Why do so many meditators want to silence this Neuroscientist?

hello thank you so much for being here at Scott Carney investigates I am so incredibly excited to have Professor Willoughby Britain on the show today you know I first met Willoughby I think it was about 10 years ago when I was working on this book called The Enlightenment trap about how intense meditative experiences can have these really really radically um dangerous side effects that really no one wants to talk about and was scouring the world uh of Academia looking for people who knew something about you know the Dark Side of meditation and you can find

thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of articles about all the ways that meditation can make you better and healthier and awesome in a number of ways but what is missing mostly from the scientific literature and the clinical literature out there is how these things can also go horribly wrong wrong or at least just even just a little bit wrong it seems like there's a taboo almost in talking about the downsides of meditation so this conversation that we're going to have today explores this idea of spirituality and all of its complexity and all of its richness we're

not saying that meditation is bad by nature but we do want to paint a full picture and Willoughby is really the leader in this field in the world uh at least for this podcast and she is also the director of a place called cheetah house uh at Brown University where she talks with people she's she's a a LIC you're a licensed therapist right Willoughby clinical psychologist yeah clinical psychologist where where people who've had these hard experiences in Med their meditative Journeys um there are only a few places that that are that really specializes and cheetah

house is one of those places so if you are somebody who's you know gone very deep in your meditations and something is not sitting with you will it be is really the person to at least talk to you or at least open the journey for for to give you the resources um to sort of understand what you might be going through so without further Ado willby thank you so much for being here I really really appreciate it it really has been quite some time since I wrote The Enlightenment trap uh you know remember just coming

to your your house uh cheetah house at Brown and just having this like really long all like I think we talked for like four or five hours uh into the night uh about you know something that's really really difficult because I think we both got into meditation because we saw something really really valuable in it uh but there's also this dark side so maybe you could just tell me why people are so hesitant to even broach the the the possibility that there is a dark side of meditation maybe we could Define what that dark side

might be as well okay well maybe I should maybe I should back up and and tell kind of how I how I got interested in this topic um I mean the first I sort of stumbled into this topic really I was also like most meditation researchers a meditation Enthusiast and evangelist and promoter but when I did my dissertation study which was looking at the effects of meditation on sleep as measured by brain wavves in a lab um you know thinking without without any hesitation that meditation was going to improve sleep when I got the data

back it basically caused cortical arousal you know insomnia in everyone and um in everyone well in in the med meditation group you know as a whole more than the on average you know significantly higher than the control group who didn't meditate so um and then when I I I didn't I didn't so I'm I am guilty of this thing that you're talking about already like I didn't publish that data because I was like okay this is the wrong answer it's not promoting meditation um so I won't I won't publish it um and then you know

during that time that I wasn't publishing it I went on a Meditation Retreat and I sort of was telling this teacher about these findings and she kind of chastised me and said you know I don't know why all you clinical psychologists are trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique everyone knows if you meditate enough you stop sleeping and so I thought okay well one you know what are what are the assumptions that we're making as researchers and often clinical clinically oriented Health Care Providers when we use meditation as a as sort of a health

promotion device are we missing something are we kind of making assumptions because it really wasn't designed for that initially at least in Buddhist practices um it had a little bit of a different or a lot of a different you know origin story than that for health benefits so that was one question then the second question was you know what else do meditation teachers know that they're not telling researchers yeah so that was in 2006 and then in 2007 I I transferred to Brown from the University of Arizona to do my clinical uh internship which is

a you know a residency and my placement is at Butler Hospital which is a inpatient Psychiatric Hospital in Providence and during that onee residency there were two yogis who came off retreat in western Mass completely psychotic wow so I was like wow two yeah go ahead what I'm I'm I'm gonna interrupt you but we're going to get right back into this I'm just thinking is that when you said you know what else are these meditation teachers not telling us or that we're the message that we're not getting it's sort of like that's the the fantasy

though right the fantasy is that when you learn meditation you will find these other secrets that the meditation teachers don't let you in on and that's one of the draws of meditation that you can go deeper and deeper and deeper but what you're saying is yeah this is like an Open Secret and why and like and like our it's our fantasy of meditation which is so proud and if you could just tell me what tradition of person were you talking to because you when we say meditation obviously there's thousands of techniques I don't know like

a bunch of techniques yeah I mean I I I have a general policy to be very ambiguous about the who's of my stories but I will just say that this is like these are I'm I practiced in you know the Western Insight tradition which is Loosely tied with terraa Buddhism okay um so Western Insight teacher um that's who we're talking about so yeah so I had two psychotic yogis meditators um at my impatient psychiatric hospital and I went back to the same teacher and was like explained what I saw I'm like have you ever seen

this before and I I just remember that I never got a verbal answer I just got this look that was kind of like oh oh really like it was like yeah it was kind of like yeah we know about that and I wish you hadn't asked kind of thing that's wait and okay go on wait sorry I was interrupt so of course I'm like whoa there's a story here I mean if I had been a journalist I would have been like okay like this is something so that conversation or that that sort of series of

events which took a couple years actually became the beginning of the varieties of contemplative experience study which was which was basically like just going to different meditation centers I was already like that that discussion was basically started to be the first interview you just go to meditation centers right you talk to the teachers that have been there and teaching there for decades and you ask them like what kind of challenges have you observed in your students what do you make of them how do you interpret them and then what do you do about it you

