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The Hidden Risks of Meditation — Dr. Willoughby Britton | The Tim Ferriss Show

Brought to you by: Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega fish oil (Use code TIM for 20% off Ultimate Omega): https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/ Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/Tim Resources from this episode: https://tim.blog/2023/11/22/dr-willoughby-britton/ Willoughby Britton, PhD is a clinical psychologist, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University Medical School, and the director of Brown’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. Her clinical neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices (meditation) on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other conditions. She is especially interested in which practices are best- or worst-suited for which types of people or conditions and why. She is probably best known for her research on adverse effects—why they happen and how to mitigate them. Dr. Britton is the founder of 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. Please enjoy! [00:00] Intro [02:37] Where did Willoughby’s interest in meditation begin? [05:45] Discovering a link between meditation and insomnia. [08:02] Challenging assumptions about meditation as a purely beneficent practice. [12:00] Awakening is not a metaphor. [14:19] Can mindfulness be too much of a good thing? [16:44] My personal experience with meditation defying positive expectations. [25:35] Undesirable consequences of meditation are more common than you probably think. [27:41] What makes some people more vulnerable to the potential dangers of meditation than others? [34:44] Mitigating risk of adverse effects [43:39] Altered states as a deviation from baseline. [44:26] The impact of diet on meditation. [46:16] The neuroscience behind psychedelics and meditation. [51:15] The dangers of combining psychedelics and meditation. [53:09] Choosing and vetting the ideal meditation retreat. [58:48] When being a high achiever is a risk factor. [1:03:49] Does Willoughby currently practice any forms of meditation? [1:06:41] When meditation compromises cognition. [1:10:36] Duration of symptoms and duration of impairment. [1:11:44] Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). [1:12:53] Differences between meditation-related and psychedelic-related adverse events. [1:15:44] The origin of Cheetah House. [1:18:12] Ideological power and scaffolding. [1:26:59] Willoughby’s self-care. [1:31:07] Resources for people seeking relief from meditation-related adverse effects. [1:36:35] Institutional betrayal and the empathy that comes from being humbled. [1:39:03] Advice for aspiring psychedelic healers. [1:41:38] Near-death experiences (NDEs). [1:53:00] Parting thoughts, and the Dalai Lama’s response to Willoughby’s meditation research. Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 900 million downloads and been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three years running. Sign up for "5-Bullet Friday" (Tim's free weekly email newsletter): https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-yt/ Follow the Tim Ferriss Podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast/ Visit the Tim Ferriss Blog: https://tim.blog/ Follow Tim Ferriss on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tferriss/ Follow Tim Ferriss on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss/ Like Tim Ferriss on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/

Tim FerrisshostDr. Willoughby Brittonguest
Nov 22, 20232h 1mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:37

    Intro

    1. TF

      [upbeat music] Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And it is my pleasure today to have Willoughby Britton, 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 Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, and that is affective 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 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 @cheetahhouseorg. Facebook you can find at cheetahhouse.org, and on Instagram @cheetah.house. Dr. Britton, thank you for making the time today. Nice to see you.

    2. WB

      Thank you so much for having me.

    3. TF

      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 wanna 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, et cetera, that you can observe in some people, and some of the adverse effects 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.

  2. 2:37 – 5:45

    Where did Willoughby’s interest in meditation begin?

    1. TF

      How did you first become interested in meditation?

    2. WB

      Like many people, I had a life crisis [laughs] 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. Like, the just, it wasn't in my repertoire of possibilities that somebody could just not be there anymore. So I had, you know, probably diagnosable PTSD at that point, and I really didn't wanna take medication. I was only 20. And my dad sent me A Path with Heart [laughs] by Jack Kornfield.

    3. TF

      Hmm.

    4. WB

      And that became my bible for the next probably decade. And so for those of you who don't know, uh, 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, a practical way to manage all of the emotions that were happening. And it was great because it was allowing them to be there too, you know? It was like it wasn't suppressing them. Ironically, that book, that particular book that he wrote, I only got about halfway through it because there was this, the, the whole second half I just, like, could not relate to because it was like the spiritual rollercoaster 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, it 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? You know, what is, what's going on? And 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, 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, at the time, the only place in the world that had a consciousness studies center.

    5. TF

      Hmm.

    6. WB

      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, like, those two lives were so divided that it, I needed to combine them just to be, like, an integrated human

  3. 5:45 – 8:02

    Discovering a link between meditation and insomnia.

    1. WB

      being. And so, uh, for my dissertation, I did a study on the effects of mindfulness training on sleep. I was working in a sleep lab and, and sleep is, you know, it's, it's a legal altered state of consciousness and it's linked with every type of possible health ... issue. And so if you wanna study altered states of consciousness, it's a good one to study because it's, you know, you're not gonna have, it's not like psychedelics that get banned. Everyone does it, happens every day.

    2. TF

      [laughs] Hard to ban sleep. [laughs]

    3. WB

      Yeah, so it was a good one to choose. At the time, this is two- around 2000, there really wasn't great research. A lot of the meditation research was 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, 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 measure the 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-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 .8. So, like, no matter where you went, there it was. And so, and this is my first confession, is that I didn't publish the data because I was like, "Oh, this is the wrong..." You know, I was like an evangelist for meditation 'cause I-

    4. TF

      Mm-hmm

    5. WB

      ... 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.

  4. 8:02 – 12:00

    Challenging assumptions about meditation as a purely beneficent practice.

    1. WB

      And at some point, when I was coming, I came to Brown to do my residency, couple years later I was on a meditation retreat and I mentioned the data that I had found, which was 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, you know, clinical psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows that if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping."

    2. TF

      [laughs]

    3. WB

      And I was like-

    4. TF

      Bulletin. [laughs]

    5. WB

      ... "What?" 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, or, 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, you know, signed up for whatever was around and believed everything that people said and the way that it was marketed as a, 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, like, 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, like, really look at the translation process of how these practices, like where they came from, what kinds of changes they made, what was the journey like to get here into, you know, into the West, and really unpack that process." And then the second question was, what other little nuggets of, of knowledge do these meditation teachers have that they're not telling us? And I, 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.

    6. TF

      Hmm.

    7. WB

      And I thought like, "Wow, two in one year is, it's kind of a lot." Seemed like a lot to me. So I went back to the 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, this look of like, "Oh, shit."

    8. TF

      [laughs]

    9. WB

      And I was like, "Oh, oh wow, like, there is a story here. Like, 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 as a meditation researcher, I was like, "Okay, we need to start asking these questions." So that whole story is the beginning of The Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, which was probably the, the simplest study that I've ever done, the hardest but simplest, in 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, what are they? How do you interpret them? And then very practically, what do you do about them?" So, like, very straightforward set of questions. And yeah, that took 10 years. It's 3,000 pages of-

    10. TF

      [laughs]

    11. WB

      ... qualitative data, and I, I don't even know how many papers we've written. We're still writing papers based on that data. I think we're, like, over 10 now. So it's, it's really just a wormhole, which we're gonna go down together.

