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hey this is Leo for Ashe lized org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about the dark side of meditation please tell me that by this point you have a meditation practice installed in your life where you're meditating every single day for however many minutes please tell me you've got that going if you don't this is the number one habit that you can install in your life that will completely transform everything you cannot be following actualise org and not meditating all right that's not going to work because the stuff I'm gonna be talking about in the future and already much of the stuff I'm talking about is going completely over your head because you have no idea what awareness or what consciousness really are and how little of it you have unless you started meditating so that's for the newbies but what I'm talking about in this episode is really some advice for those of you who already installed the habit have been meditating and are now starting to reach into the intermediate and the advanced stages of meditation so this means you've been meditating consistently every single day for at least six months or 12 months or a couple of years and then what's going to happen is weird stuff will arise as you meditate and you will discover perhaps in a shocking way that meditation is not all rainbows and butterflies the way you initially assumed some of the stuff that comes up is freaky weird downright alien and very negative sometimes and it can blindside you and sabotage your meditation habit so what I'm going to talk about here is the dark side stuff that's counterintuitive stuff that you would not expect to arise from a simple meditation habit so what is this stuff well there's a whole list now before I tell you all this stuff I want to preface it by saying that you're not necessarily going to encounter all this so don't go hunting for it because a lot of this stuff can be negative and if you don't experience it that's fine these are like side effects right if a drug has side effects that means it can happen it doesn't mean that it will happen to you but if it does happen to you a lot of this stuff is very common don't be surprised you've been warned so firstly expect hyper annoyance and crankiness this is very common and usually it comes in spells like you're meditating for weeks for weeks everything's going great you're becoming more calm and more peaceful and then you reach one week in your meditation routine where you're just annoyed by everything hyper annoyed by little little tiny insignificant things that you would think you're totally beyond like the air conditioning or the humming of your refrigerator will start to annoy the hell out of you or maybe your cat or your dog will start to annoy the hell out of you for no reason no good reason and that might take you by surprise or you just become cranky and you have this kind of spell of crankiness that lasts for a few days or for an entire week or maybe for an entire month also expect hyper judgmentalism when you become hyper judgmental of everyone around you especially people that are close to you like your family your spouse your girlfriend your boyfriend your children and so forth expect that that will come about in spells again might last for a few days my lasts for a week might last for a whole month and I don't want you to be blindsided by that expect wild mood swings up and down and up and down mood swings that can last from days to weeks where you feel terrible or you feel really high like you're on cloud nine because you've been meditating now and you're getting growth and everything's feeling wonderful and you think that that's just how it is now that's your new level you think you've arrived but then a few weeks pass then you crash into some deep depression and you wondered yourself no no I lost it what happened I thought I arrived but see that was just a wrong expectation the fact is you will have many wild mood swings throughout your entire meditation career so get used to that also expect feelings of loneliness to come over you sometimes expect feelings of disgust anger and frustration and these can vary from very mild forms of these emotions to very very heavy forms where you just feel like you're the most lonely isolated human being on the entire surface of the earth or you're just completely pissed off and angry about the the political party and what it's doing to the country or whatever right so this stuff will happen to you if you're going to be meditating for years expect crying sometimes you will cry totally and fine nothing wrong with that expect insomnia sometimes you're going to have these manic episodes where we have a lot of energy come up and you're not going to be able to fall asleep because you're excited to either by new possibilities or you're agitated or anxious about something that might happen expect depression and meaninglessness to wash over you I can almost guarantee that if you're going to meditate for longer than a year that you will be hit by some serious spells of depression and that's totally normal that's par for the course and you will at times feel like your entire life is meaningless everything you've done is meaningless your family is meaningless your career is meaningless your relationships are meaningless even meditation is meaningless and self-improve it as meaningless all of this you'll you'll experience all this stuff this is just par for the course also expect to have interference with your work in your career from your meditation habit you're going to be meditating men meditating and then all of a sudden you realize like my work in my career it's