The Tim Ferriss Show - #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More

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Starting point is 00:04:08 at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking can i ask you a personal question now we're seeing an appropriate time i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. have will be britain phd on the podcast she is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at brown university medical school and the director of brown's clinical and effective neuroscience laboratory and that is effective with an a her clinical neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices i.e meditation or certainly one example being meditation, on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other conditions. She's especially interested in

Starting point is 00:05:10 which practices are best or worst suited for which types of people or conditions and why. She's probably best known for her research on adverse effects, why they happen, and how to mitigate them. And we'll be doing a very deep dive on this, certainly. Dr. Britton is the founder of Cheetah House, as in the large and very fast cat, Cheetah House, a nonprofit organization that provides evidence-based information and support for meditators in distress, as well as meditation safety trainings to providers and organizations. You can find Cheetah House on Twitter at CheetahHouse.org. Facebook, you can find at CheetahHouse.org and on Instagram at Cheetah.House. Dr. Britton,

Starting point is 00:05:53 thank you for making the time today. Nice to see you. Thank you so much for having me. There are many reasons that I wanted to have a conversation with you. And one certainly was due to my own experience at a silent retreat and having a flooding of traumatic memories and everything that that led to. It was overwhelming to an extent that I could not have imagined and certainly had not been prepared for. Secondly is a mutual acquaintance. I won't mention his name because he's one of the more private people in the world, so I would always want to double check, had suggested that we talk because there might be some mapping or some similarities at least between meditation-related adverse events and how symptoms present, some of the dissociation, etc., that you can observe in some people, and some of the adverse effects

Starting point is 00:06:43 that you can see, some persistent effects after psychedelic use. So eventually we'll get to that, but let's start at the beginning, or at least with the Genesis story of sorts. How did you first become interested in meditation? So I think, like many people, I had a life crisis that precipitated the need for something really different in my life. One of my childhood friends committed suicide when I was in college, the summer between my junior and senior year. And it was devastating and completely dysregulating to see a person just disappear from the world. It it wasn't in my repertoire of possibilities that somebody could just not be there anymore. So I had, you know,

Starting point is 00:07:31 probably diagnosable PTSD at that point. And I really didn't want to take medication. I was only 20. My dad sent me A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield. And that became my Bible for the next probably decade. And so for those of you who don't know, Jack Kornfield's a very famous meditation teacher, and he's written many books. And this particular one, like many of them, start off with just what the mind can do and how to work with it. And it just, you know, it was very practical way to manage all of the emotions that were happening. And it was great because it was allowing them to be there too. It wasn't suppressing them. Ironically, that particular book that he wrote, I only got about halfway through it because the whole second half I just like could not relate to because it was

Starting point is 00:08:22 like the spiritual roller coaster and like Kundalini awakenings. And I was like, I don't know what that is. So I'll just put that down. Just take what you need, whatever. And then that came back fast forward 15 years. I was like, oh, right. That second half of that book. Let me go back and read that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So going into graduate school, I was also very, very interested in consciousness always and always interested in just what are we doing here? What's going on? What's looking out of my eyes? And like, just very curious. And so that was already happening. And then I had this, this experience and it kind of culminated in my graduate career looking at altered states of consciousness in a clinical psychology program at the University of Arizona, which happens to be

Starting point is 00:09:13 at the time, the only place in the world that had a consciousness study center. So I was doing that. And actually my sort of professional life, I actually studied near-death experiences for my master's thesis. And my own personal trauma and meditation practice was something I was doing on my personal time. It was not part of my scholarship. But I think at some point during graduate school, those two lives were so divided that I needed to combine them just to be an integrated human being. And so for my dissertation, I did a study on the effects of mindfulness training on sleep. I was working in a sleep lab, and sleep is illegal, altered state of consciousness, and it's linked with every type of possible health issue.

Starting point is 00:10:05 And so if you want to study altered states of consciousness, it's a good one to study because it's not like psychedelics that get banned. You know, everyone does it, happens every day. Hard to ban sleep. Yeah, so it was a good one to choose. And, you know, at the time, this is around 2000, there really wasn't great research. A lot of the meditation research was

Starting point is 00:10:27 on self-reports. There wasn't a lot of brain data available. And so I was going to be one of the first people to record overnight sleep polysomnography. So this is brain-based sleep and prove that meditation was improving sleep. Because of course it was. I mean, it's relaxing, you know, et cetera. So that was my dissertation. And I spent like 200 nights watching people sleep. And at the end of the day, the hypothesis was not at all what I expected. So we actually found that no matter how you measured arousal, cortical arousal, brain arousal, meditation was associated with increasing it, not decreasing it. So it was causing insomnia in people. And we looked at percentage of slow

Starting point is 00:11:18 wave sleep that went down. We went and looked at how fast the brainwaves were. Those went up. And the correlation was with the amount of practice was 0.8. So like no matter where you went, there it was. And this is my first confession is that I didn't publish the data. You know, I was like an evangelist for meditation because this is something that had really helped me. And I really wanted to like use my science and my position as a scientist to promote this thing. And so I didn't publish the data. At some point when I came to Brown to do my residency, a couple of years later, I was on a meditation retreat and I mentioned

Starting point is 00:11:58 the data that I had found, which is basically that it was causing cortical arousal and insomnia. And the meditation teacher sort of chastised me and said, I don't know why all you clinical psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows that if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping. And I was like, what? Bulletin. You know, yeah. And so that was kind of like a wake-up call, literally. And I thought, okay, well, what other assumptions are we making? I was definitely pretty emblematic of a lot of people who go into meditation research or the average meditator, which is like, I didn't really know my Buddhism. I didn't really know my history. I just kind of signed up for whatever was around and believed everything that people said and the way that it was marketed

Starting point is 00:12:48 as a sort of health promotion tonic. I believed all that and I didn't do my homework, which is pretty terrible as a meditation researcher. And so I was like, okay, it looks like I need to do some history homework and really look at the background of what kinds of assumptions we're making as health providers and really look at the translation process of how these practices, where they came from, what kinds of changes

Starting point is 00:13:17 they made, what was the journey like to get here into the West, and really unpack that process. And then the second question was, what other little nuggets of knowledge do these meditation teachers have that they're not telling us? And there's a follow-on part of the story, which is when I came to Brown to do my clinical residency, you have to do a year of internship to see clients, basically, to get your license. I worked at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. And during that one year, there were two yogis who came off retreat, completely psychotic. And I thought, like, wow, two in one year is kind of a lot. It seemed like a lot to me. So I went back to the

Starting point is 00:14:06 same teacher and I said, well, have you ever seen this before? And I remember like distinctly that there was no actual verbal reaction, but there was this look of like, oh shit. And I was like, oh wow, like there is a story here. There is a knowledge that this can happen. And meditation teachers are sitting on this just a ton of information that needs to be mined. And asative Experience study, which was the simplest study that I've ever done, the hardest but simplest, and that it was basically just going to meditation centers and teachers and saying, what types of challenges have you observed in your students? How do you make sense of them? Like, what are they? How do you interpret them? And then very practically, what do you do about them? Very straightforward set of questions. And that took 10 years. It's 3,000 pages of qualitative data. And I don't even know how many papers we've written. We're still

Starting point is 00:15:20 writing papers based on that data. I think we're over 10 now. It's really just a wormhole, which we're going to go down together. Oh, we are going to go arm and arm down the wormhole. So let me pause for a second. I want to make a promise to folks and I'll give you a heads up also. We will come back to the near-death experiences. I'm going to leave that as a Scooby snack at the end for people. So I do want to talk about that. However, I want to dig into the sleep for one second. If people stop sleeping, period, full stop, eventually they die. are critical to human functioning and survival. So how would you explain, if it is indeed true,

Starting point is 00:16:06 that if people meditate enough, they kind of stop sleeping or they start sleeping very minimally? How would you explain that? Is it that the meditation practice itself provokes a state that is restorative and therefore the sleep is less necessary? Or is there something else that you would put as the frontrunner for explaining that? We can point readers to various papers. There is a paper that was called Awakening is Not a Metaphor. I had to fight hard to keep that title. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. But it's a review of different studies across different types of methodologies looking at how meditation affects the awake sleep system.

Starting point is 00:16:49 It's not as straightforward as you stop sleeping or you sleep less. It's going to be dependent on many factors. And I will say that in the study that I was just talking about, my dissertation study, we found a non-monotonic, non-linear relationship. So people who are meditating less than half an hour and less than every day, they actually had an increase in sleep quality. But people who are meditating more than that, that's when it sort of switched and turned into they were prone to being more awake, more insomnia, more cortical arousal. So it's a sort of biphasic, nonlinear relationship. So just to recap, it's not going to give you insomnia, probably.