know what very practically like what's what's the like response and so that was why would you say why would you say that he didn't want you to ask that question well another another teacher this that was a woman by the way and um but another teacher that I talked to also a very famous Dharma teacher both have written many books um when I went to talk to this other teacher about various things I was seeing um that teacher also looked not surprised and like kind of nodding and looking almost bored by the like this array

of symptoms that I was describing and I was like you know about this like how come you know you've written all these Dharma books like How come you didn't publish this in any of your books and he was like well it's not good advertising oh my God this is like the problem in the world will be we want to be able to go into esoteric traditions and say there's wisdom there that we can collect and yet as we do that as sort of Western professionals we're also aware of this Spectre of people saying that's all

woo woo that's all crazy stuff and so we feel this desire to sort of like over boost the and I'm saying we in a sort of more Collective way right we westerners who are into meditation but we want to like sort of protect that thing that we're going to By ignoring some of the dangers that that go with it it seems like a pattern that's over and over again I don't know if you've seen what's been going on with whm Hoff and I but there's all these deaths that now I'm talking about associated with the

Wim Hoff method and the world is so upset that I'm bringing this out because they're like no but this is so good the cold water and the breath work save everything yeah I mean I think the question that you're asking which is why are people being so resistant to this after you know almost 20 years of doing this research and getting like extreme push back which I think is very odd an odd thing to do like to talk about you know risks and benefits of any treatment like that should just be like science I mean

that's just part of what you do the fact that we're getting such strong push back that itself is so interesting to me that now it's become a research question well why are people pushing back so much because if you say like you know cognitive behavioral therapy has side effects right obviously it does or or Prozac you know they're like yep they do and like we have this long list of of drug effects and they're required to list them on every single package and like so what it doesn't deter people from taking it my research is

not going to deter the millions and millions and millions of people meditating right it's just going to help them do it in a more informed way so so yeah so what is that about and so I think there are you know lots of different possible answers one of them the most obvious one is financial conflict of interest so a number of people are making money off of their meditation products um and you know this Behavior like a brand defense kind of strategy all of the same strategies that you would find in a brand defense um

strategy you know Playbook are being used in the meditation industry so I'm seeing um you know it's not it's not the meditation it's the user it's a user error or it's um you know it's a pre-existing condition trying to De trying to unlink the the harm with the product you know saying that the harm is actually a benefit like back way back if you go back into big tobacco they actually said that coughing was good for people because I mean they would they would have sold cancer as being good for people if they could they

said coughing was good for people because it would help like bring up stuff you know which is exactly the same thing we're hearing in the meditation industry like oh all these bad things you know negative experiences traumatic memories that are getting flooded through your system well these are all good things because you're you know you're working out your your trauma or your karma so I see so there there's actually a great book called um industrial strength denial which goes through the the brand defense strategies of all these different Industries including tobacco and big Pharma and

the Auto industry and you know kind of classifies all these brand defense so so that's like one really um disheartening answer but also like seems to be pretty accurate and then the other is just you know also a conflict of interest but not necessarily Financial which is that when something has helped you and you are relying on it to be kind of your Refuge um and your buffer to you know death anxiety and life existential doubt and crisis when somebody says oh that thing isn't perfect that becomes extremely threatening and people will lash out like

that's why I'm like why is this why is why are you lashing out with like a life or death kind of like survival response at me you know like it doesn't immed why do you go immediately go into fight or flight when basically you're you're saying like I am in control of my emotions and yet you you poke the thing that they their tool and and all of that mental training seems to just go out the window well and also like you know Buddhists in particular are very kind of condescending or or you know on

their high horse about being more compassionate than everyone else too and so I was like well some Buddhists have a like plenty of aggression I show you my I have a stalker uh stalkers and haters two separate folders with more than a thousand emails on them from people who just come after me and just like can't can't hold back um I mean go look at my doll Lama quote like my doll Lama interview when he when I gave my talk to him and it's like on YouTube and people can like comments oh my God wait

what's it say give me The quick summary because I I try not to read them because they actually do hurt my feelings by the way everyone I do actually have feelings and I actually am a person like I'm not made of titanium um I don't know I I I just read one that said something like this is a conversation between an ignorant lady me and you know a wise blah blah blah like it's just like it's just like let's make it really really simplistic you know right right I'm sure that was the lightest one as

a a common perer of my own internet comments um you know leave a comment in the video down below and you know you get so much there's so much sort of out ofth box hate that exists there but rather than go down that path I want to ask you let's actually get get into like a little bit of that evidence what can you tell me what are the symptoms of of what are some of these negative symptoms that you observe other than someone being admitted to Butler um what what what might happen to somebody who

goes intensely into meditation if we can just give like a quick rundown quick rundown yeah like 30 30 years of your career compacted into no more than three minutes if we could yeah and you're wondering why no one knows about this the journalists play a role there and that's one of the problems is that you guys are like give me a sound bite and I'm like no there isn't a sound bite This is complicated deal with it um so in the varieties of contemplative experience study we documented 59 categories of meditation related challenges U across

seven different um domains and so I'll go through the do domains the cognitive domain is basically anything related to thinking um and and I would say you know it could be your your thoughts speed up to like an insane pace or they disappear altogether so there's like no thoughts at all we call that mind emptiness or you could like have um the ability you lose the ability to form Concepts so it's concept loss so for example there was a woman in our study that was leaving Retreat um and driving which is not a good idea