so meaningless why am i putting all this effort and all this emotional labor into it and so you might want to quit your career or you might get disgusted by it or whatever that's totally normal and usually that comes and it passes so the trick with all these things is to not get triggered by them and then to make some sort of rash move as a reaction against just this emotional energy this negative emotional energy or this fear or this self-doubt that's bubbling up from inside of you right because that's what meditation is doing is it it's surfacing stuff from your deep subconscious mind and that stuff comes up to the surface but if you don't expect that then that's when you can get into trouble because you will then react against that stuff which is largely illusory but then you're reacting to it that can cause some real damage in your life also expect interference with relationships especially your closest intimate relationship with your spouse or your girlfriend or boyfriend and also your family relationships right you might feel like oh what am i doing in this room I am even married to this person then we're such a wrong match and you're going to get all this kind of self-doubt going that's totally normal expect some rash judgments like you might feel like oh okay I gotta quit my job and I got to get a divorce I gotta drop my family and my children and I got to move to a cave at India you might have some sort of fantasy like that come into your mind while you're meditating and then you think like okay that's what I got to do now and then you go I actually do it and the mistake is to act on that too quickly without letting that plan or this fantasy just kind of like work its way through you usually what'll happen is it'll pass in a few days so be aware that and other kinds of rash judgments you might have a rash judgment to sell your IRA and to to liquidate all your stocks and all your assets and to donate all that money to charity and then if you act on that too quickly you might come to regret that also expect suicidal thoughts I can almost guarantee that if you are meditating effectively you will have more suicidal thoughts than you've probably ever had in your life and that's if you're a normal person I'm not talking about suicidal people I'm talking about totally normal people me from my meditation habit I never have really suicidal thoughts but from my meditation habit alone the more I meditate the more suicidal thoughts I have and that's totally fine I recognize that I don't take them very seriously and therefore they don't bother me but someone who's not expecting that could get freaked out by that and could actually maybe think that they're going to take action on it which could become a problem expect some freak out moments some days you just start to freak out and you're not even sure why you get into an argument with your spouse or with your children for no good reason you're just blaming them for stuff or you're just a jeté today them you're snapping at them you're being passive-aggressive this sort of stuff that could happen definitely expect ego backlash this will surely happen to you at one point or another and it'll happen many times and what I mean by ego backlash is that as you're meditating you're dissolving your ego over time that's basically what you're doing but when the ego gets dissolved too much too fast what it does is it tends to come back with even more force than it had before and when it does it starts to really behave in nasty petty egotistical ways which is exactly why you might start to get into arguments with people that otherwise you shouldn't have gotten into you might turn back to old habits that you've worked through already like you might go binging on ice cream and on greasy food even though you've already cleaned up your diet you might go binge on television even though you've stopped watching television for years you might go start doing drugs again or alcohol or smoking cigarettes even though you haven't done that for years you might go on a sex binge and go sleep with a bunch of random strangers on one-night stands even though you don't usually do that you might get addicted to money again maybe you've weaned yourself off the pursuit of money and the pursuit of success in business and then you've been meditating a lot and all the sudden it's like oh my business I got to get back to my business on it it's earn more money and then you'll go and start chasing that again so this is all stuff that I call ego backlash and this can feel demoralizing because it feels like you're taking a step backwards because here you are meditating for years and now you're eating junk food doing drugs and chasing money again like what what's this about I thought I was supposed to be growing and becoming more spiritual and it seems like I'm just regressing but that's just a phase that's something you have to work through and go further and what I've noticed is that every time I have a strong ego backlash if I am mindful and vigilant of it and just kind of sort of avoid the most negative behaviors try to limit the most negative behaviors possible with that backlash and just kind of monitor it then usually within a couple of weeks it dissolves and then I'm back better than ever right so with all these things you have to understand that these are temporary and when we're told that meditation makes us more spiritual makes us more aware dissolves our ego and all this other good stuff that makes us calmer and happier that's true but only in the long run is that true that's not true in the short run that's where people really go wrong is that they assume is just going to be straighforward positive