Starting point is 00:17:39 Automatically, yeah. Yeah, because when we talk about meditation, it's like, oh, you do meditation. It's kind of like, oh, you do sports or you do exercise. It's like, well, there are a million different parameters and types and so on. Right, and I think one of the other papers that I wrote, which is called Can Mindfulness Be Too Much of a Good Thing, introduces this idea of at a small amount or an optimal amount can do exactly what the hype and the promotions and the advertising says. There is a lot of truth in the promotions and the advertising says. Like there is a lot of truth in the advertising and the positive reports. But there's also, there's another side of the story, which often comes with, you know, sort of higher doses. So one of the ways to understand

Starting point is 00:18:18 this particular finding, and actually a lot of the other ones that are on the hyper arousal spectrum would be if you think about meditation as a attention enhancing product, it gets often compared with or sort of marketed alongside Ritalin and modafinil and coffee and caffeine and, you know, all these stimulants that help attention. And so if you think about meditation as one of those, I mean, think about what happens when you... Spiritual methanol, which is an anti-narcolepsy drug for people who don't recognize it. Yeah. If you think about any of the consequences, and many of us have personal experience with a lot of these substances, taking too many of them, Just drink too much coffee. What happens? You have a panic attack and you can't sleep. You take amphetamines or cocaine or, you know, whatever, whatever the stimulant is, you take enough of it and it's going to be on the fear spectrum. And some of them, if you take enough of that, it's going to be on the psychosis spectrum, especially if you have sort of tendencies in that direction. So it doesn't seem like a huge leap to think that like, here's another attention enhancing product that with certain people and certain types of doses, it's going to lead to a hyper arousal syndrome. And that's pretty much exactly what we're seeing. So that is one of the potential mechanisms. So what I might do for folks who just don't have the personal context on me that I

Starting point is 00:19:52 alluded to earlier is I'll tell, if it's okay with you, a bit of my story, which in some ways led to this conversation. And certainly it sounds like based on what we were discussing before recording that people have mentioned this to you. And it's been a match made for many reasons. So I want to give folks sort of a contrast by giving present day and then the story of what happened to me at my silent retreat, which was a Vipassana retreat. So if we look at, for instance, the last two weeks, I have meditated twice a day, 20 minutes a day, very straightforward, transcendental meditation. And there's lots of wacky, weird stuff if you go deep enough and weird enough with TM. But if you're taking it for the off-the-shelf offering and following the basic

Starting point is 00:20:36 guidelines, I find it incredibly therapeutic. And I find also difficult to disambiguate. I haven't had any caffeine whatsoever in two weeks, so the combination of those two, for I suppose a lot of sensible reasons, seems to really help. I've been getting some of the best sleep in the last 10 years, probably in the last one or two weeks. I'm sure the abstinence from coffee and caffeine, no small part of that. And I've seen no adverse events whatsoever. And I've done a lot of TM over the years and other types of meditation. But TM I find to be the easiest life raft of sorts.

Starting point is 00:21:15 However, if we flash back, and this sort of alludes to the Paracelsus, the dose makes the poison, I approached my meditation retreat, and this was at Spirit Rock, which is a beautiful, beautiful facility, beautiful campus really, run by excellent people, and ended up being very fortunate that the author of the book you mentioned, A Path with Heart, that Jack Kornfield was at Spirit Rock. He ended up being the person who effectively triaged and helped address the situation I found myself in, ultimately. But I approached the silent retreat with the wrong mindset and the wrong set of expectations. I thought to myself, I've done lots of meditation. If you add up all the time that

Starting point is 00:21:56 I've meditated, it's quite a bit. I've spent time by myself, and I've also done A, B, C, D, and E, really not recognizing that they are two different, for me at least, and for many people, two different species of experience. And since I had heard that it was the last time Jack would be leading a retreat, I'm not sure if that ended up being the case or not, I decided that I wanted to get absolutely as much out of it as possible. I'd seen benefits from fasting before. I'd seen benefits from lower before. I'd seen benefits from lower

Starting point is 00:22:26 doses of psychedelics before. So I thought to myself, this is probably aggressive, but why don't I combine all three? And that ended up being incredibly problematic, but not immediately. I'd done the fasting. So I fasted going into this week-long retreat. And then after a few days of establishing my baseline, let's call it three days, I started adding increasing doses daily of blended, homogenized, dried psilocybe mushrooms. So people might know these better as magic mushrooms. Starting at about 100 milligrams and then slowly working up to about, I want to say it was 600 or so milligrams, which is reasonably high. It's far above what one would consider a microdose. Microdose, let's just call it 50 to 100 milligrams. And simultaneously, I'm having this first experience of being silent for effectively the entire day, maybe outside of

Starting point is 00:23:27 asking a question or two at a Dharma talk at night. This is brand new. And what ended up happening, just to jump to the punchline, is I was having difficulty with the meditation to begin with. I was very physically uncomfortable. My mind began to accelerate in terms of just rumination, the velocity of thought. And velocity sort of implies a direction. It was more like a ping pong ball bouncing around or a pinball bouncing around in a machine at increasing speed, sort of nonlinear, exponentially growing speed and it was very uncomfortable and then i want to say around day four or five i had this flooding of memories of childhood abuse and it wasn't just snapshots it was like being stuck in a fully immersive vr experience that was as convincing

Starting point is 00:24:23 as this reality whenever i closed my eyes. So whenever I closed my eyes, that's what I saw. It was a re-experiencing of these traumatic experiences from age two to four. And if people go to tim.blogs.com, they can listen to a podcast about this and certain modalities that have helped me. But nonetheless, I did not expect this, and I was utterly incapable of stopping it. I could not stop it. And this went, talk about not sleeping, anytime I closed my eyes. So I couldn't sleep.

Starting point is 00:24:53 So now what do you have? You have compounding lack of sleep. And I had never heard of this before. I didn't think this was a possibility. I certainly thought it was a unique experience, unique to me. I should be able to figure this out. But eventually got so desperate, I was like, I'm not going to be able to function. I mean, I am able to navigate my day-to-day here right now with extreme pain, but I have no confidence I'll be able to go back to normal life and make decisions,

Starting point is 00:25:22 manage my business, interact in all the ways that are necessary. And that's when I set up Meeting with Jack. And thankfully, he had the experience, he has a lot of experience also as a clinical psychologist with cutters, with people who've been abused, with veterans who've lost limbs and have moral injuries and PTSD. He has a lot of mileage with many different patients and clients and meditators. So he was able to thank God, provide a safety net and provide me with recommendations to clinicians and so on, therapists I could meet to try to address this. But if he had not been there, I shudder to think what would have happened. So that's the story and ultimately was able to sort of pull out of it and manage life. But not everyone has access

Starting point is 00:26:14 to Jack. And the contrast, and I'll shut up in a second, between my day-to-day over the last two weeks, all upside. And that experience are just black and white. I mean, there's really no comparison. Interestingly, and I'll add one more thing, I recently spent a week in isolation in the wilderness fasting for that entire week. And it was not nearly as challenging, but I did see some similar symptoms, let's say, in terms of that increased speed of the pinball bouncing around in my head, as did another person I was with. So two for two, without any attempt to meditate, which raises all sorts of questions, right? So it's hard for me to parse what caused what I experienced, but I know that it was terrible. And without Jack, I would have been

Starting point is 00:27:07 fucked for lack of a better technical term. How common is that kind of experience, I guess? And certainly feel free to start wherever you'd like or pick that apart in any way that makes sense. But it was a disaster, unmitigated disaster. And I'm very fortunate I had someone like Jack because I'd actually spoken with one other junior teacher at the time and she was unequipped. She was not equipped to handle what was happening, but Jack was. Yeah. So many different thoughts. Thank you for coming to my tech talk. I mean, one is just, wow. Wow in so many ways. Like, wow that that happened to you.

Starting point is 00:27:51 And two, that you're talking about it publicly. That's amazing. So thank you, because I think it's going to be really helpful to a lot of people. Maybe a second thought is you're definitely not alone. You're definitely not the only one. There were probably other people on your retreat this was happening to. And that in my work at Cheetah House, I see someone like that every day. I try to see at least one person every day. I'm seeing

Starting point is 00:28:26 someone later today, actually. So this to me is like my bread and butter. I see it all the time. Like it's so common, but what are the actual percentages is that's where we get into the rabbit hole of research and frequency research, which is actually quite complicated because it's about like, well, what do you mean by this? You know, and like frequent among who? And so it becomes more complicated. And I guess one other question is, given what I do, that I'm an expert on meditation-related challenges and neurobiology, is there anything that we can talk about that would be useful to you? Do you have any lingering

Starting point is 00:29:12 questions that haven't been answered yet? Or I'll just put that out there. And then another thing is let's create a public service announcement for people like you, because let me tell you, males 18 to 30 who think that combining every possible powerful tool all at once to break on through to the other side is a story that I see again over and over and over again. Doesn't always turn out well, you're saying? No, it's more like a risk factor. And so at Cheetah House, we have a program called Letters to My Former Self where people come on who did stuff like that. And then they're like, honey, let me tell you what I wish I'd known when I was your age. You tell your former self advice. I would love you to do that. It should also be a letter to your future self

Starting point is 00:30:00 so you don't do the same thing. Again, I do have a couple of questions and well, a few observations and a couple of questions. So looking back at that experience separately, prior to that experience and afterwards, I had a lot of experience with fasting, including extended fasts and a lot of experience with psychedelics. And that was pre-meditation retreat and certainly post. Based on my last experience over the last three weeks where I was in isolation in the wilderness, fasting and so on, I tend to weight, in this particular case, the fasting as an exacerbating factor more than the microdosing of psychedelics, which is not to recommend to anyone that they combine things on their first meditation

Starting point is 00:30:45 retreat. Look, there are lots of meditation retreats. Do it the plain vanilla way first would be my strong recommendation. It's going to be hard enough. Don't worry, would be recommendation number one. There are some people, and this is going to lead to my question, like Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, who I've had on the podcast, who does a silent meditation retreat for a month every year, as far as I can tell, and handles it like a champion. It is like a warm bath for his mind. I found it much harder. I'm sure there are people who find it harder. My question is this, what are the, not necessarily exclusionary criteria, but what are some of the characteristics or profiles that make someone more vulnerable or likely to have this type of experience? Because for instance, if you look at classical psychedelics,

Starting point is 00:31:32 and we could spend a lot of time defining what that means, but broadly speaking, let's just say with the usual suspects that a lot of people would recognize, let's say LSD, psilocybin, etc. There are certainly others. Ayahuasca could be thrown into this for NNDMT. That if you have a family history of schizophrenia, it is likely a bad idea for you to engage with using these things simply because, not to say that it will make you schizophrenic in a lifetime where you would otherwise not become schizophrenic, but it could expedite the onset of symptoms. And there are many documented cases of this. So in a case that you have family history of schizophrenia, maybe you should not consume these things. And I'm wondering how you would paint what the intake form should look like. What does the intake look like for a meditation

Starting point is 00:32:20 retreat so that a facilitator could say, you know what, I think maybe you should do 20 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, but not do seven days silent because that would be like taking ayahuasca for a schizophrenic. How would you think about the things that make it more likely? This is a very natural place to start, which is sort of, you know, screening out people who shouldn't meditate. And now I'm going to unpack why that's a very difficult thing to do. I conducted a epidemiological study with Vichy Davidson and Simon Goldberg looking at meditation-related adverse effects, how often they happen, and risk factors. And so statistically speaking, there is an increased risk factor for a large range of variables that would be considered stressors, adversity.