by the way but um you know and got to a red stoplight and um saw that it was the color red but what couldn't register like couldn't remember what red meant did it mean stop or go luckily there was another car in front of her that stopped and so she didn't run the red light um but that's that's concept loss and then there's also delusions which would be you know having really um you know false ideas about things so that's that's cognitive and that that can kind of bleed into psychosis um perceptual changes is probably

the most common you know early thing that's not necessarily an adverse effect but just is perceptual hypers sensitivity so you tend to see your colors get brighter um The Sounds get more suddenly you hear the clock tucking on the wall you hear your own breathing you hear your own blood in your ears you know like you just get more sensitive and that might not be a problem um unless it starts you know when you come back to the city and then suddenly you hear every car door slam you hear like the you know the traffic

feels like something's driving right through your body um so that can be too much um and then you eventually that same process and we've written some papers about the neurobiology of this but eventually that same perceptual hypersensitivity process can lead to you know outright hallucinations in any modality it could be could be visual but it could also be um you know auditory or even U motor like you could have ticks or something like that creas they would call them in the in the that's in the sematic domains right it's not quite yeah um in the

in the emotional domain affective domain um the most common emotion that we see is fear so some something in the fear Spectrum anxiety fear paranoia that kind of thing you can also see really any kind of emotion just like on steroids kind of thing um and then also you know reexperiencing of past you know traumas or stressful events so flooding of kind of of that and then you can also see the opposite so in on one hand too much emotion um and then also loss of all emotion altogether um so we call that affective blunting

um and then in the sematic domain probably one of the most interesting because there's not really a category for it in science that we know of is the what we call El's energy like sematic experiences so people have these these Sensations in their body that feels like electricity energy pressure movement um so we wrote a whole paper about that about the different um metaphors people use for that but that one tends to be really annoying and very not more than annoying it's like disabling people like are unable to work or do anything it's so it's

so overwhelming um sematic can also be like changes in appetite or uh insomnia is also super common it's so interesting because everything you're saying as a negative symptom is also things that I've heard described as positive symptoms like oh that person is a really good energy worker they can move energy through through their bodies is something that I hear fairly regularly in the The Meditation Community or the idea that oh this will heighten your senses so that you can hear more things like there's all these positive spins on these but what you're saying is is

you're seeing those same symptoms but they they make it Mal adaptive for the person the person is so hyper sensitive that all of this stuff is is too much I want really want to answer that question but I have to like just finish my list before I geted that's a really really important Next Step so um so after sematic we have cognitive which is just changes in motivation so some people get like you know Enlightenment or bust tattooed on their forehead you know not literally but you know they people leave their families and go like

I'm go you know go on Retreat um and then other people just lose all all all motivation altoe and like literally sit and stare at a wall for two years and like don't do anything um um and then the next the next part the next domain is the sense of self which is a huge one it would probably do an entire podcast just unpacking changes in sense of self I teach an entire class on it with my husband Jared lindall um but there's a lot of different changes in sense of self um but often around

loss of sense of self and this is a really good example of what you're talking about because you know losing your sense of self you know ego death or ego dissolution is is a highly sought after effect of many different types of spiritual practices um so you know how do you know when when is it not you know so this is so the so the issue of the issue of appraisal um became a really really big piece of the when you say appraisal what does that mean I'm not not so the issue of who what

what is an adverse effect what makes it adverse and who gets to decide and so we found that that question actually became really kind of pivotal and that of the 59 categories there weren't really any except for maybe suicidality there really weren't any that every single person who had the experience and every single teacher that we interviewed all said this was a bad thing MH there wasn't one single category that was like that but every category there were some people that said this is was was bad for me and the other and then so there

was so every so every single experience um we we called them potentially challenging experiences because the same experience could be positive in one person and negative in another it could be positive in the same person in One context and negative in another so a lot of these experiences when they happen on Retreat which is if if you haven't ever been on a Meditation Retreat it's extremely boring there's nothing going on there's nobody talking it's silent you're usually at this place where all of your needs are met all you have to do is show up for

the meditation CL you know sitting and then you you don't even put your shoes back on you just Pat over to you know the food and then you get fed and it's very um you can have a pretty high level of cognitive dysfunction and still like manage to do the retreat right that's a really good point that's the retreat creates the environment where you're just having one experience which is what they want you to have but it doesn't show how you integrate in society and you know just to bring up this you know you mentioned

suicide on these Retreats I mean the way I got into this was of course doing a Meditation Retreat in 2005 where um I was leading an abroad program through North India one of my students on a Tibetan retreat at um an fpmt retreat in bod gaaya one of my students committed suicide at the end of The Retreat and her journal sort of indicates she was a bodic SATA and like that's been that was like the starting point for me realizing going from the moment is like oh meditation is great it's going to make me it's

going to make me a great snowboarder or whatever like you know that like sort of like very dumb understanding of what meditation was about to suddenly seeing this drastic consequence of somebody not killing themselves not not because they were um uh dissatisfied with things that because they were they had some sort of overwhelming grief but because they were supposedly enlightened they they were supposedly at some sort of spiritual moment of transcendence you know that's like the the whole thing of my light and I I reprint a lot of her journal in that um because I

want people to understand how difficult it is to Grapple with these ideas because you're told when you're meditating that you're going to have experiences which are greater than yourselves that that's unusual and depending on the tradition these can be much more magical Traditions than other Traditions you know there sort of just a big Continuum of what's out there um and there's also these this idea that you can accumulate superpowers like if you go to certain meditation uh organizations you're like you can get super hearing you can become impervious to the cold you can be telepathic

you can um you can levitate you know Transcendental Meditation like there's this big levitating component to it and and all of that plays plays into exactly what you're talking about here and and then in addition you're also bringing up you know just even exploring your mind creates this you know hypers sensitivity is a really interesting question right because when you become very aware of things that are going in your mind that is sort of the goal and also the problem you just threw like 20 things at me which one would you like me to answer

