Side effects

[Maddie]

I have experienced unwanted side effects from Christian practice, Qigong, meditation, mantras, and other practices over the years. I feel like this doesn't get discussed very much, but it should. 

 Has anyone else had adverse reactions to their practices? 

[Barnaby]

What sort of adverse reactions did you have in mind?

[Wilhelm]

Nothing too crazy for me, but I'm still early stages - some headaches, nausea, diarrhea and for the first couple years an uncontrollable need to faceplant every time I did standing practice haha.

 

I hear it gets more severe later though (unless you get deviations early on which I didn't really experience)

 

Edit: forgot about body changes - perpetually sore AF till I got my sea legs.  Purging reactions - emotional releases and bruises and such.  Various Zifagong reactions - basically did a sweet impression of the wacky inflatable arm flailing tube man 

Edited January 16, 2023 by Wilhelm

[Nungali]

Yes.... I had sweet and sour prawns with ice cream and trifle  with gravy on top .... and now I do feel a little  ..... 

 

 

 

 

And in case you dont know what that means ......

 

Christian practice   and    Qigong    ?    No wonder !

[Maddie]

2 minutes ago, Nungali said:

Christian practice   and    Qigong    ?    No wonder !

 

No not at the same time lol. 

[Nungali]

Oh good ... I hope you had time to  digest and eliminate the Christian stuff before taking on the rest .

[Maddie]

14 minutes ago, Nungali said:

Oh good ... I hope you had time to  digest and eliminate the Christian stuff before taking on the rest .

 

This was all chronological and sequential.

 

First I was Christian. I'd say the side effects from that were guilt.

 

After losing faith in Christianity I eventually got into Qigong a few years later. The side effects of this were all sorts of unpleasant emotions coming up. 

[liminal_luke]

20 minutes ago, dmattwads said:

 

The side effects of this were all sorts of unpleasant emotions coming up. 

 

This happens to me all the time too but I consider it a benefit.  (Admittedly, not my favorite benefit.)

Edited January 16, 2023 by liminal_luke

[Shadow_self]

Well generally if you aren't getting "side effects" you'd have a fairly  impotent practice

 

[-ꦥꦏ꧀ ꦱꦠꦿꦶꦪꦺꦴ-]

One time the vision in my left eye turned red for a night 

[C T]

Sometimes 'wrong' practices and what not are helpful, even necessary. If winds only blew in one direction, why would sails be made adjustable? 

[old3bob]

'inductive reactance' (not unlike that used in electrical terms) gives one a warning or indication,

thus the purity of zero or near zero resistance is needed along the way.

Edited January 17, 2023 by old3bob

[freeform]

A hammer is useful coz it’s hard and heavy enough to hit a nail into some wood… but for that very reason it could also damage you badly if you’re not competent at operating it (or are competent, but make a one-off error).

 

If you encased the hammer in an inflatable pillow it would certainly be safer… but you couldn’t use it for much.

 

Then there are hammers with splinter causing handles… or the head is loose - so when you swing it the head flies off towards your own (much more soft and brittle) head…

 

Then there’s a good hammer, and a competent hammer operator that does everything right - but still gets blisters from her hard hammer work.

 

Different sideffects for different reasons. It’s worth working out what caused yours… though it’s never that easy or conclusive to ascertain.

[awaken]

It is a natural thing to automatically approach trees when practicing spontaneous exercises, and even automatically select good trees to approach.

In addition to automatically approaching trees, it will also automatically change its position and orientation.

I have been to Tongbai Palace in Zhejiang, China, and a friend of mine who is an official in charge of religious affairs took me there, so the staff of Tongbai Palace gave me a lot of face. He took me to the underground palace of Tongbai Palace and asked me if I could sense where the aura was better. I just use spontaneous gong, and let spontaneity take me anywhere. As a result, the spontaneous energy took me to a wall and continued to rotate. As a result, the staff member took me to a hidden entrance of the underground palace, through a dark corridor, and into a puddle. Turns out the place I'd been spinning was the outer wall of that puddle.

I was probably more surprised than the staff member because I didn't know what was going on, I just trusted my body and my aura.

 

練自發功會自動接近樹木是很自然的事情，甚至還會自動挑選好的樹木去接近。

除了會自動接近樹木之外，也會自動改變位置，自動改變方位。

我曾經去過大陸浙江的桐柏宮，我的一個管理宗教事務的官員朋友帶我去的，所以桐柏宮的工作人員給我很大的面子。他帶我去桐柏宮的地宮，問我能否感應得出來哪裡的氣場比較好。我就用自發功的方式，讓自發功帶我到任何地方。結果自發功帶我到一處牆壁旁邊持續的旋轉。結果那位工作人員帶我走到地宮一處隱密的入口，通過黑暗的走道，走進一個水坑。原來我一直旋轉的地方就是那個水坑的外牆。

我自己可能比那位工作人員更訝異，因為我根本不知道怎麼回事，我只是信任我的身體和我的氣場而已。
 

[EFreethought]

On 1/16/2023 at 2:35 PM, dmattwads said:

 

This was all chronological and sequential.