Starting point is 00:33:11 So trauma history, psych history, being some kind of minority group, whether it's racial minority or sexual orientation minority, something like that is going to be a chronic stressor. And that's going to be a chronic stressor, and that's going to be, you know, heighten the risk for adverse effects. And so it's very easy to just sort of, well, those people shouldn't meditate. You know, it's very easy to kind of do that. Well, first of all, more than 90% of people have exposure to a criterion, a stressor. So that would be like, almost everyone gets ruled out except for the extremely sheltered and privileged, which would be not what we're trying to do with meditation is just limit it to those people. And then in the varieties of contemplative experience study,

Starting point is 00:33:56 we found that a lot of the risk factors that were the most obvious ones to consider, like psych and trauma history, they didn't know what they were doing, incorrect practice, that kind of thing, that none of those actually panned out to be true. And so in our study, 60% of the people who had meditation-related challenges were themselves meditation teachers. So they were getting correct practice instructions, they were meditating correctly, they had good supervision, they had good knowledge about what to do, and there were a number of people that did not have psychiatric or trauma histories. And so while those are risk factors, it doesn't mean that if you don't have them, that you're safe. So the sort of take-home message from me is I'm not a big fan of screening people out.

Starting point is 00:34:56 The other side of this is that there are a lot of people, and this might be not as true for psychedelics as it is for meditation but meditation is being marketed for schizophrenia for psychosis for bipolar disorder for all the things that you might as a retreat manager want a red flag it would be just a strange thing to start saying oh you can't those people can't have access to this technology. And I've gotten letters from people that say, please don't just rule us out, people with what would be considered serious mental illness. So please don't just rule us out because we seem like it would be a bad idea for us. Well, let me pause for one second and just say, it seems to depend on the type of meditation we're talking about right for meditating 20 minutes in the morning there might be one intake but for doing a seven-day silent retreat

Starting point is 00:35:56 there might be a different intake so i don't know if you're able to speak to that because those two things had about as much in common for me as playing with a Hot Wheels car on the top of your kitchen table and driving an F1 car around a hairpin turn. They were about, they're like, yeah, they both involve cars. Okay. Right. I guess my point is, is that I think that the action item here is not screening people out as much as being much more informed about how to monitor them closely and how to have more off-ramps as part of their retreat. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

Starting point is 00:36:38 This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag3N8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high-quality ingredients

Starting point is 00:37:24 that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified. So you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off. I want to give people just so not everyone is like, oh my God, the next time I meditate is my, am I going to have a psychic implosion and end up in a straight jagged just to put some numbers to things. I want to read something here and just have you fact check this so people have some numbers on prevalence and also just a comparative sort of parallel of sorts that

Starting point is 00:38:13 we'll spend a little bit of time on. Then I want to talk about safety training, monitoring, and off-ramps and things like that. So this is from mindfulnessexercises.com, which is pulling from an interview with you. With a more clear definition of adverse effects in hand, Willoughby and her team set out to research the true prevalence of life-impacting adverse effects following meditation. The first surprising result was that their epidemiological sample indicated nearly half the US population has meditated at least once. I'm sure that's higher now. Of these people, 6 to 14% had lasting negative effects. So that's what I wanted to bring up. A number that closely mirrors the adverse effects

Starting point is 00:38:49 of psychotherapy, 5 to 13%. Is that roughly accurate, would you say? Frequency research is very challenging. And so I do think that the epidemiological study is probably the most valid research, but somehow the data that they're citing is actually from combining two different studies. So the epidemiological study, the denominator was anyone who's ever meditated even once. So that's like kind of the lowest common denominator. So like the lowest possible chance. And within that study, we found that people who had tried meditation even once, half of them would have at least one negative effect. And it could be extremely brief, no big deal. More concerning is that 10%, so one in 10 people who had tried meditation even once,

Starting point is 00:39:42 would have a meditation-related adverse effect that was associated with impairment and functioning. And so we can go down the rabbit hole of definitions if you want, but I think that for me, having a negative experience during meditation, which I call negative valence, I don't consider that an adverse effect. I think that if you don't have some kind of negative experience in your meditation at some point, you're probably sleeping because it's not a warm bath for the mind. It can be challenging. So I'm not worried about that part, but I'm more worried about if it has a negative impact on your life and functioning off the cushion, then I'm

Starting point is 00:40:19 like, okay, that's when we need to start talking about whether there's maybe alternatives. And so one in 10 is really the number that is jumping out of that paper. The other paper, which was a clinical trial that I did, much smaller trial, very selected sample of people who have kind of clinical to subclinical anxiety and depression, that came up with a 5% to 15%, which is still, you know, they correlate with each other. What are some things that we can do to risk mitigate in terms of, and you can pick whichever makes sense to start with, but training for instructors or monitoring. I'm actually pretty interested in the monitoring. I'm interested in all of it. And then off-ramps, what to do if somebody does have a break, I suppose, like I did. I wouldn't

Starting point is 00:41:10 necessarily describe it as a psychotic break, but I felt out of control. I felt like I was not able to, I would not be able to function normally had I returned to normal life without some intervention. What can we do to make things safer, I suppose? I think it helps to start with, we created a taxonomy of 59 categories of meditation-related challenges. And it wasn't until many years later that I went through the somatic experiencing trauma training that I started to actually see a lot of those 59 categories in terms of trauma symptoms and in terms of symptoms of the way that the body tends to react to extreme stress. And these are not necessarily so altered states, but things that might be somewhat recognizable to people. So one of the ways that I think is

Starting point is 00:42:06 the most efficient way, because we can train meditation teachers and be like, I have, you know, online courses where you're like, they have quizzes on the 59 categories and you, you know, there's all this content that they need to learn. But I actually think that the best way to do it is to train each individual person to be like, Tim, how do you know when you're getting outside of your window of tolerance? How do you know when you're feeling quote unquote out of control? What is your indicator for that? It's when I seem incapable or maybe when I am incapable of stopping very high speed negative rumination, I suppose. It would be like perseverating on either a real event, like a memory, or a perceived threat, like a hypothetical worst case scenario. And I just loop and loop and loop

Starting point is 00:43:01 and loop. And I'm furthermore aware of the looping. There's part of me as the observer that's like, holy shit, I can't believe I seem incapable of stopping this. I know it's not productive. I know it's not helping me. And yet it just goes and goes and goes. That would be my canary in the coal mine or maybe a flock of canaries in the coal mine. So is there anything that is an earlier indicator than that before you get there? You know, I would say it's more I've realized which factors can contribute to that. It's something for me that comes on. So this may be a dissatisfying answer, but it's something that can come on really suddenly.

Starting point is 00:43:43 But I would say that over caffeination lack of sleep fasting there are a handful of things that seem more likely to precipitate this type of experience than other things and doesn't happen all the time but i would say probably if i were to try to back into what i described i'm sure that it starts with, and I'm sure it started, I have to imagine, at my Vipassana retreat with having bouts of this come up and then trying to suppress it. I'm sure that it took some form like that. I would have to imagine it was something like that. So, you know, just to quid pro quo, I mean, I have lots of them, but I think my mouth gets dry. It's like an indication of

Starting point is 00:44:30 sympathetic activation. Interesting. Yeah. I get really hot. A strong stressor for me is when my visual field starts to get wonky. And that's when the sort of dissociation sets in, things get a little spacey and like you're, you know, that. So if this was a meditation class, I would have everyone go around and talk about their own personal indicators. Because no matter how much research we do, those indicators are, there's going to be a lot of overlap, but there's also going to be some individual differences. And really what matters is that the person knows what their indicators are. They're like, my system is stressed.

Starting point is 00:45:09 Don't keep doing what you're doing that's making this happen. Let's dial it back. And unfortunately, the response is often like, well, just keep going. Just keep meditating. Keep doing whatever you're doing. At some point, there's going to be a breakthrough. But instead, it's just gets worse. That is more of the angle that I'm taking is like teaching everybody what their indicator lights are. You don't get in a car and drive until you know,

Starting point is 00:45:37 like the gas meters here, like this is the tire pressure, like, you know, you have these indicator lights and we have them. We have indicator lights and we all need to be sort of trained on what they are individually. And that will keep you a lot safer when you know what your indicator lights are. I think one of the things that undermines that is this sort of fascination and romanticization of altered states. And you can think of altered states as a deviation from baseline, a deviation from homeostasis, which is, in trauma speak, that is dysregulation. An altered state is not necessarily a good idea for someone who's trying to stay stable. And so just having people be able to track that and, okay, like that thing, my indicator light is on. What typically helps that?

Starting point is 00:46:29 And go do that. I need to go lift some weights. I need to go dial back and skip the coffee this afternoon or like maybe eat something. By the way, the fasting thing is really interesting. We had a lot of information in the Varieties Project about diet, but we really hadn't done anything with it. And actually, one of my students this year has just started to delve into the diet data and is finding that it's really making a difference, that a lot of people have reported that when you go on meditation retreats, because they tend to be vegetarian and they tend

Starting point is 00:47:06 to feed you very light food, sometimes not even there's sometimes there's no dinner. And so, you know, it's not fasting so much, but it's definitely like you're going off of your like my personal high fat, high protein diet. Like I get very unregulated and floaty and sort of ungrounded when I go on retreats and I really want to have and heavy foods. Oils can also be something that can help sort of bring people down and more grounded. And when we interviewed the teachers as teachers, which was the second part of the study, there was really not a lot of consensus about what was a problem, what wasn't a problem, what was a risk factor, what wasn't. But there were two things, and one was when the person stops sleeping and when the person stops eating, that's when you intervene.

