Part 1 of 2
Untold: The Retreat [Goenka] [1st Season]
by Financial Times
1/31/24
Introducing Untold: The Retreat
Transcript
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[Music]
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the gong bangs at 4:00
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a.m. it's still dark outside but you get
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up and get
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dressed with the others you head into
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the meditation
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Hall you try not to make eye
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contact a volunteer gives you a cushion
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and directs you to find a
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spot you sit and
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begin your goal is to focus your
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mind your back hurts your knees hurt and
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your pretty
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hungry you've been here 3 days and you
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have seven
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more some people go to these Retreats
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and they
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suffer they might feel a deep deep sense
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of Terror or a break with
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reality and on the other side they're
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not themselves
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anymore yesterday you asked about
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leaving but leaving is a bad idea they
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say from the special investigations team
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at the financial times this is the
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retreat The Retreat The Retreat The
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Retreat I went into what I would
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consider a psychotic break it was like
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being in a torture chamber for my mind
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for six months The Retreat
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Retreat the final goal is to purify the
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mind the retreat is the first series
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from Untold a new Financial Times
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investigative
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podcast coming this January.
Episode 1: Dear Madison
Transcript: "Split in Half; I don't exist anymore; I have an empty body; detached from reality"
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Madison Marriage This series discusses suicide and mental health. Please take care while listening and seek support if you need it.
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In January of 2023, I was sitting at my desk at the Financial Times when an email popped into my
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inbox. The subject line immediately caught my eye. It read: “Meditation cults and mental health”.
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My name is Madison Marriage, and over a year ago, I took on a new role running a special
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investigations unit for the Financial Times. Our goal is to expose abuse of power -- institutional
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failings in any field; business, education, politics, you name it. Our publication normally
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covers financial journalism, so meditation cults are not the kind of thing I usually write about.
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But there was something about the author’s tone that made me sit up and pay attention. ‘Dear
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Madison,’ he started. Stephen Media coverage of meditation is almost universally positive, yet there is strong
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evidence that it can cause serious mental health issues, especially in the young people who are drawn to it in a search for some form of spirituality. My interest in this is due to
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the terrifying damage done to the lives of my twin daughters, now aged 27, over the last five years,
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due to their involvement with the Vipassana organisation. They are now recovering, but still fragile. Nonetheless they would be prepared to share their stories. Happy to chat whenever.
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Madison Marriage I knew next to nothing about meditation and had never even heard the word Vipassana before. I don’t meditate. I’ve known
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people who meditate, just as I’m sure many people have. But still, that would hardly qualify me as
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an expert. But Stephen’s email sounded articulate. It felt genuine. I felt concern for his daughters
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when I read it. I know lots of people who have experienced mental health challenges. Depression,
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anxiety and addiction are not unusual among my peers. And many people I know are trying
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alternative methods to feel better. So even though I didn’t understand exactly what Stephen and his
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daughters were going through, their claims seemed relevant. So I replied cautiously.
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I asked for more information. And then I began to research the organisation Stephen
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referred to . . . something to do with the word ‘Goenka’. The focus of this group is a
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specific type of meditation called Vipassana. It offers 10-day silent meditation retreats,
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to participants all over the world. You’re going to hear those two words pretty interchangeably:
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Goenka and Vipassana. Goenka is the name of the man who founded this network of retreats,
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a kind of guru at the heart of the network. And Vipassana is the meditation technique he adopted.
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You hear Goenka’s voice at every retreat. Goenka This technique will help you. To explore the truth of the entire field of matter.
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Madison Marriage Goenka’s method involves systematically scanning your body from your head to your feet over and over, observing the
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sensations you come across. Goenka Body sensation is so important, and as you proceed on the body, it will become clearer and clearer.
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Madison Marriage As soon as I started researching it, I saw how popular Goenka retreats are. [MONTAGE VOICE CLIP] So I just recently came back from the Vipassana meditation retreat. Ten-day Vipassana course,
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we can’t speak or make eye contact with anyone. Madison Marriage Twitter founder Jack Dorsey raves about Goenka retreats. Thousands of people go on
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them every year. Getting off the waitlist for one of these retreats is a bit like getting Glastonbury tickets. People love them, and they’re fanatical about their experiences online.
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[YOUTUBER VOICE CLIP] Guys, it is all true what all of these people say about these Vipassana courses [YOUTUBER VOICE CLIP]
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I’ve always go as far to say it’s almost the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life.
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[YOUTUBER VOICE CLIP] I would recommend a retreat to anyone, even if it’s just to see what you’re made of. Madison Marriage
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Goenka meditation centres are everywhere, from Scandinavia to Latin America, central Europe,
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to far flung corners of south-east Asia. People within the meditation worlds all seem to have
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heard of it. It’s respected, maybe even revered. Goenka’s technique supposedly allows for the
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“total eradication of mental impurities and the highest happiness of full liberation”. When I
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scroll down a bit further on the results of my Google search, there were a handful of articles
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that detailed personal experiences at Goenka retreats. Some of them read like horror stories.
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There’s a rabbit hole of Reddit threads where people detail physical pain and psychological
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breaks. People referred to the retreats as being like a voluntary prison sentence and accused the
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teachers running them of exhibiting irresponsible behaviour, bordering on malpractice. Before long,
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I was corresponding with the author of the email I had received a few days earlier. His name is
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Stephen. He’s the one who urged me to look into this group in the first place. From the start,
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he was not shy about voicing his opinions on the Goenka organisation. Stephen The organisation is
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based on a false premise, which is that ultimately intensive meditation can help people and maybe
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it does help some people. But it’s like a very strong drug. And it has side effects.
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Madison Marriage Stephen was adamant that the meditation group his daughters had become involved with was dangerous -- that it warranted scrutiny
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from me and from the authorities. The Goenka organisation is registered as a charity in many
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of the countries it operates in and it’s pulled in substantial government grants. He felt the whole
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set-up should be questioned. Stephen Because we don’t understand the human mind. People like this are selling what in my mind
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amounts to quack cures to vulnerable young people, including my daughters.
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Madison Marriage Frankly, initially I was sceptical. Stephen said his twin daughters had become a shell of the people they once
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were. That they were fragile. That they were in recovery. I kept thinking -- recovery from what,
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exactly? How could a meditation organisation that promises spiritual bliss end up causing
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such in Stephen’s words, terrifying damage? Was he right? Did this organisation bear any
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resemblance to a cult? This was the starting point on a 12-month journey, attempting to
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understand the world of one organisation. A world that advertises self-improvement
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and spiritual awakenings -- and allegedly has caused real psychological and physical harm.
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It’s a journey unlike any other story I’ve worked on before. From the Special Investigations Team at
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the Financial Times, this is: The Retreat. [FORMER RETREAT PARTICIPANT VOICE CLIP]
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The retreat. I went into what I would consider a psychotic break. [FORMER RETREAT PARTICIPANT VOICE CLIP] It was like being in a torture chamber for
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my mind for six months. Goenka The final goal is to purify the mind. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Madison Marriage Episode One: Dear Madison.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] Stephen told me his twin daughters had experienced serious mental health episodes after getting drawn into Goenka retreats.
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But I struggled to understand why and how. So I set off on the train from Paddington in central
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London to meet the family. [BACKGROUND VOICES] Hello, hello, nice to meet you. So how are you? Madison Marriage
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The twins don’t want to be named for many reasons. So we’re using pseudonyms. Sarah and Emily. Emily
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was the first of the twin sisters to discover Goenka. When I met her, she was lodging with
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her boyfriend and a woman in her fifties who was a vicar at a nearby church. Emily told me
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the vicar had agreed to take the couple in after learning about her difficulties. She tried to live
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with roommates her own age, but she found it too difficult living in a lively house share with other 20-somethings. Her nervous system was different now, she said, and extremely sensitive.
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Emily To different things. But I have to be careful about it. I can’t go out partying, like if I push myself too hard I
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feel that immediately and then I have to take, I just like everything gets fried and I just have to stop and I have to let go and garden for a couple of days, just to like, feel okay again. So it’s
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like -- I have to go very easy. Madison Marriage Emily is tall and slim with kind friendly eyes and a bookish look about her. She’s
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outgoing and gregarious and seems at ease with herself. She comes across as warm and generous.
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So just tell me a little bit about your childhood? Emily You know, I was very lucky to grow up with a lot of material comfort. And yeah, I went to really good schools and had lots
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of opportunities with lots of music. Madison Marriage I wanted to know whether there were any underlying issues in the family that led to the twins spiral.
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Did they have any conditions they could point to or past trauma that might make them particularly
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susceptible to severe mental health problems? Emily Yeah, I like definitely found teenage years pretty rough. Like, I was happy sometimes and sometimes I
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felt lonely and excluded. Madison Marriage But Emily said the house was overall a happy one growing up. That outside of the usual squabbling
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between the siblings or the occasional fallouts with their parents, they didn’t have significant problems. In fact, there was kind of an idyllic quality to their lives, as Emily tells it. They
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come from a very musical family. Their mum is a music teacher and pianist. Their dad, Stephen,
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works in finance, but at home he’s also quite musical. He started playing the trumpet when he
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turned 50, and he sings. Emily We go out walking a lot. We’d always go to cello classes. You have cello classes . . . we
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used to play and like, we always had nice gardens, so we’d always kind of play.
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Madison Marriage The twins and their brother were each given a cello at the age of four and weekends growing up, they spent their
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time playing in quartets as a family, singing together, going for walks in the countryside,
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cooking. Emily We’d have dinner together. Dad would always cook a Sunday dinner roast,
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and Mum and Dad were always really like strong together. And definitely cared about us a lot.
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Madison Marriage By the end of 2014, Emily’s future was looking bright. She’d been a straight-A student in school. But she still had
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fun. She worked a job on Saturdays and went to parties on the weekend, fretted about her love
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life and went on holidays with friends. Emily Like, I was pretty work hard, play hard. Like I’ll go out partying until 4:00 in the morning and then
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get up and do my weekend job and then go back to school and do my A-levels. But it was fun. Like I,
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I kind of thrived off that, I think. Madison Marriage When she was 18, Emily got a place to study French and Spanish at Oxford university. She
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was really excited for this chapter of her life to begin. But when she got to Oxford, she found
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it tough -- tougher than she had expected. Emily I just really struggled through it when other people didn’t. I felt like I didn’t
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have time to kind of breathe. And, you know, I felt like it was just too much.
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Madison Marriage Emily decided to take a year out of her studies just to catch her breath. She could go back to Oxford the following year and in the
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meantime, she’d travel. Just before she set off, a friend gave her a book on mindfulness. This book
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was the first time she had come across the word ‘Vipassana’. She found the meditation principles
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in it exciting. Emily I remember reading, I’m like, this is what I’ve been looking for because this is like,
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all about finding peace inside and like coming out of mental complexes. And like, I was just really,
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like, fascinated by the whole thing. Madison Marriage As Emily backpacked with a group of strangers, she learned more about
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meditation and a particular retreat. A special 10-day silent meditation program founded by the
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spiritual leader Satya Narayana Goenka, in the 1970s. Goenka was a businessman from Burma who
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got into meditation in his thirties to help with intense migraines. He really took to the practice
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to the point where he gave up his business to move to India and teach meditation full time.
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Goenka Let people believe in this corner that corner, this philosophy that philosophy, don’t worry, but don’t forget the essence.
