[This page follows from the work of Dr. Willoughby Britton, her research associates, the ongoing research at the The Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, and the work of Cheetahhouse to support practitioners in distress. Many bows to these bodhisattvas!]

Many people don't have any adverse impacts from concentrative meditation practices, even when sitting demanding retreat schedules; this is uncontroversial. 

The concern here is for the people who have unrecognized adverse impacts. It is also for those who might develop adverse impacts as they increase their time in meditation. Thus all Open Mind Zen practitioners attending OMZL daily 7 am EST sits are asked to become at least glancingly familiar with these issues. 

What are concentration practices? These are meditation techniques in which a practitioner is asked to focus on an object—and to return to that object, when one's mind wanders. The object could be the breath, body-scanning, one's own flow of thoughts, and many other possibilities. 

Increasingly, practitioners come to Zen with prior exposure to concentration practices: meditation apps, Mindfulness trainings, and Insight Meditation/Vipassana. Many students learn (before any Zen study) that meditation simply is focused concentration on an object. 

Concentration techniques provide a clear objective for time spent on the cushion. Concentration practices are powerful. For many, they are a strong pathway to samadhi and other kinds of enjoyable meditation experience.

It's unfamiliar (perhaps a challenge) to connect the dots between concentration practices that are effective and highly rewarding on the cushion... and increasing levels of insomnia, sensory sensitivity, spaciness, bodily pain, or reactivity in daily life. But from a scientific viewpoint, this issue is easier to consider. Please begin with this article offering a quick overview. Meet Dr. Willoughby and hear about how her research began with this video. [Note: when she says "meditation" she is referring to mindfulness concentration practices.]

Practicing ten to twenty minutes three times a week, there seems to be little cause for concern in using concentration techniques, and some evidence of benefit. Anecdotally, I am not aware of any meditators with adverse impacts from a few minutes of concentration practice at the beginning of a longer sit. Many find a brief use of a focus helps to transition, to raise energy for practice, and re-orient to the cushion.*

Sitting daily for an hour, however, moves students into the range where they might experience adverse impacts from concentration practices.

Mindfulness (concentration) meditation techniques have been found to increase cortical arousal for all participants. Whether this is beneficial or not (or both!) very much depends on how much, and on the individual practitioner. Too much cortical arousal leads to hyperarousal or dissociation. On the hyperarousal side, one might experience symptoms such as anxiety, panic, insomnia, traumatic re-experiencing, and pain syndromes. On the dissociative side, one might experience a blunting of empathy and creativity, anhedonia, disidentification with the body and the senses, and a diminished sense of personal agency. [Meditation-induced hyperarousal, signs of dissociation, mechanisms of meditation-induced dissociation.] 

Here is the comprehensive symptom list from the Varieties of Contemplative Experience research study, by Drs. Lindahl and Britton. Please review the list and assess. 

If you have experience with any of the symptoms, you are not disqualified from meditating. You may wish to educate yourself, and use other meditation techniques. Some suggestions are found at the end of this page. 

Meditation Technique and Neurodiversity

My anecdotal experience is that neurodiverse people find concentration practices to be especially attractive and accessible. Paying intense attention to a focus is an internal experience that is (at least sometimes) familiar, safer, productive, comforting, rewarding, or otherwise valued. There's a clear goal, and the hope and reward of increased personal control over internal experience.

Meanwhile, neurodiverse people and others (all people!) seem to benefit from training for 1) relaxed, accepting, soft-focus, generalized awareness; 2) fluid, timely transitions between diffuse and focused, as is situationally appropriate in the moment, and 3) co-regulation with other practitioners ("refuge in sangha").

Zazen might be a practice that better addresses how some of us actually suffer, by respecting and balancing our innate inclinations and well-rehearsed capacities. As Buddha taught, it's about the middle way. As Dr. Willoughby explains, it's about the Inverted U-Shaped Curve [see above].

Lay practice might prioritize training for that optimal range where we function at our best. Finding that range and developing a practice to support it is an individual project. 

On retreat, people might choose to use certain techniques for specific spiritual experiences. Meditators might follow practices that never were intended for the long haul and the demands of daily life. A few weeks of insomnia can be acceptable as part of someone's spiritual search. A few years of it, with no relief and deteriorating daily functioning, is another level of suffering and consequences. Please be informed about the potential impacts of the practices you choose to take up.