linear progression from the moment they start meditating and that's just completely unrealistic expect hyper horniness sometimes you can be meditating meditating and maybe you've got off porn and you stop having frivolous sex and then you just have this spell of incredible horniness and you want to like jerk off every day or you want to go have sex with a bunch of people and it's like you can't get it out of your system it's just like you feel like this there's this like horniness coursing through you that will happen expect old repressed memories to come bubbling up stuff that you have completely forgotten about stuff you might think you've worked through it's gonna be some traumatic stuff especially if you had traumas in your childhood stuff that you've repressed stuff that was very negative maybe examples like abuse sexual abuse any kinda like near-death experiences that you've had um bullying humiliation embarrassment like all this kind of stuff that you would normally not want to think about that will come bubbling up also family stuff will come bubbling up because many of your memories the earliest memories you have are of your childhood and especially if you had a turbulent childhood which wasn't all rainbows and butterflies then definitely expect that stuff to come up and definitely expect all sorts of family issues like mommy issues daddy issues sibling rivalries resentments like all that kind of stuff it'll all come up expect crazy monkey mind expect sometimes to have waves of insanity and madness wash over you where you just feel like your mind is like a swarming hive of bees and the more you try to control it the less you control the more out-of-control it gets and you just sit down you try to meditate you try to do your normal technique and nothing is working none of your normal techniques of working expect self-doubt where you start to doubt yourself you start to doubt your technique like this technique has been working for months and now it just feels like oh man this technique it stopped working it's not working anymore expect that expect nightmares expect weird dreams where in your dreams you're living out weird fantasies like having sex with your mother or you know killing people or the you know butchering your dog with a cleaver or something like that like you know unpleasant images in your mind when you're sleeping that will come up and expect spiritual arrogance where you start to believe that oh yeah I've been meditating for a few years now look at how unconscious everybody else is around me look at look at all the unconscious stuff they do and so you're going to develop that and you're going to probably go around and preach to those people and you're going to tell them look you should do what I'm doing meditate more and then you'll you'll experience all this good stuff that I'm experiencing but later you'll recognize that all that's just me at an intermediate stage thinking that I'm at the highest stage but then later I realize that all this that was just an intermediate stage it wasn't nearly the highest stage that spiritual arrogance was actually a function of my unconsciousness and so that will happen to you now this whole list of stuff this is all quite common stuff this is stuff that you should definitely expect don't be surprised at all if it happens to you and not just once but repeatedly in fact what you should start noticing is that it's a recurrent theme throughout long term meditation is that this stuff starts coming up and some of it is very subtle sometimes this stuff happens to you and you're not even making an immediate connection between you getting into a fight with your spouse and that stemmed from your meditation practice see sometimes it's not an obvious connection you only recognize it two days later after you've already gotten into a big argument because you went unconscious and you forgot about these warning signs that I gave you now what's going on here why is there this negative stuff with meditation is it meditation supposed to just make a spiritual and more conscious well it's a battle it's a battle think about what's actually happening when you're meditating and when you're growing to grow means you have to shed old patterns old memories old beliefs old thought patterns and how does that happen well your mind which is the entire collection of all that stuff for it to grow it needs to defragment itself and rearrange itself into a higher order smoother functioning system and how does it do that by purging and working through and defragmenting all the [ __ ] that's in your mind and if you're like the ordinary individual in mainstream society then your mind is filled with so much [ __ ] that you don't even know how much is in there it's everything you were taught since you were a kid it's all the media that you ingested it's all your religious scientific and political beliefs it's everything your parents told you is everything your teachers told you it's all the silly ideas that you thought were true when you were growing up all the mistakes you've made all the incorrect intuitions all your fears all that stuff and that's the deep core of your mind you're not conscious of most of that stuff so when you're meditating you're actually forcing your mind not to consciously work through that but to unconsciously work through that you are like literally defragmenting a hard drive but unlike therapy where you go to a therapist for years and you sit down on the couch and you talk and talk and talk about your problems that's logical that's conscious when you're meditating the exact same thing is happening as in therapy but it's happening automatically unconsciously in your mind and