A Place to Land

Media discussions of meditation and mindfulness routinely emphasize their benefits for health and well-being—including stress reduction, increased happiness, and improved focus—claims reinforced by scientific research and amplified through apps, books, and popular culture. Yet as meditation has become more widespread, so, too, have reports from practitioners whose experiences do not fit this narrative. For some, meditation precipitates profound distress, including resurfacing trauma, nervous system dysregulation, and severe mental health crises. These challenges are often compounded by confusion and uncertainty about where to seek help. 

Dr. Willoughby Britton has spent the past decade working at the intersection of meditation research, advocacy, and clinical care. Dr. Britton, a faculty member at Brown University and director of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, is widely known as a senior author of the landmark study “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience.” She is also the founder of Cheetah House, a nonprofit organization that provides peer support and consultation for meditators in distress, as well as educational resources for clinicians and meditation teachers. 

In November 2025, Dr. Britton and I discussed the evolution of her research and how it informs the person-centered model now guiding her work at Cheetah House.

To begin, could you tell Tricycle readers what led to your interest in researching meditation? When I was in college, one of my closest childhood friends killed herself with a hunting rifle, and I was the one who found her. I developed anxiety and what was likely PTSD. My dad sent me Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart, and I used that as my recovery manual for the next decade, well into graduate school. I wrote my master’s thesis on the neural correlates of near-death experiences and was featured in the New York Times; however, I wanted my research to do more to help others. 

In 2004, I decided to research the meditation practices that had helped me navigate the most stressful period of my life. I was curious to understand how meditation affected the brain, and back then, the existing research was fairly limited. Coincidentally, it was the first year of the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute—a program aimed at training the next generation of meditation researchers in rigorous methodology with biological endpoints. I was awarded a grant to conduct a clinical trial measuring the effects of meditation on sleep using polysomnography, the gold standard in sleep measurement that assesses brainwaves, muscle tone, breathing, and eye movements. 

Unexpectedly, the data did not match the hypothesis that meditation would be beneficial for sleep. Instead, meditation contributed to an increase in cortical arousal, more awakenings, faster brainwaves, and less deep sleep. I mentioned these findings to a meditation teacher, and she said, “I don’t know why you psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows that if you meditate a lot, you sleep less.” That comment festered like a splinter, and it was the impetus behind “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience.”

When I read “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience” study in graduate school, it clarified for me that meditation is not a one-size-fits-all practice. Much depends on context and what the individual brings to the practice, and outcomes can vary widely. How did these findings lead to your work supporting meditators at Cheetah House? When the first paper from the study was published, in 2017, the research lab at Brown received hundreds of calls from meditators in distress. I spoke with the first 500 or so people who called. But labs are not hotlines, and responding to these calls was taking up a lot of my time. So I founded the nonprofit Cheetah House to be the service arm of the lab. 

Eventually, some of the people who had received assistance at Cheetah House and wanted to give back participated in a yearlong training, and began to offer peer support as part of our first Care Team. Over time, Cheetah House grew into an online community that provides evidence-based information and support to people who encounter difficulties with meditation practice or within religious and spiritual communities.  

What types of experiences typically bring people to Cheetah House? Usually, people reach out to Cheetah House because they can no longer meditate. When they practice, they experience hyperarousal symptoms—anxiety, panic, emotional flooding—along with related challenges such as insomnia and involuntary body movements. The majority of people I see have these symptoms; they’ve lost their system of self-regulation.

The second set of symptoms is less common but includes dissociation—feeling profoundly alienated from one’s experience—and perceptual distortions of the external world. These symptoms are typically accompanied by hyperreflexivity, an obsessive monitoring of symptoms, and existential confusion. In most of these cases, it’s difficult for people to access emotions, and so they feel cognitively impaired. This can make it hard to connect with intuition, so many people who come to Cheetah House also struggle with decision-making.

The rarer cases fall on the psychosis spectrum and include manic symptoms, delusion-like ideation, and full-blown psychosis. I regularly see one or two cases per month in this category. In these situations, it is usually parents who reach out because their children are in crisis. Frequently, the situation has escalated in a retreat setting, and they are calling me from the hospital, trying to figure out what to do next.

These situations sound incredibly challenging. How do people typically come to understand the connection between their meditation practice and these intense experiences? It varies. Sometimes, as people increase their practice, the symptoms become more pronounced. If they back off, the symptoms diminish. In other words, the symptoms follow the trajectory of their practice—a classic criterion for causality. In many cases, people have dramatically increased their practice, especially during a retreat. A common demographic is individuals who are doing more meditation than they ordinarily would as part of a teacher training.  