Regarding adverse impacts, lacking the quality peer-reviewed research on specific demographics of neurodiverse folks that I hope is to come... I'll resort to a parable of a rock in a shoe. 

When people walk a path in their own time in their own way with no particular agenda, they are free to do what they need to do. After experiencing the first ouch! something's in my shoe!, people might: look for a safe spot to pause or sit, limp to it, shake out their shoe, ditch the rock, re-shoe their foot, and continue happily on their way.

Some meditation methods may interrupt this ordinary way of responding; some of us may be more profoundly disrupted. 

Bring hypervigilance or hyperfocus or sensory overwhelm or difficulty and frustration focusing on boring, repetitive tasks into the rock-shoe picture... along with beliefs about the self, hopes and dreams about the spiritual search, concerns and even anxieties about being good enough, fitting in, being welcome in community? Fears of loss of autonomy, and the tremendous impacts of the Zen Buddhist teachings and forms themselves? Oh, dear. 

One person, experiencing pain, takes it as a test and a trial and part of the practice. Believing they are supposed to ignore or transcend or tolerate the discomfort, they do not remove the rock. Another, drinking in the surroundings or otherwise absorbed in compelling experience, feels very little sensation coming from their feet and does not remove the rock.  Another one notes the ouch... but easily distracts themself from the discomfort by focusing on something entirely else; the pain is masked.

One person stops to remove the rock... but doesn't have a chair or the support they need to stand on one leg safely and get that shoe off and on again. 

One person marches on no matter what under fierce internal or external pressure—a parade, a ceremony, a classroom. Inclement weather. Military or competitive conditions. 

Another, having experienced repeated infections from foot wounds, walks little and only reluctantly with a great deal of unrelieved anxiety and frequent bouts of pain. When the rock-ouch comes, it's just more of the horrible same. 

These practitioners are extra vulnerable to harm from an activity—walking—that is ordinarily considered safe and universally recommended for everyone. These people incur wounds. 

Burnout is one of the greatest risks and struggles of life with neurodiversity. It halts ordinary functioning, and it is slow and painful to heal. Hyperfocus is compelling and rewarding, but in excess it is also a contributor. We do not want to ask our neurodiverse brains to spend more time in hyperfocus.

Non-anecdotally, for people already struggling with PTSD flashbacks, rumination, or easily triggered trauma memories, mindfulness (concentration) practices are frankly contra-indicated. "Specifically, mindfulness-based approaches may increase distress or destabilize clients who are particularly prone to flashbacks, rumination, or easily triggered trauma memories, given that they reduce avoidance of trauma-related thoughts and emotions and may increase exposure to traumatic memories and emotional states." 

*What might I do in place of concentration practices?

Just sitting with no particular expectations, treating all experience as of interest and a perfectly fine place for awakening, seems to be a generally safer practice. It takes time and study to learn to appreciate the value (and, yes, the amazing utility) of the undirected spaciousness and inclusiveness of zazen. It's a cultivated space in which both ordinary processing and deep work for the sake of change and liberation become possible. With practice, these become a spontaneous and  ordinary feature of daily life. Realization is not primarily reached through the action of concentration on a focus. It comes about through engagement with whatever happens to be happening. This is also just ordinary life.

Daily life functioning mostly requires easy, inclusive, soft-focus awareness... plus the ability to move into (and out of) a focused state at need.

Anecdotally, some people seem able to transition from use of an object of concentration to an open-ended hua-tou question, such as "who sits?" "Who hears?" "What is aware?" The hua-tou question itself is not suggested as a replacement object for fixed attention, but taken up as a pointer to direct engagement with personal experience in the moment. Accordingly, the hua-tou might be raised briefly, once or multiple times throughout the sit—depending on the practitioner, the circumstances, and the length of the sit. 

Per Willoughby Britton (when asked about safer meditation and retreat practices): integrating movement into sitting throughout the day seems to be protective. An attitude of zealotry emerged as a clear risk factor. Great determination is perhaps a quality that follows her law of the Inverted U-Shaped Curve: you need some, not too little. And definitely not too much. 

Further reading

Cheetah House has a collection of practitioner stories—first-person accounts of adverse impacts from meditative practices.

If research papers are your thing, The Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory offers the "The Meditation Safety Toolbox" as a free download. 

/\ Angie Reed Garner, Assistant Teacher OMZL