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Madison Marriage Over time, he began teaching this method to individuals all over the world. He went on to establish a
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global network of over 240 Vipassana centres and an intense and rigid method of his own.
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Goenka Ten days people had to spare. It looks too much, oh 10 days how can I give 10 days? But once you pass through it,
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you find these were the best days of my life. Madison Marriage
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One of the most unusual things about this organisation is that all of these courses
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are completely free. This helps drive their popularity, and the whole Goenka network depends
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on donations and volunteer work. Goenka passed away in 2013, but recordings of his voice still
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boom across Vipassana meditation halls around the world today, and his meditation system,
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a rigid timetable that starts at 4am and finishes at 9:30pm, remains identical in
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every country his organisation operates in. It’s hardcore. Some people call it the marines
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of meditation. Emily actually signed up to a Goenka retreat while she was traveling in India,
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but she had second thoughts after realising the course structure sounded pretty intense.
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Emily I was like, no, that sounds a bit full on. I’ll do that later on in life. So I went into like other stuff and like,
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just have fun. I just travelled loads and like, had a traveling romance and, you know, just like,
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forgot about Oxford and how stressful it was. Madison Marriage But Emily did learn a lot about meditating while she was travelling, and she started to meditate
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from time to time after she returned to Oxford in early 2016. That summer, Emily signed up to
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her first Goenka retreat at a centre close to her parents’ home in Herefordshire. This time,
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she felt ready. She wanted to continue to better herself, to keep finding ways to cope
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with stress. Emily I did not know that it might be risky. Absolutely no thought of that at all.
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Madison Marriage The retreat centre in Herefordshire is called Dhamma Dipa, and it’s in an old remote farmhouse. The setting was tranquil, but isolated.
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Emily Dhamma Dipa is very lovely, very pretty. And I stayed in like an old farmhouse, in a shed room with one other lady,
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which is very simple. I had that sense when I arrived, like, oh, this is such a nice, lovely,
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you know, lovely environment. I felt like I associated meditation retreats with like safety and nourishment and, like, good food and like, lots of sleep, lots of time to like feel,
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wow. That just wasn’t really that experience. Madison Marriage
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Emily soon realised that the intensity of this retreat was unlike anything she had ever experienced. On the first day, she was given a warning.
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Emily And the first night they kind of tell you, you should surrender to the whole process. They say it’s like an operation of your mind,
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to make your mind healthy. Madison Marriage It’s like a medical procedure, they told her, and you mustn’t leave in the middle of it.
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Emily Because if you leave in the middle of it, it’s dangerous. It’s like leaving during an operation which is in the process of happening
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when you’re cut open . . . [SOUND OF A BELL]
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Madison Marriage Over the next 10 days, silence would be mandatory as she embarked on a gruelling meditation regime starting at
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4am. She had to meditate for what felt like all day, every day. And it physically hurt.
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Emily And so I’d be fine for a bit, because I was used to doing like a bit meditation. I found that calming. But then it was like
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just . . . having to carry on. Madison Marriage Emily wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be feeling so unpleasant. She wanted to leave at
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one point, but the teachings during the retreats encouraged her to keep going. So she did.
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Emily They say in the teachings like your mind is full of impurities and like you’ve become a slave to all your impurities.
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I need to learn to control your mind. Those kind of things like I should do this, I must do this,
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I’m a bad person if I can’t do it. Madison Marriage Emily stayed through 10 days of meditating for 10 hours a day in silence and with no communication
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with the outside world. The hardest thing for her was that she stopped being able to sleep.
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Emily I couldn’t sleep at all. Madison Marriage From day one? Emily Yeah, from day one. Madison Marriage Emily says that she never
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had sleep issues before this retreats. Aside from a couple of restless nights ahead of a big exam.
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Emily I just thought it was my fault. And it was because in my mind, I wasn’t able to sleep. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Madison Marriage Some aspects of the retreats were positive -- exciting, even. Emily began to have almost transcendental experiences.
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Emily There’ll be moments which felt really good. I felt like this is what I’ve been looking for, like feeling a sense of connection to everything
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in life. It’s a state of mind that was like very above every day. Like massive rushes of serotonin
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would definitely happen at certain points. Madison Marriage
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On the 10th day, the meditators could finally talk to each other and compare experiences. Many
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seem to have reached some kind of higher plane. Supposedly, if you’ve applied the
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technique correctly, you are meant to feel a harmonious flow through your body. But Emily
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hadn’t quite gotten there. The overachiever in her felt like she’d missed the mark.
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Emily I just felt like I’d failed. I felt like I hadn’t got it right or I hadn’t, there was something that I hadn’t experienced, like everyone
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was talking about. Like this will happen. That will happen. I was like -- I can’t even do it. I can’t even, I can’t even feel my body as a whole, as everyone’s saying I should do.
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Madison Marriage She thought, maybe she just wasn’t that good at this. Maybe she needed to work harder. Emily
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So I felt like, okay, I need to come back. Try again. That was how I felt. I felt like I just failed. I felt pretty cut open. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Madison Marriage More after the break.
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Emily left the retreat, feeling a little downcast, but determined to do another Goenka retreat soon
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and get it right. She also had a slight buzz. The trippier moments during the retreats carried over
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and helped her feel calm as she headed off to study overseas. The sleeplessness aside, she felt
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it had done her some good. While she was abroad, Emily found herself with time on her hands, so
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she signed up to work as a volunteer at a Goenka retreat. Even though she had only been through a
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single retreat she was deemed qualified to work as a volunteer. Volunteers at the retreats are called
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servers, an unpaid position but your board and lodging is free. You do less meditation — around
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four hours a day — and otherwise help out around the venue, preparing meals, cleaning toilets,
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making beds, and socialising with the other servers. Emily’s serving experience during the
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first retreat was okay, but then she signed up to be a server for a second retreat, and that retreat
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was different, horribly different. Emily It really started to fuck me up, so I’d stopped sleeping. So I’d have major emotional, like big,
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big emotional reactions to things. And then I would have like lucid dreams. I was like, I was like a fish swimming through the ocean and like almost hallucinatory dreams and stuff
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like that, which I never had before. But the whole narrative that was like, Oh, it’s good, you know, that’s what we’re here for over here. It’s like, get all of our stuff out of us. If
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you’re feeling anxious or upset or anguished or whatever, you know, it’s part of the process.
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Madison Marriage Emily told me the retreat she volunteered at did something to her mind, something she could not reverse. It set in process a chain of events
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that completely overturned the next five years of her life. Her next few months were tough. She was
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supposed to be studying abroad, but she couldn’t focus or think rationally. She moved several
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times. Eventually, she dropped the university course and started hitchhiking on her travels,
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oblivious to any personal safety risks. She was meditating for several hours a day. This is what
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the Goenka course recommended Emily should do after the retreats. Keep up the program. Keep
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meditating. Emily followed the recommendations diligently. Sometimes she sat with her eyes closed
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on the side of the road, meditating while waiting for a ride. Other times she meditated while
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sitting in the back of a stranger’s car. Emily My brain was like, falling apart and I wasn’t sleeping, and I didn’t know what the hell was
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going on.I was kind of, like, slightly tripping the whole time. In that my state of consciousness
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was very like, being forcefully elevated. Madison Marriage
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She finally returned to the UK in mid-2017, a total wreck.
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Kate When she came back, she was clearly very unwell. She wasn’t sleeping. Madison Marriage
24:56
This is Emily’s mum, Kate, describing her daughter when she first returned home.
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Kate She was stick thin. And she looked ashen. I was frightened. I tried to get her to see the doctor and she wouldn’t. She just looked,
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almost like an old woman. You know, she’d lost all the bloom in her cheeks. She just looked grey. And
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not herself. She just looked like a bag of bones. Madison Marriage
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I went to meet Emily’s mum, Kate, and her dad, Stephen, the one who sent me the email at their
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home in Herefordshire, not long after I met Emily. Kate’s a lovely lady. She came to pick me up from
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the train station and drove me to their farmhouse, which overlooks a field of sheep. This is the
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house Emily returned to from her studies abroad. Kate and Stephen told me how shocking her return
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was. This is Stephen, Emily’s dad. Stephen She didn’t seem happy. She came across as not there. And obviously on one level,
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she was there physically and she could talk. But it was as if her personality had been removed.
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Madison Marriage Emily says when she returned, she felt awful all the time, every day. Emily
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So dreadful. I was still kind of like tripping. I felt like I just been split in half.
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Madison Marriage She didn’t know what was wrong with her, so she signed up to do another retreat. The only thing that seemed to provide her with
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any relief from what she describes as a dreadful day to day experience. Her parents at this point
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were supportive of her going on the retreats and meditating at home. Stephen thought that meditation was perhaps a remedy for the insomnia and detachment his daughter was displaying.
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Emily He thought that I was mentally ill and the meditation would help, which was my general narrative as well.
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Madison Marriage But Emily says she didn’t have any mental health issues before she started meditating. In autumn 2017, a little over a year since her
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first Goenka retreat, Emily returned to Oxford to start what should have been her final academic
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year. But it was hell. She became hypersensitive to noise, sickened by food and suffered from
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extreme sleeplessness and irritability. Emily Any sensory input, I’d go like, torturous, it was like being tortured every day and every night
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nonstop. I felt like I didn’t even exist anymore. I felt like there was just no one. It was like I
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was like an empty body. Madison Marriage
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Somehow she got through the academic term, but by the time she came home for Christmas, she seemed
27:45
to have entered a psychotic state. Kate She wasn’t like a normal human being. She was like a ghost. She was expressionless. She had nothing
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to say. She did nothing except sit in her room and meditate or go out wandering around the fields any
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time of day or night. Face like a thundercloud. Madison Marriage
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And then there were bouts of mania. Kate
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Sometimes she would come and talk to me and there’d be a strange look in her eyes,
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a kind of mistiness and a kind of faraway look in her eyes. I remember her saying to me: ‘Mum,
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I am the Messiah. I’m going to save the world’. She said, I’m going through the dark night of
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the soul. And I said, What’s that? She said, don’t you know what the dark night of the soul
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is?Everyone goes through this. But I’m the Messiah and I’m going to save the world.
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Madison Marriage After several weeks of watching Emily get worse and worse, she started looking through Emily’s diaries. That’s where she found some things Emily
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wrote. About taking her own life. Kate I found her journal, where she talks about contemplating suicide.
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Madison Marriage And she didn’t see a doctor throughout this period? Kate No, she wouldn’t. And she was an adult, and I couldn’t make her.
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Madison Marriage For Kate, the change in her daughter was difficult to reconcile. Emily had gone from being an outgoing grade-A student at one of the
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best universities in the world to dropping out of university and withdrawing from society. She had
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become practically unrecognisable since her first Goenka retreat 18 months earlier. Kate knew she
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had to take action. By now she suspected that the meditation might be doing her daughter harm rather
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than helping. And she started digging around on the internet for information about the Goenka
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organisation and Vipassana meditation. She learned that there were centres all over the world where
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10-day retreats were held and that the retreats were all based on the teachings of this one man.
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Eventually, she found blog posts suggesting the whole Goenka network was like a cult.
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Kate And that it was pulling the wool over people’s eyes, that what they were offering was some sort of bogus pseudo-religious experience,
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but that they were essentially cultists. Madison Marriage
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This is when Kate started to seriously panic. She told Stephen, her husband, that she thought their
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daughter might be in a meditation cult. Stephen Kate started reading books about cults and how they operate and giving them to me and saying,
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look, you’ve got to read this. And that actually caused various forms of scales to fall from my eyes. Madison Marriage
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Terrified, Kate and Stephen started to look for ways to help get their daughter away from this organisation. And Kate came across a group called the Cult Information Centre.
