First and foremost, yes changing your brain in major ways is dangerous and you should be careful with what you’re doing. I do think that there are safe ways of doing it and that it is dependent on the teachings that you follow and I go into more depth below. The main takeaway is basically that doing loving kindness and cultivating positive mindstates is a prerequisite to doing concentration practice if you’re in a bad state of mind.
I’m basically repeating the takes of my teacher who’s a thai forest tradition monk for like 30 years with some degrees in the background. He’s been a bit of a rogue and tried out a bunch of different meditation practices and the thing that he recommends to people who might be at risk for negative experiences is awareness practice and loving kindness practice and I think this makes a lot of mechanistic sense. (Do take this with a grain of salt but this is my current best theory and I’ve not seen anyone go astray with this advice.)
The basic problem of general meditation is that it is focused on concentration. This is so that your mind can stabilise yet higher concentration states can generally lead to an amplification of existing emotions which can be a large problem if you have lots of negative emotions. This isn’t necessarily the case for awareness practices and loving kindness practice as they induce different mental states for you. They’re not about intensifying experience and only letting a small amount through, they’re about expanding and seeing more. (see more on this model here)
So the advice is, if you’re worried about the downside you can most likely safely do things like: Yoga Nidra, Loving Kindness practice or awareness practice as it is unlikely that you will be absorbed into negative states of mind even though you’re coming from a worse state (since it’s not absorption based!). It is generally the most direct path to healing and acceptance (imo) and it is what has helped my mother for example the most as she’s a lot more calm and accepting of her current illnesses. My guess is that you could probably do up towards an hour or two a day of this practice without any problems at all. (especially yoga nidra and loving kindness practices)
A bit more detailed on sub points:
1. On the feasibility of there being different types of practice:
I did some research on this before and there’s a bunch of interesting contemplative neuroscience out on the differences in activation in brain areas for meditation. Different brain areas are activated and this is something that is also mentioned in altered traits which is a pop science book on the science of meditation. (I did a quick report for a course a while back on this here which might have some interesting references in the end, the writing is kinda bad though (report) (here are the links that are most relevant in the underlying papers: paper 1, paper 2)
2. One of the main concerns later on in the practice is “The Dark Night of the Soul”. According to my teacher this is more of a concept within practices that are based on the burmese tradition and through retreats that are focused on “dry” (meaning non-joyful) concentration like goenka vipassyana retreats and daniel ingram’s books. One of the underlying things he has said is that there’s a philosophical divide between the non-dual and theravadan styles of practicing about whether you “die” or whether your experience transforms into something that it already was (returning to the unborn) which can be quite important for changing your frame of self.
Also final recommendation is to do it alongside therapy for example something like ACT as it will then also tie you to reality more and it will allow both western and eastern healing to work on you in tandem!
Hopefully this might help somewhat? The basic idea is just to cultivate joy and acceptance before training your amplification abilities as positive emotions would be what is amplified instead.
I think it’s a fair suggestion that is adjacent, I do think the mechanisms are different enough that it’s wrong though. Some of what we know of the mechanisms of dreaming and emotional regulation through sleep are gone through here (Dreams, Emotional regulation) and one of the questions there is to what extent yogic sleep is similar to REM sleep.
For your lucid dreaming angle, I would say the main dangerous thing is the inhibition of bodily action that leads to this spiral of anxiety when you can’t move? (Sleep paralysis)
I’m like ~70% (50-90%) certain that this does not occur during yoga nidra and that yoga nidra is a technique that actually helps you if you’ve had these problems before.
I also read this book to get the vibe of it, it doesn’t have the best epistemic rigour but the person writing it has a psychiatry practice specifically focused on yoga nidra and one of the main things that this person claims it helps with is PTSD and sleep related problems. I think it has a specific activation pattern that can be very healing if done correctly, if you’re worried you can probably find a ACT psychologist or similar to do the practice with but I do think it is one of the safer practices you can do.
I am not personally worried about it; I don’t think I’m in the at risk group.
From the people I know in the lucid dreaming community, I have just a couple of reports of people with diagnosed schizophrenia who tried lucid dreaming and it made their symptoms worse. To which the general view seems to be: if it makes your symptoms worse, don’t do it. I don’t have adequate evidence on whether yoga nidra is safe or not; I think a reasonable approach would be to use caution and stop if you start getting bad symptoms.
Also personally, I don’t find sleep paralysis to be a big deal. I know some people are really freaked out by it. But sleep paralysis isn’t the actually risky thing that’s the concern here (the actually risky thing is psychotic symptoms that persist)
This is helpful. Details about specific traditions and their relative dangers is what I hoped to see. Hard for me to verify, of course, but that’s just what it’s like when you’re out of your depth.
First and foremost, yes changing your brain in major ways is dangerous and you should be careful with what you’re doing. I do think that there are safe ways of doing it and that it is dependent on the teachings that you follow and I go into more depth below. The main takeaway is basically that doing loving kindness and cultivating positive mindstates is a prerequisite to doing concentration practice if you’re in a bad state of mind.