Starting point is 00:48:16 So those were the two things that people, all teachers, mentioned as being something that they worry about. Let me hop in for a second just to mention something that I found in the process of doing homework for this. This was actually in a Harper's piece about you and your team. And it discussed something that I've also seen, which does not really get discussed. So I'm bringing it up very deliberately, post certain potent psychedelic experiences. So this is something that I've seen in both. Well, actually, I should say now I've seen described here as a adverse effect of meditation, possibly for some folks. And also I've seen this post psychedelic and this is I'll just read quote practicing letting go of

Starting point is 00:49:05 concepts one meditator told Britain was sabotaging my mind's ability to lay down new memories and reinforce old memories of simple things like what words mean and colors mean what I'm going to underline is what's coming next meditators also reported diminished emotions both negative and positive quote I had two young children another meditator said I couldn't feel anything about them I went through all the routines you you know, the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all that stuff, but there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead, end quote. So this anhedonia, let's call it, which interestingly can also be, for some people, addressed with

Starting point is 00:49:38 psychedelics, but what's less talked about is that it can be initiated in some people by psychedelics, where they come out and they're sort of numb to the world. And people think of the amygdala as this fear center, but it's not exactly a fear center. So maybe you could just speak to this particular manifestation of issue, because I've seen it in both camps. There's kind of two different ways that this can happen with meditation and psychedelics. With meditation, if you look at the neuroscience of meditation, and there's lots of different kinds, but we'll just say like concentration practice, you tend to see a

Starting point is 00:50:20 downregulation of the limbic system, the amygdala, and, you know, activation of the prefrontal cortex. So a tension system goes up, downregulates the limbic system. And again, this can be great, good things. You regulate all your anxiety and depression. But if you keep going, then you're going to see a downregulation of not just negative emotions, but also positive ones. People forget that like the amygdala is, you know, a salience detector for all sorts of things, positive and negative. And you're going to see if you continue to downregulate your limbic system with meditation, and you take it far enough, then you will see a decrease in the intensity of all emotions,

Starting point is 00:51:04 otherwise known as anhedonia. According to Oba Sekeri, that could also be something that could be equanimity. So depends on what you want. Tomato, tomato. Yeah. Obviously, the person who didn't feel anything for her children, that was not her goal. But I actually, that particular quote that you're reading, I read that quote in a conference and a Buddhist scholar jumped up at the end and said, cutting attachments with affection with your families is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And so I was like, okay, well, we need to talk about what your goals are. Yeah, thou doth protest too much. With meditation, there is overlap. So what's interesting about that model, prefrontal cortex control over the limbic system,

Starting point is 00:51:51 is that that's also the neuroscience of dissociation. So there are certain forms of meditation that mimic the exact neurobiology of dissociation. So that's one way to end up in this place. The other way, so I call that the low road because you're just basically just taking everything down, getting calmer and calmer and calmer. The high road is the one we were talking about earlier where you're training your attention and everything's upregulating and you're getting more and more and more like your thoughts are racing and you're having flooding of traumatic experiences and you're, you know, everything's getting heightened.

Starting point is 00:52:26 And at some point your system's like, whoa, this is too much. And you have this beautiful, adaptive, natural breaker switch called dissociation. It'll basically shut down the limbic system again. And you'll basically end up in that state, the first state that I just talked about, where you have like a strong activation of the prefrontal cortex and a down regulation of the limbic system again. And you'll basically end up in that state, the first state that I just talked about, where you have like a strong activation of the prefrontal cortex and a down regulation of the limbic system. It's two different roads to the same place. And so what's interesting and sort of the overlap with psychedelics is that that too much kind of response that can lead to dissociation, it doesn't always have to be

Starting point is 00:53:05 negative. People can have like a euphoric, unitive experience where they merge with the universe or they have just something just ecstatic kind of experience. But their organism is like, that was too intense. That was too much for me. I'm turning on the breaker. And they wake up in the morning and they're like, they feel dead. And they spend years trying to recreate that awesome experience. But, you know, they're not really listening to their organism's messages, which is saying like, that was too intense. Are you listening? There is a very interesting overlap at Cheetah House when people come for help. We see the combination of psychedelics and meditation

Starting point is 00:53:45 very often. A lot of times in this scenario where they go on a meditation retreat, have an ecstatic experience or just a very intense experience, wake up feeling dead and anodonic, and they think, I got to sort of shock the system back into action and they go take a psychedelic. And that just makes things worse because the system's like, I've been trying to tell you that this is too much. And now you're just really pushing the envelope. And we also see the opposite. People who have the initial experience on psychedelics and then they decide, well, I'm very dysregulated. And they get told by various authorities, you should go on a meditation retreat or you

Starting point is 00:54:29 should meditate. Either way, at least the people who show up at Cheetah House, the combination was not the answer for them. Let me hop in for a second just to ask a few follow-up questions on retreats specifically. Are there any intensive retreats that you recommend or extended retreats? And I suppose the broader question is how can one know where to practice and vet properly, right? If someone wants to do a meditation retreat. And the reason I ask is, for instance, with psychedelics, which are still largely underground at this point, even though at some point, hopefully there will be an entire framework for administering them

Starting point is 00:55:15 reasonably safely to people who fit certain criteria. If someone finds a facilitator who says, no one under my care has ever had a bad trip. That is a huge red flag because it means they're either deluding themselves, they're lying, or they're really inexperienced. Those are kind of the only options on the table because you're effectively using nuclear power to change the plasticity of the mind. Of course, there are going to be adverse events. Of course, there are going to be outliers. And so you want someone who has actually handled those cases to push my F1 analogy. If you go to a racetrack, let's just say, and you're going to a track day

Starting point is 00:55:57 and the track runner says, we've never had any accident of any type on our track. That's a bad thing because someone's going to have an accident. You want to make sure they have protocols in place, they have experience, they have the presence of mind to handle it calmly, etc., etc. So I could see that applying also to vetting meditation retreats. But putting myself in the position of someone listening to this, I might say, holy shit, of the people who've tried meditation once, X percentage have these persistent problems like this seems really, really dangerous. Maybe I just shouldn't meditate. So to maybe offset that a little bit, are there retreats that you ever recommend? And how can

Starting point is 00:56:37 someone vet if they're considering doing a retreat? A lot of it has to do with matching the goals to the person. So I don't want to necessarily rule out or recommend any particular retreat across the board. I think that there are certain retreats that are pretty repeat offenders. And those are ones that have like high dose, you know, 15 hours of meditation a day, no movement practice. Often you see an alternation between walking and sitting and sometimes there's even yoga added. So more intense practices with no movement and also not necessarily tailored feedback from teachers. So I would be very careful before going on one of those. And I think just in general, there are so many different options for retreats these days. You can do like an afternoon retreat where it's only a couple hours.

Starting point is 00:57:42 Start there. Titrate up. And you can do this at home. You don't even have to necessarily spend the money. You can just download an app and do that for a day and see how you do. Titrate up and add a day at a time rather than signing up for a 10-day retreat. Something I have not mentioned before is that I've done shorter meditation retreats, like two or three days, with no issues whatsoever. So I just want to point that out. The other fine detail that I want to mention,

Starting point is 00:58:08 because I think Spirit Rock runs a very good ship and I think they're very well formatted and they do have safeguards in place that they explicitly advise against fasting. And I violated that rule. I overrode that. Right. And also added the psychedelics, which certainly I had not mentioned to anyone until I had already sort of capsized. Yeah. This never used to be an issue. But I know that people are doing that, that people are bringing psychedelics on retreats. And I think a lot of the retreats, they have to manage a lot of people. People are already having

Starting point is 00:58:51 challenging experiences, the regular kind of challenging experiences with meditation. And so to have to manage people who are also taking psychedelics, that's a lot. It's not really fair to a meditation retreat no it's going to be invisible to them for the most part yeah i'm sure right it's not going to be reported just like people lie on their medical intakes about the psychiatric medications they're taking if they are wedded to taking psychedelics with facilitator this happens all the time people sort of misrepresent their health status because they're so vested in this last Hail Mary, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Final Hope

Starting point is 00:59:33 solution panacea that they see in psychedelics. And I have to imagine that also happens with meditation retreats. I should also say, I'd love for you to say a bit more about repeat offenders. Are there any other characteristics or format issues that you see producing more problems than others outside of what you already mentioned? So in terms of the retreat or meditation type or in terms of personal risk factors? The retreat or meditation type that seem to produce a higher volume of people with these issues? I would say retreats that recruit or are attracting a certain type of meditator, which by the way, you fit the bill pretty exactly. When I heard the story, I was like,

Starting point is 01:00:20 wow, that's pretty emblematic of textbook. Yeah. Young male, pretty educated, combining all sorts of tools, you know, fairly aggressive. We used to joke that one of the risk factors was zealotry, the kind of zealotry, a zeal. So something like that. And so there's a certain kind of almost like military. This is going to be a really, really hard retreat. Those types of retreats are a little bit more high risk. And I think there's also the combination of the person experience study is that on one hand, we expected to see people who ran into problems as people who had lots of problems in their lives. But when we

Starting point is 01:01:10 actually looked at the data, 75% had graduate degrees, MD, PhDs, JDs. These were CEOs of major companies. These are super high-achieving people. And we're like, this is so interesting. How do we make sense of that? And we're like, oh, right. Being a high achiever is a risk factor. I was just about to say like the drug addiction in the medical profession is off the charts, like suicide's off the charts. So it's because these are the kinds of people that you're like, okay, you're going to sit and follow your breath. And they're like, okay, like they're the ones that show up early for the meditation and they are the last ones to leave. They follow instructions exactly. They would never modify the instructions for their own benefit. That would not

Starting point is 01:01:56 even occur to them. Unless they make it more intense. You know, the kinds of people that, and this is kind of where trauma comes in. If you've been trained to scan, what are the expectations here? What are the sort of unspoken social rules that I need to ace in order to not be punished? If that's like kind of your MO running in the background, then we have all these people like following instructions exactly, not modifying them, basically listening to an external authority rather than their own internal compass, that's the recipe for disaster. And so if you can interface with really any type of meditation, spiritual system, with maintaining your inner compass, that's going to be a recipe for a much better outcome.