I mean all of well we we this is just free form just tell me what comes into your mind I mean I think that let me let's just say a little bit about suicide because I don't often publicly or I don't even think I've ever talked publicly about suicide and the reason isn't I'm not particularly proud of but it's really because one of the one of the tropes that like I get attacked with is kind of like the hysterical woman Trope that I'm a fear mongerer and I'm doing all of this for attention and um

that I that I'm over the top you know that I'm I'm sensationalizing these experiences which I'm totally not because I don't even talk about the suicides and there are too many and there are so many in fact that we have to have an entire special group at cheetah house for parents oh my god of of children or you know young adults that have gone on Retreats and Ked killed them not come back how how I mean what what do numbers look like are you able to to tell to give me sort of a figure of

what this this actually is no I don't think we really know but I mean I know I I can count five on on my hand like pretty much right off the top of my head that I know about yeah well it's interesting even even in the in the venea so when the Buddha was teaching meditation right originally in the venea there's this story of the melanda which which is one of his monks where 500 monks in the sort of the very first in writings on Buddhist Meditation all committed suicide or were murdered by migal andika

uh because they were doing an intensive form of meditation and at the end of that that in that story and this is in the poly Canon um at the end of that story The the Buddha says well maybe we shouldn't do this really intensive type of meditation which at that point was meditating in journal grounds and graveyards and watching corpses Decay very intense and related to a Tibetan tradition called Chu which is out right now which is still you know in the Consciousness after that the Buddha was like no let's just focus on breathing it's

way better to do breathing which is is such a fascinating story to me and I love this story because it shows that the Buddha can make errors right right self correct like great can we keep doing that yeah Y and and it's in it's in the lurgical tradition right it's like it's not just you Willoughby saying that there could be problems it was the Buddha saying this so and also just say that you know these experiences these intense experiences um are documented in all three major schools of Buddhism you know Tibetan Buddhism calls them yams

um there's the whole Zen sickness or or meditation sickness of of Zen um terraa Buddhism has the stages of insight with some really harrowing stages that are known to be um pretty challenging so we there are and and they don't agree by the way on whether these are a problem or whether they're progress either right well you said stages and I'm like well someone's just going to hear stages they're like well you didn't get through stage four but stage five you're going to be okay you just got stuck because you did it wrong right that's

sort of the so I mean we know so so yeah these are well documented in Buddhist texts these are so that's that's another reason why people should just know about it just have be have informed consent about what they're getting into just be more informed and now we heard from our sponsors by which I mean you thank you for being here and I wanted to say if you really like the stuff that I do it would be great if you could support the show on patreon where you'll get early access to new videos and a

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who who gets into meditation in the first place usually you go there seeking something right most especially in the western tradition right we're not raised in it usually it's something that you're raised in either atheist or in a religious tradition they're like oh no let's go into Buddhism so they're they're they're obviously seeking something and there's something called like a Kundalini Awakening that you hear you read about all the time could you tell me what a calini Awakening is I mean Kundalini Awakening is kind of like it's like the fibromyalgia of or autoimmune disorder of

the spiritual World I.E it is a garb garbage category that like everybody just throws everything into when they don't really know what's going on so I think there's probably like a clean calini you know where it's very specific where it's like just you know heat or Sensations like going up the spine and that's like you know there's there's something very specific but if you look at the way the word calini has been used in the sort of literature um it's there there's kind of everything is Kundalini and so I don't find it particularly helpful and

also when when people who get into meditation for largely secular reasons to manage their stress to help them manage their emotions um to work through grief or loss um when they start to have symptoms and then somebody says it's Kundalini Awakening and now they have to like deal with chakras and gurus and and you know Reiki that itself can be such a terrifying idea that it just it doesn't tend to be a super helpful category for most people that I that I see for other people you know who have um who really want a spiritual

interpretation then it you know it can be somewhat useful but um you know I think there are some other like there's a book called Gopi Krishna it's on my it's on my one of my bookshelves back there and he has like I forget what they're called but one of them's called like living with Kundalini and then it's like you think that he that's his only book but then it's like 10 years later he writes another one that's basically like still living with Kundalini you know and it's like oh boy like that's a long time to

have this these intense symptoms and they're very very difficult you know to the sort of classic Kundalini which is like all these energies you know these Elsa it's interesting there there's something here that I've I've talked about on other episodes of my podcast where I talk about the the difference between a disease and diagnosis and the way we think about things just in the Western Medical tradition but you know in this when we're talking about uh something in an esoteric tradition in a in a meditation tradition such as they they give diagnosises for um this

spiritual sickness for instance in the Tibetan tradition there's also this thing called lung which is wind disease and it and it's like your Shakra winds get you know they're going all over the place in the wrong order and and and bad things happen it's it's fascinating to me the the way you're positioned in this is that that you're taking a western clinical approach and there's also this other esoteric approach they're both recognizing the same condition how how do the treatments vary between those in the in the Buddhist Traditions or the Hindu traditions and the the