    12. TF

      [laughs]

  5. 12:00 – 14:19

    Awakening is not a metaphor.

    1. TF

      Oh, we are, we are gonna go arm in arm down the wormhole. So let me pause for a second. I wanna 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 gonna leave that as a Scooby Snack at the end for people. So I do, I do wanna talk about that. However, I want to dig into the sleep for one second.

    2. WB

      Hmm.

    3. TF

      If people stop sleeping, period, full stop, eventually they die, right? So the restorative functions of sleep, I mean, a- as it is, still poorly understood, but are critical to human functioning and survival. So how would you explain, if it is indeed true 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?

    4. WB

      We can point readers to various papers. There is a paper that I called Awakening is Not a Metaphor.

    5. TF

      [laughs]

    6. WB

      I had to fight hard to keep that title.

    7. TF

      That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

    8. WB

      Yeah.

    9. TF

      [laughs]

    10. WB

      It's a review of different studies across different types of methodologies looking at how meditation affects the wake-sleep system.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. WB

      It's not as straightforward as, like, you stop sleeping or you sleep less. It's, you know, it's gonna 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-

    13. TF

      Mm

    14. WB

      ... they actually had an, a- an increase in sleep quality.

    15. TF

      Mm.

    16. WB

      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, non-linear relationship.

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. WB

      So just to recap,

  6. 14:19 – 16:44

    Can mindfulness be too much of a good thing?

    1. WB

      it, it does not, it's not gonna give you insomnia probably.

    2. TF

      Automatically, yes.

    3. WB

      Depending on-

    4. TF

      Yeah, because when we talk about meditation-

    5. WB

      Yeah

    6. TF

      ... it's like, oh, you do meditation.

    7. WB

      Yeah.

    8. TF

      It's kind of like, oh, you do sports or you do exercise.

    9. WB

      Right.

    10. TF

      It's like, well, there are a million different parameters and types and so on, right?

    11. WB

      Right, and I, and I think, you know, one of the other papers that I wrote, which is called Can Mindfulness Be Too Much of a Good Thing, introduces this idea of a small amount or an optimal amount can do exactly what the, you know, the hype and the promotions and the advertising says. Like, a lot of, 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 c- often comes with sort of higher doses. So one of the ways to understand this particular finding and, and actually a l- a lot of the other ones that are kind of on the, on the hyperarousal spectrum, would be if you think about meditation as a attention-enhancing product, you know? Like, it, it gets often compared with or sort of marketed alongside Ritalin and modafinil and coffee and caffeine and, you know, all these stimulants that, that help attention.

    12. TF

      Mm.

    13. WB

      And so if you think about, if you think about meditation as one of those-

    14. TF

      [laughs]

    15. WB

      I mean, think about what happens when you-

    16. TF

      Spiritual modafinil

    17. WB

      ... yeah

    18. TF

      ... which is an anti-narcolepsy drug, for people who don't recognize it.

    19. WB

      Yeah.

    20. TF

      Yeah.

    21. WB

      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, t- taking too much, just drink too much coffee, what happens? You have a panic attack and you can't sleep. You know, like, 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 it, it's gonna be on the psychosis spectrum, especially if you have sort of tendencies in that direction. So it's not, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to think that, like, here's another, uh, you know, attention-enhancing product that with certain people and certain types of doses, it's gonna lead to a hyperarousal syndrome, and that's pretty much-

    22. TF

      Mm

    23. WB

      ... exactly what we're seeing. So that is one of the potential mechanisms.

  7. 16:44 – 25:35

    My personal experience with meditation defying positive expectations.

    1. TF

      So what I might do for folks who just don't have the personal context on me that I alluded to earlier is I'll t- I'll tell, if it's okay with you, a bit of my story, which in some ways led to this conversation, and certainly I, it sounds like, based on what we were discussing before recording, that, that people have mentioned this to you [laughs] and it's, so it's been, it's been a match made for many reasons. So I wanna give folks sort of a contrast, uh, by giving present day and then the story of what happened to me at my silence 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, with [laughs] TM. But if you're taking it for the off-the-shelf offering and following the basic 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 helps. 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 [laughs] of sorts. However, if we flash back, and this sort of alludes to the, maybe like 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 [laughs] triaged and helped address the situation I found myself in ultimately. But I, 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 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, uh, lower 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 the blended, like 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 wanna say it was 600 or so milligrams, which is, 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 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 around... 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, 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 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 th- these traumatic experiences from age two to four, and if people go to tim.blog/trauma, 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. So now what do you have? You have compounding [laughs] 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 gonna be able to function. I mean, I, I, I am able to navigate my day-to-day here right now with extreme pain, but I've, I have no confidence I'll be able to go back to normal life and make decisions, manage my business, interact in all the ways that are necessary." And that's when I set a 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 have 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've 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 to Jack, and the contrast, and I'll, 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, 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've been fucked, for lack of a better, uh, technical term. How common is that kind of experience, I guess? And, uh, certainly feel free to start wherever you'd like or pick that apart in any way that makes sense. Uh, 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 sort of junior teacher at the time, and she was unequipped. She was not equipped to handle what was happening, but Jack was.

    2. WB

      Yeah, so many different thoughts.

    3. TF

      [laughs] Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Yeah. [laughs]

    4. WB

      I mean, one is just, wow, and, like, wow on so many ways. Like, wow, that, that happened to you.

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. WB

      And, two, that you're talking about it-

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm

    8. WB

      ... you know, publicly. That's amazing. So thank you, because I think it's gonna be really helpful-

    9. TF

      My pleasure

    10. WB

      ... to a lot of people.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

  8. 25:35 – 27:41

    Undesirable consequences of meditation are more common than you probably think.

    1. WB

      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 [laughs] that 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 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, like, what are the actual percentages is-

    2. TF

      Mm-hmm

    3. WB

      ... that's where we get into the rabbit hole of research and frequency research, which is, which is actually quite complicated because it's about, like, w- what do you mean by this? [laughs]

    4. TF

      Right.

    5. WB

      You know? And, like, frequent among who? And so it, it's ... you know, it, it becomes more complicated. And I guess one other question is, given what I do, like, that I'm, you know, an expert on meditation-related challenges and, and neurobiology, is there anything that we can talk about that would be useful to you to sort of make sense of? Do you still have ... Do you have any lingering questions that haven't been answered yet? So that, that's ... I'll just put that out there. And then another thing is, like, 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-

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. WB

      ... all at once-

    8. TF

      Yeah

    9. WB

      ... to, you know, break on through to the other side is a story that I see, again, over and over and over again.

    10. TF

      Doesn't always turn out well, you're saying? [laughs]

    11. WB

      No, it's more like a risk factor.