Starting point is 01:02:45 Not everybody can do that, and not all systems are tolerant of that. And so I would also encourage, and we've had lots of trainings with meditation centers trying to be able to be able to be more flexible. And so if somebody knows like, I need to be able to leave the meditation in the middle so that I'm not continuing to meditate. And the meditation retreat manager is like, no, that won't be allowed. You have to stay. If you come, you have to stay for the whole thing. That's not really allowing flexibility. So are there ways that people can titrate the amount of practice that they're getting within a retreat? Is there a way to like, hey, on Wednesday, we'll have burger night for people who need to

Starting point is 01:03:25 increase the fat intake? That is actually happening now. The vegetarian diet piece is super interesting. I mean, I don't know if the acuity is sufficient as a factor, but it makes me think also with, for instance, some of these conditions that are, let's just say, contraindicated for most psychedelic use, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, understanding these are all kind of like word salad things taken from the DSM, which is kind of a big question mark for a lot of reasons. But some of these more, for lack of a better term, sort of chaotic conditions are contraindicated,

Starting point is 01:04:00 respond really well to something called metabolic psychiatry. Chris Palmer has spoken about this out of Harvard, using high-fat, effectively ketogenic diet, but high-fat moderate protein. Some of these people respond incredibly well. So if you look, though, at the food served at these meditation retreats, uniformly, effectively the exact polar opposite, right, which is kind of interesting. Do you meditate? Do you meditate now or is that not a practice for you? Ooh, that's a long, long story. All right, let's do it. Depends on what you mean by meditate. Okay. So meditation, when I first undertook it, you know, with Jack's sort of meditation came from a specific tradition and it had a whole bunch of implicit goals and values that weren't really

Starting point is 01:04:48 clear to me because I was just like suffering. And so I thought, I'm just going to do this so I won't feel so much panic and anxiety and et cetera. And so, you know, I've done tens of thousands of hours of meditation. I've been, you've been the expert meditator in many brain imaging studies. I've done my time as a Buddhist meditator. But I've started to understand that there's a whole set of implicit values that I didn't necessarily choose. What would be an example, if you don't mind? An example is that the ideal affect or the goal emotion state is more on the calm end of things. And as a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, it's not really in my

Starting point is 01:05:35 blood to be calm. More of a border collie, less of a great day. Yeah. Anyway, there's lots of people who their ideal state is not calm. And so there's lots of implicit values. And I think that this is just something as meditation is moving into the West and kind of mixing with a lot of different cultures and subcultures and goals and values. Like, can these contemplative practices be used for many different types of goals rather than ones that were preset as part of a religious practice? And I think that is happening. But for myself in particular, I have, you know, specific practices that I do that I have permission now from myself to modify a practice to not just follow the rules the way that I did before and end up

Starting point is 01:06:34 somewhere that I didn't want to go, but rather to modify things and make sure that I'm going where I want to go. But that also requires me to like actually sit down with myself and be like, where do you want to go? Which is another thing that I recommend for people. Amy Mann has a song, write down what you need before you sign away the deed. Make sure you know what you want, because you're going to get on a highway and it's going to be fast tracking you to somewhere, making sure that you are actually going where you want to go. I want to know what practices that you follow, not to imply that anyone should just copy-paste, right? You got to know your own needs, but I am curious where you've landed personally.

Starting point is 01:07:13 You tell me, where would you like to start? I want to go to the varieties of contemplative experience. This was the study that took us 10 years, and we came up with 59 categories of meditation-related challenges and adverse effects. And we categorized them into seven different domains, cognitive, perceptual, affective, which is emotional, somatic, cognitive, which is motivational, sense of self, and social. So I'm not going to go through all 59. People can look them up. They're on the Cheetah House website under symptoms. But just to give you a sort of basic overview of what is in each category. So cognitive types of experiences are increase in thought frequency, which you talked about, you know, trouble with executive functioning. So making decisions, paying attention,

Starting point is 01:08:03 the loss of conceptual meaning structures, which you also mentioned. Probably the most famous example is the woman who, on the way back from retreat, stopped at a red light, saw the red color, but didn't register what it meant, that it meant stop. You can see how that would be. Sometimes you need your concepts. Executive function. You can see how that would be. Problematic. Sometimes you need your concepts. Executive function. You need your concepts. So that's the cognitive domain. Perceptual, you see perceptual hypersensitivity.

Starting point is 01:08:30 You can also see hallucinations, visions, changes in perception, also changes in derealization. So feeling like you're in a dream or things feel flat or cartoon-like. Emotions can go in either direction, which you've already kind of touched on. So increases in fear and panic and re-experiencing of trauma, but also affect of blunting. So loss of emotions altogether. You can also see in the somatic domain, we can see ELSAs, energy-like somatic experiences. We have an entire paper on that. Wait, say that again? What does that stand for? ELSAs, energy like somatic experiences. So experiences of sort of electricity or voltage or going through the body. We talked about insomnia already and lots of different kinds of pain syndromes, headaches, different kinds of pains. In terms of cognitive or motivational, again, insane, just enlightenment or bust kind of

Starting point is 01:09:30 changes in motivation. Sorry, honey, like I'm gone. I'm going to go shave my head and become a monk. We see that all the time. And then the opposite, complete loss of motivation. Why would I do anything? No goals whatsoever. The sense of self-domain is my personal favorite. I teach an entire class on it called Me, Myself, and I, but there's lots of changes in senses of self, and that can range from the narrative self, the story of me, your identity self, all the way down to your sense of ownership over your own body, over body sensations, emotions, thoughts, and then also down to your sense of self, other self, world boundaries can dissolve. We have a whole paper on that as well. And obviously there's a lot of overlap

Starting point is 01:10:20 with psychedelics with that particular category. So we can unpack that if you want. And then within the social domain, not surprisingly, if you're having these experiences, it can be related to some social consequences. People don't like hearing about this. They have all sorts of reactions. Wait till you get your responses to this episode. Yeah. I want to talk about the Dalai Lama too before we go too far. People don't like to hear about this. So a lot of people get shunned by their communities. Sometimes their teachers get irritated with them.

Starting point is 01:10:54 And then there's also trying to go to work and trying to explain why you can't function. So there's all sorts of social dynamics that go with that. That was kind of the quick and dirty overview of the 59 categories. And I will say that within that particular study, the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, we looked at duration of symptoms and duration of impairment. And duration of impairment, the average was one to three years. So it was quite a bit of time, and it ranged from a few days to more than a decade. So this can be, and I think your experience, you can kind of understand why. It could be

Starting point is 01:11:34 quite a long time before you recover if you don't happen upon Jack Kornfield for a while. Yeah, I won the lottery on that latter part of things. And the duration you're describing, I just want to draw a couple of parallels. I mean, you already alluded to this, but you could take almost everything you just mentioned, if not everything, and map it to adverse events related to psychedelic experiences. Pretty much everything. I think everything that you mentioned. And in terms of duration, there's something that doesn't get talked about very much events related to psychedelic experiences. Pretty much everything. I think everything that you mentioned. And in terms of duration, there's something that doesn't get talked about very much also because it is viewed as perhaps risking the cause and the momentum of the psychedelic

Starting point is 01:12:18 renaissance. But there's something, it's a bit of a mouthful, I wish it had a better name, but HPPD, hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. And I know people who've experienced this where they are effectively hallucinating on some level for years. I have a family member who experienced this by marriage. I have a very close friend who experienced this for the second half of his undergrad and for several years afterwards. And people can find more on this online. But I suppose we could move into scaffolding, but I'd like to ask you, are there any particular distinctions, clear differences between meditation-related adverse events and psychedelic-related adverse events?

Starting point is 01:13:03 Well, we don't really know. That was actually a study that we're in the middle of collecting data on. So I'm glad that you mentioned that there's a lot of overlaps because I'm also seeing them. And a lot of people that have had both experiences are mentioning that there's a lot of overlap. So the study that we're conducting is basically looking at, basically seeing how much they overlap and whether there are systematic differences. If I had to guess, I would say that the perceptual changes, the HPPD-like changes, would be more common in the psychedelic world. I do think there's something neurological going on there that

Starting point is 01:13:45 might be not happening in all forms of meditation, but we definitely see visual snow and there can be some perceptual changes that are enduring, visual changes that are enduring. But if you look at the HPPD literature, it's actually a lot more than just visual changes. There's a whole lot of different things going on. So yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. How they compare, but also with whether somebody is a dual user and whether it's changing that way. A lot of people are dual users. Yeah, it's very hard to disambiguate.

Starting point is 01:14:21 The resource I want to recommend, and I can't vouch for it personally, because fortunately I do not have HPPD, but the more people use these compounds, meaning psychedelics of various types, the more this is going to become prevalent and really need proper addressing. There is a website. It's perception.foundation, and that's the Perception Restoration Foundation. They have resources. They have resources, they have frequently asked questions about HPPD, they have a documentary trailer, they also have a specialist directory. I cannot vouch for the capabilities of any of the specialists,

Starting point is 01:14:57 but a lot of people who experience this feel the way I did in the midst of my silent retreat, which is, I am broken. I don't know how to fix this. Everyone else seems fine. I don't even know what to call this. And there's a real sense of futility or hopelessness that can come with that. So suffice to say, the Perception Restoration Foundation may be a place to start. I can't vouch for it, but Perception.Foundation for folks who may want to look that up. What is scaffolding? For people who come to Cheetah House, and let me just back up a little bit about the Cheetah House sort of origin story. I mean, the actual Cheetah House started as a halfway house for Brown students who wanted to become monastics because of our

Starting point is 01:15:46 contemplative studies program. So kids will get meditation training in school. As part of college, they get so inspired by it that they want to go to India and ordain as monks. And going there and coming back and living in dorms as celibate, non-intoxicant-taking college students doesn't really work. So they lived at Cheetah House. That was the sort of the original function of Cheetah House was to support sort of semi-monastic Brown students. And is it true Cheetah is a play on words? Cheetah is a play on words. It's a play on the Sanskrit term chitta, which means loosely mind. When we started doing the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, we were interviewing a number of And so I live at Cheetah House. So this is like, you know, my house,

Starting point is 01:16:45 it's a big Victorian house with lots of floors. And so there was an entire floor where meditators could live and kind of recover from whatever was happening. So that was the beginning of Cheetah House. It is now entirely online and is helping people recover from meditation-related challenges. And a number of them, they are not able to meditate at all. They're not able to engage in anything that looks like meditation. All the trauma cues and associations are around everything meditation. So sitting with your eyes closed, sitting on a floor with your legs crossed, using a soft voice and guidance, like all of that triggers the response. Trigger city. Basically half of the like mental health world just becomes inaccessible to these people because, you know, they go to a therapist and the therapist is like, oh, you need to do mindfulness.