the only signs of it that you're going to experience are these emotional swells these mood swings these reactions this horniness this depression the sense of meaninglessness that's how it's going to bubble up and you've got to be smart enough and vigilant enough and conscious enough to be aware that that's what's happening here on the bigger picture always keep the bigger picture in mind and this is the best reframe you can have for this stuff is to see it as actually purging this is actually called spiritual purification you're purifying and purging all the toxic thoughts and emotions and that process isn't always pleasant but what's great about purification is at once the purification process completes itself then you're left with a relatively clean pure substance and then that is what is gonna be you five 10 15 years from now so you're not purified after a week of meditation you're purified after a decade of meditation and the purification it comes in waves it's like you're purifying yourself for a few weeks for a few months and then some big obstacle comes in your way and you've got to really work through that and purge a lot of stuff and that's when you have your emotional freak-outs and mood swings and then you purge that stuff after weeks and then you get back and things are going nice and smooth and now you're working at a higher level of consciousness until you head the next obstacle and then again there's going to be a few weeks of turmoil and then the next obstacle and then the next obstacle next obstacle that's going to continue for years that's actually what you're aiming at with meditation see so the way that I reframe this in my mind is I tell myself when I'm experiencing something negative I tell myself oh this is actually a sign that I'm growing and that the process is working and I'm excited by that and that is enough to mollify any kind of depression that I have or any kind of like self-doubt that I have about this whole process and that allows me to stay on track now you might think that that's bad enough but actually I haven't gotten yet to the weirdest stuff what I talked about so far is I gave you a list of the common stuff now let me give you a list of the really weird [ __ ] some of this stuff is incredible you won't believe it's possible until it happens to you so here's some of the weird side effects of meditation you can expect tingling jerking shaking and various pains throughout your body that feel very real you can expect seeing lights and auras bright lights of various kinds with your eyes open or with your eyes closed and they can be animated that can be very beautiful or very scary in medicine and they can look very lifelike you can also expect to see vivid sexual fantasies you might even see fantasies of the opposite pole of your sexuality so if you're heterosexual you might start to see homosexual fantasies and they might be completely lifelike not just a little daydream but like fully lifelike and of course those will tend to seduce you off the path you might start to behave like an animal like literally you might start to scratch yourself like an animal or crawl around on your knees or even howl howling like a wolf oh can you imagine that you're sitting there meditating for weeks and then one day you just have this uncontrollable urge to start howling like a wolf and as you're doing that your spouse walks in the door yeah that's pretty awkward and now you got some explaining to do and they look at you like you're going insane what is this meditation thing you're doing it's turning you into an animal so expect that I'm not saying that it'll necessarily happen to you but if it does don't be surprised by it is what I'm saying also expect paranormal phenomena to happen to you what do I mean by this that means reliving the past having past live experiences or seeing the future having weird deja vu experiences having full out-of-body experiences where you actually leave your body in a totally lifelike way and you travel to some sort of astral realm or different parts of the world and interact with various kinds of entities you might see spirits or hear spirits you might hear weird voices in your head and they can be totally lifelike not imagined but totally lifelike you might actually see angels and demons again not imagined but like standing before you completely real as real as I look to you now but it's going to be an angel or [ __ ] demon like out of a movie you might see gods deities giant crawling insects praying mantis people spirit animals that talk to you try to tell you things or maybe that try to kill you try to clot you you might see entities you might see aliens you might feel like you're being channeled by some sort of extraterrestrial or that you're getting abducted or probed and all these experiences are not just like mere dreams like a nightmare it can be a lot more realistic feeling and looking than that so that's pretty weird and it's pretty far out but all this stuff is possible and the reason it'll blindside you is because your present model of reality if you haven't meditated for long periods of time is that all this stuff is fiction and it's not possible I mean how could this stuff be possible but see you underestimate the power of your limited consciousness when your consciousness rises weird [ __ ] that you've never imagined all of a sudden starts to become possible you start to become a lot more open-minded than you ever thought you would be and when this weird [ __ ] starts happening to you well if you have this kind of dogmatic insistence that it's not possible this is not supposed to happen then you can imagine the sort of shock that you will be in also you