    12. TF

      Yeah, yeah, for sure.

    13. WB

      At Cheetah House, we have a, a program called Letters to My Former Self where people come on-

    14. TF

      [laughs]

    15. WB

      ... who did stuff like that, and then they're like, "Honey, let me tell you, like, what I wish I'd known when I was, like, your age."

    16. TF

      [laughs]

    17. WB

      And they tell ... You know, you, you tell your former self advice. I would love you to do

  9. 27:41 – 34:44

    What makes some people more vulnerable to the potential dangers of meditation than others?

    1. WB

      that.

    2. TF

      It should also be a letter to your future self [laughs] so you don't do-

    3. WB

      Right

    4. TF

      ... the same thing again. I do have a couple of questions and-

    5. WB

      Yeah

    6. TF

      ... 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 a, an exacerbating factor more than the microdosing of psychedelics, which is not to recommend to anyone that they combine things on their first meditation retreat. Look, there are lots of meditation retreats. Do it the plain vanilla way first [laughs] would be my strong recommendation. It's gonna be hard enough, don't worry, would be recommendation number one. There are some people, and this is gonna 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, and we could spend a lot of time defining what that means, but broadly speaking, let's just say with the, the usual suspects that a lot of people would recognize, let's just say LSD, psilocybin, et cetera, there are certainly others, ayahuasca could be thrown into this, for ... And N,DMT, 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 what the intake form, right, should look like. What does the intake look like for a meditation 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, the things that make it more likely?

    7. WB

      So I think th- this is a very natural place to start, which is sort of, you know, screening out-

    8. TF

      Mm-hmm

    9. WB

      ... people who shouldn't meditate. And now I'm gonna unpack why that's [laughs] a very difficult thing to do.

    10. TF

      Yep.

    11. WB

      So I conducted a epidemiological study with Vichy Davidson and Simon Goldberg looking at meditation-related adverse effects, how often they happen, and, and risk factors. And so, you know, statistically speaking, there is an increased risk factor for a large range of, of variables that would be considered stressors, adversity. So trauma history, psych history, being some kind of minority group, whether it's racial minority or sexual orientation minority, something like that is gonna be a chronic stressor, and that's going to be, you know, heighten the risk f- for adverse effects. But at the same time... And so it's, it's very easy to just sort of, well, th- those people shouldn't meditate, you know? It's very easy to, to kind of do that. Well, first of all, you know, more than 90% of people have exposure to a criterion A stressor, so that would be, like-

    12. TF

      [laughs]

    13. WB

      ... almost everyone gets ruled out-

    14. TF

      Right

    15. WB

      ... except for the extremely sheltered and privileged, which would be, like, not what we're trying to do with, you know, meditation is just limit it to those people. And then in our, the varieties of contemplative experience study, 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, in- incorrect practice, that kind of thing, that none of those actually panned out to be true. And so in, 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.

    16. TF

      Hmm.

    17. WB

      And so while those are risk factors, it doesn't mean that if you don't have them, that you're safe.

    18. TF

      Right.

    19. WB

      So m- the sort of take-home message from me is I'm not a big fan of screening people out. I think the, the, the other side of this is that there are a lot of people... And then, and this might be ch- 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 wanna red flag. So you can't... It, it would be just a strange thing to start saying, "Oh, you can't. Those people can't have access to this technology." So, and I've gotten letters from people that say, like, t- you know, "Please don't just rule us out," people with what would be considered serious mental illness.

    20. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    21. WB

      "Please don't just rule us out because we seem like it would be a bad idea for us," because-

    22. TF

      Well, well, let me-

    23. WB

      Yeah

    24. TF

      ... pause for one second and just say it seems to depend on the type of meditation we're talking about, right? For meditating-

    25. WB

      Yeah

    26. TF

      ... 20 minutes in the morning, there might be one intake, but for doing a seven-day silent retreat, there might be a different intake, right?

    27. WB

      Mm-hmm.

    28. TF

      So I don't know if you're able to speak to that because those two things, I mean, had about as much in common for me as, like, playing with a Hot Wheels car on the top of your kitchen table and, like, driving an F1 car around a hairpin turn. [laughs]

    29. WB

      Right.

    30. TF

      Like, they, they were about... They're like, yeah, they both involve cars. Okay. But they're [laughs] like, they were so-

  10. 34:44 – 43:39

    Mitigating risk of adverse effects

    1. TF

      Okay. Can we pause for a second?

    2. WB

      Yeah.

    3. TF

      So I wanna talk about that. I wanna give people, just so not everyone is like, "Oh, my God, the next time I meditate is my, am I gonna have a psychic implosion and end up in a straitjacket?" Just to put some numbers to things, I want to read something here and it, just to have you fact-check this so people have some numbers on prevalence, and also just a, a comparative sort of parallel of sorts that, uh, we'll spend a little bit of time on. Then I wanna talk about safety training, monitoring, and off-ramps, and things like that. So this is from mindfulnessexercises.com, uh, 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 of 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 of psychotherapy, 5 to 13%." Is that roughly accurate, would you say?

    4. WB

      The f- frequency research is very challenging, and so-

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm

    6. WB

      ... I do think that the epidemiological study is probably the, the most valid research, but the, somehow that, the, the data that they're citing is actually from combining two different studies.

    7. TF

      [laughs] Okay. Got it.

    8. WB

      So the epidemiological study, the denominator was anyone who's ever meditated even once.

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. WB

      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, you know, like no big deal. More concerning is that 10%, so one in 10 people who had tried meditation even once, would have a meditation-related adverse effect that was associated with impairment in functioning. And so we can go down the rabbit hole of definitions if you want, but I think that for me, like, having a, an, a negative experience during meditation, which we call negative valence, I don't consider that an adverse effect. I think that if you're, if you don't have some kind of negative experience in your meditation at some point, you're probably sleeping, because it's, it's not a warm bath for the mind. It can be challenging. So I- 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.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. WB

      Then I'm like, "Okay, that's when we not start, need to start talking about whether there's maybe alternatives."

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. WB

      And so one in 10 is really the number that is jumping out of that paper.

    15. TF

      Yeah.

    16. WB

      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 the 5 to 15%.

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. WB

      They correlate with each other, but yeah.

    19. TF

      So what are some things that we can do to risk mitigate in terms of ... And you can, 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, I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a psychotic break, but I felt out of control, right? I felt like I was not able to ... I was, 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?

    20. WB

      I think it helps to start with ... We created a taxonomy of 59 categories of meditation-related challenges, and it wasn't until m- 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 that these are, these are not necessarily so altered states, but things that, that might be somewhat recognizable to people. So one of the ways that I think is the most ef- 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 and to be like, "Tim, how do you know when you're getting outside of your window of tolerance? When you're like, how do you know when you're feeling, quote unquote, 'out of control?' Like, what is your indicator for that?"

