When I say side-effects, I mean the same as when we talk about side-effects in medicine or programming: not what it says on the tin.
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Perhaps it's more accurate to say the meditation practice does what it's supposed to be, but the practitioner has an unexpected reaction.
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It's simple enough to plot causes: meditation practices in all shapes and forms lead to more clarity and awareness of body sensations.
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This sounds nice and benign, right? To most people, at least. What's less talked about is how distorted people's body-awareness has become.
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Most people suppress one or several categories of emotional reactions, body-emotional pain and other very uncomfortable experiences.
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For scientific research on the topic, look at the works of Gabor Mate or stress researchers like Robert Sapolsky. It's very well-documented.
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Despite being well-documented, it's not generally known. Powerful interests would prefer that we spend money on medication. But I digress...
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If we take it as fact that these distortions are real, and give rise to various psychosomatic issues up to and including cancerous tumors...
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... it makes perfect sense that if you start exercising meditation regularly enough to improve clarity & body-awareness, it can get messy.
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In my own case, it plays out something like this: I've had severe problems with integrating anger and several other emotions into my life.
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As a child, I was very, very angry - but almost always as self-defense or a reaction to injustices wrought on others.
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Because I was also strong, fast and sharp, this became a problem at school, as teachers had to explain a lot of bruised & injured children.
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Over time, this behavior was beaten out of me (not literally) using various behaviourist techniques designed to "fix" behavior, not causes.
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Despite being both cartoonishly evil and scientifically discredited, behaviourism is still a popular way to "teach" children & criminals.
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Like many other people, I have severe issues surrounding the expression of emotion - because causes were ignored, behaviour manipulated.
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This sort of issue tends to lead to addictive behaviours - had a lot of those - or antisocial behaviour - a bit of that, too.
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It's unresolved pain. The behaviour that has been removed was a way to express pain; is not replaced/integrated/understood, pain continues.
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But the acknowledgement of the pain, in the form of our own behaviour, is gone. Over time, it is pushed into compensatory behaviours.
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When you meditate a lot, and especially after awakening-type experiences, these sensations are very, very difficult to ignore completely.
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In the past year, I've suffered from depression over unresolved issues, pain that can't be effectively soothed and other weird problems.
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These are the sorts of problems that I used to be able to distort or run away from, but now those compensatory behaviours are transparent.
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Even while distracted, there is still pain. The discomfort is never completely gone.
This probably sounds terrible! And it is, but...
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There is also an equal and opposite reaction. A lot of "problems" are more accurately described as the consequences of pathological behavior
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And when the behaviour is bad, and you can see that it's fake and does not actually address your pain, there is a strong incentive to let go
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In letting go, the problem then evaporates. It is just not there anymore, its originative behaviour cut off.
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So you feel different every moment, cut to a natural awareness of pain-as-it-comes. Some days suck, others are fine, but you are *there*.
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This is most certainly not how meditation is generally advertised, but it's what happens when you have strong, unresolved issues.
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Another, more surprising effect, is that most forms of fear people feel seem to be regulatory. It's there to inhibit "bad" behaviour.
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Once those inhibitions (the ones that are clearly phony and counter-productive) start to break down, there is a whole lot less fear.
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I feel sadness, anger and other emotions with far deeper intensity and more often than I remember doing before, but I'm almost never scared.
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Even in situations we might think of as intrinsically frightening are not quite frightening when you recognize your feelings as they appear.
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This has put me in a strange bubble where I am shocked people *don't* react to certain things, and perplexed when they react to others.
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Much of what we would describe as "genuine" emotion is fear of a situation triggering unwanted behaviour; fear you'll lose control.
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And much of what is described as overreaction, childishness or "weird" is really how you actually feel.
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The thing is: it's not a dichotomy. You don't need to either react to emotions or suppress them; society just doesn't know what else to do.
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When you start deeply feeling your feelings, deeply feeling your pain, it comes about that it usually has a very salient cause.
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In some cases, the cause can be dealth with. In other cases, the pain can only be accepted or rejected. Rejection makes it worse, so...
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... in genuine acceptance of what's going on, things either dissolve utterly or come to a sort of stillness. "There is pain. OK, fine."
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Coming to this sort of calm integration, however, takes time. Emotions produce implicit responses, and you don't really *control* them.
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So the chaos, the lack of stability, the sense of losing control, the utter bewilderment as you cry or shout or do something unexpected...
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... is all a normal side-effect of meditating a lot if you have severe distortions in your psychosomatic awareness. Which you do, 99.999%.
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