anyone, and are in fact incapable of forming close relationships. Some are to help you to adapt to a life of total poverty, others to make you a compliant and unquestioning obeyer-of-orders, some are to help you to lose interest in life so all you want to do is sit in a cave and slowly die. So it is really quite a task to find or create a meditation practice that is designed to be supportive of the life you want to live. If you don't do that, then you won't proceed on to the next obstacle.

NOT GETTING THE HELP YOU NEED

Over the next couple of years, through the late 60's, I met many people who were meditating and noticed that some of them were afraid to face what was coming up during meditation – they did not seem to trust their inner process, or were not getting the coaching or supervision they needed. Some of these people quit meditating, and others continued, but meditation was a bit of a struggle. By and large, those who don't get the feeling of how to ride their rhythms will quit meditating, and the inner uproar fades into the background.

So in general, my sense of meditation is that if you do it, you will have to face everything inside yourself. If you aren't willing to do that, then you are going to have problems meditating. The other thing I have noticed is that just regular people are totally capable of facing everything that comes up in meditation. Everyone who is not an addict has to do this anyway. If you love anyone, if you want to get married, if you have children, if you have friends, you will have to face every feeling in the world, just because of the intimacy of your relationships. Even if you live a charmed life, people you know and love will suffer from various vicissitudes.

In meditation, you pay attention, and this sometimes has the feeling tone of paying bills, it hurts a little. Or a lot, then you feel much better when you have done it. The debts we pay in meditation are our debts to the body, to the nervous system, and to life. Anything we ever said, "I'll deal with that later. I will feel that later. I will think about that later," will come up in meditation, because by meditating you are saying to life, "OK, later is NOW. Bring it on."

For one thing, meditation is in no way separate from anything you do during the day, all your relationships, and your whole purpose on Earth. In every meditation, you will have to sort through all the stuff in your mind and heart, and if anything is out of balance, you will feel it intensely. If you have wronged someone, or left an important conversation unfinished, you will find your attention going to it again and again. If you want to go any deeper in meditation, you will have to bring some resolution to your outer situations, otherwise your meditation will start to feel stalemated. So you'll find yourself adjusting your behavior in daily life to be more ethical, to minimize the amount of your meditation time that is taken up by processing the residue of the day. In other words, in meditation every day you will have a small degree of the insight people have on their deathbed, where they wish they had lived their lives differently.

THE TOTAL LACK OF USEFUL INFORMATION

The next biggest danger is that no one thinks there are or can be any dangers to meditation, so there is almost no discussion and information-gathering on the subject. Everyone is just going blah blah about the benefits. As a consequence, meditators are constantly being blindsided and derailed by things that should be trivial hazards, easily dismissed or bypassed. If we compare meditation to a day at the beach, it is as if people are saying, "Oh, don't worry, you can never get enough direct sunlight. Just soak it up. You don't even need a hat. And swim out in the ocean as far as you want. It's a lake. With dolphins that will love you."

For something so powerful, meditation has relatively few truly negative side effects. This is because meditation is not a drug, it is a way of accessing your body's own built-in healing response. Your body, your nerves, your organs, your entire system has immense inner resources of adapting. Human beings have adapted to environments from the humid tropics to the frozen Arctic. Our bodies are geniuses at adapting to and mastering the world. When you meditate, you give life permission to fine-tune your adaptation to the world.

There is a weird set of problems here, having to do with the meditation traditions themselves, and what a good job they have done of preserving the teachings that were given in 100 BC, 500 BC, 100 AD, 1300 AD, and so on. Almost all teachings on meditation are slanted toward the needs of the monks who lived long, long ago in places far, far away. The traditional teachings are slanted toward how to adapt to life in 500 BC, IF you are a male, IF you are a Hindu, or Buddhist, IF you are a male-Hindu or Buddhist who wants to be celibate. Or how to adapt to life in a Tibetan lamasery in 1500 AD.

Furthermore, because the knowledge of how to meditate has been preserved by the sacred Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India, Tibet, China, and so on, they have framed the knowledge as part of religion. It's not a science in the Western sense, although it pretends to be. Western science is about questioning everything, and always searching for better formulations of principles. To religious thinkers, such questioning is iconoclasm, a breaking of idols, and as such is almost like murder. Ordinary mortals are not allowed to change a religion, or the meditation practices that go with a religion. From a religious outlook, it is forbidden, a great heresy, the deepest kind of treachery and betrayal to modify the teachings to suit the very different needs of all those low-lifes out there who have the bad karma to be born in the United States or Europe. People who are so degraded that they have not taken vows to abandon their families, to abandon working for money, and abandon their individuality. As a consequence, we have a huge literature on "meditation techniques to suit the needs of monks living in monasteries, if they are Hindu or Buddhist," but not much at all about how to meditate if you live in the modern West and have a family and job that you really don't want to abandon.

Many of the best, most brillant and articulate teachers working in the West are from Hindu and Buddhist lineages, and even when they are talking to women who have families, they tend to use language and techniques that were designed only for monks, such as: detachment, renunciation, silencing the mind. These attitudes are harmful to people who are not monks, because they injure one's ability to be intimate with another human being. You can see how monks need to learn techniques for killing off their sexual desire and creating distance, so they don't become too intimate with the monk in the next cell. But men and women who are married should no more internalize these attitudes than they should inject themselves with chemotherapy toxins.

