Affective Domain Summary
Affective changes refer to changes in the type, frequency, or intensity of emotions. A wide range of emotional changes was reported, capturing both discrete (primary) experiences and also responses to changes in other domains (secondary). Practitioners reported having both increased as well as decreased emotionality.
In terms of increased emotionality, fear, anxiety, panic and paranoia was the most frequently reported category, not only in the affective domain, but across all domains, with 82% of practitioners reporting it. Often the fear or anxiety was an additional response of negative affect that coincided with other unexpected or undesired changes, but in some cases fear was non-referential and was reported as a phenomenological change unto itself. Increased emotionality also took the form of increased affective lability, sensitivity, or reactivity in response either to people or to other environmental stimuli. Emotional sensitivity to others often manifested as empathic and affiliative changes (increased feelings of empathy, or sharing others’ emotions) between the practitioner and other human beings. In contrast to increased emotionality, some practitioners reported having fewer or less intense emotions or affective flattening, sometimes even the complete absence of emotions.
Positive affect, including bliss and euphoria were also commonly reported, but sometimes were followed by subsequent depression or agitation, either within the context of a practice or in the transition from formal practice to daily life. In some cases, depression became sufficiently severe to result in suicidal ideation. In other cases, intense positive affect did not alternate with low arousal states, but instead escalated into destabilizing conditions resembling mania and psychosis, which often required hospitalization. It should be noted that neither “mania” nor “psychosis” were phenomenological categories in our coding structure, even if practitioners or more commonly experts used such terms to describe an experience. Rather, because our categories aimed to capture distinguishable components of experience, what practitioners referred to as “mania” was found to be typically composed of a combination of positive affect and increased processing speed, and in some cases, delusions.
Changes in doubt and faith as well as self-conscious emotions (guilt, shame, pride, etc.) were often secondary responses to other meditation experiences and typically had an impact in the social domain as well. Although typically a secondary response, shame in particular was a large contributor to levels of distress.
For practitioners with a trauma history, it was not uncommon for them to report a re-experiencing of traumatic memories, and even practitioners without a trauma history similarly reported an upwelling of emotionally-charged psychological material. Practitioners reported involuntary crying or laughter either in response to positive affective content such as bliss or joy, in response to negative affective content like grief or sadness, or in some cases without content altogether. Other states of negative affect included increased agitation or irritability, which could become intensified to either transient outbursts or long-term expressions of anger and aggression.
In their own words…
Meditators describe their experiences in the affective domain
Crying, Laughing
Rachel
Rachel is a forty-six-year-old female practitioner who engaged in Vajrayāna preliminary practices while living in a nunnery in India. While her teacher, a Tibetan woman, was off teaching in the United States, she dedicated herself to diligently and quickly completing the sngon ’gro, estimating “maybe I got up to where I was doing 2,200 a day of the prostrations.” She likened this diligence to being “an overachiever in some ways and also addictive in some ways.” She also expressed a belief that “the Tibetans do their sngon ’gro really fast, right? So it’s the way it is supposed to be done.” Rachel found that “the effects are more dramatic if you do eight hours of prostrations a day, you get a really intense physical and emotional effect from it.” Despite reporting both a history of abuse and an anxiety disorder, Rachel described only upwelling of emotions associated with different parts of the sngon ’gro. She “experienced a lot of grief and sadness, like crying for days,” which she described as “kind of cathartic.” She recalls having thoughts about how her parents were eventually going to die, and then she “would just bawl for like four hours.” During the mandala part of the preliminaries, Rachel also experienced “uncontrollable laughter,” which she found “a little off-putting,” and “a little hysterical” on account of not being able to control the experience. She interpreted this experience as “a some kind of nervous energy that needed to get out or clear because I was sitting there a lot every day.”
Depression, Dysphoria, Grief
Barbara
Barbara is a sixty-five-year-old female practitioner who reported a history of acute depression. She began having practice-related difficulties while engaged on her sixth three-month retreat—her first Tantric retreat after completing her sngon ’gro. It was while engaged with subtle body visualization practices when she “really started to get into trouble.” After completing her daily sādhanā, she would rest her mind in calm abiding, and it was during these periods when she experienced a resurgence of depressed feelings and emotions as well as suicidal ideation. Barbara felt that she “wasn’t prepared for it, and it wasn’t explained to me in psychological terms that I could understand. I didn't know that ‘māras’ meant my own māras, right?”