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. WB

      You can just answer that.

    23. TF

      Sure. 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, a real event, like a memory, or a perceived threat, like a hypothetical worst-case scenario, and I just loop and loop and loop and loop. And I'm furthermore aware of the looping, right? Like there's part of me-

    24. WB

      Mm-hmm

    25. TF

      ... as the observer that's like, "Holy shit, I can't believe I seem incapable of stopping this. I know it's not productive."

    26. WB

      Mm-hmm.

    27. TF

      "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 f- yeah, flock of canaries in the coal mine.

    28. WB

      Is there anything that is an earlier indicator than that before you get there?

    29. TF

      [laughs] 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. But I would say that over-caffeination, right? Lack of sleep, fasting. There are a handful of things that seem more likely to precipitate this type of experience than other things, and it doesn't happen all the time.

    30. WB

      Mm-hmm.

  11. 43:39 – 44:26

    Altered states as a deviation from baseline.

    1. WB

      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 [laughs] in trauma, in trauma speak, that is dysregulation. You know, an altered state is not necessarily a good idea for someone who's trying to stay stable.

    2. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    3. WB

      And so just having people tr- be able to track that and like, "Okay, like, that thing, my indicator light is on, what typically helps that?" And go do that. I need to go lift some weights. I need to go dial back, and I skip the coffee this afternoon.

    4. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    5. WB

      Or, like, maybe eat something.

  12. 44:26 – 46:16

    The impact of diet on meditation.

    1. WB

      By the way, the, the fasting thing is really, 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, they tend to be vegetarian, and they tend 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, you're going off of your, like my personal high-fat, high-protein diet. Like I, I get very unregulated and, and floaty and, and sort of ungrounded when I go on retreats, and I really wanna have, like, heavy food. And so a lot of people found that to be a factor and found that actually eating really high-fat protein meat is a remedy-

    2. TF

      Hmm

    3. WB

      ... for problems. And this is also, you know, recommended within Tibetan medicine and, like, in old, you know, Buddhist texts. Textual reports will also report eating meat and heavy, 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, like, 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, like, that's when you intervene. So those were the two things that all teachers mentioned as being something that they worry

  13. 46:16 – 51:15

    The neuroscience behind psychedelics and meditation.

    1. WB

      about.

    2. TF

      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, 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 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, I'll just read. Quote, "'Practicing letting go of concepts,' one meditator told Britton, '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 gonna underline is what's coming next. Meditators also reported diminished emotions, both negative and positive. Quote, "I had two young children," um, another meditator said. "I couldn't feel anything about them. I went through all the routines, 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 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, right? 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, um, because I've seen it in both camps.

    3. WB

      There's kind of two different ways that this can happen with meditation and, and psychedelics. With meditation, if you look at the neuroscience of meditation, and there's lots of different kinds, but, like, we'll just say, like, concentration practice, you tend to see a downregulation of the limbic system, the amygdala, and, you know, activation of the prefrontal cortex. So attention system goes up. Downregulates the limbic system. And again, this is a, this can be great, good things. You know? Like, you regulate all your, all your anxiety and depression. But if you keep going, then you're gonna 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 gonna see, if you continue to downregulate your limbic system with meditation, and you take it far enough, then you, you will see, you know, a decrease in the intensity of, of all emotions. [smacks lips] And that can lead, you know, otherwise known as anhedonia. But depends on, you know, according to Obaseki, that could also be something that's, that's could be equanimity, so depends on what you want.

    4. TF

      [laughs] Tomato, tomato.

    5. WB

      Yeah.

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. WB

      Obviously, the person who didn't feel anything for her children, that was not her goal.

    8. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    9. WB

      But I actually, that particular quote that you're reading, I read that quote in a conference, and a Buddhist scholar, like, jumped up at the end and said, you know, "Cutting attachments with affection with your families is exactly what you're supposed to be doing."

    10. TF

      [laughs]

    11. WB

      And so I was like, "Okay, well, we need to talk about what your goals are." So-

    12. TF

      Yeah. Thou, thou doth protest too much. [laughs]

    13. WB

      So with, with meditation, like, there is overlap. So what's interesting about that model, prefrontal cortex control over the limbic system, is that that's also the neuroscience of dissociation.

    14. TF

      Hmm.

    15. WB

      So there are certain forms of meditation that mimic the exact neurobiology of dissociation. That's one way to end up in this place. 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, 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 everything's getting heightened, and at some point, your system's like, "Whoa, this is too much," and you have this beautiful, adaptive, natural breaker switch called dissociation that will basically shut down the, the limbic system again, and you'll basically end up in that first state that I just talked about, where you have, like, a strong activation of the prefrontal cortex and a downregulation of the limbic system. And so it's two different roads to the same place.

  14. 51:15 – 53:09

    The dangers of combining psychedelics and meditation.

    1. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    2. WB

      And so what's interesting and sort of the overlap with psychedelics is that too-much kind of response that, that can lead to dissociation, it doesn't always have to be negative.

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. WB

      People can have, like, a euphoric, unitive experience where they, like, they merge with the universe or they have just something just ecstatic kind of experience, but their organism is like, "That was, that was too intense. That was too much for me. I'm turning, I'm turning on the breaker." And they wake up in the morning and they're like, they feel dead, and they spend, like, years trying to recreate that awesome experience, but they're s- 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, of psychedelics and meditation very often, a lot of times in this scenario, where they go on a meditation retreat, have a ecstatic experience or just a very intense experience, wake up feeling dead and anhedonic, and they think, "I gotta, I gotta sort of, like, shock the system back into, 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 the end, we also see the opposite, people who have the ex- the initial experience on psychedelics, and then they decide, "Well, I'm very dysregulated," and they get told, you know, by, by various authorities, "You should go on a meditation retreat," or, "You should meditate." Either way, at least the people who show up at Cheetah House, the combination was not the answer for them.

  15. 53:09 – 58:48

    Choosing and vetting the ideal meditation retreat.

    1. TF

      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, how can one know where to practice and vet properly, right? If, 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 reasonably safely to people who fit certain criteria. If someone finds a facilitator who says, "I've never had... No one under my care has ever had a bad trip," that is a huge red flag, 'cause it means they're either deluding themselves, they're lying, or they're really inexperienced, right? Those are kind of the only options on the table, because you're, you're effectively using nuclear power [laughs] to change the, you know, 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, right? If you go to, to push my F1 analogy, if you go to a racetrack, let's just say, and you're going to a track day- And the track owner says, "We've never had any accident of any type on our track." That's a bad thing, because [laughs] someone's going to have an accident. You wanna make sure they have protocols in place, they have experience, they have the presence of mind to handle it calmly, et cetera, et cetera. 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 for those people, to maybe offset that a little bit, are there retreats that you ever recommend? And how can someone vet if they're considering doing a retreat?