Starting point is 01:17:42 And they're like, no, not mindfulness, please. Anything but mindfulness. And they're like, no, not mindfulness, please. Anything but mindfulness. So we have to figure out a way to help people build their own practice. And I think the other piece that I wanted to unpack with you after I heard your podcast was the term ideological power. And so ideological power is the power to control meaning, language, and which concepts are available and how they're used. The power to interpret your own or others' experiences, behavior, or feelings, and the power to silence or undermine. The important thing here is that trauma is associated with powerlessness and a lack of options and a lack of agency.

Starting point is 01:18:29 And so for people who have been traumatized by meditation or meditation systems, any kind of system is also a form of ideological power over them. Even like CBT as a system, any kind of therapy or model as a system. And so that also becomes something that they're not able to work with because it feels controlling. It feels like it's some kind of value system

Starting point is 01:18:57 or model that's being imposed on them. So how do you work with that? And so we have to start with, so this is called person-centered approach. So if you were my pretend client, I would ask you, before you started meditating or just outside of your meditation life, what is something that is a resource for you?

Starting point is 01:19:19 Just for general well-being, are we talking about? Psychological well-being as a resource? I mean, what I typically do is actually ask you to look around where you are right now and pick something like a tangible object that's in your immediate vicinity that's something that's meaningful to you but unrelated to meditation right i was gonna say intense exercise i mean like i've told every girlfriend i've ever had if you see me trying to sit down and think my way through a problem for more than like a half hour, just tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for an hour. It's just like, tell me to get out of the house and go

Starting point is 01:19:55 exercise and chances are it'll resolve itself. But if I'm looking for something meaningful that is near me right now, there's quite a bit here around me at the moment. I could say there's a artist's sketchbook for working with mostly graphite and ink where I do some drawing. There's a copy of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, which I read when I hop in the sauna. I'll just read a couple of pages frequently and then put it down. I could keep going, but those are two. So as you're scanning the environment, when I ask you, notice something that's meaningful. There's a salience glomming onto different objects, skipping over certain areas, but glomming onto certain objects. But it's not that the salience has a different flavor for each

Starting point is 01:20:41 one. So if you were going to think about, I'm going to take my nervous system in that direction, I'm going to take it in that direction, you could actually start to chart where you could go, different options, just by looking at these different objects. They're kind of telling you, oh, this will be activating, this will be energizing, this will be calming, this will be strength-inducing. So pick a direction, where would you want your nervous system to go? And then pick an object that goes with that. I'll choose the sketchbook because that's where I am totally immersed in something present tense. I can get lost in artwork. I don't think about whatever mistake I made in the conversation yesterday. I don't think about whatever mistake I made in the conversation yesterday. I don't

Starting point is 01:21:26 think about whatever bullshit I have to handle tomorrow. I find that very nourishing in a calming way. So I'll choose that. And so as I'm watching you, I can see your eyes are kind of going somewhere that's not anywhere in particular, which means you have some images that are in your mind. Oh, maybe. I'm also looking at the sketchbook that's directly past the laptop. Okay. So maybe more generally. But we can work with that. Yeah. So maybe more generally, when you look at the sketchbook and you're talking about it and you're thinking about what it can do for you, what are you noticing that goes with that?

Starting point is 01:21:59 I would say my sympathetic nervous system seems to downregulate. Breathing seems to slow a little bit. If I'm being totally honest, I have a small amount of anxiety because I was really consistent with my art for a while and I've lapsed for the last two months and I feel badly about it. Some level of guilt, but that's not what I'm going for. Yeah. So let me just pause there. So some kind of drop in your sympathetic nervous system.

Starting point is 01:22:25 So how is that manifesting? You said you're breathing, starting to calm down. What else is going with that? What are other ways that you're noticing? Some muscular relaxation. Any particular area? Yeah, back, back, neck. Those would be most obvious, I would say.

Starting point is 01:22:44 Less fidgety, less bouncing of the foot and so as you're looking at this object this sketchbook and talking about it you're noticing that you're having sympathetic activation is decreasing it's changing your breathing there's something happening in your back that's easing and as as I'm feeding this back to you, what are you noticing that goes with that? I think it reinforces it. It's not exactly positive reinforcement. It sounds like positive reinforcement for the relaxation. So I'm able to settle into it, I suppose.

Starting point is 01:23:17 This is kind of like the beginning of scaffolding. This is what it's like. Okay. Because if I try to say like, like okay you're going to focus on your breathing or i'm going to give you an object to focus on 50 of people who are given the breath as an object of meditation find that it's not a safe object and it can actually induce anxiety so if i have you pick the object i couldn't have picked that in a million years if i got to wander around your house and be like which thing should i pick i wouldn't have picked that in a million years if I got to wander around your house and be like, which thing should I pick? I wouldn't have been able to pick something. You know, immediately you have so much going on. And as a meditator, you're able to like feel into your environment. And there's like, oh, wow, these different flavors of how they're actually impacting me. And so I would spend an hour with you unpacking one particular object and I would be

Starting point is 01:24:08 watching how your hands are moving. And you might be like, oh, and there is a story that goes with the sketchbook. And like, you might end up on who gave you the sketchbook. And like, it's really about that. We kind of like go down this rabbit hole together and I'm tracking your physiology with mine. And if you're very, very dysregulated and dissociated, and you're one of those people who can't feel anything anymore, I can notice very small changes in your physiology and be like, Hey, you remember that one thing that you just said? Cause I saw your eyes brighten up a little. I'll be able to like amplify specifically amplify certain things, but I'm following your lead.

Starting point is 01:24:46 And so as somebody who's been very traumatized about power dynamics and following any kind of instructions feels like oppression and feeling trapped in sort of some system. If I'm following you and just reflecting back to you what I'm seeing, that can be a little bit more palatable. That's kind of what scaffolding is. And that's what we offer to meditators who have basically developed a trauma response to meditation itself, which can really rule out a lot of things. Yeah, that's an elegant workaround slash approach. And I would say that I'm very fortunate that I don't personally, despite the childhood experience with the abuse, have that aversion to systems or coaches or teachers. I think in part because I'm such a problem student in the sense that I just will constantly stop things and question things and I don't feel like I need to take anything that is just off the rack, so to speak. So I feel very

Starting point is 01:25:53 fortunate about that. Let me return, since I made a promise to my listeners and to myself that I would, to your personal practices. What does your self-care look like in that department? What are those practices? Where have you landed? So I've been doing this resourcing for a long time, this scaffolding, and where it landed me. So I started to realize that I, this is in some ways not super surprising, but I have a very strong reaction to living things, like animals and plants. And so I started to realize how powerfully impacted my gardening. I started getting really obsessed with rare plants and growing them in a grow light. What kind of rare plants? Just give you a name one. I'm so curious. Oh, just like, I don't know, weird tomatoes, things that you can't buy in the

Starting point is 01:26:44 grocery store, just things that you can't buy in the grocery store, just things that you can't find otherwise. But basically where I ended up was my husband and I bought 90 acres in an undisclosed mountain area in Vermont, and we built an off-grid cabin there. And it is so awesome that I think I'm going to move to Vermont. Oh, whoops. I just did it on like the Tim Ferriss podcast.

Starting point is 01:27:12 But yeah, like this exercise that we just did, if that becomes the practice, replacing the hours a day that I did with Vipassana with a practice like that actually amplifying my positive engagement with the world and what's in it, that that grew into something so beautiful and magnificent as this place in the mountains. And so it's not just a technique that you do at your house in order to perform better. It's just completely taken over my life. So that's where I ended up. So it sounds almost Epicurean in a way, right? Like tending the garden, engaging with nature.

Starting point is 01:27:59 Sure. Certainly not to add the label to it. I'm just saying that, do you find that you derive the benefits you hope to derive from meditation through this new engagement that you're referring to? Or have your goals just changed? If you wanted to paint a picture of what my daily practice looks like,

Starting point is 01:28:20 imagine, I'm wearing actually my plaid shirt, like sort of in commemoration of my Vermont self. But imagine me putting on like some Carhartt overalls and like getting a weed whacker chainsaw and going out and like doing trail work. idea of coming back and having to do, you know, writing a paper or, you know, running statistics or something. Meditation never really improved my cognition. I always found that I was sort of one of those sleepy meditators. I would just get really, really, really calm and kind of like, my brain just kind of got dull. But if I go out there and just use power tools outside in the cold, then my blood's moving, my brain's working. That's doing more of what I was hoping meditation would do. And I'm also just ecstatically happy, which meditation never did that for me. Humans are built for movement. You got to move. The meditation's great, but it's, for me,

Starting point is 01:29:23 very valuable. So I will say that small dose, high frequency, high meaning twice a day, is very strengthening to my life and my experiences. And I spend four to five times minimum as much time moving every day, right? Like the movement is a critical piece of things. Where can people find more information with respect to a class or training related to the meditation-related adverse effects, preventing them, mitigating them, recovering from them, whether it's as an individual or a facilitator slash trainer? The public-facing sort of service branch, info branch of my lab is at Cheetah House. So that's cheetah, like the animal, house, likeahouse.org. And there's tons of information on the website, lots of videos and links to different kinds of symptom-specific resources.