might have Samadhi States these are quite common usually quite positive but also they might shock you a little bit a Samadhi state is when you actually stop existing as an individual body and you actually merge with objects like you might be looking at a lamp and you might actually merge and become that lamp you might be looking at a car and merge and become that car you might be looking at your spouse or your children and actually become your children literally and now my freaked you out but generally this is something that's positive and you're actually should be anticipating that if you're doing serious meditation you can even have a samadhi experience of emptiness or nothingness where you merge not with an object but with nothing nothing at all you might also experience a Kundalini awakening which can be a freaky thing a Kundalini awakening is when energy in your body gets concentrated then it sort of shoots up your spine into your head and then it explodes out of your head and that can be a very powerful experience it can be beautiful but also it can be terrifying because it might feel like you're losing your mind and you actually have this weird energy moving through you and you start to behave as though your body is being controlled by a puppet master like you're not even in control of your body anymore your body is just moving on its own and you have no idea what the hell is controlling you it's almost like you've been possessed also you might experience a total blackout or the void in Buddhism one way that they describe a attainment on the path towards enlightenment is something called neither perception nor non-perception which is a state or you're sitting there and you're concentrating and meditating and then there's like a total uh erasure of reality physical reality stops existing for a while now in physical reality time that might be just a few seconds but in your time as you're sitting there and experiencing this it might feel like an eternity like the entire world has vanished and disappeared and including your body and including yourself and you're just sitting there as the void that might be pretty freaky also of course expect ego death if you're serious about meditation that's probably why you're doing in the first place to experience ego death so this would be something to look forward to but also ego death can be scary can be freaky because it's probably not anything you imagined it to be your sense of reality will get shattered and it will expand in ways that are beyond your wildest imagination and the question is will you be open to that or are you not expecting it and then that will really freak you out and probably the worst thing that can happen to you is the dark night of the soul which is basically when you start to see that everything you've ever believed a note about reality is false and completely delusional and you start to realize that reality is meaningless and purposelessness and purpose lists has no purpose it has no meaning and that all your um old creature comforts and everything that you attached yourself to all the meanings that you assigned to your family to your career to money to your marriage to your children even to self-improvement even to meditation even to the pursuit of enlightenment when you realize that all this is completely meaningless and you start to interpret that as a negative thing you can get into the spiral of depression that can get very dark and it's called the dark night of the soul now this isn't common but it can happen and in the worst situation it can lead to this depersonalization disorder where you actually start to feel like you don't exist as a person and you interpret that whole thing as negative but there's ways out of depersonalization disorder and there's ways out of the dark soul so again generally speaking all this stuff that I'm talking about you want to treat it as temporary phases as just arisings or a bubbling up from your subconscious mind of stuff stuff that you need to work through so none of this is really ultimately negative it's actually all very positive stuff but in the moment for a few days for a few weeks it can feel very negative all right so what do we do about all this stuff what's the recommendation well if you talk to a serious meditation teacher or master or an enlightened master their advice on this stuff is actually very simple it's actually very easy to give good meditation advice here it is firstly just relax and realize that all this stuff is normal and that really it's no different than any other phenomenon that you're seeing around you seeing an alien is no different than seeing my face it really doesn't matter you're just attributing a different meaning to an alien because it's an alien than to my face and if you're seeing a demon or an angel recognize that it's no different than seeing your car or seeing your mother or seeing a chipmunk at the park right it's really no different the only difference is the meaning that you assigned to it and of course all your meetings are self constructed and a lot of them come from the ego so as you start to unravel your ego this sort of weird [ __ ] will stop bothering you so much the way it does normal people so just relax that's step number one step number two remember don't get distracted by this stuff remember what's going on here is that your ego is trying to maintain its sense of tyranny over your life it's like you're trying to depose a dictator so when you're deposed in a dictator what do you think happens there's resistance right he fights back because he doesn't want to get deposed neither does your ego your ego and your mind and your brain are trying to maintain