    2. WB

      I mean, I think that a lot of it has to do with matching the goals to the person.

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. WB

      So I don't wanna necessarily rule out or recommend any particular retreat across the board.

    5. TF

      Yeah.

    6. WB

      I think that there are certain retreats that are pretty repeat offenders.

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. WB

      And those are ones that have, like, high dose, like 15 hours of meditation a day, no movement practice.

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. WB

      Often you see an alternation between walking-

    11. TF

      Right

    12. WB

      ... and sitting, and sometimes there's even yoga added. So you know, more intense practices with no movement, and also not necessarily tailored feedback from teachers.

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. WB

      So I would be very careful before going on one of those. And I think just in general, like, there are m- so many different options for retreats these days. You can do, like, an afternoon retreat where it's only a couple hours.

    15. TF

      Mm.

    16. WB

      Like, start there.

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. WB

      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, you know? Like, titrate up and, and just do it, like, one at a day at a time if you're worried about, like, you know, rather than signing up for a 10-day retreat.

    19. TF

      Something I have not mentioned before-

    20. WB

      Yeah

    21. TF

      ... is that I've done shorter meditation retreats, like two or three days, with no issues whatsoever.

    22. WB

      Yeah.

    23. TF

      So I just wanna point that out. The other fine detail that I want to mention, 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.

    24. WB

      Mm-hmm.

    25. TF

      And I violated that rule. [laughs] Right? I overrode that.

    26. WB

      Right.

    27. TF

      And also added the psychedelics, which certainly I had not mentioned to anyone until I had already sort of capsized.

    28. WB

      Yeah. So I think those are definitely things... I mean, that, this, this never used to be an issue, but I know that, that people are doing that, that, that people are bringing psychedelics on retreats. And I think a lot of the retreats, they have to manage a lot of people.

    29. TF

      Yeah.

    30. WB

      People are already having, like, challenging experiences, the regular kind [laughs]

  16. 58:48 – 1:03:49

    When being a high achiever is a risk factor.

    1. TF

      retreats. 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?

    2. WB

      So in terms of the retreat or meditation type, or in terms of personal risk factors?

    3. TF

      The retreat or meditation type that seem to produce a higher volume of people with these issues.

    4. WB

      I would say retreats that recruit or are attracting a certain type of meditator, which, by the way, like [laughs] you fit the bill, like, pretty exactly.

    5. TF

      [laughs] Yeah.

    6. WB

      When I heard this story, I was like, wow, like, that's pretty emblematic of, like-

    7. TF

      Text- textbook

    8. WB

      ... you know. Yeah.

    9. TF

      [laughs]

    10. WB

      Young male, pretty educated, combining all sorts of, of tools. You know, fairly aggressive.

    11. TF

      Yeah.

    12. WB

      We used to joke that one of the risk factors was zealotry, a kind of zealotry.

    13. TF

      [laughs]

    14. WB

      A zeal. So something like that. And so people, there's a certain kind of almost, like, military, this is gonna be a really, really hard retreat. Like, those types of retreats are a little bit more high risk. And I think there's also the combination of the person and the teacher/format.

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. WB

      One of the things that we found that was really shocking in the varieties of contemplative 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 actually, like, looked at the data, like, 75% had graduate degrees, MD, PhDs, JDs. You know, these were like CEOs of major companies. These were, like, super high-achieving people, and we were 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.

    17. TF

      [laughs] I was just about to say, like, the drug addiction in, in the medical profession is off the charts. Like, suicide's off the charts. [laughs] So, right.

    18. WB

      It's because, like, these are the kinds of people that you're like, "Okay, you're gonna sit and follow your breath," you know? And they're like, "Okay." Like, they, they're the ones that show up Early for the meditation and they're the last ones to leave. They're the ones that are like, they follow instructions exactly.

    19. TF

      [laughs]

    20. WB

      And they would never modify the instructions for their own benefit. That would not even occur to them.

    21. TF

      [laughs] Unless they make it more intense. [laughs]

    22. WB

      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, you know, really any type of meditation, spiritual system with your having, maintaining your inner compass, that's gonna be a recipe for a much better outcome. But not, not everybody can do that and not all systems are tolerant of that.

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    24. WB

      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, you know, in the middle so that I'm not, like, continuing to meditate," and the meditation manager, 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, on Wednesday we'll have burger night for people who need-

    25. TF

      [laughs]

    26. WB

      ... to, like, increase the, like, fat intake," you know? That is actually happening now.

    27. TF

      Yeah. The vegetarian diet piece is super interesting. I mean, I, I don't know if the sort of acuity is, is sufficient as a factor, but it, 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 l- a lot of reasons. But some of these more, uh, for lack of a better term, sort of chaotic conditions are contraindicated respond really well to something called metabolic psychiatry with... and Chris Palmer has spoken about this out of Harvard, using high fat, effectively ketogenic diet, but, like, high fat and 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.

  17. 1:03:49 – 1:06:41

    Does Willoughby currently practice any forms of meditation?

    1. TF

      Do you meditate? Do you meditate now or is that not a practice for you?

    2. WB

      Ooh, that's a long, long story.

    3. TF

      All right. Let's do it.

    4. WB

      Depends on what you mean by meditate.

    5. TF

      Okay.

    6. WB

      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 clear to me, 'cause I was just, like, suffering. And so I thought, "I'm just gonna do this so I won't feel, like, so much panic and anxiety, and et cetera." I've done tens of thousands of hours of meditation. I've been the expert meditator in many brain imaging studies. Like, I've done, I've done my time-

    7. TF

      [laughs]

    8. WB

      ... as a Buddhist meditator. But I, I've started to understand that there's a whole set of implicit values that, like, I didn't necessarily choose.

    9. TF

      What would be an example, if you don't mind?

    10. WB

      Well, so an example is that the ideal affect or the, the goal emotion state is more on the calm end of things.

    11. TF

      Hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

    12. WB

      And as, like, a, a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, like, it's not really in my blood to be calm, so.

    13. TF

      [laughs] More of a border collie and less of a great dane, yeah. [laughs]

    14. WB

      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, you know, 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 somewhere that I didn't wanna go, but rather to modify things and, and make sure that I'm going where I wanna go. But that also requires me to, like, actually sit down with myself and be like, "Where do you wanna go?"

    15. TF

      Yeah.

    16. WB

      Which is another thing that I recommend for people. Aimee Mann has a song, write down what you need before you sign away the deed, you know? Like-

    17. TF

      [laughs]

    18. WB

      ... make sure you know, like, what you want, because you're gonna get on a highway and it's gonna be kind of fast-tracking you to somewhere, making sure that you are actually going where you

  18. 1:06:41 – 1:10:36

    When meditation compromises cognition.

    1. WB

      wanna go.