the Western clinical um Paradigm so I mean I think you know meditation itself is positioned in this very interesting place where on one hand it's offered as secular scientific you know neuroscientific um it's often compared with you know different kinds of drug drugs as having a you know can can you know anti-depressants or or you know Ridin can be compared to different kinds of drugs as you know being a better treatment so it's playing all the roles of a medical treatment um when it's convenient and then when it's you know when it's also convenient it

can also be by the same people presented as you know uh a magical sacred practice that can't be captured by science um and so that switch often happens when bad things happen you know somebody's like going to you know they're going to this like mindfulness class and it's secular and it's scientific and then bad things happen and they're like oh you're experiencing you know Kundalini that's and they're like what what are you talking about you said it was secular what is Kundalini so that's like and then that's called that's called institutional betrayal and that's like

another kind of trauma so that's a whole other thing that happens but um so you know it's obviously it's we're going down it's a it's a hornets nest of complexity um but I you know I as somebody who works with people who are in some in some ways victims or patients I try to take their perspective and I try to be advocates for them so um I'm going to answer your question but I just want to caveat the hell out of it just like a good scientist um which is basically like I want to know

how that person is experiencing it and interpreting it because what happens is you know the authorities whether they're medical authorities or whether they're spiritual authorities basically step in and be like I will interpret that for you and now determine the rest of your life because if I if I determine it you know regardless of what you think this is a spiritual awakening and you may not medicate it which means that you will have these Energies surging through your body for the rest of your life and you will not be able to work or take care

of your family like too bad that's your spiritual calling whoa you know it's like whoa does this person get any vote in their life you know do they want that um is do they even believe in that so I I want to like I want to be able to give power back to the person who has to actually deal with it which is the experiencer right and so you know so I always when I'm asking people when they come to cheetah house I always ask like well how are you making sense of this you know

what interpretive Frameworks that you've been offered like are resonating with you and which ones are not resonating with you and I often find and I can you know I'm probably a biased Source because people see my website and my degree and they're like oh she like she's a neuroscientist I'm going to her so I probably like only see you know one group of people but people tend to be pretty freaked out by the spiritual interpretations and pretty you know put at ease when there there can be a biological explanation so that's my huge caveat sure

okay and then in terms of you know like I said the different different schools of Buddhism um have words for for these same experiences that we documented however they don't all agree whether they are things to be intervened upon or whether they are signs of progress and so you you can't say that there's like a spiritual interpretation and then a medical one and that all the spiritual ones say oh this is good this is part of the path because they don't there are many like I said Zen has something called meditation sickness which is considered

a problem something to be intervened upon um there are certain kinds of problems like you mentioned l in Tibetan Buddhism you know stop meditating if you have L like that is not something that you want to continue it's not going to get better on its own so it really depends on the symptom and the tradition um how it's going to be treated but I would say that often or or more often there are places where certain kinds of experiences are normalized or expected and are not necessarily grounds for concern or intervention um and so that's

that would be one sort of difference is that it does tend to be more normalized within spiritual Traditions but also you know I think that to some extent that is sort of back to where we started or like why are people getting so mad at me for calling out harms which is that spiritualizing is a really easy way to deflect any claimed of harm this you're not having spiritual bypassing is the is the you know spiritual bypassing is when you you know take up a meditation practice to avoid or get super spiritual to avoid all

of your like regular human messiness and Milestones this is another kind of spiritual bypassing where it's it's basically spiritualizing in order to deflect liability right to protect the actual institution yeah which in some cases it is started you know in all of in I guess many of these cases that we're talking about these Traditions start in medieval periods sometimes even ancient periods in an ancient context of a monastery or a person by a tree and like we're taking these Concepts and we're migrating them to the modern world which is not necessarily a bad thing like

lots of ancient things migrate to the mo modern world just fine but not all of them right and and and and just because something was really adaptive to be a Madman living under a tree having no you know having no thoughts um might have been okay in small some instances in the 600s in Nepal it doesn't necessarily make you uh it work well when you are an investment banker or a you know or a you know a mindful sniper right that's a big category now like or these people who are like trying to to take

that old tradition and put it in an entirely novel context yeah I mean all the all of those are yes will be I'm sorry I keep on hitting you with these things that are like so big and you're like Scott in order to talk to talk about this really we need to go in depth and and break apart all of your Concepts I mean I'm I'm I'm a slow if slow science isn't a thing I just invented it I'm into slow science which is like deeply thinking about all of these issues like so thoroughly the

varieties of contemplative experience study took us 10 years it's 3,000 pages of transcripts and we're still publishing things and it's like you know I'm really I really think about all these things that you're throwing at me like really deeply um but they're all you know they're all hugely important so let's just keep unpacking well I guess I mean I guess we can do like a four hour podcast just see where this goes will be we're digging in we're putting on our pajamas we we're we're going for it um all right I want one thing I

want to try to stand at least for my myself this is one of the questions that comes up over and over again is the difference between an exper a spiritual experience so so in the me in the yoga tradition we have things called cidies These are Miracles right these are or you have you're you're sitting down with a a teacher and they they do something that surprises you and makes you amazed and I I believe that you've hung out in India a little bit I remember 10 years ago we were talking about VIs visiting yogic