homeostasis so as you're pulling towards spiritual higher consciousness it's pulling back in full force towards lower consciousness towards egotism and the way that it does that is by sending these strong negative emotions at you getting you to be afraid and by trying to distract you from your ultimate goal and the only thing you got to do to stay on track is just to keep meditating that's really it stay relaxed keep your cool and just keep meditating if you start to break your meditation habits that's when you know the ego has really won okay because that's all the ego wants the ego wants to sabotage you to get you to stop so that it can remain the tyrant in power remember that all this negative stuff is just a sign of real growth real growth doesn't always feel pretty the way you imagined newbies think of growth is positive stuff advanced practitioners know that growth growth is tough and that it requires a emotional labor that's what tells that meditation is real and not just a fantasy because you are working through and it takes emotional labour to focus and to keep yourself on track and to not get distracted remind yourself that this is a phase depression is a phase seeing weird entities and aliens and demons and stuff that's a phase all this is stuff you will pass through it's not going to last forever remember to trust yourself trust your higher self trust your original motivations for why you started doing meditation if you have a a thirst for enlightenment trust in that there's something there that will cut through all the [ __ ] all the fear all the egotism all so treat yourself with love and kindness on this journey meditation is not about disciplining yourself harshly and self-flagellation it's supposed to be a process of self-love you're doing this out of compassion love for yourself so when you sit down to meditate be kind be gentle on yourself both mentally and physically it does no good for you to start to argue with yourself inside your mind to start to create partitions in your mind where you say oh this part of me is bad and this part of me is good and the good part needs to discipline the bad part no all of that is just more ego games so a lot of times when I am very frustrated or I'm going through some sort of turbulent stuff during my meditation I just remember that hey let me just calm down and relax let me accept all this stuff let me not resist any of it because you know what I know that in the bigger picture I have no control over it at all all my negative emotions that come up I have zero control over it and when I'm meditating well I have zero control over that my only job is just to sit here and to be mindful that's it and the self love is so deep that if I feel like I need a short break I will take a short break I will meditate less you could even stop meditating for a week if you really need to like if you feel like this meditation is completely destroying your career in your relationship make a calculated strategic move to take a break for a short time but then of course with always the intention to come back because the greatest failure you could experience as if you get fed up and discuss it with meditation then you never want to come back anymore then you've let the ego win it accomplished a job and the last thing I would suggest is to read spiritual books read books from people who have meditated for decades who can give you some tips and pointers and they could keep you inspired they can keep you connected with your original motivation for why you're meditating and they could point out the different traps to you and the different ways that you can deal with those traps so that if you do ever experience a dark night of the soul for example you know which book to go to where there's going to be a bunch of advice that tells you how to deal with a dark night of the soul you don't want to get caught off guard by that all right that's it those are my tips meditation does have a dark side but remember that actually the bigger the dark side the bigger the purer the spiritual purification that you will experience and the higher your consciousness will ultimately go so all this stuff is ultimately very positive so don't despair stay on track and if you don't have a meditation have it yet make sure you install it first thing starting today or starting tomorrow all right I'm signing off post your comments down below please click the like button for me share this episode with a friend and lastly come check out actualizado right here this is my newsletter and website I have some resources there I have a book list I have a lot of amazing spiritual books that will point out all the different traps on this path for you so that's going to be super useful for you if you're a meditator and if you're working towards enlightenment I have a life purpose course there and just generally I'm releasing content every single week new in-depth content as time continues my content will become more advanced and as you do your work and I do my work together we will have a higher quality degree of teaching interaction with each other and the stuff that I will share with you in the future will just blow your mind meditation is really just the beginning meditation is the foundation then when you take that and you add some of the other concepts and methods that I'll share with you in the future it'll just take you to levels of growth and consciousness that you never imagined possible so I'm really excited about seeing you get a taste of that because I've already gotten to taste that in my own life and it's just the most amazing stuff beyond words beyond words so sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more you