Starting point is 01:30:28 But if you're interested in training specifically on the Cheetah House website, there's a tab called Online Courses. If you're a meditation teacher or a clinician, you can actually take the courses. And there's a quiz, and it will give you, you know, you can make sure that you know the content. So there's more information there. You can also sign up for the Cheetah House newsletter and that will alert you to any of the kind of public lectures that we have. Spiritual, Existential, Religious, and Theological Issues in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies by Roman Pulitsky. So that's a good one to see today. He just published an article in JAMA about that topic and he'll be unpacking it for people. So we do meditation-related challenges, meditation-related issues, but also psychedelics are becoming much more of a topic. It's unavoidable that those meditation and psychedelics are combining. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to zoom out for just a quick second

Starting point is 01:31:35 and say that, well, actually, let me volunteer something I don't think I've said publicly, which is we've been talking about, among other things, these adverse events, adverse effects that can be associated with meditation, different types, different volumes, and psychedelics. However, I don't want to lose what I mentioned earlier. I may have gotten the boundaries, the upper and lower bounds wrong on the numbers, but adverse events in psychotherapy. After my experience with Spirit Rock, I went to one of the most famous psychotherapists who works with trauma in the world. And if I mentioned his book, everyone would recognize it, who's in the trade per se. And this guy was one of the most narcissistic, unbelievably unempathetic people I'd ever met in my life. And he did a tremendous amount of damage. I met with him twice for two individual sessions. And his ego is so out of control and his recommendations so intense and so flippant that it did a tremendous amount of damage. And that took, this was related to the childhood sexual abuse, and it took a long time to

Starting point is 01:32:46 undo the damage inflicted by a famous psychotherapist. And I guess I wanted to bring this up to say that when you engage with these mind-altering modalities, whether or consciousness altering modalities, assume that you're dealing with power tools and you need people who will admit that, yes, you can cut fingers off if you use power tools incorrectly, and furthermore, who have lots of time not just working with clients but handling adverse events. And handling them is not just an issue of capability. It's also an issue of empathy and will. So Danny Meyer, who's famous for Shake Shack and hospitality and many different restaurants, Gramercy Tavern and others, has this sort of matrix on the wall for employees and it's the

Starting point is 01:33:37 will-can matrix, right? So just because someone is a skilled psychotherapist does not mean they are going to be willing to provide aftercare or a safety net if you have an unraveling. It's, to me, really important that you sort of assess practitioners in advance to ensure that they have, in fact, handled these cases and feel very capable and have demonstrated competency in handling these things calmly. So I just want to say that because there's so many fly-by-night rent-a-shamans running around and people who have done one yoga retreat and had one or two psychedelic experiences who are suddenly acting as on-the-road messiahs trying to proselytize everyone. And this also goes for meditation, right? I know people who have basically

Starting point is 01:34:21 had what I would call psychotic breaks pursuing k Kundalini awakening, and then they're suddenly traveling salespeople for endorsing this, and they haven't yet even achieved stability for themselves. This is really common. So just make sure you're dealing with people who have handled redline casings and have a clear demonstrative track record, regardless of the modality. Is there anything you'd like to add, not necessarily along those lines, but any comments you'd like to make? I have more questions I do want to ask about NDEs. Oh, I forgot about that part of my life. Oh, I know. I take notes so I don't forget.

Starting point is 01:34:58 I mean, one of the things that we've learned at Cheetah House is that exactly that scenario that you're describing is that the helper professions can also be the source of harm and trauma. This is called institutional betrayal when the people who are supposed to be helping you are actually the cause of harm. What happens when you have not only trauma to meditation, but trauma to all helping professions and helping professionals. It really restricts your options. And so we, and there's other groups that do this too, we run a peer support model because a lot of people get to the point where they don't trust anyone until they can sort of prove that I was completely undone by this. I understand what it's like to be leveled by this scenario.

Starting point is 01:35:54 And then you're like, okay, you get it. Now I can talk to you. Because that empathy, when you've been leveled that much, this is like one of the silver linings, is that you have so much compassion and empathy when you've been leveled. You really understand what that's like to be in that place, to be a puddle on the ground. So that's one of the models that we have at Cheetah House. And I think it really works. It works in two ways. One is that people feel heard and validated and not alone because they're being able to talk to someone that this happened to as well, who's also recovered.

Starting point is 01:36:29 So they're like, oh my God, I can actually recover from this. And then for the people who are offering care, you know, they're like, wow, I had this five-year hole in my life that was just this thing that is not good for anything. And now I can actually, it's something that's actually a gift I can give to somebody else. And so every moment that they spend with someone else is actually sort of being fueled by that trauma. So it's nice to be able to have that trauma mean something and be useful in some way and not just be a drain on your life. So that's another piece that I think is a nice model that's out there. But yeah, I hear you with the trouble finding a good therapist, boy, yeah. Yeah, a lot of clowns running around all over the place. And just to underscore the peer support,

Starting point is 01:37:14 because you reminded me of something, I'll put out a plea to the psychedelic communities, which is, if you have not, this is also related to your getting leveled comment, if you have not had at least 30 to 50 high-dose psychedelic experiences, you should not be serving psychedelics to anyone. That'll be statement number one. That would be a minimum. And I'm not recommending people do anything illegal, but I'm simply saying people are going to do what people are going to do. If you have not been tumbled and humbled in a way that has left you

Starting point is 01:37:48 questioning whether you should ever touch these compounds again, you are not in a position to administer to other people. And the equivalent would be if you go skiing once on the bunny slope and you happen not to fall and all of a sudden you're taking people on heliskiing trips without any type of guides or airbags because skiing is fun and helpful. That is what I see all over the place. So step number one is 30 to 50 minimum personally, because that'll give you a chance to go skiing 50 times. And not only will you fall, you will have some bad falls and you'll have different types of falls. And then you'll be more informed on a subjective level about the risks involved. And then I would say secondly, you should, and this connects to your peer support comment, volunteer with an organization like Zendo at festivals where the age range skews younger, like Lightning in a Bottle and other places. Zendo is peer-driven harm reduction related to psychedelic, but really drug consumption.

Starting point is 01:38:53 And you get a decent amount of training. It's pretty nominal. It's non-directive support, so you're not trying to therapize people. But here's what I would suggest, is you volunteer for the roughest shift, which is generally going to be after midnight. And if you're capable, and you should determine if you're capable, volunteer what they sometimes call the crisis tent, which is when they have red line cases, when people are really freaking the fuck out and losing their minds, often for hours at a time. and see how well you handle those. If you don't handle those really well, you should not be serving psychedelics to anyone. So that's my public service announcement. Anyway, NDEs, how did you become interested in near-death experiences?

Starting point is 01:39:39 Wow. This was not a question that I- I'm deeply interested in this. I was like, I wonder what part of my website he's going to find, discover. I totally forgot about this. I mean, I think, wow, this is a really long time ago, but I was really interested in temporal lobe epilepsy and how people have religious experiences as a result. They call it the sacred disease, and there's been speculation that there have been a number of saints that had temporal lobe epilepsy. And so I was really interested to know whether near-death experiencers... Well, I was just really interested

Starting point is 01:40:17 in the question of whether religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy, if there was an overlap. But near-death experiences are actually one of the few types of spiritual experiences that are actually kind of similar. There's a typography, like there's a tunnel, there's a light, there's a life review. They're kind of similar. And so that's kind of an ideal thing to study. And so that's what I did and I happen to work in a sleep lab and sleep is a natural activator of hypersynchrony so basically epileptiform brain activity because as you go to sleep your brain synchronizes and so if you tend to have epilepsy it will show up in your sleep you can also use strobe lights to induce epilepsy yeah do you? Hence the warnings on all the video games.

Starting point is 01:41:06 But from an institutional review board, human subjects, I feel like I'm going to induce seizures in people. But hey, I'm not doing any induction. They're just sleeping. I don't have to tell them that. So anyway, they slept in the lab and we looked at their brains to see whether they had any kind of hypersynchrony. And they did.

Starting point is 01:41:28 That was the shocker. Wait, when you say they, these are people with diagnosed epilepsy? You're talking about people who had NDEs. I taught a class on death and loss in graduate school. And as part of that class, one of the people, I kind of inherited a lot of the guest speakers from other people that taught the class. And one of them was a woman who had had a near-death experience and ran a near-death experience support group. And I was like, oh, amazing. So I went, started going to the support group and I was like, there's so many of them. And then I was like, hey, you guys want to come

Starting point is 01:41:58 sleep in the lab and we'll scan your brains and see what's going on there. And so I kind of made friends with the near-death support group. And that's how that study happened. So the group was, I forget how many there were, but I don't know, like 20 or something like people who had had near-death experiences. And then we had people who had some type of non-near-death experience control group. I forget if they were trauma survivors. I can't even remember. Fire death experience? Yeah. Anyway, we had a control group and they did not have any kind of epileptiform activity in their brains.

Starting point is 01:42:33 How do you explain that? That's so fascinating. I'm pretty agnostic as to what that means. Yeah, but just if you're like two drinks in and speculating. There's two possibilities. One is that they did not have epileptiform activity and it's a scar. It's like a residue of the experience. Chances are when you have a near-death experience, and these are people that all had their heart stopped, so they definitely had some anoxia, oxygen deprivation, which can cause hypersynchrony and epileptiform activity.

Starting point is 01:43:02 So that's one possibility. The other possibility is that they had a sort of tendency towards hypersynchrony and epileptiform activity. So that's one possibility. The other possibility is that they had a sort of tendency towards hypersynchrony and that was what caused the experience. But, you know, I was very agnostic about not choosing a position or having an interpretation. I just said, this group has a sort of distinct brain activity compared to non-experiencers. And I just left it at that. But what was so interesting was the response that I got from both complete skeptics and from the near-death experience community. So I got the total opposite from no interpretation on my part. And this has been actually like a kind of thing that's followed me for my whole life. The universe Rorschach test. Let's see how people take it.

