Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Is Meditation Dangerous?

A guy I know wrote me the following question:

Is meditation dangerous? Is zazen safe for trauma survivors? I know a lot of people in difficult situations (like people in jail) get a lot of benefit from meditation, but is sitting a retreat dangerous if you have all kinds of fucked up shit sitting under the surface?

Zazen is the type of meditation I teach. I use the word meditation here a bit loosely since zazen differs greatly from most other activities that fall under that heading. Unlike most forms of meditation, zazen is completely non-directed and has no goal. This is the key to its tremendous power. To see SuicideGirl LizaRose demonstrating how it's done go here. For more info see my book Hardcore Zen.There must be a zillion on-line sources of info on it as well.

The subject of Zen practice (aka zazen) for survivors of trauma has been much on my mind of late. I’ve tried several times to write something intelligent about it. But since I’m not a survivor of trauma myself -- other than life’s usual traumas that we all have -- I sometimes feel it’s not my place to say. I have known people who are both childhood sex abuse survivors and dedicated Zen practitioners. I hope one day one of them will write about this subject. But until then, I’ll take a shot. Much of what I want to say is based on what I’ve observed in them. But whether they involve childhood sexual abuse or not, traumas of all kinds are serious business and probably share much in common.

It’s a fact that zazen brings stuff up. No matter what kind of stuff you have locked away in your mind and body it's going to come out during sitting. It’s also true that zazen is different from other forms of meditation (if zazen is even a form of meditation) in that it is not directed at any ideal condition. In zazen you allow whatever comes up to just come up as it will, rather than attempting to move the mind toward a specific desired state as most forms of meditation do. This means that trauma survivors may be more likely to face repressed memories and suchlike while doing zazen than while doing other forms of meditation.

I don't think it's truly dangerous for trauma survivors to do zazen. But they have to be careful. Of course, anyone should exercise caution while doing the practice. But survivors of trauma need to be possibly even more careful. A practice that's very much focused on having an "Enlightenment experience" quickly is more likely to bring this stuff to the surface before you’re ready for it. This is yet another reason why crap like Big Mind® is so incredibly heinous and irresponsible. A pox upon them and their putrid ilk!

But here’s what a trauma survivor might expect to encounter in traditional Zen practice. Most of this is also applicable to anyone who practices zazen, trauma survivor or not. There’s not a single person in the world who doesn’t have some stuff they don’t acknowledge buried below the surface.

On the most superficial level zazen will bring up memories. At first these will be familiar memories. Meaning they won't be particularly surprising, just stuff you haven't thought of in a long time. For a trauma survivor, this can mean you start recalling things that are painful and that you have avoided thinking about, but which you are basically aware of. The reaction to this runs along the lines of the response you'd have to it even if you weren't sitting zazen. But sitting tends to intensify emotions. You might start crying or having other similar responses. This can be a bit embarrassing in a crowded zendo. But you should know that you are not alone in having feelings like this.

On the next level zazen can bring up things you have deliberately repressed and forced yourself to forget. At this level the memories can be surprising since you might start recalling things you were not consciously aware had happened. You may even be unsure if they're true memories or not. Indeed some may not be true at all. That’s important. Just because you remember something doesn’t mean it actually happened. These memories might make you confused, angry, etc. Again, the fact of sitting zazen can intensify this more than if it had come up in a "normal" day.

As you continue to practice you get to stuff that is hard to even recognize as memory. You may get strange impressions of vague things or just bare emotions devoid of any particular context. These are harder to deal with because they're impossible to figure out. You’re better off not to even try to figure this stuff out because that just builds up more thought and emotion on top of what you’ve already got to deal with. Acknowledge it and, as much as possible, try to just let it be. It will pass.

Sometimes -- even when they try not to -- practitioners will assign these emotions to events and people inappropriately. People who experience this kind of thing and don't understand the source of it (and no one could possibly understand the source of it) may blame it on their teachers or on other people practicing. It is often the difficult duty of a Zen teacher to bear the brunt of some of this misdirected stuff. So be kind to us, please! Or practitioners may blame themselves or have a whole lot of different responses. Don’t worry about your responses either. Let them go.

I should point out here that it generally takes months or years to get to this level. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to encounter in your first zazen class. What you generally encounter in your first few times doing zazen is utter boredom!

So what do you do if this happens? By the time you get down to the more difficult strata of buried stuff you will probably already have developed a relationship with a teacher. If you have a teacher it's good to discuss it with her or him. That’s what they’re there for. As long time practitioners you can be certain they have experienced this themselves. Remember that most of us in the Zen teaching game came into it because we had our own very serious stuff to deal with. Since they have watched their own stuff come up in a similar matter, your teacher should be able, at the very least, to tell you how they dealt with it. They can also assure you you're not going crazy and so on.

Whether or not any of this comes up in this way depends largely on the practitioner. If you're very gung-ho and in a big hurry to reach some rarified state of consciousness or -- God forbid! -- Enlightenment, you're more likely to encounter this kind of thing faster. If your practice is more gentle and unhurried, you're less likely to. If it does come up, you’ll already have some grounding that will allow you to handle it. So I would suggest taking it slow and easy. Just enjoy sitting zazen for its own sake and don't try to get anywhere with it. If you do it that way, the stuff that comes up will come up in smaller portions over time and won’t confront you before you're ready to deal with it.

In spite of all the foregoing cautionary material, I still believe zazen can be a very good thing for survivors of traumatic experiences. Maybe even the best thing. It can put you directly in contact with the source of the trauma itself. By slowly and carefully removing the psychological barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself from these memories you can finally become aware that the memories themselves are just thoughts in your head. No matter what the content of your thoughts are, they are all just thoughts. This is easy to say but very difficult to truly understand because we’ve been taught since birth to believe in our own thoughts.

Once you’ve seen what these thoughts and memories truly are, you will come to see that they have far less power than you imagined they did. And once you’ve seen how powerless all thoughts really are, you can then transcend these memories and the detrimental effects they’ve had upon you. The key is to see what's going on right now, rather than trying to see into the past through memory or into the future through thought.

This is all more complex and involved than I can possibly get into here. But these are the basic things to look out for.

Brad Warner is ON TOUR RIGHT NOW and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/all/23636/Brad-Warners-Hardcore-Zen-Is-Meditation-Dangerous/