 

First I was Christian. I'd say the side effects from that were guilt.

 

After losing faith in Christianity I eventually got into Qigong a few years later. The side effects of this were all sorts of unpleasant emotions coming up. 

 

If you don't mind me asking: What is your main practice these days? I remember you posting about various mantras and their effects on you.

 

[Maddie]

17 hours ago, EFreethought said:

 

If you don't mind me asking: What is your main practice these days? I remember you posting about various mantras and their effects on you.

 

 

I would say mantra is probably still one of my main practices along with mindfulness. Although I wasn't just asking in reference to myself but about side effects in general.

[Indiken]

.

Edited February 5, 2023 by Indiken

[Maddie]

One example of side effects that I just thought of is when I am mindful a lot of something that I had previously not been mindful of I feel like I become very tired and sort of fuzzy minded for a while. I wonder if this is my brain rewiring emotion or mental aspect that I'm being mindful of? Because typically after I'm mindful of something that I hadn't been mindful of before after all of those affects clear up the issue tends to be much less than before.

[yeq88]

On 1/16/2023 at 11:11 PM, Maddie said:

I have experienced unwanted side effects from Christian practice, Qigong, meditation, mantras, and other practices over the years. I feel like this doesn't get discussed very much, but it should. 

 Has anyone else had adverse reactions to their practices? 

I have, from all of the above. In regards to the Christian methods, it's harder to do so if you're using methods like discursive meditation, just contemplating the goodness of God (note: not meditative contemplation, I mean verbal contemplation) and also the Christian prayer I did generally relies in my personal experience on the power of God to empower you to pray - I've been able to pray for upwards of an hour or two on end with high intensity with little harm. It is cleansing, uplifting, and efficacious. However, if you use 'Charismatic' or Pentecostal methods you can absolutely get fucked up bad in my opinion. They nick so much from New Age shit you don't know what you're mixing with what. Likewise with trying to do stuff like force the 'Baptism of the Holy Ghost' without any clue if you're doing something recommended and appropriate or not can lead to delusions, I think. I have also had poltertgeist-like activity start around the same time I started mixing up stuff and getting lazy and impatient, which I just took as a punishment for blasphemy, lol. Either that or it was caused by me thinking that way!

Re the qigong stuff, I've come to harm by mixing acupressure-based methods with Western magick stuff. I don't know wtf I was using at the time since I'm so unfamiliar with western magick and the guy whose products I was using was completely untransparent except he mentioned energies and so on. There are also some popular methods like variations on EFT that are popular for wrecking people. Likewise I think there's a real risk of reifying psychological and psychosomatic events and conditioning yourself when you try to play with chi/some force you're imagining as real (even if it exists, your imagination is a problem imo), and that's one of the harms I deal with - constant tingling bullshit and low-level sexual arousal! Also weird urges and shit. I can turn it off by grounding, though, usually. So no biggie.. I kid, it's irritating! I wanna be a cowboy, not a deviant..

As a Christian, I did 'meditation' - that is, internalized prayer with eyes closed, trying to use rigid phrases and stuff, briefly. Generally speaking, I found that trying to use prayer to control my inner experience was very bad for me psychologically, whereas praying in a verbal way, to God, was fairly harmless. But any attempt to control or condition my inner experience lead to altered states of consciousness and shenanigans like sexual hyperarousal and such. Annoying, and harmful.

That issue was unfortunately inherited by meditation in general for me. So no breath meditation for me without being able to focus on the external world, or everything gets wonky. I tighten, start to strive, my lower back starts to tremble.. all that stuff like that. Depends on what I'm doing. Not intense or anything, and I believe it's linked to intent. A greyness arises in me, and I get headaches and a sense of malaise within. A fuzziness type of thing. It's just classical conditioning or dissociation, or my brain getting confused, imo.

Mantras have energetic effects on me that are not unpleasant but that I feel I need experienced practitioners to explain: for instance, chanting the Nembutsu even once sometimes makes me feel a lot better, but it's a blissful experience almost. I don't think it's dangerous, in fact it seems to make all the general negativity I feel go away but since idk what's going on and I feel like other doubts I have regarding Buddhist doctrine itself make it feel disrespectful to the deity, I've reduced it for now. I want to chant honestly if I chant, not induce effects due to on some level wanting effects. I do believe Deities exist, I think, either way, so there is merit in honoring gods (or whatever they are) by keeping your distance when it is necessary, I feel.