Masters in caves because I think we've both done this in our in our in our 20s uh where you meet these people who are like you know sort of recluses but then they do something which just mind boggles you uh and and there's this performance of the of the of the miracle or the the really big Insight I I'm sitting here I'm meditating and I shoot down a tunnel of light and I see a bearded guy I've done that too right and then there's also the ethical considerations do like did seeing that bearded guy at

the end of the tunnel make me a better person or was it just an experience of seeing a bearded guy at the end of a tunnel how do we unpack that sort of distinction between these two things oh boy this is another big one so when is a spirit when is an experience a religious experience or when is it a spiritual experience what makes it that way so we wrote a paper on this actually two different ones um one is called progress or pathology which is how to differentiate you know a sort of expected spiritual

experience from something that's needs intervention um and then we also did uh we wrote a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of meditation on this exact question like how have other people you know looked at this question so basically what we found echoing other people was that the experience itself the phenomenology isn't what people use to determine that to what do you mean so it's not the experience itself that like the category of experience whether it it's it's act that determines whether it's religious or not what determines whether it's religious are a whole host of other

things are sort of secondary or contextual to the experience when you say religious what do you mean so my anthropology neurons just fired like when you say something when you said something is religious do you mean Supernatural is that is that sort of or or or do you mean like lurgical like you know this is the tradition oh boy so I mean my husband is a religious study scholar and oh no they're still arguing about the definition of religion you know at the American Academy of religion so I am probably not the person to be

asking this anthropolog still don't know what cultural is so you know yeah I mean it's one of those fuzzy categories but I think that like maybe another way to say it would be like that certain experiences have are special they're different than other experiences and they are of high value maybe maybe that would be a way to say it and so so what we've found is that there there's an experience and then there's a process of appraisal that is that this experience is spiritual okay and that that or or or of value and special and

all that stuff and stuff and that that process of deciding that is not determined by The Experience itself I mean there is so and I can and I've gone through every you can go through all 59 categories of my you know of my my study I think the one around changes in sense of self especially like losing all of your boundaries between yourself and the world or yourself and other people that's classically like what Stace or Hood would call sort of a mystical experience like having sort of one a Oneness experience or emerging with with

the world um also found that there were plenty of people in our study that found that that was an extremely terrifying and dysfunctional experience not at all something that they wanted to repeat ever again and they definitely wanted it to stop but that's you know and also some people had positive experiences of that too I don't want to say it's all negative but there so there's not really any experience that is itself like aha that one is a religious experience Ah that's a that's a a spiritual experience it's not the experience itself it's it's the

context I mean I've heard people say like anything that happens on a Meditation Retreat because as you're it's happening on a Meditation Retreat is to be good is a yeah is a spiritual experience and I'm like that makes no sense because you've made you you because you set an intention for this to be a Sacred Space right that then therefore everything that fits into that container of sacred facei must by definition be sacred but does that mean it's a good thing or not I mean I think one of the things that I come to when

I when I think about the Buddhist or even the Christian tradition right if I saw someone walking on water um in a Christian tradition you know we've got Jesus we've got we've got this thing and therefore because they did something impossible right or I had this Vision which was impossible because it was outside of my normal perception of reality therefore everything that is said in the tradition must also be true right I I I I find this to be a um it's sort of a hook right in a way whe you if you can perform

the miracle then then therefore everything that person that that teacher gives you must be true and then then you get into things like um what's the word uh it has just lost me in Sanskrit uh it's the it's the idea that um you can lie you can do magic tricks you can do things to trick somebody to believe there was a miracle therefore it's called upaya right this is the word in Sanskrit skillful means skillful means right where you where you I skillfully convince them to believe everything I said because I lied to them and

then and then you know in in the beginning you're Amazed by something and then later you become the protector of the LIE right you're brought in it's like no you've seen the other things I've given you now now you must protect the lie for everything you know Stephen Bachelor has a great book on this as well um you know the truth I could lie for I had to lie for something yeah I mean I see that a lot with you know if your meditation class or program like beats the control group mhm you know on

a single VAR therefore Buddhism is true you're like no that's not that's doesn't follow no yeah it's it's sort of like it when you say like there was there were significant results and you're like do you mean statistically significant because that doesn't mean what you think it means it wasn't doesn't mean substantial it means yeah we beat the control group by like you know 0.04% just you know just for your for your listeners when a study finds that any treatment is is better than a control group in a you know R hopefully it's a randomized

control trial if it's not you can just stop listening you know better be an RCT but that's you know it's a it's good start but it doesn't necessarily mean that that thing is going to work for you you know these are based on averages and there's always going to be people that didn't benefit from the treatment there's always going to be people that probably got worse um it's a it's a good sign that probably most people got better or didn't get worse but you can't base individual treatment protocols on on averages so you know and

it Def and it definitely doesn't generalize past the group that you're talking about and it definitely doesn't have anything to say about a world religion's veracity right although it's presented like that continually right you know we look at right now so I just did this book uh on dreaming that I have coming out very soon and I delved into some meditations on dreaming like Yoga Nidra that was something that I was very interested and I found it was actually pretty cool like I did yoga NRA and I felt pretty good afterwards uh and my subjective

experience I think is worth worth saying that yeah other people could do this too it's probably gonna be good but the way that we've also framed it as because right now it's like the buzzword right yoga NRA is like the thing that everyone's doing there is actually so little science on it like there's so little actual useful science and the and the couple that have been done can you imagine doing Yoga Nidra in an MRI machine with all the clicking and the banging and all that like what is actually going on they it proves very