    2. TF

      I wanna know what practices that you follow. Not to imply that anyone should just copy, paste-

    3. WB

      Yeah

    4. TF

      ... right? You gotta know your own needs, but I am curious, like, where you've landed personally. So you tell me, where would you like to start?

    5. WB

      Okay. So I wanna 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, we categorize them into seven different domains: cognitive, perceptual, affective, which is emotional, somatic, conative, which is motivational, sense of self, and social. So I'm not gonna go through all 59. People can look them up. They're on the Cheetah House-

    6. TF

      Mm-hmm

    7. WB

      ... website under Symptoms. But just to give you, like, 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.

    8. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    9. WB

      Trouble with executive functioning, so making decisions, paying attention, 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, the red color but didn't register what it meant, that it meant stop.

    10. TF

      [laughs] Oh, boy.

    11. WB

      You can see how that would be-

    12. TF

      Yeah, problematic

    13. WB

      ... sometimes you need your concepts.

    14. TF

      You need your concepts. [laughs]

    15. WB

      So that's the cognitive domain. Perceptual, you see perceptual hypersensitivity. You can also see hallucinations, visions, changes in perception, also changes in, you know, derealization, so feeling like you're in a dream or things feel flat or cartoon-like. Emotions can go in either direction, which we've already kind of touched on, so, you know, increases in, in fear and panic and re-experiencing of trauma, but also affective blunting, so loss of emotions altogether. You can also see, in the somatic domain, we s- can see ELSES, energy-like somatic experiences. We have an entire paper on that.

    16. TF

      Wait, say that again. What does that stand for?

    17. WB

      ELSES, energy-like somatic experiences. So f- so-

    18. TF

      What does that mean?

    19. WB

      ... experiences of, of sort of electricity or voltage or-

    20. TF

      Ah, I see

    21. WB

      ... going through the body.

    22. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    23. WB

      We talked about insomnia already and lots of different kinds of pain syndromes, headaches, different kinds of pains. In terms of conative or motivational, again, insane, just m- enlightenment or bust kind of changes in motivation.

    24. TF

      [laughs]

    25. WB

      Like, you know, "Sorry, honey, like, I'm gone. I'm gonna go shave my head and become a monk." Like, we see that all the time, and then the opposite, like 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.

    26. TF

      [laughs]

    27. WB

      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, which has... You know, we have a, a whole paper on that as well, and obviously there's a lot of overlap 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 all kinds of social consequences. People don't like hearing about this. They have all sorts of reactions. Wait till you get your responses to this episode. [laughs]

  19. 1:10:36 – 1:11:44

    Duration of symptoms and duration of impairment.

    1. TF

      Yeah. I wanna talk about the Dalai Lama, too, before we-

    2. WB

      Yeah

    3. TF

      ... [laughs] go too far.

    4. WB

      People don't like to hear about this.

    5. TF

      [laughs]

    6. WB

      So a lot of people get shunned by their communities. Sometimes they get-

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm

    8. WB

      ... you know, their teachers get irritated with them, 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 s- social dynamics that go with that. So that was kind of the, the quick and dirty overview of the 59 categories. 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.

    9. TF

      Mm.

    10. WB

      So it was quite a bit of time, and the, it ranged from a few days to more than a decade. So this can be... And I think y- y- you know, your experience, you can kind of understand why.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. WB

      It could be a quite a long time before you recover, if you don't happen upon Jack Kornfield for a while.

    13. TF

      Yeah. I won the lottery on that latter part of things, and the,

  20. 1:11:44 – 1:12:53

    Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD).

    1. TF

      the duration you're describing, I just wanna 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, right? 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 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.

    2. WB

      Yep.

    3. TF

      And I know people who have experienced this, where they are effectively hallucinating on some level for years.

    4. WB

      Yep.

    5. TF

      Uh, I have a family member who experienced this, uh, 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.

  21. 1:12:53 – 1:15:44

    Differences between meditation-related and psychedelic-related adverse events.

    1. TF

      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?

    2. WB

      Well, we don't r- really know.

    3. TF

      Yeah.

    4. WB

      That was actually a study that we're in the middle of collecting data on. So I think that it- I'm glad that you mentioned that there's a lot of overlaps because I'm also seeing them, and a, 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 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-

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm

    6. WB

      ... something neurological going on there that might be not happening in all forms of meditation, but we definitely see, like, visual snow, and there can be some s- 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-

    7. TF

      Oh, sure

    8. WB

      ... things going on.

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. WB

      So yeah, I think that's a really interesting question, how they compare, but also with whether somebody's a dual user and-

    11. TF

      Yeah

    12. WB

      ... whether it's changing that way.

    13. TF

      A lot of people are dual users. Yeah, it's very hard to disambiguate. The resource I want to recommend, and I can't vouch for it personally because fortunately I, 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 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, 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?

  22. 1:15:44 – 1:18:12

    The origin of Cheetah House.

    1. WB

      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 contemplative studies program. So kids will get meditation training in school, in, as part of college. They get so inspired by it that they wanna go to India and ordain as monks, and going there and coming back and living in dorms as celibate, you know, non-intoxicant-taking college students doesn't really work, so they lived at Cheetah House. That was the, the original function of Cheetah House was to support sort of semi-monastic Brown students.

    2. TF

      And is it true Cheetah is a play on words, the name?

    3. WB

      Cheetah is a play on words. It's a play on the Sanskrit term chitta, which means loosely mind.

    4. TF

      All right.

    5. WB

      When we started doing the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, we were interviewing a number of people who were having meditation-related challenges, and some of them had just gotten out of the hospital and, you know, they're like, "I'm 27 and I'm living with my parents. Like, can I live with you?" [laughs]

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. WB

      You know? And, and so ch- I live at Cheetah House, so this is, like, m- you know, my house. 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. Like, the trauma is, you know, 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, all of that triggers the response.

    8. TF

      Trigger city.

    9. WB

      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." 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.

  23. 1:18:12 – 1:26:59

    Ideological power and scaffolding.

    1. WB

      And I think the, the other piece that I wanted to unpack with you-

    2. TF

      Mm-hmm

    3. WB

      ... after I heard your podcast was the term ideological power.

    4. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    5. WB

      And so ideological power is the power to control meaning, language, and which concepts are available and how they're used.

    6. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    7. WB

      The power to interpret your own or others' experiences, behavior, or feelings, and the power to, to silence or undermine. The important thing here is that trauma is associated with powerlessness and a lack of, of options and a lack of agency. And so for people w- who have been traumatized by meditation or meditation systems, any kind of system is also a form of Ideological power over them. So any, even, even like CBT is a system. Any kind of therapy or model is 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 or model that's being imposed on them. So, oh man, how do you, like, how do you work with that? And so we have to start with-

    8. TF

      Oof

    9. WB

      ... 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?"