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Kate And I phoned them up and started describing to them what was happening to my daughter. And they said this state
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of psychosis can be brought on by meditation and you need to get a very specialist help.
31:37
Madison Marriage Kate didn’t even know how to go about finding a specialist for this sort of thing. It’s like looking up a Ghostbuster. You
31:44
don’t even know you need one, until you do. The centre made some recommendations, and that’s how
31:53
she found Graham Baldwin. Graham Baldwin Groups work to try and stop people thinking for themselves. And so our job is to rekindle those
32:06
critical abilities. Madison Marriage Graham’s the director of Catalyst, which is a charity that helps families and individuals that
32:13
have been damaged by abusive relationships and groups. He remembers the call he got from Kate.
32:20
Graham Baldwin She described the way her daughter was behaving. She was cutting herself off, sitting in a room all the time, unable to
32:28
sleep. Having paranoid episodes and, you know, the usual sort of signs of a psychiatric breakdown.
32:39
Madison Marriage Graham’s worked with lots of families who have made calls to him just like this one. Families who think their loved one has
32:46
become involved in a cult. But Graham thought the important issue was less about whether Emily was
32:53
involved in a cult and more about the fact she was involved with such intensive meditation. He
32:59
told me about the first time he heard of people having difficulties from meditation. It was back in the nineties and he had been asked to go to India to try and track someone down who’d become
33:09
involved in a cult there. Graham Baldwin So I decided to talk to people locally and I went to a local psychiatric hospital. The doctor said
33:19
to me, I’m glad you called, because the problem we have here is something that we termed the English
33:26
disease. I said the English disease? What’s the English disease? And he said, it’s people
33:33
that have psychiatric breakdowns because they got involved with meditation groups in India. And so
33:42
these people come over here, they get involved in a meditation group, they do excessive meditation,
33:48
and then they have breakdowns. Madison Marriage So when Graham heard about Emily, he wasn’t surprised. This wasn’t the first time he’d been
33:57
asked to help someone who’d been intensely practicing Vipassana meditation and fallen
34:02
into difficulty. Graham Baldwin And this is a problem with some meditation groups and groups like Vipassana, which presented
34:11
meditation as the solution to everything. Yeah, it will help you to become a better
34:17
person and etc etc. Madison Marriage Graham says from his own personal experience, not everyone becomes a better person from
34:27
intensive meditation. Graham Baldwin About a third of the people that do meditation, it works. And they feel that it does make them feel
34:36
better. About a third say it doesn’t do any good one way or the other, and it’s useless and people
34:42
stop doing it. And another third develop problems as a result of the meditation.
34:52
Madison Marriage I was taken aback by what Graham was saying --that effectively it was well known that intensive meditation could harm people. And Graham says
35:01
there’s often a reluctance for meditation groups to accept the meditation is just not good for some
35:06
people. Even bad for them, like it was for Emily. Graham Baldwin
35:12
Now, what’s interesting about that is that when the groups see this problem, of people having,
35:19
you know, psychiatric breakdowns, they claim that it’s just sort of clearing out the rubbish in the
35:24
pipes. You know, it’s something people have to continue doing and get over it. And in my
35:33
experience, all it ever does is make the person worse. And the biggest thing in putting them
35:40
back together was getting them to stop meditating, which is quite difficult when they’ve been told it
35:46
was the only answer to their problems. Madison Marriage Graham told Kate and Stephen that it sounded like their daughter was in a state of psychosis from
35:56
too much meditation. They needed to get her to stop meditating right away, but this would not
36:03
be easy and they needed to tread lightly. Kate created a plan to try to convince Emily to get
36:09
on a call with Graham. Kate I said, somebody on the phone wants to talk to you. He’s very interested in your experience with
36:19
Vipassana. Would you talk to him? And amazingly, she agreed. And so she spent, I don’t know,
36:29
like two hours talking to him on the phone. And afterwards she was completely exhausted.
36:36
And we went on like this for four or five weeks, planning phone calls where she would talk to him.
36:44
And by the end of about, she must have had five or six long sessions of conversation with this man,
36:54
she started doing things like picking up the Sunday papers, commenting on an article,
37:04
listening to something that was said on the radio and responding to it, having a conversation with
37:11
us. She started basically coming back into touch with reality. And that was the beginning
37:20
of her recovery. Madison Marriage
37:25
Graham’s intervention seemed to work, but the progress Graham made didn’t reverse things back
37:31
to normal. Emily was still on a very different trajectory to two years earlier. She had dropped
37:38
out of Oxford, was living at home and still wasn’t able to function in society. But at least she no
37:46
longer seemed suicidal or completely detached from reality. Kate and Stephen thought they
37:52
were beginning to get their daughter back, that things were about to improve. But then something
37:59
else happened. Unbelievably, Emily’s twin sister, Sarah, started to get into meditation
38:08
as well. Ultimately becoming hooked on the same form of Vipassana meditation taught by Goenka.
38:17
Sarah had seen her sister meditating as a way to feel better, so she thought she’d try it too.
38:24
Emily I do feel a sense of responsibility and a great, great deal of guilt and shame and embarrassment and like horror
38:33
because of the way that I encouraged her to go to do Vipassana. But I also can see that I was only
38:42
acting on the information that I had available to my conscious kind of self at that time.
38:50
Madison Marriage Sarah went to her first retreat, then another, then another. Soon, Sarah started to exhibit the same behaviour as Emily had,
39:01
only more severe. She was being plagued by memories of rape, war and murder. Events that had
39:09
never happened to her. Kate now had two daughters in serious psychological distress. And the common
39:18
variable was the Goenka retreats. Kate
39:26
It was horrific. She was hallucinating some of the time. I remember her crying. She’s going.
39:36
I’m losing her. She’s gone. Madison Marriage
39:44
I needed to understand what happened to Sarah and whether these frightening
39:49
experiences were unique to the twins. Were there others who’d had this experience,
39:56
too? Just how widespread were these issues? That’s in the next episode of The Retreat.
40:18
[MUSIC PLAYING] The Retreat is the first season from Untold, a new Financial Times investigative podcast. It is produced by the Financial Times with
40:27
Goat Rodeo. The series lead producers are Rebecca Seidel and Persis Love. Reporting by me, Madison
40:36
Marriage. Writing by me, Megan Nodolski and Rebecca Seidel. Story editing from Ian Enright.
40:45
Executive producers for the Financial Times are Topher Forhecz and Cheryl Brumley. Executive
40:51
producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Nodolski. Mixing, editing and sound design by
40:59
Rebecca Seidel. The series theme is Everyone Alive Wants Answers by Colleen. Additional music from
41:08
Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel and Blue Dot Sessions. Editorial and production assistance from Paul
41:16
Aflalo, Joshua Gabert-Doyon, Petros Gioumpasis, Andrew Georgiades, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan
41:25
and Laura Clarke. Thanks also to Alastair Mackie. If you’ve been affected by anything in this
41:32
series, there are some useful resources highlighted in the show notes. And if you
41:37
want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch with me, Madison, at madison.marriage@ft.com. If you’re an FT subscriber and don’t want to wait to hear
41:44
the remaining three episodes of the series, log on now to FT.com or find in our FT app a new playlist feature where you can binge the entire season. You can find a link in our show you notes. Thanks to you for listening and thanks to the many sources who shared their very personal stories with me.
Emily Falls Apart in a Goenka Retreat: "She Doesn't Exist"
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• Page 1 of 1
Emily Falls Apart in a Goenka Retreat: "She Doesn't Exist"
by admin » Thu Feb 01, 2024 2:14 am
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Re: Emily Falls Apart in a Goenka Retreat: "She Doesn't Exis
by admin » Thu Feb 01, 2024 2:26 am
Part 2 of 2
Episode 2: Ten Long Days
Transcript
0:00
Madison Marriage This series discusses suicide and mental health. Please take care while listening and seek
0:07
support if you need it. [SOUND OF A GONG]
0:18
Madison Marriage The gong bangs at 4am. It’s still dark outside,
0:24
but you get up and get dressed with the others. You head into the meditation hall. You try not
0:33
to make eye contact. Talking is forbidden. A volunteer directs you to find a spot. You sit
0:45
and begin. Your goal is to focus your mind. Your back hurts. Your knees hurt and you’re hungry.
0:59
They don’t serve dinner here. You’ve been here three days and you have seven more. Yesterday,
1:09
you asked about leaving. But leaving is a bad idea, they say. You’re not sleeping as much
1:17
as you usually do. Actually, you can’t sleep no matter how hard you try. You’re exhausted.
1:28
You don’t really know how you’re going to sit and meditate for over 10 hours one more day.
1:45
[SOUND OF A GONG] You’re at this retreat because you’ve been looking for something to relieve whatever feelings you’re having. Something that’s not
1:53
pharmaceutical. Something safe. And at the very least, it’s kept you from looking at your phone.
2:02
They took your phone away when you arrived at the centre. After breakfast, you go back to meditating
2:10
for three more hours, followed by a lunch break and then more meditating. Then some more. Then
2:18
some more. You’re taught to scan your body slowly up and down. Feeling every single sensation. Laser
2:31
focusing your attention. This goes on for hours and hours. In the evening, everyone gathers
2:57
around while an instructor loads a videotape into a VCR. The screen shows an older man with an open,
3:05
friendly face. He sits cross-legged on the floor. The video is grainy and the audio is not the best,
3:13
but you can hear the teachings. The man on the TV screen is called Satya Narayan Goenka.
3:22
Goenka To get the best result of your stay here, you have to work very hard. Diligently. Ardently. Patiently but persistently.
3:43
Continuously. It is your own hard work which will give you the best fruits of your stay here.
3:59
Madison Marriage From the special investigations team at the
4:11
Financial Times, this is The Retreat. Goenka
4:18
You have to work out your own salvation. Your own liberation. No one else can do that for you.
4:28
Madison Marriage Episode 2: Ten Long Days.
4:34
In the last episode, I met Emily and I learned how her family became fractured after she was
4:41
drawn into the Goenka organisation. How she went on retreat after retreat. How it robbed Emily of
4:50
her day to day life and her grip on reality. How it nearly broke her. After hearing her story,
5:00
the big question for me was how unusual was her experience. Were there others like her?
5:13
I started to probe deeper to look for others who’d been to retreats. Among the blog posts
5:20
and YouTube videos of people saying how much they recommend the retreats, I began to find
5:26
more and more accounts that said the opposite. The people I found weren’t just in the UK. I talked
5:35
to people from all over the world: Australia, America, Sweden, France, New Zealand. There
5:42
wasn’t much in common between these individuals. Some of them came from wealthy backgrounds,
5:47
like Emily and her twin sister. Some had nothing. Some were well established in their careers,
5:55
and some hadn’t even gotten their first job yet. But what emerged was a pattern where people from
6:03
all walks of life signed up to a Goenka retreat in the hope of self-improvement, to help relieve
6:11
stress or anxiety, or simply to experience something new to challenge themselves. Instead,
6:20
they said their brains were ripped apart. Jenny
6:25
Being in a retreat, there’s something about the absolute silence. Michael You know I felt very very anxious. I was scared of what was happening. I felt as if I couldn’t trust myself.