difficult to study and and and and just because you find a mechanism whereby something might work um it doesn't mean that does says anything about Consciousness itself I mean you start like getting into all these really thorny questions where you're going to need like it's not like you couldn't answer these questions scientifically you could always develop hypoth is and test hypothesis but we're never we're nowhere close to what we need to find anything like Truth uh what we have is a great way to get hype yes and hype is really not helping the meditation industry

they think it is but it's actually going to just eat it up and swallow it and spit it out it it is you know like just making this thing it's already happening you know with with mindfulness so mindfulness started off like when I started in 2000 so over 20 years ago I started doing research in mindfulness and it's slowly kind of hit a peak of being a Panacea and good for everything and now people are like ah you know it's it's it's pretty good you know but it's not good for everything and the sort of

hype is has waned and I think we're moving actually into a much more mature place where we can engage with it in a in a much more like levelheaded way like it's a good tool it's everyone should have this tool in their toolbox but you can't use it for everything um but then there's always a new guy on the scene so right now it's psychedelics and psychedelics can do everything you know so oh my God yeah willby I I avoided using the word psychedelics till now but you just dropped it and because you know when

we actually arrange you know originally wanted to talk it was because there was this big psychedelic conference happening in Denver uh where you know obviously psychedelics are huge like we just sort of legalized them in in Colorado and it's going to be the therapeutic mainstream MDMA was was is right on the verge of FDA approval um mushrooms ketamine everyone does ketamine apparently right now um there are obvious connections between what you're learning what what your research is on meditation and what we might see in psychedelics right in psychedelic research right now we're so excited that

if you do mushrooms you're going to get rid of your mother problems you're G to you're going to face your your your your family issues and at the end of that you're going to become what better all right where are we going will it be I mean there are so many parallels and I I think you know one of them is just when you're when when people are enthusiastic about something it could be a treatment it could be whatever a you know new food who cares like when some people are really enthus enthusiastic about it

they get loud about it you see the you know they talk about it they they share about it with other people um and so but the people who had who don't like it you know who they tend to just not say anything and so it gets very the sort of effects get Amplified in a very asymmetrical way and then when you have people who are being like really harmed by something and so now traumatized and so they they don't even have the wherewithal and the like capacity to speak up because speaking up would be they're

already so disregulated that they just they are basically just spending all their time managing their symptoms they don't have time to like confront whoever gave them this treatment or or you know the therapist or or the meditation teacher or whatever so I think that that you know continues to happen over and over again in different Industries and it happen it's happened happening in the meditation industry it's happening in the Psychedelic industry so those are really common par those are common across all Industries and those are sort of the most obvious parallels um but I think

that the the salvific altered state the what I've never heard that word oh just like this the the the altered state of consciousness that's going to solve all your problems okay um is this is another common um story narrative that you hear in both meditation and psychedelics that their the way that they their therapeutic mechanism the way they act their mechanism of action is for to sort of annihilate your sense of self and you know you know to borrow the words from Jim Morrison Break On Through To the other side and then all is good

and everything's going to be awesome and like you can just choose like what that's going to look like like you know Jim Morrison's story ended really well too as we all remember you know well maybe if he really died I mean who knows if that's actually true I mean I think you put it really well I me I know people here in Denver now because Denver is I feel like it's like The Hot Spot there's probably California Denver Oregon where this is happening at at sort of accelerated rates I know people now who would go

to an iasa treat Retreat every two weekends or every week right and if they're not doing that they're going to try ketamine and maybe there's going to be some MDMA and they keep on having these Peak experience Peak experience after Peak experience and they they deal they when they they they relate they say I dealing with all of my issues and that person hasn't dealt with their issues but I have and and but I look from an outside perspective I'm like well have your have you changed as a person like have we seen you're becoming

a more empathetic person are you becoming you know more honest or more you know whatever positive trait you want to throw there am I actually seeing personality change and I can't say that I am in a lot of these people like I know that i' at the same time I know that I've had psychedelic experiences which I rate as some of the most profound experiences of my life uh and maybe there was some change to it for sure but I'm not I'm not seeing in the in the therapeutic context the wonder story that we do

talk about in fact like what you're saying with the Dark Knight project you know another experience that I had a friend of mine's experience she did mushrooms with a therapist locally I don't think they were licensed and she saw ghosts while on mushrooms and the therapist said well those ghosts are real and you need to learn to deal with them and then she couldn't sleep for a year because she was haunted by ghosts what are we doing like like what is what is this world like in the 60s and the 70s we have this idea

of like these acid Trippers these who then never came back to reality and we and it seems to me that we haven't learned learn that lesson incredibly well I mean to your point about if these Technologies let's call them collectively meditation and psychedelics really were this transformative thing that could turn people into enlightened beings of endless compassion wouldn't have happened already I mean LSD and Sila cybin is like not new like it might be new in the research world and it might be making a Resurgence but like people didn't stop doing it just because it

was illegal you know there have been people that have been doing in in iasa you know like this has been going on continuously for Millennia I don't see a huge you know upsurge of well-meaning compassionate good people coming out of that world and I can tell you the ones that you know in in meditation you know the fact that I have you know a thousand emails of of hate mail tells you that I I don't know I'm not particularly impressed that's fascinating and and of course you're we're going to get more hate mail at the