Starting point is 01:43:49 Thank you so much for verifying and proving scientifically with neuroscience, because neuroscience can prove anything, right? That heaven exists. You know, and I'm like, well, I don't think I really did that, but thanks. I'm not sure that was in my summary. And then the skeptics would write me and be like, thank you for finally proving that these people are all nuts. And I was like, okay, I didn't either of those things, but that's interesting. And so, wow. I mean, that's a whole other conversation is be a researcher or just talk about charged topics and see what kind of responses you get. Fascinating. I could keep going on the ideas. I have a lot of questions about that. A lot of

Starting point is 01:44:30 the descriptions seem to be incredibly similar to the mystical experiences reported by users of higher dose psychedelics. The descriptions are very, very similar, which is interesting because you have this sort of fear extinguishing related to death in both camps frequently. It seems to be the case. And I'll ask you a question. We can cut it out of the audio if you want, but I'm curious. So there seem to be, and I don't think there's anything in any peer-reviewed studies or anything, but many case studies of supposedly reports of people who observe things while their hearts are stopped or they are technically brain dead. So conversations that are happening, things that are moving around, the tools that are used. They take the dentures out of someone and put them on a specific tray, these types of things.

Starting point is 01:45:29 Is that just complete nonsense? Or do you think that's something that's worth investigating? Peaks my curiosity. It's funny because I have the reputation for being the grumpiest skeptic ever. And now I'm going to tell you some mind-blowing stories from my near-death experience research. What are you trying to do to my reputation here, Tim? We don't have to keep it, but I think I know people will be interested and I'm interested. I have to follow my own interest. I'll tell you a crazy story that happened. This is true. And it happened like the sort of end of the story happened recently. I'll tell you the end of the story first. So we want to move to Vermont and we're building

Starting point is 01:46:05 another off-grid cabin. So we're like interviewing builders. And so we went walking around, we met this builder and we were walking around this other house that he built. And he's just showing, you know, he's showing us all the features of this house. And one of the features was a double pane glass that you can just like flip the switch and there's an opaque gas. Maybe you have one of those. No, I don't have one, but I know the windows you're talking about. And I was like, that's so awesome. Suddenly this window goes opaque and it's like kind of foggy. And that reminded me of this experience that this woman had in my study. she was actually a survivor of a World War II bombing in London. So it was a very long time ago. First of all, she came back speaking another language from her near-death experience.

Starting point is 01:46:55 So that was the first weird thing. So I was like, you know, all of these stories, I was like a graduate student and all of these stories were very far-fetched to me. And this was a language she had not been exposed to? I don't know. Okay. She came back speaking another language. All right. Yeah. I wasn't paying that much attention. Their stories were kind of, we never published their stories, but I have them. You're like, okay, Kathy. All right. I'll write that down.

Starting point is 01:47:18 Let's see what's going on in your brain. But she told me this story about some near-death experiencers have, a lot of them have life reviews where they go through their lives and they kind of experience the consequences of their actions from the perspective of who they impacted, which can be very hellish, depending on what kind of person you've been. But then if people are sort of dead long enough, they also have flash forwards where they actually not only see the past, but also the future. So this was one of the ones that was a flash forward.

Starting point is 01:47:49 And so she told me that she basically saw this city and all the buildings were basically made of this glass that had, and this is a woman, she's probably like 80 at this time. She's not super like technologically sophisticated. And she's describing this glass that when you flip a switch, you can turn it. It has some kind of gas in between it that you can flip a switch and it turns into opaque and that the future will be this glass. And I was like, whatever. Okay. That's so crazy sounding. And then maybe like four years later, she called. And I was like, whatever. Okay, that's so crazy sounding. And then maybe like four years later, she called me and she was like, the glass exists.

Starting point is 01:48:30 And she sent me to like a Scientific American or like Discover Magazine. And it was like Smart Glass, I think it's called. She's like, this isn't the exact company. So don't like invest in it or anything. But like, this is the precursor to what it's going to be. She's like, this is the future of what things are going to be made out of so again completely sealed off that part of my life for like i don't know 25 years 23 years and now i just saw the glass myself in vermont so i don't

Starting point is 01:49:02 know people think i'm super grumpy and skeptical but like i'm just agn So I don't know. People think I'm super grumpy and skeptical, but I'm just agnostic. I don't know. I think just letting the mystery be theirs is fine. It just doesn't need to be solved. I have heard crazy stories like that. I don't know what to make of it. Will I be investing in smart glass? Maybe. I mean, it can't hurt, right? I mean, it could hurt depending on how much you invest. But a little bit might go a long way if they're going to build cities out of it. That's amazing. You know, there's part of me that with no defensible foundation, well, I'll leave that alone for a second. But it feels like some of these NDEs, the high-dose,

Starting point is 01:49:49 or they don't even need to be high-dose, but let's just say higher-dose psychedelic experiences, and many other things, some of these meditative states are kind of touching parts of the same thing. It's like the five blind men holding onto different parts of the elephant, that whole parable. But anyway, working pet theory without a whole hell of a lot to back it up that would stand up to the capital S kind of skeptic societies and so on. But still, something that sticks in my mind. Well, Dr. Britton, this has been great. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think it

Starting point is 01:50:22 will be helpful to people and to many who are listening, probably who have had some of these adverse events or effects who have felt very much alone. And certainly I could have used that feeling when I was going through what I went through at my meditation retreat. Is there anything else that you would like to add? People can find Cheetah House on Twitter at Cheetah House, org on Facebook, Cheetah House.org,

Starting point is 01:50:50 and Instagram, Cheetah.house. Anything that you'd like to add before we wind to a close? I mean, I think that I'd like to end just by thanking you for being as open and forthcoming as you have been. I don't know if you've gotten any pushback, but a number of people who share their negative experiences, any kind of negative experience, but particularly ones with meditation, get a lot of kickback and it's not an easy thing to do.

Starting point is 01:51:19 So I'm very appreciative that you've done that and you didn't have to. So I think it's going to be really helpful for people and, you know, especially this kind of group of people that emulate you and these sort of young male 18 to 30 demographic. So, you know, you're really, in my world, you're, you know, really a hero and doing something that's hard. And just so I just want to say thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that. And it's my pleasure to do it because by offering my story, I'm not saying meditation bad. I actually find meditation in small doses to be incredibly,

Starting point is 01:51:59 incredibly helpful in my life. And that is not mutually exclusive with also saying, hey, in different formats and different doses, things can go off the rails and you need to, being a good boy or girl scout, be prepared for that. And institutions and groups and facilitators and centers need to be prepared for that. And hope is not a strategy. It's like you get in your car and drive with the seatbelt off. It's like, that's just stupid. It's like, maybe you haven't had a head-on collision, but they happen every day. So wear a seatbelt. I mean, they're basic precautions. And I hope that will help people to think about this in a sort of risk-informed way, not so that they can say, I'm never going to meditate, but simply to know this

Starting point is 01:52:47 is a possibility and to ensure that they have support structures around to help them in case they run into turbulence or something even more extreme as I did. And that's true for so many things in life. And I really appreciate you doing the research you do. I'm sure you get a hell of a lot of flack for it. And it's important to have this be part of the conversation. And it's going to increasingly be part of the conversation. I mean, you have startups and companies that are worth billions of dollars promoting mindfulness and meditation. You have the same thing happening in psychedelics, lots of profit motives, which is not automatically something that begets evil, but it does beget incentives. And that means we will most certainly

Starting point is 01:53:33 have tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands and millions of people engaging with things that historically were pretty limited to a fine slice of the population. And we are going to see adverse events. You know what? I promised one other thing that I have to ask about. So how did the Dalai Lama receive your description of your research? Oh, boy. Did you watch the video?

Starting point is 01:54:02 No, I didn't see the video. I saw some text about it, but I did you watch the video? No, I didn't see the video. I saw some text about it. Okay, so there is a video of me presenting to the Dalai Lama as part of the Mind and Life Dialogues. I will let viewers make their own decisions about what they think. I will tell you some feedback that I got. I mean, you'll see me there if you want to watch Willoughby in sympathetic overload. It was a pretty terrifying experience in general. So I don't really remember the feedback as it was happening because I was a little bit out of my

Starting point is 01:54:31 body probably, but there were a lot of people there. The entire Mind & Life board was there. And so they gave me some feedback. A lot of people found his response fairly dismissive and also a bit not particularly compassionate. Like he was laughing half the time. And I was like, well, did I tell you that the duration of impairment was three years? And also the people that it happened to were some of our best and brightest meditation teachers. Name any meditation teacher that you can name who's written Dharma books. He was probably in our study and he probably had a meditation-related challenge. And the Dalai Lama was basically saying that this happened to people because they didn't have enough Buddhist training.

Starting point is 01:55:20 So I don't know. You're not really supposed to talk shit about the Dalai Lama. So you might want to cut this one out, but- No, people need to grow up. Come on. I wasn't particularly impressed, if you're allowed to say that. Yeah. No, it's fine. I just think people need to grow up. It's like, if you have externalized your agency into someone you view as a god, you're setting yourself up for trouble. And I think, I'm not a Dalai Lama expert.

Starting point is 01:55:45 I'm sure that he has and demonstrably has offered a lot to the world, but it doesn't mean he's infallible. This is also, my husband was like, he's the Dalai Lama. He was brought up from like age zero until however old he is now, like to defend Buddhism. What do you expect? So I think that's a pretty good answer. And also, it's very emblematic of, it's possible that certain teachers have never heard of any problems, because why would you tell them that? You never want to be the one that's failing the practice that they're giving you, or telling them that the practice that they gave you is harming you. Like that would, that's just not even like a possibility. So yeah, it is what it is. I left it up there as sort of a historical marker, but I didn't refer you to it because it's kind of a

Starting point is 01:56:37 mixed bag. All right. So boys and girls out there, be safe, measure twice, cut once. And thank you, Willoughby, so much for the time. I really have enjoyed this. I think it will be valuable for people. And at the very least, it's going to spark conversation. So I'm going to get a ton of shit. I'm fine with it because I think this is important. And for people listening, you'll find links to everything, the resources we've mentioned, any books, etc., people, and so on in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blogs.com. And until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary, not just to others, but to yourself. I'll quote Jack Kornfield, actually, and I'm going to paraphrase here, but if your compassion does not include yourself, then it is incomplete. And part of being compassionate, now this is my voice,

Starting point is 01:57:28 is making sure you account for risks and not live in fear, but certainly live informed. So until next time, everyone, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

Starting point is 01:58:10 It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday,. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More

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