6:36
Jenny So I was like, kind of like toppled over on the floor crying. And all these people just walked by me. And it was a horrible experience.
6:44
Niels I was extremely scared. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. Jack
6:49
And like, literally, I felt like the whole of my chest just exploded and my body started
6:55
involuntarily shaking. Jenny Sometimes when you meditate, thoughts come up and it was like this voice was like,
7:02
maybe you would be better off dead. Madison Marriage
7:07
All in all, I interviewed nearly two dozen people. There was Sky from Massachusetts.
7:15
Sky I think people would describe me as someone who’s kind of like, daring and probably strong. Madison Marriage
7:22
Sky first heard about Goenka retreats while studying for a degree in social work. At the time,
7:29
she says there was a lot of excitement about the role of meditation in mental health intervention,
7:35
and she herself was dealing with mild anxiety and depression. Sky Some of it might have been work related, some
7:41
of it might have been related to childhood, and some of it was just kind of how I’m wired. I was
7:47
sort of looking forward to where this would take me, you know, with all the purported benefits.
7:53
Madison Marriage It was actually her doctor who suggested she try meditating to help with her symptoms. He recommended she apply to a nearby Goenka centre.
8:03
Sky filled out the application form, which asked a few basic questions about her physical and mental
8:08
health. But when she found out she was accepted, she was still quite anxious about going.
8:14
Sky I was kind of terrified, but he wouldn’t be recommending this if it wasn’t really a good fit for me. And
8:22
also just kind of being an adventurous person. That part of me was really excited about going.
8:29
Madison Marriage And then there was Nick from Alabama. Nick I grew up in kind of like an industrial
8:34
suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Madison Marriage Nick said he got into meditating in his 20s. He used to do about 40 minutes a day. He felt it
8:43
helped him gain some clarity of mind. Nick Like just a little more crisp or just a little more calm. I think it was helping to some degree
8:52
with the anxious patterns of my mind. Madison Marriage He signed up to his first Goenka retreat in Jesup, Georgia.
9:00
There was Michael from Britain. He signed up to a Goenka centre in Herefordshire, deep in the British countryside. Michael
9:08
I felt like I was emerging from an illusion. Not that I was heading into a hallucination.
9:13
Madison Marriage And there were others. There was Niels from Denmark. John from Sydney. Jenny from southern California. There was
9:22
something about the self-denial and isolation of the Goenka retreats that’s appealed to all
9:29
of them. Jenny I thought I was doing this really profound and deep thing and mystical experience, you know.
9:39
Madison Marriage All of them entered these retreats, hoping this was going to be a positive and maybe even transformative experience. But
9:48
few of them had an understanding of just what exactly they’d be doing. It felt mysterious.
9:56
Sky I think day one was kind of okay. It was sort of exciting. The things that are really kind of stuck into my mind were like
10:03
turning over my keys and my wallet and my phone, you know, and kind of like taking the plunge into,
10:10
I don’t know what I was getting into. Madison Marriage They sat still for hours with Goenka’s voice surrounding them. And as the hours stacked up,
10:20
each of them did have gratifying moments. Jenny I experienced a lot of peace and stillness in my mind, and feeling a connectivity with everyone
10:32
around me and just serenity. Michael I was feeling tremendously energised. It wasn’t relaxing. It was like being wired.
10:43
Nick So you’re filled with all these, like, positive emotions, you know. Niels I suddenly felt an enormous wave of inner peace. Total peace of mind. Total quiet,
10:55
total relaxation. Total bliss. For about an hour on day three.
11:08
Madison Marriage But each in different ways and at different times in their experience, started to feel something unsettling.
11:17
Michael At first I just began to feel afraid. I just started to feel fear. Sky
11:22
I started to feel these waves of panic. Jack I couldn’t sit still. I was in panic. I was freaking out. And I was like, oh my God,
11:29
what’s happening? Madison Marriage They told me that the more they meditated throughout the retreats, the more they had
11:37
difficulty sleeping. Sky And that cycle happened over and over again. And then sometimes that kind of nodding off
11:44
and then startling back awake would shift into just feeling absolutely terrified. And
11:50
that terror wasn’t attached to anything. It was kind of like like a nightmare or a bad trip.
11:58
Madison Marriage They were all silently suffering. Despite this,
12:05
the Goenka volunteers would press them all to continue. Some of them sought advice from the
12:12
teacher at the end of the day. Nick And so I told him, you know, like I’m crying. I’m going through all these
12:18
experiences. And his response to me was, it’s just another sensation. That was his response.
12:26
Jenny The teacher just did not have the skills to really receive what I was going through. Literally everything I was saying so he just kept
12:34
responding like, just do the technique. Madison Marriage And it wasn’t just the teachers at each centre who told them to keep
12:41
going. Goenka’s teachings gave quite clear guidance on seeing the 10 days through.
12:48
Goenka This is a very serious job that you are doing. It is actually a deep surgical operation of your own mind. Deep surgical operation.
12:58
Sky Goenka talks about how doing Vipassana or taking
13:05
this course is kind of like doing brain surgery. And if you leave in the middle of the course that
13:12
you’re kind of like leaving when your skull is still open. It was just stuck in my mind that
13:18
if I leave without finishing, whatever happens to me is going to be more terrifying than if I just,
13:27
you know, stick it out. Goenka The whole process of cutting the wound and taking the pus out is unpleasant. You have to face
13:37
it. Accept it, bravely and every unpleasant experience that you had, bear it smilingly.
13:47
Because it is for your good. Madison Marriage They all felt like they shouldn’t leave. Or in some cases, perhaps they couldn’t
13:56
leave. And they began to have severe breakdowns, some more dire than others.
14:02
Niels I finally lost it completely. They got the assistant teacher and he came to my room. And, uh, at that point, I was sort of
14:15
believing 100 per cent in my hallucination. And he, he was half a reptile in his face. So one side
14:23
of his face, he was like a lizard or something like that. And at this point, I had no idea that I
14:29
was hallucinating or dreaming or whatever. For me, this was real. This was my reality. There is this
14:38
half lizard creature sitting in my room trying to convince me to come back to the meditation hall.
14:46
Nick My life shattered. My life shattered into a million pieces. I was so dissociated at the time. It was like being
14:59
stuck in, like a bad psychedelic trip that you can’t get out of. It just keeps going.
15:14
Madison Marriage Sky nosedived after she finished her first retreat. Sky Yeah, I got to the point, you know, after about 50 days of not really sleeping, where I just couldn’t
15:25
go on anymore. I remember lying in bed. I was staying with my mom because I was struggling
15:31
so much and kind of having this realisation that, you know, like, maybe the only way to,
15:38
to kind of get through this is to die. Madison Marriage After realising she had suicidal ideation, Sky asked her therapist to refer her to a
15:50
psychiatric unit. Sky I was there for, I think, about seven nights. Madison Marriage
15:58
Michael didn’t make it to the end of his first retreat. On day eight, he ended up
16:04
being removed from the Goenka centre in handcuffs by the police before being taken to hospital.
16:10
Michael When the ambulance team arrived. I wouldn’t cooperate with them. I just said, no, I’m not going with you. And the only people who can
16:17
move you against your will are the police. Madison Marriage Michael remembers being under police supervision at the hospital, and while he waited to see
16:27
the on-duty psychiatrist, he says he was subsumed by a roiling, primal fear that
16:34
it was like he was dying and being reborn every 90 seconds. This went on for hours.
16:41
Michael I couldn’t really determine what was happening. It was very difficult for me to understand what was real and what was not.
16:58
Madison Marriage Of all the people I interviewed, a few of them, like Sky and Michael, had experiences during or after an initial Goenka
17:08
retreat. But for most of these people, it was only after several retreats that something seemed to
17:16
go wrong. And when it went wrong, it went really wrong. Like with Sarah. That’s after the break.
17:33
Sarah Do you want something to eat? It’s kind of lunchtime. Madison Marriage Yeah Sarah
17:38
Cool, we made some really nice venison stew for you. [Inaudible chatter] Madison Marriage
17:47
I met Sarah in Oxfordshire, where she lived in a sweet little house with a roommate. Sarah is
17:53
Emily’s identical twin sister. You met Emily in the last episode. You might recall the twins grew
18:00
up playing music together in a beautiful house with gardens in the English countryside. Sarah
18:07
seems a bit more introverted than her twin sister, but is a kind and warm host. We sat
18:12
down to do the interview in a music room next to her cello. Nowadays, Sarah doesn’t give off
18:19
party animal vibes, but she pulls out a photo of herself at a house party during her student
18:25
years where she’s covered in body paint, wearing a boob tube and grinning at the camera. She looks
18:32
like she’s the life and soul. She tells stories about when she was in college. The old her.
18:39
Sarah We used to have these big parties in our house, just like lots of fun themes, lots of dressing up. There was one party
18:47
which was like, it was desert island themed, but I, I went as Ariel from The Tempest. It was so
18:52
weird. We were like, we were only gonna speak in Shakespearean verse the whole night.
18:58
Madison Marriage Sarah had tons of fun at university, but she was feeling a little lost after finishing her degree. She was also struggling to find a
19:08
cure for a debilitating nerve pain in her arms. She thought meditation might help. And Emily,
19:16
her twin sister, recommended going to a Goenka retreat. The retreat centre in Herefordshire was
19:24
peaceful, and she was pleased to be around a big group of people her own age. As the
19:30
course progressed, she found that amazing things started happening to her mind.
19:36
Sarah I remember finding it quite incredible what would happen if you observe, like if you stay that concentrated for a long time. It kind
19:43
of felt like my mind was becoming very clear, very sharp, and I felt like I was getting into a state of mind that’s quite above ordinary. The third day I started to like see patterns.
19:56
Madison Marriage What do you mean by see patterns? Sarah It was kind of like with my eyes closed, my field of vision, there were just like all these geometric kind of patterns, like shapes and things
20:05
moving. And then when I went outside, everything looked really geometric. Everything was really,
20:11
really colourful. Madison Marriage Sarah achieved what the organisation says is possible. She was able to reach a higher
20:20
spiritual plane, one that led to, quote, increased awareness, non delusion, self-control and peace.
20:28
Sarah It’s basically like a sober psychedelic experience. It’s very, very mentally altering. It was as if I’d taken
20:38
psychedelic drugs for 10 days. Madison Marriage And something else amazing happened to Sarah during the retreat. Her nerve pain completely
20:47
disappeared. Sarah So it did kind of feel like a kind of cleanse that was benefiting my body as well. So that
20:54
was kind of quite amazing. I was like, oh, wow. You know, I seem to really be responding well to,
21:01
to this, this practice. Madison Marriage By the fourth day, Sarah felt overwhelmed by emotion and broke down sobbing.
21:12
Sarah I left the hall and I went outside and then the helper came and was like, you know, are you okay? And I was just like, it’s just all a lot,
21:21
you know? And she was just like I know, but just go on in and just carry on, carry on
21:27
with the meditation and just let the tears flow. Madison Marriage
21:35
When she came out of the other side of the 10-day program, Sarah felt like a new person.
21:40
Sarah I felt like I kind of went to a different planet. I don’t know if that makes sense. I kind of felt like I could see through all the problems in the world and I just felt like my mind had been so,
21:53
so transformed. And I had, like, entered in some completely new way of like seeing the world. Madison Marriage But the fact she suddenly saw
22:01
the world differently meant she also viewed her family in a new light. Back at home things weren’t
22:09
the same around them. Sarah Afterwards basically, I felt like I didn’t trust my family or I was always kind of
22:16
convinced that they were like bad and that this was the way to be good and it kind of
22:24
made me feel like… very euphoric, but also very at odds with everything in my life.