As you know, meditation-related challenges are well documented in Buddhist traditions. In Zen, they are called “meditation sickness,” whereas in Tibetan communities they are often characterized as an imbalance of the elements, most commonly rlung, a wind disorder. Moreover, intense emotional states are often intentionally evoked through Buddhist contemplations. To a certain extent, difficulties are expected, and in some cases, they are framed as a necessary stage on the path. Within this framework, even distressing experiences can be seen as signs of spiritual progress. Could you give an example of this? Trauma is a controversial example. If you have trauma, you’ll do anything to get rid of it. Meditation can be framed as a way to purify trauma, so even when someone is being flooded with traumatic memories, they are often told to keep meditating because it’s seen as a sign of purification and spiritual progress.  

The purification narrative is very intuitive and compelling, and it’s cross-cultural. There are Buddhist versions of it, but it also has deep roots in Western philosophy, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Going back to classical Greece, Hippocrates and the influential physician Galen prescribed methods to release blocked humors in the body. Freud’s theory of catharsis can be used to interpret any highly emotional or intense experience as a sign of progress: Repressed emotions and memories come up, and that is considered good. People may view such difficulties as purification, but they can also be a sign of becoming very destabilized. 

In our research, we asked numerous meditation teachers about how they determine whether someone facing meditation challenges should continue practicing, take a different approach, or pursue a more significant intervention. Teachers use a variety of criteria to make this decision, but a few are particularly important: how long the difficult experience lasts, the degree of associated distress, and whether there is functional impairment. If a meditator stops eating, for example, that is generally seen as a reason to intervene. But there was no consensus; teachers draw that line in different ways.

The criteria used to make these decisions are often not based on the nature of the experience itself but on how it is interpreted through cultural, psychological, and religious frameworks. Scholars have been debating for millennia how to distinguish a genuine sign of spiritual progress from a deceptive one. It’s a philosophical conversation that’s never going to be fully resolved.

At Cheetah House, we ultimately decided that, for us, debates about what counts as progress are a red herring. They distract from the actual situation on the ground: There is a person in trouble. Our work focuses on the individual in crisis and the kind of support they need. Importantly, this approach brings in the perspective of the person themselves. Simple questions—such as “What would be helpful for you right now?”—can dramatically shift the dynamic, but that shift depends on who is asking and how. 

Your recent paper, “The Teacher Matters,” explores the role of the teacher in working through meditation-related challenges. Why is this role so important to understand? The main finding of this paper was that meditators rated teachers as both the most helpful and the most harmful factor influencing their ability to overcome challenges. 

Teachers rated as helpful were warm, empathetic, and available to provide guidance and support. Unhelpful or harmful teachers were unavailable, failed to pay close attention to or check in with their students, or lacked knowledge of meditation-related challenges. Teachers rated as harmful were also seen as dismissive and invalidating, often blaming the meditator for their difficulties or offering nonspecific, scripted responses such as “keep sitting” or “just observe.” The difference between help and harm often comes down to whether teachers recognize and respond to the distress, rather than treating it as just something to be pushed through.

The difference between help and harm often comes down to whether teachers recognize and respond to the distress, rather than treating it as just something to be pushed through. 

The degree of social and cultural compatibility between student and teacher is another important factor. A shared understanding of interpersonal dynamics and norms—such as the goals of practice and issues of authority, hierarchy, and gender equality—often leads to better outcomes, whereas differing worldviews can make it harder to respond to a meditation-related challenge. 

In another recent study, we found that a student’s relationships with teachers and other meditators in a community was more predictive of changes in mental health (both improvement and deterioration) than either the type or the amount of meditation practice. All of these findings have important implications for meditation teacher training.

In reading your work, I noticed that people struggling with the distress of what they are feeling in meditation often lose their connection to a community. Cheetah House offers a place to land. How do you see it addressing this secondary challenge? Meditation-related challenges are often isolating, and people frequently feel like they’re the only ones this has ever happened to. It can take a long time to gather the courage to speak up—for instance, to share doubts about whether a meditation practice is right for them—and when they finally do, they often face pushback from their community. The idea that meditation can have negative outcomes is often dismissed, or people are told that such experiences are extremely rare and advised simply to keep meditating. As a result, they may continue to struggle with experiences that others cannot relate to and receive little to no support.

People come to Cheetah House with a complex mix of emotions. On one hand, there is strong attachment to a form of meditation, which in many cases was like a close friend—their most reliable friend—and on the other, it has somehow betrayed them. It can be hard to know whether to approach or avoid it, and the nervous system can become highly dysregulated. In these circumstances, speaking with someone who understands can be deeply validating. Simply realizing that they’re not alone brings a huge sense of relief.

