I’m on day nine of this retreat, and honestly, I cannot wait to be done. The chaos from earlier this week has settled into something manageable—not because I’ve transcended anything or broken through the walls of the Self to become one with the cosmos. I don’t levitate or see mystical lights dancing behind my eyelids. But there’s something here: I’m marginally more steady when life decides to throw its usual curveballs. The line between waking and dreaming has become paper-thin, and somehow I’m maintaining awareness even while asleep—which is both astonishing and completely useless in any practical sense.
My legs, for the record, still hurt like hell.
After mapping this strange landscape for over a week, what’s the actual answer to whether you should be doing this?
The Honest Case for Meditation
The research is there—meditation genuinely helps with stress, anxiety, depression, and attention problems for many people. The effect sizes are comparable to established psychological interventions, which means it’s not just placebo or wishful thinking. Once you learn it, it’s free, portable, and doesn’t require you to schedule appointments or remember to take pills. Buddhist scripture talks about practice as a “refuge” frequently and it absolutely feel that way. This strange piece of solid ground you access to no matter what happens. To this day, I have sense that even if everything else in my life fell apart spectacularly and catastrophically, I would still be able to practice.
Unlike medication that targets specific symptoms, meditation seems to create these broader improvements in well-being and emotional regulation. The attention and awareness skills transfer to daily life in ways that can improve relationships, work performance, emotion regulation. In short, I do believe it can help you be more wise. And if you’re drawn to it, meditation connects to rich philosophical traditions that offer frameworks for understanding suffering and human flourishing, a well so deep you could spend several lifetimes and you’d never be able to get to the bottom of it.
For many WEIRDos—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people—the advent of modernity has been profoundly secular. This is great for some of us, excruciatingly painful for others, myself included. Meditation is one path people use to access something sacred, but it might be the right path for you. It meshes well with other paths too, and can provide a simple practice framework to fall back on in the midst of other exploration.
The Honest Case Against (Or for Serious Caution)
As we covered before, meditation evangelists don’t always tell you that there are risks. Just like we see in therapy, any “one size fits all” approach of meditation programs ignores this reality.
There are legitimate concerns about cultural appropriation when we strip meditation from its original context while claiming all its benefits. The commodification of meditation in apps and corporate wellness programs often reduces profound practices to stress-management techniques. At best, this is just kinda lame, at worst it’s stripping them of valuable guardrails that the traditional context provides, like teachers, ethics, and community.
Then there’s opportunity cost, and that’s really not trivial. Time spent meditating could be spent on other beneficial activities like exercise, socializing, or therapy (self-serving plug, sorry) which might be more helpful for some individuals. I remember one moment on a later retreat, 40 hours in and 4 days to go thinking, “Holy crap, every breath I take brings me one closer to dying. Is this what I’m doing with my one wild and precious life?”
Meditation can also become a form of spiritual bypassing—a way to avoid rather than address life’s challenges, leading to emotional suppression rather than growth. This leads to the risk of becoming an astonishingly annoying person, who just sighs deeply all the time and only speaks in a weird, hushed tone.
Finally, all of this needs to set into the context of dosage. A little meditation, 20 minutes/day is not the same thing as a ten-day retreat supplemented with psychedellics and fasting. Be smart.
Finding Your Middle Path
The Buddha’s concept of the “middle path” offers wisdom here. Rather than asking whether meditation is universally good or bad, we might ask: “Given who I am, where I am in my life, and what challenges I’m facing, might meditation be helpful for me right now?”
Consider meditation if you struggle with chronic stress, anxiety, or mild depression. If you have difficulty with attention or emotional regulation, or if you’re interested in developing greater self-awareness. Make sure you have support available if difficulties arise, and that you can commit to regular practice for at least a few weeks. If you’re drawn to the philosophical or spiritual aspects, that’s worth exploring.
Approach with caution if you have severe mental health conditions without professional support, or if you’re in crisis or dealing with acute trauma. If you’ve tried meditation before and found it consistently unhelpful or distressing, trust that experience. If you prefer more active or social forms of stress relief, or if you’re looking for a quick fix rather than a long-term practice, meditation might not be for you.
Finally, are most of your issues rooted in relationships? Meditation may not address them directly enough. The meditation world is replete, replete I tell you, with amazing meditation teachers, capable of extrordinary feats of cosciousness and focus, who are just awful to be around. People make excuses for them, but honestly they’re just bad at people. Don’t idolize that.
Better alternatives might include therapy (especially for trauma or severe mental health issues, or to address ongoing relationship problems), exercise (which has similar stress-reduction benefits), social connection and community involvement, creative pursuits like art, music, or writing, volunteer work, or simply spending time in nature.
Final post next week: How I Actually Use Meditation in Therapy Now
References – Post 6
Note: This post primarily draws on synthesis of research covered in previous posts.