22:35
Madison Marriage Sarah was job hunting while living at home, but she had also started meditating for three hours a day. And soon enough,
22:45
Sarah signed up to another retreat in France. And then another. And then another. She became
22:52
a server as well, working for weeks at a time as a volunteer at the Goenka retreats.
22:58
Sarah Once I’d started the whole thing, I felt like I couldn’t really function without it. I honestly just felt like I had to keep doing it.
23:07
Madison Marriage It almost sounds like an addiction. Sarah Yeah, it is like an addiction. And it’s
23:12
even more confusing because they portray it as like this ultimate antithesis to addiction. Like,
23:17
they say that you’re becoming more independent, and more self-sufficient by practicing meditation.
23:24
But actually the opposite is true. And I think it’s like anything that’s very mentally altering,
23:30
it has the potential to become addictive. Madison Marriage
23:35
An addiction to meditation. That’s what Sarah told me she had. After nearly three years of
23:48
meditating, serving, traveling and struggling to sleep, something in Sarah’s mind finally
23:56
snapped. She hit rock bottom. This was the retreat that broke her. It was January 2021.
24:09
Sarah I felt like, um, something in my kind of psychological structure had been really just broken and really damaged.
24:21
Madison Marriage For a lot of people, meditating for hours can bring old memories to the surface. Sometimes those memories are traumatic. But for Sarah,
24:32
something else was happening. Sarah I basically felt like I didn’t actually have any of my own trauma to surface, and it was kind of
24:41
all this like trauma was surfacing from, I can only think of it as like from other lifetimes.
24:51
I felt like I was in a war zone, or I was like witnessing someone being raped, or I was like a
24:57
perpetrator, and I was like, killing people. And that was kind of what was going on in my brain.
25:04
Madison Marriage Sounds horrible. Sarah Yeah, yeah, it was really, really horrible.
25:14
Madison Marriage Over the next six months, Sarah spiraled out of control. By the summer of 2021. She was in full blown psychosis. Her
25:24
memory of these weeks is hazy because she was so far gone. Here is what she does remember.
25:30
Sarah Basically, I was, like, hallucinating for like, probably three weeks straight, and I was convinced that I was
25:38
like going to go to hell, and going to go to these places where all this, like, torture. And I was
25:44
actually convinced at one point that I was going to die, and that I was going to go to a place
25:51
where these horrible things happen, like, all the time. I was just basically completely delusional.
25:57
Madison Marriage Kate, Sarah’s mum, and Stephen,
26:06
Sarah’s dad, say Sarah was only sleeping for two hours a night. By day she seemed to be living a
26:15
nightmare. It was like a terrible repeat from when Emily fell ill from too much meditation,
26:23
only worse. Here’s Kate. Kate It was horrific. She would be wracked by these terrible sobbing fits. You know we’d try and
26:34
take her out for a walk to try and relax her. She was so keyed up. We were trying to walk
26:40
around the fields with her, and she’d suddenly be convulsed with crying and immobile. We couldn’t,
26:48
I couldn’t move her. You know, she’s a big strong girl. She’d just stop and she’d be [IMITATES SARAH]. Like this. Madison Marriage
27:00
Kate began to fear that Sarah would take her own life. She hid all the medication in the house and
27:07
kept it under lock and key. Kate became Sarah’s appointed guardian to manage doctors appointments
27:15
and to ensure she couldn’t stockpile painkillers. She and Stephen slept in shifts to make sure one
27:22
of them could keep an eye on Sarah at all times. By this point, Emily had come home to try and help
27:30
care for Sarah. Emily was still meditating all the time as well, but seeing the distress her twin
27:38
sister was in was the final trigger for her. She had begun to realise that the meditation retreats
27:46
were not helping either of them. That they were, potentially, the root cause of their pain. Kate,
27:58
Stephen and Emily struggled to keep Sarah stable. Kate
28:03
There were other crises where you know, where she’d be thrashing. We were sitting on the sofa
28:10
over there, you know, trying to hold her down. Madison Marriage Why would you need to hold her down? Kate
28:15
We were just afraid she was going to hurt herself or hurt us. She was murderous as well as, um,
28:21
suicidal. She’d pick up a knife. I remember her smashing a plate full of food on the floor over
28:28
there. And just the threats, you know, I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to kill myself. She
28:36
kept asking me to help her kill herself. And I had to say, no, I can’t, I can’t do that.
28:48
Madison Marriage Sarah’s episodes got progressively worse that summer. Just like with Emily, Kate was constantly watching over Sarah,
28:58
hoping she didn’t hurt herself. There was one night that she won’t ever forget.
29:04
Kate She was so sick and her eyes were like this. And
29:12
she was making awful, awful noises, like growling, shrieking. Whoops. Animal guttural noises and
29:25
just screams and it was like, you know, it just felt like a really bad 1970s BBC horror movie,
29:33
you know, in the asylum. And this was my beautiful daughter in my house. This is our family. It was
29:42
just shocking. Deeply, deeply, shocking. Madison Marriage
29:56
That night, in desperation, the family called an ambulance. After a nightmarish few weeks,
30:04
they finally got the help they needed. The local doctor put Sarah on a combination of medications
30:12
that helped her to sleep. After years of sleep deprivation. Slowly, Sarah started to reemerge
30:21
from the fog of the previous three years. In the daytime, she watched trashy TV shows. At night
30:30
she slept for 12 hours straight. Crucially, she stopped meditating. But she seems damaged. Her
30:42
cognitive function seemed slower. She struggled to do things that had previously been easy,
30:49
like turning pages of music in time, while her mum played. But slowly she seemed to improve. She
30:59
started singing again with her twin sister. [SINGING]
31:11
Madison Marriage More than two years later, Kate still worries desperately about Sarah’s mental wellbeing.
31:18
Kate Sometimes she’s fine. Sometimes I see the girl I used to know in her. We had a lovely Christmas, you know. She came home,
31:27
she slept well. It was like old times. We were all laughing around together and playing games.
31:35
It was wonderful. And then suddenly she crumples and she’s this little vulnerable, lost person.
31:57
[MUSIC PLAYING] Madison Marriage
32:02
So now I was convinced. I talked to so many people like Sarah and Emily, who had had severe mental
32:09
health issues during or after a Goenka retreat. So many people who said intense meditation had caused
32:18
them serious harm. But why and how? What was happening to these people? Was there a clinical
32:28
reason people were coming out of these retreats so broken? Were the people I interviewed always
32:35
prone to mental health issues? Was meditation just the catalyst that unleashed these problems?
32:43
Or did meditation cause them? Hi, Willoughby. How are you?
32:52
Willoughby Britton Hi. Good. Madison Marriage I tracked down Willoughby Britton, who is widely considered one of the global experts on meditation-related difficulties. Willoughby is
33:03
the founder of a nonprofit organisation linked to Brown University that’s been offering support to
33:09
people experiencing meditation-related challenges for over a decade. It’s called Cheetah House. Her
33:17
organisation has around 150 appointments every month to provide advice to people in crisis.
33:24
Willoughby really knows this subject inside out, starting with her own personal experience.
33:31
Willoughby Britton I got into it, you know, for myself to manage my own stress, anxiety and trauma. Madison Marriage
33:38
Meditation helped Willoughby at first, and she became a kind of meditation evangelist.
33:44
But she began to experience something that can happen to committed meditators,
33:49
something called dissociation. Willoughby Britton Things like having your body dissolve, not feeling like you exist, feeling like you’re floating or
34:02
like located somewhere else other than behind your eyes, having, uh, kind of hyper empathy. Like,
34:11
you don’t have a lot of boundaries in terms of other people’s emotions. Madison Marriage After her own personal experience with
34:18
intense meditation, Willoughby decided to study meditation and what it does to people. Willoughby
34:26
told me I should think about meditation as a form of cortical arousal, something that stimulates the
34:32
brain almost like a drug. Willoughby Britton So if you think about other drugs that people take to enhance their attention or their alertness,
34:42
like coffee, amphetamines, cocaine, Ritalin, these are all stimulants. And they have a sweet spot
34:52
that if you take them, you know, you have better concentration. You can focus, you’re more awake.
34:59
But if you take too much, then you start to have anxiety, panic and insomnia. And probably in some
35:06
cases, psychosis, if you take enough. Madison Marriage This sounds a lot like an overdose. Willoughby Britton
35:13
Obviously the dose is a big deal. So the higher the dose, the more likely you’re
35:21
going to see difficulties. Madison Marriage
35:29
From their research, Willoughby and her team have found that people respond to meditation differently. For example, they found that meditation can sometimes help with sleep at first,
35:40
but when people start meditating for more than 30 minutes a day, it can have the opposite effect.
35:46
Willoughby Britton And so it can be very confusing for people, especially when for a long time meditation was relaxing or calming or helped
35:55
their minds. When they start to develop anxiety, they often start meditating more in order to calm
36:03
down more. And then of course, it gets worse. And so they get more anxiety, so they meditate more.
36:13
Madison Marriage Willoughby is describing what Sarah told me about; essentially, an addiction cycle. You begin meditating to help your mental state,
36:22
and the process of meditating allows you to feel as though you are helping your mental wellbeing,
36:27
so you meditate more. But the meditation in part is what starts causing new issues. As the problem
36:35
grows, so does the amount of meditation. It starts to spiral. The cure becomes the
36:42
sickness. Willoughby sees it all the time. Most of the people that Willoughby sees are having
36:49
issues from intense doses of meditation. But some people, she says, have a reaction from the
36:57
smallest dose of meditation. Willoughby Britton We’re also seeing problems from people who are only doing daily practice at home. Less than an
37:07
hour a day. So we also see problems from app use. Madison Marriage
37:13
She’s talking about apps like Headspace and Calm. Willoughby Britton So it’s important to say that if you’re doing a low dose, that doesn’t mean that
37:23
that’s 100 per cent safe. Madison Marriage
37:30
Willoughby’s research findings are not universally popular. In some corners of the meditation
37:35
community, she’s despised. Willoughby Britton Oh, yes. I’ve received over a thousand emails from people who have all sorts of things to
37:48
say about me, about my research, about how I’m wrong, how I’m terrible, how I’m evil. I’ve been
37:55
called a false prophet. I’ve been threatened with lawsuits. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I get it all.
38:03
Madison Marriage But Willoughby is not deterred. She believes in her research. And she does have a particular concern about intensive
38:11
meditation retreats. Especially those that don’t tailor their programs to suit individual needs.
38:19
Willoughby Britton If you have a super high dose, if you have a lot of people and a few teachers, if you have a one size fits all, everybody’s doing
38:27
the same practice and there’s no way to modify it according to each person, then that’s also a
38:35
really a kind of a recipe for disaster. Madison Marriage And then when people raise a red flag and say they’re encountering difficulties
38:44
while meditating… Willoughby Britton The kind of most common response that most people will get from a meditation teacher does not help,
38:54
which is basically keep meditating. Whatever happens, keep meditating is
38:59
almost always the answer. Madison Marriage
39:05
Speaking to Willoughby, it becomes clear that there is a problem here, and the lack
39:12
of consensus around this means there’s also a lack of support systems on many retreats,
39:18
which makes them particularly dangerous. Willoughby Britton It’s so common that meditators get blamed for their experience. You know,
39:27
it’s never the practice. It’s always the meditator. It’s they didn’t do it right. They had a preexisting condition. They weren’t adequately prepared. There’s so many ways that
39:37
they get blamed by their meditation teachers, but also by their doctors and their therapists.