Tell us a bit more about the people who help meditators at Cheetah House? What kinds of training and experience do they bring? Everyone comes from a different background. I have a PhD in clinical psychology and was trained as a MBSR and MBCT teacher. The other Care Team members draw from various therapeutic modalities and academic training, along with their experience in contemplative practices. All of our bios and credentials are on the website, so people who come to Cheetah House can look at them and choose whom they want to speak with in a consultation. 

All Care Team members have experienced—and recovered from—a meditation-related crisis. The first cohort reflected on how their teachers, communities, and clinicians had fallen short, and on what they wished had gone differently. We adopted a peer-support model to address feelings of isolation, along with methods for scaffolding, boundary setting, and gently inquiring into assumptions and worldviews. Developing this training was a long process. Everyone is also trained in active listening and in taking a person-centered approach, which means supporting and empowering people to navigate their situation in their own way, according to their values. We ran our second cohort training last year, and currently there are ten people on our team. 

The idea of a person-centered approach really struck me while reading your work. Could you say more about that? A person-centered approach respects each meditator’s definitions of well-being and harm, and their personal goals for practice. It’s a central part of a trauma-informed approach, which helps support a sense of empowerment, agency, and autonomy. 

It can be as simple as offering options. In 2018, Thomas Anderson and Norman Farb conducted an influential study on meditation anchors. Participants were given three choices—the breath, a mantra, or visualizing a simple image—and experimented with each before rating their preferred option. Anderson and Farb then examined participants’ physiology during three ten-minute meditation sessions, each using a different anchor. People were more relaxed and had lower heart rates when using the anchor they chose. Conversely, they showed an increased heart rate and a stress response when using a nonpreferred anchor. Promoting choice is an easy way to support a person-centered approach and maximize the fit between practice and meditator. 

However, meditators don’t always understand that they have choices, especially if they’ve primarily adopted other people’s perspectives. Supporting a shift toward greater autonomy is part of a larger process of meaning-making, cultivating agency, and deciding how they want to relate to a spiritual system. Our goal is for the meditator to be in the driver’s seat—deciding where the bus is going, how fast it travels, and whether there are stops along the way. All of it.

What resources does Cheetah House offer for people exploring new ways of relating to contemplative practice? Cheetah House hosts support groups for people who have dealt with meditation-related challenges. Crowdsourcing provides multiple options, and helps integrate the experience.

We have a lecture series in which researchers and scholars discuss meditation studies and related topics. Recordings are available as online courses for continuing education credits. Letters to My Former Self are delivered by people who have recovered from a meditation crisis. The lectures focus on what they wish they had known and what they learned along their path. We just started this series, and it has been extremely popular. 

Regarding new ways of relating to practice, I created a course called MyMap (My Meditation Assessment Process) to help people assess their meditation practices and goals. Most participants have tried a variety of practices, so I recommend writing them all down and using a color code—red or green—to indicate how well each one is working. This exercise helps identify which practices are effective, and ensures that one’s goals are being met; in some cases, alternative activities can better serve the same goal. It’s also helpful to map one’s relationship to contemplative practices over time, since a practice that was beneficial at one point may no longer be a good fit. People often get stuck trying to repeat the same practice, seeking that initial response. Seeing it all laid out on paper can be clarifying.

Cheetah House also offers one-on-one consultations for meditation teachers and clinicians who want to be better informed or need help learning how to manage meditation-related challenges in their students or clients. Many of our on-demand courses are used by meditation centers to train their teachers.

How do you see your work evolving in the years ahead? Currently, I’m collaborating on a team project that addresses many of the unanswered questions from “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience.” We are using a large multinational sample of 800 participants. The methodology will allow us to obtain more precise information about risk factors and how they interact. We are particularly interested in the social responses to meditation-related difficulties—how such challenges are appraised and managed, and how these responses relate to the overall trajectory of the meditator. 

Cheetah House is also expanding its training capacity. In the future, we will offer meditation teachers and clinicians a practicum in which they can observe and assist a Care Team member supporting a meditator in real time. By sharing knowledge, our aim is to create a culture in which both positive and challenging experiences are understood within meditation communities.  

Like an engineer building a bridge, I see my role as paying close attention to potential problems or weak points, so that everything is safer and stronger. I care about the meditation space and the people in it. I want it to be the best it can be: accountable and beneficial to the widest possible range of people. Responses to contemplative practices vary, and the sooner we embrace this diversity, the better it will be for everyone. The first step is making a deliberate effort to listen to voices that have previously gone unheard.