Empathic and Affiliative Changes
I was outside of my body, and I couldn’t get back inside. I was about eight to ten inches to the right, and I couldn’t get in. It was like being in a hell realm. My mind functioned okay, not great. But, as I said, I could tell you things. My body was 100 percent fine; it functioned completely well. What suffered for me was my emotional body. I had two young children. I couldn’t feel anything about them. I couldn’t connect with them. I went through all of the routines, you know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all of that stuff. But there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead. It was really like the living dead. It was like being in the hell realm for a year. (#12, Theravāda F)
Another thing was that I didn’t feel like I had any personal space—like, a sense of a boundary-ness. […] If you came close to me, I’d just feel you in a painful way—it’s like you’re inside of me or something. So if anybody had any feelings or emotions… Of course, I was too whacked out to be able to tell what they were, but I could feel it. So I was very permeable in that way. It was not a pleasant experience, either. (#08, Theravāda, M)
Positive Affect
All of a sudden this tremendous amount of bliss, the jet engine feelings of bliss, would come up while I was sitting and meditating.
Or the white lights, or sometimes blue lights, would come up while I was meditating. It was not associated with an unpleasant feeling, or with any kind of palpitations, or rushes, other than this energetic jet engine vibration feeling.
The boundary between me and my environment began to break down.
A bird flew in front of me, but it didn’t fly in front of me—it flew through me. I continued to walk. There were some dogs off in the distance about 200 feet, and one of them mounted the other and they were copulating, and I remember feeling a tremendous joy about this—but it was all happening within me, which is very consistent with a satori experience. Now, at the same time, I was manic, so it’s hard for me to be clear on whether the illness was distorting the experience or whether this was genuinely a satori experience, but I had never experienced anything like this in mania before. (#28, Zen M)
Rage, Anger, Aggression
According to one teacher in our study, a Tibetan male teaching in the United States, challenging experiences involving strong emotional responses could just be nyams. His view was that nyams were a necessary part of the process of purification. Like some of the practitioners quoted above, he expressed a similar theory of how habits and emotions are “very much stuck or stored in our body,” and so his retreats aim to help meditators “to work with their body and perhaps to go into their body.” And like Christopher described above, he suggested that the best way to do this was by adopting a stance of equanimous non-reactivity to whatever emotional content arises in order to effectuate karmic purification.
Mainly it seems what nyams does is kind of enhance, almost blow up, everything very large—all your extremes. Like if you have a little anger and your anger becomes really strong. If you have some paranoia, the paranoia gets really strong. And if you’re having a more beautiful state of mind like love, compassion, it gets really big in the meditation. So nyams, for most people, is like this enhancement, this total blowing, blowing the proportion of their experience. […] So as a teacher I tell people, “Don’t react to it. Don’t get attached to it. Just witness it until it dissolves.” And that is the way to purify your consciousness of karmic patterns or to undoing your grooves in your brain; it is through abiding awareness.
While some Vajrayāna practitioners in our study also reported that a non-reactive “witnessing” approach or responding with “equanimity” was sufficient for navigating transient meditation difficulties, as the next section will demonstrate, emotional experiences that are too intense, intrusive, and prolonged make this approach not viable for some practitioners.
Re-experiencing of Traumatic Memories; Affect Without Recollection
Ashley
Ashley—who was introduced above in the section on somatic changes—also experienced intense emotional experiences while on her solitary retreat. She describes practicing meditations on death that entail contemplating the subtle body in terms of its “elements.” During the “dissolution process” in which earth dissolves into water, water into fire and so on, Ashley reports corresponding changes in her body or her mind. In the later stages of the practice, during the dissolution into redness and blackness, she explains how
It got to this point where I would feel like there was almost this primal element that lives somewhere around my right neck and shoulder that would seize up. I would go through that process a few times. Then, in this process, I started to run through this thing where I had to re-live every experience in my life up until the present moment that I had failed to experience the first time around. Of course, they were only the negative ones.