39:52
Madison Marriage What Willoughby was saying, all checked out with the personal experiences I’d heard. But I wanted to sense check what she had told me with
40:01
other meditation experts to find out to what extent her views were an outlier in her field.
40:09
It turns out they aren’t. I found many experts who corroborated her findings about intense and
40:17
prolonged meditation practices. The experts I spoke to said that meditation-related challenges
40:24
are real, serious, and can happen to anyone. This seemed to be widely accepted. The experts said it
40:37
didn’t matter whether or not you had a previous experience of trauma or mental health condition,
40:44
or whether you were experiencing a major life event. Intensive meditation could unleash dramatic
40:51
problems in an individual. Even those who believed they were completely stable, without any prior
40:59
warning that this was possible. And those affected suffered real harm as a result. So the next
41:14
question was how far does this harm go? And what’s the ultimate consequence if it’s not addressed?
41:26
[MUSIC PLAYING] Nathalie Regardless of whether she had something going on or not, at the end of the day,
41:31
nobody helped her. So even if she had a mental illness and we didn’t know and she just, you know,
41:37
it was never shared with anyone, nobody helped her regardless of what was going on.
41:46
Madison Marriage That’s next time, on The Retreat.
42:03
The Retreat is the first season from Untold, a new Financial Times investigative podcast.
42:09
It is produced by the Financial Times with Goat Rodeo. The series’ lead producers are Rebecca
42:16
Seidel and Persis Love. Reporting by me, Madison Marriage, writing by me, Megan Nodolski and
42:24
Rebecca Seidel. Story editing from Ian Enright, executive producers for the Financial Times are
42:32
Topher Forhecz Faraz and Cheryl Brumley. Executive producers for Goat Radio are Ian Enright and Megan
42:39
Nodolski. Mixing, editing and sound design by Rebecca Seidel. The series theme is Everyone Alive
42:49
Wants Answers by Colleen. Additional music from Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel and Blue Dot Sessions.
42:57
Editorial and production assistance from Paul Aflalo, Joshua Gabert-Doyon, Petros Gioumpasis,
43:05
Andrew Georgiades, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan and Laura Clarke. Thanks also to Alastair Mackie.
43:15
If you’ve been affected by anything in this series, there are some useful resources highlighted in the show notes. And if you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast,
43:25
please get in touch with me, Madison, at madison.marriage@ft.com. Thanks to you for
43:33
listening, and thanks to the many sources who shared their very personal stories with me.
Episode 2: Ten Long Days
Transcript
0:00
Madison Marriage This series discusses suicide and mental health. Please take care while listening and seek
0:07
support if you need it. [SOUND OF A GONG]
0:18
Madison Marriage The gong bangs at 4am. It’s still dark outside,
0:24
but you get up and get dressed with the others. You head into the meditation hall. You try not
0:33
to make eye contact. Talking is forbidden. A volunteer directs you to find a spot. You sit
0:45
and begin. Your goal is to focus your mind. Your back hurts. Your knees hurt and you’re hungry.
0:59
They don’t serve dinner here. You’ve been here three days and you have seven more. Yesterday,
1:09
you asked about leaving. But leaving is a bad idea, they say. You’re not sleeping as much
1:17
as you usually do. Actually, you can’t sleep no matter how hard you try. You’re exhausted.
1:28
You don’t really know how you’re going to sit and meditate for over 10 hours one more day.
1:45
[SOUND OF A GONG] You’re at this retreat because you’ve been looking for something to relieve whatever feelings you’re having. Something that’s not
1:53
pharmaceutical. Something safe. And at the very least, it’s kept you from looking at your phone.
2:02
They took your phone away when you arrived at the centre. After breakfast, you go back to meditating
2:10
for three more hours, followed by a lunch break and then more meditating. Then some more. Then
2:18
some more. You’re taught to scan your body slowly up and down. Feeling every single sensation. Laser
2:31
focusing your attention. This goes on for hours and hours. In the evening, everyone gathers
2:57
around while an instructor loads a videotape into a VCR. The screen shows an older man with an open,
3:05
friendly face. He sits cross-legged on the floor. The video is grainy and the audio is not the best,
3:13
but you can hear the teachings. The man on the TV screen is called Satya Narayan Goenka.
3:22
Goenka To get the best result of your stay here, you have to work very hard. Diligently. Ardently. Patiently but persistently.
3:43
Continuously. It is your own hard work which will give you the best fruits of your stay here.
3:59
Madison Marriage From the special investigations team at the
4:11
Financial Times, this is The Retreat. Goenka
4:18
You have to work out your own salvation. Your own liberation. No one else can do that for you.
4:28
Madison Marriage Episode 2: Ten Long Days.
4:34
In the last episode, I met Emily and I learned how her family became fractured after she was
4:41
drawn into the Goenka organisation. How she went on retreat after retreat. How it robbed Emily of
4:50
her day to day life and her grip on reality. How it nearly broke her. After hearing her story,
5:00
the big question for me was how unusual was her experience. Were there others like her?
5:13
I started to probe deeper to look for others who’d been to retreats. Among the blog posts
5:20
and YouTube videos of people saying how much they recommend the retreats, I began to find
5:26
more and more accounts that said the opposite. The people I found weren’t just in the UK. I talked
5:35
to people from all over the world: Australia, America, Sweden, France, New Zealand. There
5:42
wasn’t much in common between these individuals. Some of them came from wealthy backgrounds,
5:47
like Emily and her twin sister. Some had nothing. Some were well established in their careers,
5:55
and some hadn’t even gotten their first job yet. But what emerged was a pattern where people from
6:03
all walks of life signed up to a Goenka retreat in the hope of self-improvement, to help relieve
6:11
stress or anxiety, or simply to experience something new to challenge themselves. Instead,
6:20
they said their brains were ripped apart. Jenny
6:25
Being in a retreat, there’s something about the absolute silence. Michael You know I felt very very anxious. I was scared of what was happening. I felt as if I couldn’t trust myself.
6:36
Jenny So I was like, kind of like toppled over on the floor crying. And all these people just walked by me. And it was a horrible experience.
6:44
Niels I was extremely scared. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. Jack
6:49
And like, literally, I felt like the whole of my chest just exploded and my body started
6:55
involuntarily shaking. Jenny Sometimes when you meditate, thoughts come up and it was like this voice was like,
7:02
maybe you would be better off dead. Madison Marriage
7:07
All in all, I interviewed nearly two dozen people. There was Sky from Massachusetts.
7:15
Sky I think people would describe me as someone who’s kind of like, daring and probably strong. Madison Marriage
7:22
Sky first heard about Goenka retreats while studying for a degree in social work. At the time,
7:29
she says there was a lot of excitement about the role of meditation in mental health intervention,
7:35
and she herself was dealing with mild anxiety and depression. Sky Some of it might have been work related, some
7:41
of it might have been related to childhood, and some of it was just kind of how I’m wired. I was
7:47
sort of looking forward to where this would take me, you know, with all the purported benefits.
7:53
Madison Marriage It was actually her doctor who suggested she try meditating to help with her symptoms. He recommended she apply to a nearby Goenka centre.
8:03
Sky filled out the application form, which asked a few basic questions about her physical and mental
8:08
health. But when she found out she was accepted, she was still quite anxious about going.
8:14
Sky I was kind of terrified, but he wouldn’t be recommending this if it wasn’t really a good fit for me. And
8:22
also just kind of being an adventurous person. That part of me was really excited about going.
8:29
Madison Marriage And then there was Nick from Alabama. Nick I grew up in kind of like an industrial
8:34
suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Madison Marriage Nick said he got into meditating in his 20s. He used to do about 40 minutes a day. He felt it
8:43
helped him gain some clarity of mind. Nick Like just a little more crisp or just a little more calm. I think it was helping to some degree
8:52
with the anxious patterns of my mind. Madison Marriage He signed up to his first Goenka retreat in Jesup, Georgia.
9:00
There was Michael from Britain. He signed up to a Goenka centre in Herefordshire, deep in the British countryside. Michael
9:08
I felt like I was emerging from an illusion. Not that I was heading into a hallucination.
9:13
Madison Marriage And there were others. There was Niels from Denmark. John from Sydney. Jenny from southern California. There was
9:22
something about the self-denial and isolation of the Goenka retreats that’s appealed to all
9:29
of them. Jenny I thought I was doing this really profound and deep thing and mystical experience, you know.
9:39
Madison Marriage All of them entered these retreats, hoping this was going to be a positive and maybe even transformative experience. But
9:48
few of them had an understanding of just what exactly they’d be doing. It felt mysterious.
9:56
Sky I think day one was kind of okay. It was sort of exciting. The things that are really kind of stuck into my mind were like
10:03
turning over my keys and my wallet and my phone, you know, and kind of like taking the plunge into,
10:10
I don’t know what I was getting into. Madison Marriage They sat still for hours with Goenka’s voice surrounding them. And as the hours stacked up,
10:20
each of them did have gratifying moments. Jenny I experienced a lot of peace and stillness in my mind, and feeling a connectivity with everyone
10:32
around me and just serenity. Michael I was feeling tremendously energised. It wasn’t relaxing. It was like being wired.
10:43
Nick So you’re filled with all these, like, positive emotions, you know. Niels I suddenly felt an enormous wave of inner peace. Total peace of mind. Total quiet,
10:55
total relaxation. Total bliss. For about an hour on day three.
11:08
Madison Marriage But each in different ways and at different times in their experience, started to feel something unsettling.
11:17
Michael At first I just began to feel afraid. I just started to feel fear. Sky
11:22
I started to feel these waves of panic. Jack I couldn’t sit still. I was in panic. I was freaking out. And I was like, oh my God,
11:29
what’s happening? Madison Marriage They told me that the more they meditated throughout the retreats, the more they had
11:37
difficulty sleeping. Sky And that cycle happened over and over again. And then sometimes that kind of nodding off
11:44
and then startling back awake would shift into just feeling absolutely terrified. And
11:50
that terror wasn’t attached to anything. It was kind of like like a nightmare or a bad trip.
11:58
Madison Marriage They were all silently suffering. Despite this,
12:05
the Goenka volunteers would press them all to continue. Some of them sought advice from the
12:12
teacher at the end of the day. Nick And so I told him, you know, like I’m crying. I’m going through all these
12:18
experiences. And his response to me was, it’s just another sensation. That was his response.
12:26
Jenny The teacher just did not have the skills to really receive what I was going through. Literally everything I was saying so he just kept
12:34
responding like, just do the technique. Madison Marriage And it wasn’t just the teachers at each centre who told them to keep
12:41
going. Goenka’s teachings gave quite clear guidance on seeing the 10 days through.
12:48
Goenka This is a very serious job that you are doing. It is actually a deep surgical operation of your own mind. Deep surgical operation.
12:58
Sky Goenka talks about how doing Vipassana or taking
13:05
this course is kind of like doing brain surgery. And if you leave in the middle of the course that
13:12
you’re kind of like leaving when your skull is still open. It was just stuck in my mind that
13:18
if I leave without finishing, whatever happens to me is going to be more terrifying than if I just,
13:27
you know, stick it out. Goenka The whole process of cutting the wound and taking the pus out is unpleasant. You have to face
13:37
it. Accept it, bravely and every unpleasant experience that you had, bear it smilingly.
