Varieties of Contemplative Experience (Lindahl 2017)

The first taxonomy of meditation-related challenges: interviews with Western Buddhist practitioners and teachers, mapping the phenomena, the influencing factors, and the remedies.

MODERN RESEARCH

What the study did

Lindahl and colleagues (Britton’s lab) conducted the “Varieties of Contemplative Experience” (VCE) study: interviews with Western Buddhist meditators and meditation teachers across traditions — Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan — building the first systematic taxonomy of meditation-related challenges. The project is qualitative: its product is categories and mechanisms, not prevalence statistics.

What it found

• A taxonomy of difficult experiences, spanning somatic changes (unusual sensations, energy), emotional intensification (fear, anxiety, sadness), and perceptual/cognitive shifts (including experiences practitioners found hard to integrate).
• Timing varies enormously. Onset of challenges ranged from the first days of practice to more than 25 years in: mean 7.1 years; 29% first encountered challenges within their first year; 45% between 1 and 10 years; 25% after more than 10 years. Some (12%) reported challenges within the first ten days.
• Challenges arise across practice types — not only from “advanced” methods: participants attributed challenges to sitting practices (including just-sitting, shikantaza), concentration practices, and many others.
• Influencing factors and remedies were themselves taxonomized: practice intensity, retreat context, prior history, and — centrally — how the experience is framed and responded to (the study’s practical upshot: interpretation and support matter as much as the experience itself).

How it sits in this site’s evidence base

This study is the qualitative partner of the Farias 2020 review: Farias counts occurrences; Lindahl classifies what occurs. Together they ground the site’s two claims about difficulty:

1. Difficult experiences are a real, documented feature of contemplative practice — not legend and not illness, but a spectrum that practice traditions themselves have always named (the Daoist tradition’s own vocabulary: the seeing-light question, the 走火入魔 fear treated on the can-sitting-go-wrong page).
2. No part of this literature concerns Daoist sitting specifically. The VCE study is Western Buddhist; Farias found no Daoist-specific studies. Both are cited here for what they are: the nearest evidence, explicitly not evidence about zuowang.

Boundary, stated plainly: this is a qualitative study of Buddhist practitioners; its taxonomy is descriptive, not causal; and it says nothing about the safety or effects of Daoist practices. It is recorded here as the best existing map of the terrain of difficulty — a map the Daoist tradition approaches with its own older vocabulary.

Sources

• Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K., & Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0176239. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0176239