A Note on “The Dark Side of Mindfulness”

C.M. Kushins / Editor of Modern Occultist

Yesterday, a piece in The Atlantic made its way around my circles, tracing the research career of Dr. Willoughby Britton, a Brown University psychiatrist who set out, back in 2004, to prove that meditation improves sleep, and found instead, to her own genuine dismay, that it sometimes made things worse. The editors, as editors tend to do, named it something decidedly attention-grabbing: “The Dark Side of Mindfulness.”

As a practitioner of diverse esoteric practices whose personal journey began with a study (and positive, self-affirming experience) in Buddhism, my first reaction, I'll admit, was something close to what several of you have written in to say yourselves: a flash of defensiveness on behalf of a practice that has given so many of us so much. Having sat with it longer, I don't think defensiveness is the right response, and I don't think this magazine is in the business of arguing against good science to protect a practice we love. Dr. Britton isn't a hostile outsider, and shouldn't be perceived as such. She's a longtime practitioner who once considered ordaining as a Buddhist nun, and her research since that original study has been aimed squarely at making meditation safer and more honestly taught, not at discrediting it. That distinction matters enormously, and it's worth sitting with rather than rushing past.

It's also worth remembering that this isn't news to the traditions themselves. Every serious contemplative lineage I've ever studied has its own vocabulary for the difficulty that can surface in deep practice: the Zen tradition speaks of makyo, the deceptive visions and states that can arise on the cushion; the Christian mystics wrote at length about the “dark night of the soul”; the Theravada tradition has long cautioned that certain stages of insight practice can be genuinely destabilizing without proper guidance. None of these traditions built those cautions into their teaching because meditation is dangerous in some sweeping sense. They built them in because any practice powerful enough to change how a mind relates to itself is powerful enough to occasionally do so roughly, and because that power is precisely why a teacher, a community, and real discernment have always mattered more than a cushion and an app. The late, great Israel Regardie himself recommended proper psychoanalysis and therapy prior to taking up any form of ceremonial magic or intensive mediative practices, something still echoed in modern experts, such as Dr. David Shoemaker.

What the current research actually shows, when you look past the headline, is something narrower and more useful than “meditation is bad”: that difficulty tends to cluster around intensive retreats, unsupported solo practice, and practitioners carrying unaddressed trauma, and that the research world has, until quite recently, simply not been looking for it. That's not a scandal, necessarily, but rather a science catching up to something contemplative teachers have quietly known for a very long time, and it should make us better practitioners and better teachers, not more frightened ones. (It may, however, rightly gear those new to meditation and mindfulness away from online influencers inexperienced or properly accredited when it comes to teaching more advanced methods.)

I will say that in an age of "click-bait" and sensationalistic grabs for attention, perhaps The Atlantic could have chosen a more appropriate headline. However, in my many years as a freelancer, I'm well-aware that that was, most likely, out of Dr. Britton's hands once the article was handed in. To this, I'll say plainly what I believe: rigorous honesty about a practice's risks has never once weakened a tradition worth keeping. It's how medicine matured, how self-analysis matured, and it's how meditation will mature too, into something taught with the same care that made it worth teaching in the first place. My own practice hasn't wavered, nor is it going to. If anything, this made me trust it more.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)

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