When harm arises at the CENTER of the Dharma, what is “care”?

Forthcoming: Talking About Cults: Abuse and the Study of New Religious Movements, November 2026

First Do No Harm: A Meditation Safety Training

A comprehensive, evidence-based training by the world’s top experts.

Training faculty consist of top experts on meditation-related challenges, including clinicians, researchers, religious studies scholars, yoga and meditation teachers. Perhaps most importantly, the Cheetah House safety training includes individuals who have lived experience of meditation-related difficulties and what was helpful, unhelpful and harmful. Many of the training faculty serve on the Cheetah House Care Team and actively provide support to meditators-in-distress.”

SYMPTOMS:

A table of 59 categories of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning. This list is based on the Varieties of Contemplative Experience research study, by Drs. Lindahl and Britton. Symptoms are organized and color-coded by 7 domains: affective, cognitive, somatic, perceptual, sense of self, conative, social. Links to detailed summaries of each domain and corresponding research articles are provided under each heading . In color-coded tables, symptom titles are listed on the left, followed by a description, with symptom-specific resources listed on the right. You can also type your symptom into the search field to search the entire Cheetah House website.

[A few] Signs of Dissociation

Body Somatic: Extremely still (frozen), Fixed gaze or glassy eyes

Cognitive: Disorientation, ‘Spacey’ or‘ungrounded’ or ‘floating’

Self: Outside body or at a distance, Disconnected from body/emotions/thoughts

Emotion/Motivation: Affective flattening (blunted or loss of emotions), Lack of meaning or motivation

Perception: World appears unreal or dreamlike, Visual hyper-clarity or fog

Social + Occupational: Withdrawn or avoidant, Eye contact difficulty

To view the complete list, visit the link

The Cheetah House Care Team

We help meditators suffering from adverse effects…Our team has a wealth of experience in a wide range of meditative and spiritual traditions.”

Learn more here

Institutional Courage™  is the solution.

It is an institution’s commitment to seek the truth and engage in moral action, despite unpleasantness, risk, and short-term cost. It is a pledge to protect and care for those who depend on the institution. It is a compass oriented to the common good of individuals, institutions, and the world. It is a force that transforms institutions into more accountable, equitable, effective places for everyone.”

Please,  join us

If you have experienced difficulties or challenges related to meditation, you may be eligible to participate in a study by Emory University.”

Learn more about participating here.

Meditation-Related Challenges Study: A study to understand the nature of meditation-related difficulties and adverse effects

Institutional DARVO occurs when DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender) is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity) as when police charge rape victims with lying. Institutional DARVO is a particularly aggressive form of institutional betrayal.”

Center For Institutional Courage

We are currently prioritizing institutional courage in addressing sexual violence across various kinds of institutions. Additional areas will be added to our research and education agendas as we grow. In all of our research and educational projects, we consider the roles of power, privilege, and marginalization in how institutions both betray and act courageously.”

[Bessel]Van der Kolk sent numerous highly traumatized patients to do mindfulness exercises with John Kabat- Zinn, and he found that many of them were returning in a state of upset and agitation after those experiences. Van der Kolk explained that, as the patients became silent and started to pay attention to themselves during the meditation exercises, their internal sensations could be so intense that they felt overwhelmed and, without the tools to work through those sensations, they would dissociate.”

Kate Williams is a PhD researcher in psychology at the University of Manchester and a mindfulness teacher. She has said that ‘negative [mindful] experiences generally fall into one of two categories’: ‘a natural emotional response to self-exploration,’ which might be experienced as ‘pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral’ or the negative experiences can be ‘quite extreme, to the extent of inducing paranoia, delusions, confusion, mania or depression’.”

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 challenges.”

Interviews from the VCE [Varieties of Contemplative Experience] project demonstrate that meditation-related challenges are inseparable from the social relationships between meditation practitioners and meditation teachers in ways both helpful and harmful.”

In response to accusations of teacher misconduct and abuse that havee merged within various communities in the United States and Europe, a small corpus of scholarship has begun to examine harmful and abusive student-teacher dynamics within Western Buddhist traditions. These studies identify various features that contribute to and perpetuate harmful dynamics, including theological ideas, personality traits, relationship expectations, institutional structures, and conflicts between cultural values, among others.”

This paper also offers a detailed assessment of the various impacts – both positive and negative – that a meditation teacher can have on the trajectory of a practitioner who is working through and making sense of challenges.”

We have no viable systems of accountability. We have no way of allowing people to report. We have no way of making people feel safe to report.”

For truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair, I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that those things are sequential. You can’t get the beautiful ‘R’ words like ‘redemption’ and ‘reconciliation’ and ‘restoration’ and ‘repair’, unless you first tell the truth…I think this process of truth-telling has to shape what we do.”

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.”

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.”

At Cheetah House…[o]ur 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.”

I wish we could all begin with trust and love for each other. But we can’t. There has been too much damage to too many bodies for too many generations.

But we all can begin with respect, caring, and a willingness to help.”

Trauma is anything the body perceives as too much, too fast, or too soon.”

I don’t mean ‘cult’ here in the automatically pejorative, sensationalistic sense but rather in the sense of a self-enclosed entity that is both overattached to its core beliefs and almost impermeable to outside feedback and internal dissension…The range of cultic behavior is enormous: ego can arguably be a cult of one; plenty of couples function as cults of two; and various religious and political movements are cults of the many.”

Boundaries make freedom possible by clarifying what must be worked with, not just personally and transpersonally, but also interpersonally. Since everything – everything! – exists through relationship, it is crucial that we learn to work well within relationship, both with others and with our own needs, states, and identity. This work is not possible if our boundaries are not clearly delineated and skillfully maintained.”