Recently a woman successfully sued a yoga retreat for triggering her childhood PTSD. It is not clear what actually happened, as there are two different versions of events. The people running the yoga retreat said the activity was optional; she says it was compulsory.

Western uses of mindfulness & meditation

There has been a trend over the last decade or more of importing spiritual techniques like meditation and mindfulness from Eastern religions (usually Buddhism) to the West. There have also been many cases where people have experienced very distressing symptoms as a result of intense meditation, often in the context of vipassana meditation.

I have frequently observed from my reading on the subject that western yoga and meditation retreats do not check if people are ready for the intense work involved. They assume that yoga and meditation are fluffy and that they don’t have profound effects on brain chemistry and mental states. They also take these practices out of the context of their original traditions and offer them in isolation.

For example, I learned the Metta Bhavana meditation from someone who meant well, but is not a qualified or lineaged teacher of Buddhist meditation. A Buddhist friend told me that when he learned it in the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (now Triratna), they taught it with some important safeguards built in, such as not sending loving-kindness to anyone you are currently in open conflict with, and not sending loving-kindness to the dead. The person I got the technique from did not know about these safeguards. I sent loving-kindness to someone I was in open conflict with, and I managed to temporarily give myself a version of Stockholm syndrome as a result.

Western wellness gurus who push meditation and mindfulness are frequently looking to make a lot of money out them, and are often not properly qualified and trained. They also seem to be happy to take people’s money for an extreme ten-day meditation retreat without checking to see if the participants have meditated before, whether they have a prior history of trauma that could be triggered by the retreat, and so on. And many of these retreats and courses do not ensure that their staff are trained in what to do if a participant starts to experience flashbacks, depersonalization, dissociation, or other distressing symptoms, nor do they have counsellors available for distressed participants. Instead, people are often advised to carry on meditating and “push through” the symptoms.

Eastern uses of mindfulness & meditation

Eastern traditions that use mindfulness and meditation have been doing it for centuries, and are aware of the pitfalls that may arise. They have developed safeguards to prevent distress, and they will take people through a gradual process of developing their meditation practice. The goal of these practices within these traditions is to help the practitioner towards enlightenment (as opposed to making a fast buck for the person teaching it to you). That is not to say that abuse never occurs in these traditions – it does – but at least you should be getting the practice from a qualified, lineaged teacher who has been trained properly in the tradition. Any bona fide teacher will not object to students asking for their credentials.

Spiritual exercises in occult settings

Within witchcraft, Pagan, and occult circles, we often use visualization and meditation techniques. We tend not to use them in an intense way, but we do need to be aware of how to respond if any of our group members experience distressing symptoms as a result of these techniques.

Hermetic magical visualizations make me feel very queasy and disoriented. I have to go and eat something, lie down on the earth, and focus on being in my body. I don’t know if this is because of the six months I spent doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram nearly every day, or if it is because of the time I was at a place where someone else was leading a meditation which involved visualizing leaving your body and going thousands of light years away.

Breathing exercises and standard visualizations do not cause negative symptoms for me, fortunately.

Sometimes people will experience profound consequences from a meditation or visualization that are helpful and transformative, such as uncovering things that need dealing with, and then addressing them. But we need to be able to distinguish between the desired effects of a practice, such as freeing people from fears, insecurities, or past trauma, versus making their problems worse. So if someone says they can’t deal with a practice, we have to believe that they need to take a break, or avoid it altogether.

A powerful toolset

Meditation, mindfulness and visualization, when practiced under the supervision of experienced and trained practitioners, can be profoundly beneficial and transformative. They are extremely powerful tools and should be treated with respect. You wouldn’t give the tools of a brain surgeon to an untrained person and encourage them to use them, and this should not be happening with advanced meditation techniques either.

The takeaways (TL;DR)

• stop doing these practices immediately if they make you feel dissociated or depersonalized
• don’t do these practices if you have PTSD
• don’t go from zero to 100, i.e., don’t go from no meditation at all to a weeklong silent retreat
• check the qualifications and credentials of the practitioners. Buddhists have been doing these practices for centuries and they know how to ease people in gently and they know what the safeguards are. Western practitioners who are not in a proper initiatory lineage often have no clue and are just trying to make a fast buck.

Further reading

• Beyond McMindfulness – HuffPost (2013)
  The rush to secularize and commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique may be leading to an unfortunate denaturing of this ancient practice, which was intended for far more than helping executives become better focused and more productive.
• Mindfulness therapy comes at a high price for some, say experts – The Guardian (2014)
• Look out for your mental health before joining mindfulness bandwagon – The Guardian (2015)
• Miguel Farias & Catherine Wikholm (2015). The Buddha Pill, Watkins Publishing.
• Is mindfulness making us ill? — Dawn Foster (2016), The Guardian
• Managing stress in the workplace – Yvonne Aburrow (2018). An article that I wrote about the problem with workplace wellness and mindfulness programmes
• A new podcast examines the perils of intense meditation – NPR (2024)
  For many people, meditation retreats bring peace of mind. But for some, it’s the opposite. Reporters heard from dozens of people who experienced hallucinations, paralyzing fear – and worse.
• Mental-health lessons in schools sound like a great idea. The trouble is, they don’t work. Lucy Foulkes(2025) – The Guardian
• Dance teacher wins payout after yoga course triggers emotional breakdown – The Independent (2025). Melissa Revell was ‘retraumatised’ and now cannot look after herself or exercise.
• Mariana Galvao de Oliveira (2025), Psychosis Triggered by Intensive Meditation: A Case Report and Review of Risk Factors – Volume 11 Issue S1 – Cambridge Core (academic paper on the risk factors)

Articles about the Goenka meditation retreat

• TW: suicide. ‘She didn’t know what was real’: Did 10-day meditation retreat retreat trigger woman’s suicide?– Penn Live (2017) [Goenka meditation retreat]
• Running Towards Death – How I Survived a Ten-Day Silent Meditation Retreat(2017) [Goenka meditation retreat]
• TW: suicide. When Meditation Retreats Go Wrong: Suicide, Meditation and What We Can Do– The Tattooed Buddha(2025) [Goenka meditation retreat]
• TW: suicide. Discussion of the above deaths on a Reddit forum about vipassana meditation

Support groups

• Cheetah House | Help for Meditators In Distress
  Counseling, resources and support for meditators experiencing adverse effects.
• Meditating in Safety
  Raising awareness of mental health issues in relation to meditation practice