Ashley focused on one experience in particular, which she said “felt like early childhood—where the sensations were of burning in my right nostril, burning in my ears, burning in my right tonsils, in my vagina, on the exterior of my vagina.” She said she “had to re-experience that one a number of times, to experience all of the detail of it,” and over time a story came together about these parts of her body being burned with a cigarette by the husband of a babysitter. However, Ashley denied having a trauma history, and emphatically stated, “I have no reason to believe this actually happened.” She continued to go through the process of re-experiencing her life for at least “a week of all day long and into the night.” Some experiences surfaced multiple times because “some of them you had to re-experience until it was not a thing, almost—until it lost its energy. I had to experience the energy out of them. […] And then I went on to the next.”
Susan
Susan, a fifty-year-old female, was engaged in a short-term retreat comprised of shamatha, Mahāmudrā, and various Tantric elements, including ritual offerings and subtle body yogas. She was the only Vajrayāna practitioner in our study who had not undertaken the sngon ’gro. During this retreat, she began re-experiencing childhood traumas, though unlike Ashley, Susan did report a trauma history. Susan’s story also demonstrates the relationship between the resurfacing of memories, the physical body, and what she calls her “subtle body” or “energetic body.” She describes being engaged in a sitting meditation period when
I had a flash of my father leaving, which I’d not really had a memory of before. And that put me in touch with some pain at the back of my spine that I often feel, like I want to crack that part of my back or adjust that part of my back. And I decided, I knew there was something… Emotionally I knew some pain wanted to come up around that. After the practice, I thought there might be some sound that would want to come out, and so I waited to really go into that pain in my back, to bring all my focus into that pain until there was a break in the practice period and everybody went to lunch. And so I just sat in the meditation hall with about ten people, and I brought all my awareness into that point of soreness in the back and could feel this sound that wanted to come out of my body. It wasn’t like crying or yelling or anything like that. It was a very primitive sound, and it came up very slowly. My body went down so that my head was on the floor. And it felt very easy to do that.
Then, she went on to describe how “this vibrating sound that seemed to come out of my body, […] and then I knew. It felt done.” Susan attributed this process to her becoming more embodied through the practices she was doing and described how “it just felt like the subtle body outline of my three-year-old self came in to my adult body.” She explained that this was her age when her parents divorced and her father left. While at the time this process “was a really beautiful experience, but I think later it opened up all the trauma of my life.” Later, as she tried to make sense of her experience, she realized that “I was doing all these basically Tantric practices that are […] awakening those energies, and that’s the goal. But I was so ignorant. All I knew was: ‘I love these practices, I feel really connected with [this] lineage, Go for it.’ And nobody really stopped me or slowed me down.”
Betsy
Betsy, a sixty-year-old female engaged in sngon ’gro practice, reported repeatedly experiencing memories of prior abuse that pervaded her attempts to engage in prostrations over the course of two-and-a-half years. She wasn’t doing the prostrations daily, but “would do some weekend intensives.” Even at the outset, she “started to have a sense that something was wrong.” Then, “a month to the day of starting sngon ’gro, I wrote down on my calendar: ‘Remembered.’” Betsy had experienced a “very strong flashback of being abused.” She described being initially quite confused about this.
For the first couple of months that this went on—because this went on for quite a while—I didn’t even believe them. I thought I was going crazy and that I had made it up, that something was wrong with me now, and that—why would this be going on when I’m doing these practices?
The flashbacks came intermittently, sometimes during practice sessions, and other times during dreams or upon waking up. For Betsy, the flashbacks “were a very physical sensation.”
There’d be this sense of tension and tightness, and then when either the memory would come up or a lot of emotion would come up, it would release. […] I could feel sometimes when I was prostrating that sense of it building up energetically in my body—getting tighter and tighter. And it would either release while I was prostrating and I’d be crying, or it wouldn’t and later on I would have a flashback. […] I can remember one time even looking at my hand, and it looked like a child’s hand. I guess that made it even more destabilizing, because it was like literally going through the trauma again, physically as well as—it wasn’t just remembering things like you remember a memory. So, it had a very, very strong effect at the time. […] It’s literally like feeling as though I was in a child’s body again. It wasn’t just looking at my hand, but it’s like my hand felt like a three year old, and so having an experience of my body being very young again.
