In recent days, several friends have forwarded me an article from The Atlantic. It’s by Olga Khazan and it highlights the work of Willoughby Britton, a former academic researcher who has raised questions about potential negative health effects of meditation in some individuals. For Britton herself, and it would appear for some other folks too, meditation—most often in large doses of hours a day, as is often done on retreat—has contributed to difficulty sleeping, increased anxiety, and even psychosis, i.e. really serious stuff.
To me, the article read as more than a bit tendentious (In non-academese: it felt like Khazan had an ax to grind). Britton’s data set is, by her own admission, astonishingly small, yet the article implied broad conclusions from it, despite a requisite nod to the overwhelming number of studies demonstrating the positive effects of meditation practice. Choice quotes seemed to be deployed to make major meditation teachers look bad. Some who were left unnamed were quoted as telling participants suffering negative experiences on retreat to “just keep meditating,” advice which may have been normative a couple of decades ago but which, at least at IJS and among the folks I know, would not be given now.
(Indeed, one of the ironies here is that our faculty at IJS, along with many other teachers in the mindfulness meditation world, have worked hard to learn about and use trauma-informed pedagogies—including through training with Cheetah House, the organization that Britton founded and leads.)
But my point in bringing this up is not to offer a defensive rejoinder to the Atlantic article. It is rather to observe the process that followed the stimulus of encountering it. Because, as we observe Rosh Hashanah, I think it’s a great opportunity for some reflection.
I’m going to go out on a limb and conjecture at part of the dynamic in this case. It involves encountering a story in the news media—particularly in a publication that codes as college educated, politically liberal, smart, and yes, to many Jews, Jewish (the New York Times and The New Yorker are neighbors to The Atlantic in this media zip code). For not a few folks, if a claim is printed in one of these publications, then it takes on a kind of weight or truth. We instinctively give it the benefit of the doubt, before our minds have even had a chance to decide.
But in a case like this, that process collides with another belief: We trust meditation. We know from our own experience that it has been helpful in our lives. And, if you’re reading this, it might also be that you believe in IJS, you trust our teachers, you might even contribute to us (it’s never too late, btw). So there’s some motivated reasoning already churning in the background, and that can lead to a feeling of internal destabilization and conflict: We want to believe both of these things, but they seem to be diametrically opposed, and holding two truths can feel like it will break us apart on some level.
As my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius might say, “What an opportunity for practice!”
Regular readers will know that I’ve intentionally been writing about the experience of feeling at home for the last several months. (We also just wrapped up a 10-part miniseries on this topic over at the Soulful Jewish Living podcast.)
Regular readers may also know that one of my longstanding Elul practices is listening to a recording of the poet David Whyte. On this year’s encounter with it, my ear alit on a line in the final poem on the album, which is called Coleman’s Bed, in reference to a cave in the Burren region of County Clare. After inviting the reader/listener to “make a nest now” like Saint Kevin, who is said to have held his hands up long enough for a mother bird to have laid her egg and for the offspring to have hatched and flown away, Whyte writes:
and then bring in from those horizons
all discordant elements that seek a home.
Home, in this rendering, is a place or state of being in which “discordant elements” can reside together. That is different from the idea of home as a place of uniformity or homogeneity. In fact, it might even be a near total inversion: When we are at home, we feel strong and secure enough to contain multitudes (to quote another poet). Or, to turn it one more time, if we are able to hold contradictions, that’s a good sign we’re feeling at home.
Whyte continues:
Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.
Another definition of home here, though very much related to the first: Home is a state of being in which we can welcome guests—even, as Rumi might suggest, parts of ourselves. It is a place in which we can hold separation and brokenness within a larger frame of wholeness.
On Rosh Hashanah, that inevitably brings us to the shofar and the brokenness-inside-wholeness of the shofar blasts. The fact that the middle blasts are called shevarim, broken, has been the genesis of many a sermon. It connects us to the midrashic story that the broken first set of tablets were placed inside the Ark along with the whole ones, which the Talmud then connects to the way we continue to honor sages even when, in old age, they have forgotten their Torah (a poignant note for those of us caring for elders with dementia). And, of course, it can take us to the Kotzker Rebbe’s classic teaching: There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.
Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav had his own Torah of brokenness. One of his stories, quoted in the Itturei Torah of Rabbi Aharon Greenberg (an indispensable resource I refer to weekly), comments on the verse that introduces the shofar service: “Happy is the people that knows the teruah” (Psalms 89:16). Rebbe Nachman glosses: That is, “Who know the wisdom of a broken heart (shevirat ha-lev).”
He offers a parable:
A king sent his son far away to learn the seven wisdoms of the world. When the son returned full and filled with wisdom, the father wished to test him. He commanded him to lift a large stone to the top of the mountain. The son mustered all his strength and rolled the stone up the slope of the mountain, and after great effort, brought it up to the peak.
When he came to his father and recounted his immense toil in rolling the stone, the father shook his head and said: “Is this your wisdom? What entered your mind to carry a stone so hard and heavy to the top of the mountain? You should have broken it into small pieces, and then it would have been easy for you to carry it to its place.
Rebbe Nachman concludes: “The Holy One commanded us to lift our heart—which is hard and heavy like stone—and the best advice is to break the heart of stone and shatter it into fragments (shevarim).”
This is the anti-Sisyphus: There is no nobility in the endless struggle to exert brute force to move the boulder up the mountain. Rather, genuine wisdom comes through what Whyte might refer to as a “robust vulnerability”: Allowing the heart to break open, not expecting perfection. It is precisely in the letting go, the seeming surrender, the brokenness, that we can encounter a greater wholeness, a deeper experience of home.
“Above all, be alone with it all,” continues David Whyte, “a hiving off, a corner of silence amidst the noise.” The silence, perhaps, between the blasts of the shofar. (To you shofar-blowers out there: perhaps there’s no need to rush. The silence has as much to offer as the sound.) He concludes with an image that, to me, evokes our ritual of Tashlikh, when we cast our sins into a moving body of water:
Become the source that makes
the river flow, and then the sea
beyond.
The sea is distinguished in being both container and that which we aim to contain. Which perhaps makes it a metaphor for the mind, or for our very sense of self (Spelled in reverse, yam, sea in Hebrew, is mi, who—as in, Who are you?)
To return to where we started: Of course meditation can have a shadow side. Everything can. That is one way to understand the story of eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which our progenitors did within moments of their creation, on Rosh Hashanah. As a result, multiplicity, contradiction, paradox, and the challenges—and opportunities—of living with them are hard-wired into the human condition.
On balance, there is little question in my mind that practicing to live with mindful awareness brings far more good into the world than not doing so. So as we begin this new year, I bless us all with the ability to allow our hearts to break open, to hold the pieces lightly and with care, to lovingly support each other on the journey up the mountain and toward the sea.