It is very strange that such brilliant people have little sense of how to talk to the people who are actually there in front of them. Just because recluses and renunciates by definition have a sour grapes attitude toward the world, does not mean this is a universal truth. In fact, cultivating monk-like disgust toward bodies, the senses, sensual enjoyment, is very damaging to non-monks. It's like studying cooking with someone with an eating disorder, who conveys a conflicted, problem-laden attitude toward food with every look and word.

If meditation teachers were doctors, they would be prescribing that everyone take antibiotics all the time, because life is a disease. They would give healthy people massive doses of x-rays, just because tradition says that it is good to have a clear, ruthless view of the inside of the body, and to develop contempt for it.

To put things in perspective, many millions of people have meditated, over the past several thousand of years, and written about it extensively – there is a vast literature. If you look at this history as a vast trial run of a new drug, there are remarkably few negative side effects for such a powerful process.

Meditation usually comes wrapped up in a religion and a set of superstitions from a traditional culture. So we can make a distinction between "the dangers of meditation itself" and the dangers of say, converting to Buddhism if you are a woman living in the midwest United States in 2006. There is not much going on in the world of meditation that is aimed at how people really live now. There are thousands of varieties of Buddhism-flavored meditation, Hindu-flavored meditation, and so on. So we have to distinguish the dangers of meditation itself, even if a woman could find a woman-friendly form to practice, from all the extra cultural baggage meditation tends to come with.

The Dilation Syndrome

In sports, injuries can result from being too flexible, or more flexible than you are strong. In meditation, a crucial balance seems to be sensitivity and strength. Meditation does tend to make you more sensitive, and if you meditate just the right amount for your daily activity, living your life and pursuing your passions will make you stronger. But if you meditate too much, you may become too sensitive too fast. I am thinking of calling this The Dilation Syndrome, because it may be related to the chakras opening too rapidly. The analogy I am making is that opening the chakras is like learning to dilate your pupils – if they are too wide open, then they will not adapt to the light levels, and bright lights will hurt your eyes. You may then become afraid of the light or think "the light is hurting me."

I have just been noticing this syndrome in people who started meditating in their late teens or early twenties, when their personality is not fully formed and they are not fully engaged with the world yet. Here is how the syndrome seems to begin: the individual starts meditating during college years or just after, and has profound inner experiences of peace. They also absorb Eastern teachings encouraging passivity. They do not get the teaching that you need to balance meditation with expression. The more you meditate, the more you need to go out and live it up. They read spiritual material, cultivate a mood of equanimity and calmness, and become more sensitive than they are strong.

As a result of cultivating sensitivity, they start to hate everyone. Because they see themselves as spiritual, everyone else is unspiritual in some way and fallen, except for certain spiritual heroes, who would be the dead Asian males on their altars, and maybe one living Asian male. Then they cover this disgust with humanity with a veneer of compassion or tolerance, and there they go – a person with artificial layers, who even 20 years later is irritable. The irritability shows up in problems forming lasting human relationships and a complicated internal balancing act.

I have to reach here to develop a language to talk about the dynamics. The basic pattern is that the individual has learned to manipulate their internal rhythms through meditation. As part of a spiritual attitude, they suppress their natural dislike of other people. This lowers their guard, dissolves their boundaries. As a result of having too-permeable boundaries, they experience other people as a really "getting under their skin." As a result of this irritation, they find they don't want to be around people. But they get lonely, so they have to be around people. Then they resent the people they are around.

And the whole issue seems to be that the meditator is not living her or his own real life. When people are just in their authentic personality, the energy flow of their own natural movements creates an appropriate boundary, spontaneously. If you keep your chakras, your "energy pupils" too open, then you will always be squinting in the daylight and being hurt by brightness.

APPROACHES TO HEALING DILATION

The basic cure for this syndrome is to rediscover your instinctive joy of life and become more aggressive in pursuing your desires and dreams. This changes the quality of energy flow through and around the body, so you become more attuned to what you want, and therefore less attuned to how gross the world is. This usually takes several years to accomplish - about as much time as it took to get into the syndrome in the first place. Good effects can be felt almost instantly in some cases, if you stop repressing the self. People under the age of about 25 are sometimes able to turn on a dime, once they see the mistake they were making.

If you find yourself feeling overly sensitive, here are some areas to explore.

Aggression. Having a desired outcome and focusing on it narrows the field of attention, and as a side-effect of this narrowing, the chakras become less sensitive to outside impressions. You have to figure out what it is you want, underneath all that spiritual self-brainwashing. And then just go for it.

Diet. Eat meat, or fish or birds. Eat for strength, not "purity."

Sports. Almost all sports require a lot of aggression, competition, and dynamic focus.

Martial Arts. Some of the martial arts consciously activate chi, or the life force, and focus it for defense and attack. This is good energy-exercise and over time can result in the chakras regaining their natural balance between open and closed.

Tai Chi can be especially good for this, as is Qi Gong. How good the art is for you will probably depend on your relationship to the teacher you are working with as much or more than the art you are studying. You can learn a lot from DVDs, so check that out also.

Once you learn how to activate your energy shielding or close your chakras with Tai Chi, expect to have to spend a few minutes a day for many years doing so. It is much more challenging to close the chakras than to open them.

Minimize Meditation Time. Some people I encounter are meditating way too much for their stage of life, and therefore benefit from meditating less. I often meet people who have been meditating for 45 minutes to an hour at a time. There is a natural body rhythm of about 20 minutes, and that is a good minimal amount of meditation for the morning and evening. If that is still too much, meditate for 12 to 15 minutes.