It took Betsy some time—as well as some assistance—to figure out how to understand and respond to what was happening to her. When she mentioned her experiences to another practitioner who had gone through the sngon ’gro, the practitioner told Betsy “‘I went through that too. […] It’s just part of the purification. If you’ve been keeping any secrets from yourself, they are going to come up now.’” Betsy described being “really pissed” about this and wondered “why didn’t anybody tell me that this could be a part of it?” Initially, these experiences “weren’t interfering with my life—yet,” although “they did later.” She decided to seek therapy, and her first therapist “believed in encouraging the memories,” which she found destabilizing. Her second therapist was much more supportive of her and didn’t work so directly with the memories. However, Betsy wasn’t able to continue with her preliminary practices because she “wasn’t able to do prostrations at all.” She “ended up going into a pretty serious depression” and was having “difficulty dealing with the world.” Then, she lost her job and “got diagnosed with PTSD at that point. Was hospitalized for a short period of time because I felt suicidal.” After that, she met with her teacher, who encouraged her to do shamatha instead, but Betsy “couldn’t even do that at that point.” Over the next three years, she worked with therapists, friends, and family to heal from her trauma history and learned ways of managing her PTSD response. Then, she took monastic vows, which she experienced as “a container of protection” that had a “very positive effect.” From this, she “gradually moved back into my meditation practice again,” eventually practicing the Vajrasattva mantra and completing her cycle of prostrations.
Kevin
The last example is from a Kevin, a thirty-six-year-old male, who was living in a monastic community. The intensity of the monastic lifestyle resulted in an ongoing struggle with his personal trauma history, starting in the context of shamatha practice, during which he “started to have little flashback memories of sexual abuse and other abuse issues that were incredibly frightening.” The memories would be “extremely intrusive” and affected his concentration. He had ongoing “thoughts about rape and sex and terror,” and “the actual practice of sitting generally made that worse.” Kevin describes feeling like “a madman engaging in religious behavior” during this period. These challenges continued through his attempts to engage with Tantric practices, which he did under the direction of both Tibetan and American teachers in his monastery.
I still believed that I should be doing the Vajrayāna practices because that’s what these big Rinpoches were telling me to do. So I went back to doing the sngon ’gro and the deity yoga and all this weird stuff and it never helped. I don’t even know why I did it, because it wasn’t helpful. In fact I think it was very damaging and detrimental and wrong. I’m finished with those Vajrayāna practices and taking all these vows and commitments. I would never recommend that people struggling with mental health problems as much as I was go down that road. […] Trying to do Vajrayāna practices when you’re suffering from horrible, untreated PTSD is just a god-awful idea. The visualizations would just turn into nightmares, where I’d be beheading and raping the deities and stuff. And then absolutely convinced that I was gonna go to hell because of desecrating the sacred Vajrayāna. The visualization practice itself was extremely unstable and frightening and infused with— The intrusive, violent imagery became part of the visualizations, so then I was battling with that. I think that’s an important thing to note.
Kevin decided to seek help from a licensed therapist who was also a Buddhist and ultimately joined a different Buddhist community where therapists were “heavily involved with everything.”
Suicidality
Barbara is a sixty-five-year-old female practitioner who reported a history of acute depression. She began having practice-related difficulties while engaged on her sixth three-month retreat—her first Tantric retreat after completing her sngon ’gro. It was while engaged with subtle body visualization practices when she “really started to get into trouble.” After completing her daily sādhanā, she would rest her mind in calm abiding, and it was during these periods when she experienced a resurgence of depressed feelings and emotions as well as suicidal ideation. Barbara felt that she “wasn’t prepared for it, and it wasn’t explained to me in psychological terms that I could understand. I didn't know that ‘māras’ meant my own māras, right?”
REFERENCES
Jared Lindahl, Willoughby Britton, David Cooper, and Laurence Kirmayer. 2019. Challenging and Adverse Meditation Experiences: Toward a Person-Centered Approach. In Oxford Handbook of Meditation, Ed. Miguel Farias, David Brazier, Mansur Lalljee
Jared Lindahl, Nathan Fisher, David Cooper, Rochelle Rosen, and Willoughby Britton. 2017. The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists. PLOS ONE 12(5): e0176239