Those are my side effects and experiences with various spiritual practices. I generally these days mostly rely on language-based, abstraction reliant methods. So like Internal Family Systems and Inner Relationship Focusing, imagining pictures, externalizing my emotions, etc. Head-based stuff, but with bodily engagement on some level. I've heard from another person who has issues with meditation that stuff like that works well for them without the intense side effects that they got from other methods.

Long post, but I wanted to share! I hope you can find something useful in my reply.  Note that I believe everyone is unique, and I understand that the problems you experience will probably be manifestations of your tendencies - so in my case, excessive control, tightness, rigidity, pushiness is how I've been internally since I was a kid. I take responsibility for that. It was a huge factor, along with my clinical OCD, in experiencing side effects. I don't mean to dismiss the methods themselves, or the traditions they came from.  It did me a lotta good. I first learnt self-love and acceptance by doing Christian prayer at the age of 12 - it was shoddy, bad prayer, but it seems whoever heard had mercy on me. It helped a LOT. Defined my life, in my opinion. 

Potential side-effects and harms, and spiritual issues in general, are now being worked into actual medicine - look up stuff like Qigong syndrome (I think it's called?), Trance Possession Disorder, and the whole section in the DSM called 'spiritual and religious issues' I think it was. So basically, you can't just get called a schizo if you think there's a demon (or deity) possessing you.

[C T]

Maybe the real bogeyman is not the side effects, but the habitual tendency to be overly analytical and critical of our thoughts, physicality, and emotions. This habit often reinforces the clinging and aversion dynamic, which in turn reinforces cyclical periods of highs and lows, leading to feelings like being trapped in a generally perpetual state of melancholia. 

 

Sometimes it really helps to simply let it all go, and just rest the mind within a pervasive sense of spacious openness. This isnt the same as spacing out. As Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche once said, "Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind, beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought, like the relentless fury of pounding waves in the infinite ocean of samsara."

 

 

[ChiDragon]

On 1/16/2023 at 9:41 AM, Maddie said:

I have experienced unwanted side effects from Christian practice, Qigong, meditation, mantras, and other practices over the years. I feel like this doesn't get discussed very much, but it should. 

 Has anyone else had adverse reactions to their practices? 

For what I have understood. They weren't side effects. They were the uneasy feelings of going through the healing process of the body. Some people were having illnesses in the body to begin with. What Qigong does, it will scan the whole body for any illnesses when one start the practice. As soon these illnesses were detected, Qigong will begin with the healing process. Those so-call side effects were the feelings during the healing process. After those illness were taken cared, the body will go back to its normal condition with no more bad feeling. From then on, the body will continue to be benefited from the intended purpose of the practice. Thus the body will be much much healthier than before.

One might noted that, without realizing it, all Qigong do go through a healing process at the beginning of the practices. Hence, one will see that there are biological changes taken place in the body. The sighs are there were no more uneasy feelings and the body health condition was improving. The self esteem was increased and more self confidence. 

Edited February 23, 2023 by ChiDragon

[EFreethought]

This is not exactly a negative side effect, but lately I have been remembering my dreams a lot more often in the past few months than in my entire life.

 

Granted, I usually have forgotten them an hour later, but I used to rarely remember them. Over the past few months, it has been happening a LOT.

 

 

[Maddie]

Here's an example of what I mean by side effects. I've noticed frequently that if I'm really mindful of something especially something that I hadn't been mindful of before that I will get super super sleepy and take like the deepest nap ever.

[ChiDragon]

2 hours ago, Maddie said:

Here's an example of what I mean by side effects. I've noticed frequently that if I'm really mindful of something especially something that I hadn't been mindful of before that I will get super super sleepy and take like the deepest nap ever.

 

It seems that you had overworked your mind. It may not be considered as a side effect. You need to give some room for your mind to rest.

Edited February 26, 2023 by ChiDragon

[Mark Foote]

On 2/26/2023 at 10:21 AM, Maddie said:

Here's an example of what I mean by side effects. I've noticed frequently that if I'm really mindful of something especially something that I hadn't been mindful of before that I will get super super sleepy and take like the deepest nap ever.
 

Always interesting to me to read people's experiences with a practice of one kind or another.

Reading works my mind, and after awhile it does make me tired.  Reading anything to do with mathematics, down for the count after a page and a half (reading and rereading a page and a half, actually).

My guess is that when you say "really mindful of something", you are focusing attention on some aspect of your behavior (as opposed to, say, your coat hanging on the wall).  Would that be right?