13:47
Because it is for your good. Madison Marriage They all felt like they shouldn’t leave. Or in some cases, perhaps they couldn’t
13:56
leave. And they began to have severe breakdowns, some more dire than others.
14:02
Niels I finally lost it completely. They got the assistant teacher and he came to my room. And, uh, at that point, I was sort of
14:15
believing 100 per cent in my hallucination. And he, he was half a reptile in his face. So one side
14:23
of his face, he was like a lizard or something like that. And at this point, I had no idea that I
14:29
was hallucinating or dreaming or whatever. For me, this was real. This was my reality. There is this
14:38
half lizard creature sitting in my room trying to convince me to come back to the meditation hall.
14:46
Nick My life shattered. My life shattered into a million pieces. I was so dissociated at the time. It was like being
14:59
stuck in, like a bad psychedelic trip that you can’t get out of. It just keeps going.
15:14
Madison Marriage Sky nosedived after she finished her first retreat. Sky Yeah, I got to the point, you know, after about 50 days of not really sleeping, where I just couldn’t
15:25
go on anymore. I remember lying in bed. I was staying with my mom because I was struggling
15:31
so much and kind of having this realisation that, you know, like, maybe the only way to,
15:38
to kind of get through this is to die. Madison Marriage After realising she had suicidal ideation, Sky asked her therapist to refer her to a
15:50
psychiatric unit. Sky I was there for, I think, about seven nights. Madison Marriage
15:58
Michael didn’t make it to the end of his first retreat. On day eight, he ended up
16:04
being removed from the Goenka centre in handcuffs by the police before being taken to hospital.
16:10
Michael When the ambulance team arrived. I wouldn’t cooperate with them. I just said, no, I’m not going with you. And the only people who can
16:17
move you against your will are the police. Madison Marriage Michael remembers being under police supervision at the hospital, and while he waited to see
16:27
the on-duty psychiatrist, he says he was subsumed by a roiling, primal fear that
16:34
it was like he was dying and being reborn every 90 seconds. This went on for hours.
16:41
Michael I couldn’t really determine what was happening. It was very difficult for me to understand what was real and what was not.
16:58
Madison Marriage Of all the people I interviewed, a few of them, like Sky and Michael, had experiences during or after an initial Goenka
17:08
retreat. But for most of these people, it was only after several retreats that something seemed to
17:16
go wrong. And when it went wrong, it went really wrong. Like with Sarah. That’s after the break.
17:33
Sarah Do you want something to eat? It’s kind of lunchtime. Madison Marriage Yeah Sarah
17:38
Cool, we made some really nice venison stew for you. [Inaudible chatter] Madison Marriage
17:47
I met Sarah in Oxfordshire, where she lived in a sweet little house with a roommate. Sarah is
17:53
Emily’s identical twin sister. You met Emily in the last episode. You might recall the twins grew
18:00
up playing music together in a beautiful house with gardens in the English countryside. Sarah
18:07
seems a bit more introverted than her twin sister, but is a kind and warm host. We sat
18:12
down to do the interview in a music room next to her cello. Nowadays, Sarah doesn’t give off
18:19
party animal vibes, but she pulls out a photo of herself at a house party during her student
18:25
years where she’s covered in body paint, wearing a boob tube and grinning at the camera. She looks
18:32
like she’s the life and soul. She tells stories about when she was in college. The old her.
18:39
Sarah We used to have these big parties in our house, just like lots of fun themes, lots of dressing up. There was one party
18:47
which was like, it was desert island themed, but I, I went as Ariel from The Tempest. It was so
18:52
weird. We were like, we were only gonna speak in Shakespearean verse the whole night.
18:58
Madison Marriage Sarah had tons of fun at university, but she was feeling a little lost after finishing her degree. She was also struggling to find a
19:08
cure for a debilitating nerve pain in her arms. She thought meditation might help. And Emily,
19:16
her twin sister, recommended going to a Goenka retreat. The retreat centre in Herefordshire was
19:24
peaceful, and she was pleased to be around a big group of people her own age. As the
19:30
course progressed, she found that amazing things started happening to her mind.
19:36
Sarah I remember finding it quite incredible what would happen if you observe, like if you stay that concentrated for a long time. It kind
19:43
of felt like my mind was becoming very clear, very sharp, and I felt like I was getting into a state of mind that’s quite above ordinary. The third day I started to like see patterns.
19:56
Madison Marriage What do you mean by see patterns? Sarah It was kind of like with my eyes closed, my field of vision, there were just like all these geometric kind of patterns, like shapes and things
20:05
moving. And then when I went outside, everything looked really geometric. Everything was really,
20:11
really colourful. Madison Marriage Sarah achieved what the organisation says is possible. She was able to reach a higher
20:20
spiritual plane, one that led to, quote, increased awareness, non delusion, self-control and peace.
20:28
Sarah It’s basically like a sober psychedelic experience. It’s very, very mentally altering. It was as if I’d taken
20:38
psychedelic drugs for 10 days. Madison Marriage And something else amazing happened to Sarah during the retreat. Her nerve pain completely
20:47
disappeared. Sarah So it did kind of feel like a kind of cleanse that was benefiting my body as well. So that
20:54
was kind of quite amazing. I was like, oh, wow. You know, I seem to really be responding well to,
21:01
to this, this practice. Madison Marriage By the fourth day, Sarah felt overwhelmed by emotion and broke down sobbing.
21:12
Sarah I left the hall and I went outside and then the helper came and was like, you know, are you okay? And I was just like, it’s just all a lot,
21:21
you know? And she was just like I know, but just go on in and just carry on, carry on
21:27
with the meditation and just let the tears flow. Madison Marriage
21:35
When she came out of the other side of the 10-day program, Sarah felt like a new person.
21:40
Sarah I felt like I kind of went to a different planet. I don’t know if that makes sense. I kind of felt like I could see through all the problems in the world and I just felt like my mind had been so,
21:53
so transformed. And I had, like, entered in some completely new way of like seeing the world. Madison Marriage But the fact she suddenly saw
22:01
the world differently meant she also viewed her family in a new light. Back at home things weren’t
22:09
the same around them. Sarah Afterwards basically, I felt like I didn’t trust my family or I was always kind of
22:16
convinced that they were like bad and that this was the way to be good and it kind of
22:24
made me feel like… very euphoric, but also very at odds with everything in my life.
22:35
Madison Marriage Sarah was job hunting while living at home, but she had also started meditating for three hours a day. And soon enough,
22:45
Sarah signed up to another retreat in France. And then another. And then another. She became
22:52
a server as well, working for weeks at a time as a volunteer at the Goenka retreats.
22:58
Sarah Once I’d started the whole thing, I felt like I couldn’t really function without it. I honestly just felt like I had to keep doing it.
23:07
Madison Marriage It almost sounds like an addiction. Sarah Yeah, it is like an addiction. And it’s
23:12
even more confusing because they portray it as like this ultimate antithesis to addiction. Like,
23:17
they say that you’re becoming more independent, and more self-sufficient by practicing meditation.
23:24
But actually the opposite is true. And I think it’s like anything that’s very mentally altering,
23:30
it has the potential to become addictive. Madison Marriage
23:35
An addiction to meditation. That’s what Sarah told me she had. After nearly three years of
23:48
meditating, serving, traveling and struggling to sleep, something in Sarah’s mind finally
23:56
snapped. She hit rock bottom. This was the retreat that broke her. It was January 2021.
24:09
Sarah I felt like, um, something in my kind of psychological structure had been really just broken and really damaged.
24:21
Madison Marriage For a lot of people, meditating for hours can bring old memories to the surface. Sometimes those memories are traumatic. But for Sarah,
24:32
something else was happening. Sarah I basically felt like I didn’t actually have any of my own trauma to surface, and it was kind of
24:41
all this like trauma was surfacing from, I can only think of it as like from other lifetimes.
24:51
I felt like I was in a war zone, or I was like witnessing someone being raped, or I was like a
24:57
perpetrator, and I was like, killing people. And that was kind of what was going on in my brain.
25:04
Madison Marriage Sounds horrible. Sarah Yeah, yeah, it was really, really horrible.
25:14
Madison Marriage Over the next six months, Sarah spiraled out of control. By the summer of 2021. She was in full blown psychosis. Her
25:24
memory of these weeks is hazy because she was so far gone. Here is what she does remember.
25:30
Sarah Basically, I was, like, hallucinating for like, probably three weeks straight, and I was convinced that I was
25:38
like going to go to hell, and going to go to these places where all this, like, torture. And I was
25:44
actually convinced at one point that I was going to die, and that I was going to go to a place
25:51
where these horrible things happen, like, all the time. I was just basically completely delusional.
25:57
Madison Marriage Kate, Sarah’s mum, and Stephen,
26:06
Sarah’s dad, say Sarah was only sleeping for two hours a night. By day she seemed to be living a
26:15
nightmare. It was like a terrible repeat from when Emily fell ill from too much meditation,
26:23
only worse. Here’s Kate. Kate It was horrific. She would be wracked by these terrible sobbing fits. You know we’d try and
26:34
take her out for a walk to try and relax her. She was so keyed up. We were trying to walk
26:40
around the fields with her, and she’d suddenly be convulsed with crying and immobile. We couldn’t,
26:48
I couldn’t move her. You know, she’s a big strong girl. She’d just stop and she’d be [IMITATES SARAH]. Like this. Madison Marriage
27:00
Kate began to fear that Sarah would take her own life. She hid all the medication in the house and
27:07
kept it under lock and key. Kate became Sarah’s appointed guardian to manage doctors appointments
27:15
and to ensure she couldn’t stockpile painkillers. She and Stephen slept in shifts to make sure one
27:22
of them could keep an eye on Sarah at all times. By this point, Emily had come home to try and help
27:30
care for Sarah. Emily was still meditating all the time as well, but seeing the distress her twin
27:38
sister was in was the final trigger for her. She had begun to realise that the meditation retreats
27:46
were not helping either of them. That they were, potentially, the root cause of their pain. Kate,
27:58
Stephen and Emily struggled to keep Sarah stable. Kate
28:03
There were other crises where you know, where she’d be thrashing. We were sitting on the sofa
28:10
over there, you know, trying to hold her down. Madison Marriage Why would you need to hold her down? Kate
28:15
We were just afraid she was going to hurt herself or hurt us. She was murderous as well as, um,
28:21
suicidal. She’d pick up a knife. I remember her smashing a plate full of food on the floor over
28:28
there. And just the threats, you know, I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to kill myself. She
28:36
kept asking me to help her kill herself. And I had to say, no, I can’t, I can’t do that.
28:48
Madison Marriage Sarah’s episodes got progressively worse that summer. Just like with Emily, Kate was constantly watching over Sarah,
28:58
hoping she didn’t hurt herself. There was one night that she won’t ever forget.