    10. TF

      Just for general wellbeing? Are we talking about psychological wellbeing as a resource?

    11. WB

      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-

    12. TF

      Hm

    13. WB

      ... immediate vicinity that's something that's meaningful to you, but unrelated to meditation.

    14. TF

      Right. I was gonna say intense exercise. I mean, like, I've told every girlfriend I've ever had, you know, when I, when I think it, when, 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. [laughs] Just like tell me to get out of the house and go exercise, and chances are it'll resolve itself. But if I'm looking for something meaningful that is near me right now, there's, 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 Kahlil Gibran, which I read when I hop in the sauna. I'll just read a couple pages frequently and then put it down. I could keep going, but those are two.

    15. WB

      So as you're scanning the environment, and you'll notice that when I ask you, notice something that's meaningful, right?

    16. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    17. WB

      So there's a salience kind of like 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 one, right?

    18. TF

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    19. WB

      So if you were gonna think about, I'm gonna take my nervous system in that direction, I'm gonna take it in that direction, you could actually start to chart where you could go, different options just by looking at these different objects. Like, they're kind of telling-

    20. TF

      Mm

    21. WB

      ... you like, "Oh, this will be activating. This will be energizing. This will be calming. This will be strength inducing."

    22. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    23. WB

      Pick a direction. Where would you want your nervous system to go? And then pick an object that goes with that.

    24. TF

      I'll choose the sketchbook-

    25. WB

      Yeah

    26. TF

      ... because that's where I am totally immersed in something present tense. I can get lost in artwork. I don't think about whatever s- mistake I made in a conversation yesterday. I don't think about whatever bullshit I have to handle tomorrow. I find that very nourishing in a calming way, so I'll choose that.

    27. WB

      Mm-hmm. 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 probably some images that are in your mind.

    28. TF

      Oh, maybe. I'm also looking at the sketchbook that's directly past the laptop.

    29. WB

      Okay, so maybe more generally-

    30. TF

      But we can work with that.

  24. 1:26:59 – 1:31:07

    Willoughby’s self-care.

    1. TF

      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?

    2. WB

      So I've been doing this resourcing for a long time, and-

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm

    4. WB

      ... this scaffolding.

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. WB

      And where it landed me, so I started to realize that I, 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 like how powerfully impacted my gardening. I started getting really obsessed with, like, rare plants and growing them in a grow light.

    7. TF

      What kind of rare plants? Just can you name one? I'm so curious.

    8. WB

      Oh, just like weird, like, tomatoes, things that, like, you can't buy in the...

    9. TF

      In the grocery store. Yeah.

    10. WB

      Yeah, in the grocery store.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. WB

      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.

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. WB

      And we built an off-grid cabin there.

    15. TF

      Nice.

    16. WB

      And it is so awesome that I think I'm gonna move to Vermont.

    17. TF

      Nice. Don't tell anybody.

    18. WB

      Oh, whoops, I just did it on, like, The Tim Ferriss Podcast.

    19. TF

      [laughs]

    20. WB

      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-

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm

    22. WB

      ... and what's in it, th- that grew into something so beautiful and magnificent as this place-

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm

    24. WB

      ... in the mountains. And so-

    25. TF

      Hmm

    26. WB

      ... it's not just a technique that you do, y- you know, at your house to, in order to perform better. It's just completely taken over my life. So that's where I ended up.

    27. TF

      So it sounds almost epicurean in a way, right? Like tending the garden, engaging with nature.

    28. WB

      Sure.

    29. TF

      Not to add the label to it. Do you find that you derive the benefits you hope to derive from meditation through these new, this new engagement that you're referring to?

    30. WB

      If you wanted to paint a picture of what my daily practice looks like-

  25. 1:31:07 – 1:36:35

    Resources for people seeking relief from meditation-related adverse effects.

    1. TF

      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 a, an individual or a, a facilitator/trainer.

    2. WB

      The public-facing sort of service branch, info branch of my lab is at Cheetah House. So that's cheetah, like the animal, house, like a house.org. And there's tons of information on the website, lots of videos and links to different kinds of symptom-specific resources. But if you're interested in training specifically on the Cheetah House website, there's a tab on, 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, that will alert you to any of the kind of public lectures that we have. We have one a month and actually we have one today that's on CERT, which is Spiritual, Existential, Religious and Theological Issues in Psychedelic Assisted Therapies by Roman Tylicki.

    3. TF

      Hmm.

    4. WB

      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 sort of unavoidable-

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm

    6. WB

      ... that those, the meditation and psychedelics are combining.

    7. TF

      Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I wanna zoom out for just a quick second and say that... Well, actually let me volunteer something I don't think I've said publicly which is, we've been talking about, aside, among other things, these adverse events, adverse effects that can be associated with meditation, different types, different volumes and psychedelics. However, I, I don't want to lose what I mentioned f- earlier. I may have gotten the, the boundaries, the, the upper and lower bounds wrong on the numbers, but adverse events in psychotherapy. After my experience at 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, 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 was so out of control and his sort of 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 undo the damage inflicted by a famous psychotherapist. And I, 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 a, an issue of empathy and will, right? 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 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, right? So it's, 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 wanted to say that because there's so many fly by night rent-a-shamans running around and people who have done like 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? Like I know people who have basically had what I would call psychotic breaks pursuing 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 red line cases and have a, a clear demonstrated track record regardless of the modality. Is there anything you would like to add, not necessarily along those lines, but any

  26. 1:36:35 – 1:39:03

    Institutional betrayal and the empathy that comes from being humbled.

    1. TF

      comments you'd like to make? I have, I have more questions. I do want to ask about NDEs.

    2. WB

      [laughs]

    3. TF

      [laughs]

    4. WB

      Oh, I forgot about that part of my life.

    5. TF

      [laughs] Oh I know. I, I, I take notes so I don't forget. [laughs]

    6. WB

      One of the things that we've learned at Cheetah House is 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. Then like what happens when you have not only trauma to meditation but trauma to all helping professions and hel- helping professionals? It like really restricts your options.

    7. TF

      [laughs] Yeah.

    8. WB

      And so we, and there's other groups that do this too- You know, 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, like, "I was completely undone by this. I understand what it's like to be leveled by this scenario," and then you're like, "Okay, you get it. Now I can talk to you." Because that empathy, when, when you've been leveled that much, this is like one of the, the silver linings, is that you have so much compassion and empathy when you've been leveled.

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. WB

      You really understand-

    11. TF

      Yeah

    12. WB

      ... what that's like to be in that place, to be a puddle on the ground.

    13. TF

      Yeah.

    14. WB

      So that's one of the models that we have at Cheetah House, and I think it, it really works. And it, and it works in two ways. One is that people feel heard and validated and not alone because they're like, they're being able to s- to talk to someone that this happened to as well who's also recovered, so they're like, "Oh my God, I can actually recover from this." And then for the people who are offering care, they're like, "Wow, I had this five-year hole in my life, this thing that is not good for anything, and now it's something that's actually a gift I can give to somebody else."