I’m basically repeating the takes of my teacher who’s a thai forest tradition monk for like 30 years with some degrees in the background. He’s been a bit of a rogue and tried out a bunch of different meditation practices and the thing that he recommends to people who might be at risk for negative experiences is awareness practice and loving kindness practice and I think this makes a lot of mechanistic sense. (Do take this with a grain of salt but this is my current best theory and I’ve not seen anyone go astray with this advice.)
The basic problem of general meditation is that it is focused on concentration. This is so that your mind can stabilise yet higher concentration states can generally lead to an amplification of existing emotions which can be a large problem if you have lots of negative emotions. This isn’t necessarily the case for awareness practices and loving kindness practice as they induce different mental states for you. They’re not about intensifying experience and only letting a small amount through, they’re about expanding and seeing more. (see more on this model here)
So the advice is, if you’re worried about the downside you can most likely safely do things like: Yoga Nidra, Loving Kindness practice or awareness practice as it is unlikely that you will be absorbed into negative states of mind even though you’re coming from a worse state (since it’s not absorption based!). It is generally the most direct path to healing and acceptance (imo) and it is what has helped my mother for example the most as she’s a lot more calm and accepting of her current illnesses. My guess is that you could probably do up towards an hour or two a day of this practice without any problems at all. (especially yoga nidra and loving kindness practices)
A bit more detailed on sub points:
1. On the feasibility of there being different types of practice:
I did some research on this before and there’s a bunch of interesting contemplative neuroscience out on the differences in activation in brain areas for meditation. Different brain areas are activated and this is something that is also mentioned in altered traits which is a pop science book on the science of meditation. (I did a quick report for a course a while back on this here which might have some interesting references in the end, the writing is kinda bad though (report) (here are the links that are most relevant in the underlying papers: paper 1, paper 2)
2. One of the main concerns later on in the practice is “The Dark Night of the Soul”. According to my teacher this is more of a concept within practices that are based on the burmese tradition and through retreats that are focused on “dry” (meaning non-joyful) concentration like goenka vipassyana retreats and daniel ingram’s books. One of the underlying things he has said is that there’s a philosophical divide between the non-dual and theravadan styles of practicing about whether you “die” or whether your experience transforms into something that it already was (returning to the unborn) which can be quite important for changing your frame of self.
Also final recommendation is to do it alongside therapy for example something like ACT as it will then also tie you to reality more and it will allow both western and eastern healing to work on you in tandem!
Hopefully this might help somewhat? The basic idea is just to cultivate joy and acceptance before training your amplification abilities as positive emotions would be what is amplified instead.
Data is scarce here, but I think yoga nidra is one of the practises under suspicion, so I would not be hasty to assure people it’s safe.
I have done yoga nidra myself, and it seemed fine.
On the other hand: it feels adjacent to lucid dreaming, which, probably, has a risk of precipitating psychosis in people who are vulnerable to it.
To explicate the connection between yoga nidra and lucid dreaming …
Yoga nidra feels like doing a wake induced lucid dream, except you don’t quite cross the threshold into the sleep state.
I think it’s a fair suggestion that is adjacent, I do think the mechanisms are different enough that it’s wrong though. Some of what we know of the mechanisms of dreaming and emotional regulation through sleep are gone through here (Dreams, Emotional regulation) and one of the questions there is to what extent yogic sleep is similar to REM sleep.
For your lucid dreaming angle, I would say the main dangerous thing is the inhibition of bodily action that leads to this spiral of anxiety when you can’t move? (Sleep paralysis)
I’m like ~70% (50-90%) certain that this does not occur during yoga nidra and that yoga nidra is a technique that actually helps you if you’ve had these problems before.
I also read this book to get the vibe of it, it doesn’t have the best epistemic rigour but the person writing it has a psychiatry practice specifically focused on yoga nidra and one of the main things that this person claims it helps with is PTSD and sleep related problems. I think it has a specific activation pattern that can be very healing if done correctly, if you’re worried you can probably find a ACT psychologist or similar to do the practice with but I do think it is one of the safer practices you can do.
I am not personally worried about it; I don’t think I’m in the at risk group.
From the people I know in the lucid dreaming community, I have just a couple of reports of people with diagnosed schizophrenia who tried lucid dreaming and it made their symptoms worse. To which the general view seems to be: if it makes your symptoms worse, don’t do it. I don’t have adequate evidence on whether yoga nidra is safe or not; I think a reasonable approach would be to use caution and stop if you start getting bad symptoms.
Also personally, I don’t find sleep paralysis to be a big deal. I know some people are really freaked out by it. But sleep paralysis isn’t the actually risky thing that’s the concern here (the actually risky thing is psychotic symptoms that persist)
This is helpful. Details about specific traditions and their relative dangers is what I hoped to see. Hard for me to verify, of course, but that’s just what it’s like when you’re out of your depth.