29:04
Kate She was so sick and her eyes were like this. And
29:12
she was making awful, awful noises, like growling, shrieking. Whoops. Animal guttural noises and
29:25
just screams and it was like, you know, it just felt like a really bad 1970s BBC horror movie,
29:33
you know, in the asylum. And this was my beautiful daughter in my house. This is our family. It was
29:42
just shocking. Deeply, deeply, shocking. Madison Marriage
29:56
That night, in desperation, the family called an ambulance. After a nightmarish few weeks,
30:04
they finally got the help they needed. The local doctor put Sarah on a combination of medications
30:12
that helped her to sleep. After years of sleep deprivation. Slowly, Sarah started to reemerge
30:21
from the fog of the previous three years. In the daytime, she watched trashy TV shows. At night
30:30
she slept for 12 hours straight. Crucially, she stopped meditating. But she seems damaged. Her
30:42
cognitive function seemed slower. She struggled to do things that had previously been easy,
30:49
like turning pages of music in time, while her mum played. But slowly she seemed to improve. She
30:59
started singing again with her twin sister. [SINGING]
31:11
Madison Marriage More than two years later, Kate still worries desperately about Sarah’s mental wellbeing.
31:18
Kate Sometimes she’s fine. Sometimes I see the girl I used to know in her. We had a lovely Christmas, you know. She came home,
31:27
she slept well. It was like old times. We were all laughing around together and playing games.
31:35
It was wonderful. And then suddenly she crumples and she’s this little vulnerable, lost person.
31:57
[MUSIC PLAYING] Madison Marriage
32:02
So now I was convinced. I talked to so many people like Sarah and Emily, who had had severe mental
32:09
health issues during or after a Goenka retreat. So many people who said intense meditation had caused
32:18
them serious harm. But why and how? What was happening to these people? Was there a clinical
32:28
reason people were coming out of these retreats so broken? Were the people I interviewed always
32:35
prone to mental health issues? Was meditation just the catalyst that unleashed these problems?
32:43
Or did meditation cause them? Hi, Willoughby. How are you?
32:52
Willoughby Britton Hi. Good. Madison Marriage I tracked down Willoughby Britton, who is widely considered one of the global experts on meditation-related difficulties. Willoughby is
33:03
the founder of a nonprofit organisation linked to Brown University that’s been offering support to
33:09
people experiencing meditation-related challenges for over a decade. It’s called Cheetah House. Her
33:17
organisation has around 150 appointments every month to provide advice to people in crisis.
33:24
Willoughby really knows this subject inside out, starting with her own personal experience.
Cheetah House
cheetahhouse.org/about-us
Accessed: 1/31/24
About Us
Cheetah House is a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices. Most of us have experienced them and know firsthand how difficult it can be to find expertise, community, or basic validation. We are working to change that!
Mission, Vision, and Values
Mission:
Cheetah House exists to provide support to those experiencing meditation-related difficulties, to train meditation providers in understanding and treating meditation adverse effects in a person-centered way, and to empower people to make informed decisions about the role of meditation in their lives. In a world in which claims about meditation are often overhyped, Cheetah House also aims to provide a balanced, realistic and informed perspective about the risks associated with meditation through the dissemination of research-based information.
Vision:
Our vision is to be a global gathering space for meditators in distress and to lead the conversation about the existence of, treatments for, and solutions to meditation-related adverse effects; we envision an environment where meditators-in-distress are adequately supported by communities and professionals who are equipped with the knowledge and skills to prevent and mitigate adverse meditation experiences.
Values:
Informed consent: We believe that individuals and organizations need access to the full range of evidence and information in order to make their best decisions.
Trauma-sensitive conduct: We acknowledge the unique experiences of each person and strive to approach our work with empathy, curiosity, and non-assumption.
Peer-Leadership: We believe the ongoing perspectives of those we serve are irreplaceable and serve as the basis of the services we provide.
Self-empowerment: We work to maximize the autonomy of individuals in their relationship with Cheetah House and beyond.
Freedom from systems of influence: We strive to critically assess the workings of power within meditation communities, academia, healthcare, and Cheetah House itself.
The Team
Willoughby Britton Ph.D.
Willoughby Britton Ph.D. is a an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University Medical School, an Associate Professor of Behavior and Social Sciences in Brown University’s School of Public Health and the Director of Brown’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.
Dr. Britton earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona. She completed her clinical residency in behavioral medicine and neuropsychology, and a 2 year NIH-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship in adult mood disorders treatment research at Brown University Medical School. She has received multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of meditation.
Her clinical neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma and other emotional disturbances. She is especially interested in practice-specific effects, and moderators of treatment outcome, or in other words “Which practices are best or worst suited for which types of people or conditions and why”. She recently completed “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience” study which investigates the full range of experiences that can arise in the context of contemplative practices, including experiences that could be considered difficult, challenging or adverse.
As a clinician, she has been trained as an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and has taught mindfulness to both clinical and non-clinical populations. She has also completed three years of training for treating trauma and destabilized nervous systems. She now specializes in helping meditators who are experiencing meditation-related difficulties, and providing meditation safety trainings to providers and organizations.
Link to Dr. Britton’s care team profile, and availability for consultations here.
33:31
Willoughby Britton I got into it, you know, for myself to manage my own stress, anxiety and trauma. Madison Marriage
33:38
Meditation helped Willoughby at first, and she became a kind of meditation evangelist.
33:44
But she began to experience something that can happen to committed meditators,
33:49
something called dissociation. Willoughby Britton Things like having your body dissolve, not feeling like you exist, feeling like you’re floating or
34:02
like located somewhere else other than behind your eyes, having, uh, kind of hyper empathy. Like,
34:11
you don’t have a lot of boundaries in terms of other people’s emotions. Madison Marriage After her own personal experience with
34:18
intense meditation, Willoughby decided to study meditation and what it does to people. Willoughby
34:26
told me I should think about meditation as a form of cortical arousal, something that stimulates the
34:32
brain almost like a drug. Willoughby Britton So if you think about other drugs that people take to enhance their attention or their alertness,
34:42
like coffee, amphetamines, cocaine, Ritalin, these are all stimulants. And they have a sweet spot
34:52
that if you take them, you know, you have better concentration. You can focus, you’re more awake.
34:59
But if you take too much, then you start to have anxiety, panic and insomnia. And probably in some
35:06
cases, psychosis, if you take enough. Madison Marriage This sounds a lot like an overdose. Willoughby Britton
35:13
Obviously the dose is a big deal. So the higher the dose, the more likely you’re
35:21
going to see difficulties. Madison Marriage
35:29
From their research, Willoughby and her team have found that people respond to meditation differently. For example, they found that meditation can sometimes help with sleep at first,
35:40
but when people start meditating for more than 30 minutes a day, it can have the opposite effect.
35:46
Willoughby Britton And so it can be very confusing for people, especially when for a long time meditation was relaxing or calming or helped
35:55
their minds. When they start to develop anxiety, they often start meditating more in order to calm
36:03
down more. And then of course, it gets worse. And so they get more anxiety, so they meditate more.
36:13
Madison Marriage Willoughby is describing what Sarah told me about; essentially, an addiction cycle. You begin meditating to help your mental state,
36:22
and the process of meditating allows you to feel as though you are helping your mental wellbeing,
36:27
so you meditate more. But the meditation in part is what starts causing new issues. As the problem
36:35
grows, so does the amount of meditation. It starts to spiral. The cure becomes the
36:42
sickness. Willoughby sees it all the time. Most of the people that Willoughby sees are having
36:49
issues from intense doses of meditation. But some people, she says, have a reaction from the
36:57
smallest dose of meditation. Willoughby Britton We’re also seeing problems from people who are only doing daily practice at home. Less than an
37:07
hour a day. So we also see problems from app use. Madison Marriage
37:13
She’s talking about apps like Headspace and Calm. Willoughby Britton So it’s important to say that if you’re doing a low dose, that doesn’t mean that
37:23
that’s 100 per cent safe. Madison Marriage
37:30
Willoughby’s research findings are not universally popular. In some corners of the meditation
37:35
community, she’s despised. Willoughby Britton Oh, yes. I’ve received over a thousand emails from people who have all sorts of things to
37:48
say about me, about my research, about how I’m wrong, how I’m terrible, how I’m evil. I’ve been
37:55
called a false prophet. I’ve been threatened with lawsuits. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I get it all.
38:03
Madison Marriage But Willoughby is not deterred. She believes in her research. And she does have a particular concern about intensive
38:11
meditation retreats. Especially those that don’t tailor their programs to suit individual needs.
38:19
Willoughby Britton If you have a super high dose, if you have a lot of people and a few teachers, if you have a one size fits all, everybody’s doing
38:27
the same practice and there’s no way to modify it according to each person, then that’s also a
38:35
really a kind of a recipe for disaster. Madison Marriage And then when people raise a red flag and say they’re encountering difficulties
38:44
while meditating… Willoughby Britton The kind of most common response that most people will get from a meditation teacher does not help,
38:54
which is basically keep meditating. Whatever happens, keep meditating is
38:59
almost always the answer. Madison Marriage
39:05
Speaking to Willoughby, it becomes clear that there is a problem here, and the lack
39:12
of consensus around this means there’s also a lack of support systems on many retreats,
39:18
which makes them particularly dangerous. Willoughby Britton It’s so common that meditators get blamed for their experience. You know,
39:27
it’s never the practice. It’s always the meditator. It’s they didn’t do it right. They had a preexisting condition. They weren’t adequately prepared. There’s so many ways that
39:37
they get blamed by their meditation teachers, but also by their doctors and their therapists.
39:52
Madison Marriage What Willoughby was saying, all checked out with the personal experiences I’d heard. But I wanted to sense check what she had told me with
40:01
other meditation experts to find out to what extent her views were an outlier in her field.
40:09
It turns out they aren’t. I found many experts who corroborated her findings about intense and
40:17
prolonged meditation practices. The experts I spoke to said that meditation-related challenges
40:24
are real, serious, and can happen to anyone. This seemed to be widely accepted. The experts said it
40:37
didn’t matter whether or not you had a previous experience of trauma or mental health condition,
40:44
or whether you were experiencing a major life event. Intensive meditation could unleash dramatic
40:51
problems in an individual. Even those who believed they were completely stable, without any prior
40:59
warning that this was possible. And those affected suffered real harm as a result. So the next
41:14
question was how far does this harm go? And what’s the ultimate consequence if it’s not addressed?
41:26
[MUSIC PLAYING] Nathalie Regardless of whether she had something going on or not, at the end of the day,
41:31
nobody helped her. So even if she had a mental illness and we didn’t know and she just, you know,
41:37
it was never shared with anyone, nobody helped her regardless of what was going on.
41:46
Madison Marriage That’s next time, on The Retreat.
42:03
The Retreat is the first season from Untold, a new Financial Times investigative podcast.
42:09
It is produced by the Financial Times with Goat Rodeo. The series’ lead producers are Rebecca
42:16
Seidel and Persis Love. Reporting by me, Madison Marriage, writing by me, Megan Nodolski and
42:24
Rebecca Seidel. Story editing from Ian Enright, executive producers for the Financial Times are
42:32
Topher Forhecz Faraz and Cheryl Brumley. Executive producers for Goat Radio are Ian Enright and Megan
42:39
Nodolski. Mixing, editing and sound design by Rebecca Seidel. The series theme is Everyone Alive
42:49
Wants Answers by Colleen. Additional music from Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel and Blue Dot Sessions.
42:57
Editorial and production assistance from Paul Aflalo, Joshua Gabert-Doyon, Petros Gioumpasis,
43:05
Andrew Georgiades, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan and Laura Clarke. Thanks also to Alastair Mackie.
43:15
If you’ve been affected by anything in this series, there are some useful resources highlighted in the show notes. And if you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast,
43:25
please get in touch with me, Madison, at madison.marriage@ft.com. Thanks to you for
43:33
listening, and thanks to the many sources who shared their very personal stories with me.
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