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. WB

      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-

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm

    18. WB

      ... that I think is a, is a nice model that's out there. But yeah, I, I hear you with the trouble finding a good therapist. Boy,

  27. 1:39:03 – 1:41:38

    Advice for aspiring psychedelic healers.

    1. WB

      yeah.

    2. TF

      Yeah. There are a lot of clowns running around all over the place. And, uh, just to, to underscore the peer support, 'cause you're, 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, uh, I'm not recommending people do anything illegal, but I'm simply saying people are gonna do what people are gonna do. If you have not been tumbled and humbled in a way that has left you 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 heli-skiing 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, uh, more [laughs] informed on a subjective level about the risks involved. And then I would say, secondly, you should, and this, 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, 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 gonna be after midnight, [laughs] 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,

  28. 1:41:38 – 1:53:00

    Near-death experiences (NDEs).

    1. TF

      NDEs. How did you become interested in near-death experiences?

    2. WB

      Wow. This was not a question that I-

    3. TF

      I'm deeply interested in this. [laughs]

    4. WB

      I was like, "I wonder what part of my website he's gonna find and discover."

    5. TF

      [laughs]

    6. WB

      I totally forgot about this. I mean, I think lo- you know, wow, this is a really long time ago, but I was really interested in temporal lobe epilepsy-

    7. TF

      Uh-huh

    8. WB

      ... and how people have religious experiences as a result. They call it the sacred disease, and there's been speculation that there've been a number of saints that had, had temporal lobe epilepsy, and so I was really interested to know whether near-death experiencers... Well, I was just really interested 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.

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. WB

      There's a typography, like there's, you know, 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 happened to work in a sleep lab, and sleep is a natural activator of hypersynchrony, so basically epileptiform brain activity, 'cause you-

    11. TF

      Hmm

    12. WB

      ... as you go to sleep, your brain synchronizes. And so if you tend to have epilepsy, it will show up in your sleep. And so there was... You can also use strobe lights.

    13. TF

      You mean to induce epilepsy?

    14. WB

      Yeah.

    15. TF

      Hence the warnings on all the video games.

    16. WB

      Right. But from an institutional review board human subjects-

    17. TF

      [laughs]

    18. WB

      You know?

    19. TF

      IRB didn't love that.

    20. WB

      They're like, "I'm gonna induce seizures in people," so-

    21. TF

      [laughs]

    22. WB

      But like, hey, I'm not doing any induction. I'm just let- they're just sleeping.

    23. TF

      [laughs]

    24. WB

      I don't have to tell them that the- there's, it- so anyway, they slept in the lab, and we, we looked at their brains to see whether they had any kind of hypersynchrony, and they did. That was the shocker.

    25. TF

      Wait. When you say they, these are people with diagnosed epilepsy, or you're talking about people who had NDEs?

    26. WB

      No, no, so I taught a class on death and loss in graduate school, and as part of that class, I kind of inherited a lot of the guest speakers from, like, other-

    27. TF

      Yeah

    28. WB

      ... 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."

    29. TF

      Hm.

    30. WB

      So I went, started going to the support group, and I was like, "There are so many of them." And then I was like, "Hey, you guys wanna come 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. 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... There was some type of non-near-death experience control group. I forget if they were trauma survivors. I can't even remember.

  29. 1:53:00 – 2:00:55

    Parting thoughts, and the Dalai Lama’s response to Willoughby’s meditation research.

    1. TF

      in my mind. Well, [laughs] Dr. Britton, this has been great. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think it 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, at my meditation retreat. Is there anything else that you would like to add? People can find Cheetah House on Twitter @cheetahhouseorg, on Facebook Cheetahhouse.org, and Instagram cheetah.house. Uh, anything that you'd like to add before we wind to a close?

    2. WB

      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, their negative experiences, any kind of negative experience, but particularly ones with meditation, get a lot of kickback, and it's not, it's not an easy thing to do. So I'm, I'm very appreciative that you've done that, and you didn't have to. [laughs]

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. WB

      So and I think it's gonna be really helpful for people and, you know, especially this kind of group of people that emulate you and, you know, these sort of young male 18 to 30 demographic. So in my world, you're really a hero and doing something that's, that's hard. And yeah, just, so I just want to say thank you.

    5. TF

      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 am, I, I actually find meditation in small doses to be incredibly, 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, right? 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- 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 gonna meditate," but simply to know this 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, 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. [laughs] 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 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. [laughs] 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? [laughs]

    6. WB

      Oh, boy. Did you watch the video?

    7. TF

      No, I didn't see the video. I saw some text about it, but I did not see the video.

    8. WB

      Okay, so there is a video of me presenting to the Dalai Lama as part of the Mind & Life Dialogues. I will let viewers make their own decisions about what they think. I will, I will tell you some feedback that I got. I mean, you'll see me there if you wanna watch Willoughby in sympathetic overload. You know-

    9. TF

      [laughs]

    10. WB

      ... it was, it was pretty, a pretty terrifying experience in general. So I don't really remember the feedback as it was happening 'cause I was a little bit, like, out of my, my body probably, but I got... There were a lot of people there. The entire, like, 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, like, 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, you know? And it was like, I don't know. So I don't know. You're not really supposed to talk shit about the Dalai Lama-

    11. TF

      [laughs]

    12. WB

      ... so you might wanna cut this one out, but.

    13. TF

      No, people need to grow up. Come on.

    14. WB

      I wasn't particularly impressed, um, if you're allowed to say that.

    15. TF

      Oh, it's fine. Like, I just think people need to grow up. It's like if you have externalized your agency into someone you view, you view as a god, you're setting yourself up for trouble. And I think, look, I'm not a Dalai Lama expert. I'm sure that he has and demonstrably has, has offered a lot to the world, but it doesn't mean he's infallible, right?

    16. WB

      My husband was like, "He's the Dalai Lama. He was brought up from, like, age zero until however old he is now to defend Buddhism. What do you expect?"

    17. TF

      Yeah.

    18. WB

      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?

    19. TF

      Yeah. Yeah.

    20. WB

      You never wanna be the one that's failing the practice that they're giving you-

    21. TF

      Yeah

    22. WB

      ... or telling them that the, 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.

    23. TF

      [laughs]

    24. WB

      I left it up there as sort of a historical marker, but I didn't refer you to it because it's-

    25. TF

      [laughs]

    26. WB

      ... it's kind of a mixed bag.

    27. TF

      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 gonna spark conversation. So I'm gonna 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, et cetera, people, and so on in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. 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 gonna paraphrase here, but if your compassion does not include yourself, then it is incomplete, and part of being compassionate, now this is my voice, [laughs] 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.

Episode duration: 2:01:16

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