you know in the comments to this video right because there's going to be people who hear these words and want to believe a reality that that their own reality or a collective reality in their social group that has been reinforced by um not only ideology but also economics right also the these these m ion and billion dollar company I don't think there's a billion dollar psychedelic company yet but there is one with a market cap of 400 million out of Boston that I read about yesterday the thing with psychedelics though I mean the difference is

that they actually it's very easy to continue to say meditation has no side effects I mean even with all of my research and all of these teachers that that say up there can be problems um that still continues to be a very popular narrative not so in psychedelics there isn't a single credible person that will say it has no side effects I mean all the researchers all the wise people you know who have been around are are saying yes there can be risks and you know some of the same brand defense strategies are being applied

like it only happens to people with you know psychotic pre-existing Tendencies which is also not true um but but you know I I I do think the Psychedelic world and researchers have been more responsive um to the possibility of there being risk and and do take it more seriously so in some ways the Psychedelic world is a little ahead of the meditation World in terms of dealing with risk but the every issue that was was happening in meditation which was just like the market share like how many billions of dollars are we talking how how

big is this industry um how invested are people how much you know craze it's more than hype it's like craze how much like energy is behind it all of that is meditation on steroids when it comes to psychedelics all I mean the the market share is just like astronomical so it's all every single issue that is in meditation is just being Amplified just I don't even a thousandfold yeah well and you'll probably see people deploy meditation techniques while they are on psychedelics right you know to heighten the experience in order to get deeper because the

inter one of the interesting things about psychedelics it's not just a physical mechanism right it's not let your neurotransmitters transmit it in a better way or a more you know fundamental way it's also you're bringing cognitive tools to it and I and I believe those cognitive tools mixing with whatever is going physiologically plus the experience that the Psychedelic brings in is where if there is a possibility for beneficial training it's it's all of those contexts coming in at once well did you hear my podcast with Tim Ferris that I just finished no I didn't I

didn't even know you were on him oh it just came out so Tim I heard through the graine or I guess he had talked about it on other podcasts that he being the way he is you know kind of like a fairly like aggressive you know self- cultivator um um he decided to go on retreat at Spirit Rock and start fasting a week beforehand and do psychedelics while on on the retreat it didn't it didn't go well what happened and so well you can listen to him tell the story but but that's why I got

to be on the podcast was because he is actually now sort of dialing back giving a public service announcement to be like hey guys that approach to like combine all your powerful tools at once like you can actually go off the rails I did don't do that so we basically decided to make a public service announcement together because no one listens to me you know they'll Listen to Tim because he's you know like he's kind of like the the king of this kind of this culture that that does things all over the top and this

is one of the things that you don't want to do over the top like don't the heroic dose of psychedelic like you know actually big shout out to Tim on this because you know he is someone who tries things and I think we do need as humans one of the the beauties of being alive is that you get to try things and see how they work and I think that's it's a generally a good um personality trait to have with some caveats here and there but it also seems that he is able to pull back

and assess something that he has tried because he was also very instrumental and for instance the Wim Hoff method becoming huge because um you know Wim Hoff is is giant but then after that came out he started realizing that people were drowning and dying you know on on a show Josh whiteskin who was the the chest Prodigy from Searching for Bobby fiser almost drowned um doing this and he was like oh actually we have to like walk back a little bit and balance the amazing things in these techniques with the potential dangers that are there

and it's not to say that anything is good or bad with like sort of like a binary but instead saying that these things are powerful is a better way into it right these are powerful things and power can go either which way how it's channeled how it's used and but admitting that there's risk and taking responsibility is incredibly rare in fact Tim and Sam Harris yes I me actually Dan Harris too the other the other Harris but Sam Harris also has his app waking up was causing problems and he actually reached out to me and

and then also allowed me to read emails from people having problems with his app that had written me he allowed me to read those on his podcast wow so he's allowing me to you know publicly criticize his product as not perfect um you know shout out to to Sam as well yeah I am not seeing that from really anyone else that kind of behavior usually it's this protectionism like the things that you were saying with with you know protecting your Market protecting your brand and then blaming the patient for doing something wrong or blaming the

messenger yeah The Whistleblower yeah oh my God I mean you and me are just like fighting this all the time I'm sure because like I am now so public about drownings with Wim Hoff right I've collected 20 deaths and it just the the numbers are just mounting all the time and it's so funny because when I began this and I think when you began your research too it was to save the thing that you love right it was it was to go in there and be like look no there is something really good here we

want to protect it we want we want the good things to be accentuated but you have to you have to face the negative consequences you have to like deal with them and try to like make things better and that is not a message that I think the community you know there aren't a lot of famous truth tellers in the world I don't know if you've noticed this there's not a lot of people who are out there who like focus on telling the truth and then their careers benefit because of that like that's why we have

like whistleblower laws because whistleblowers always get into trouble uh with the powers that be and the audience of that that that the whistle anyone who thinks that like I mean you've written a couple books like if anyone thinks I'm getting rich by being me like think again and if you think I'm having fun and you I'm enjoying it like think again in fact like I built an off-grid cabin in the mountain mountains of Vermont undisclosed you know location oh it's in New Hampshire willby you live in New Hampshire last I hampsh Virginia maybe um because

like it's completely taking a toll on me to be able to to try to speak up over and over again and just to get it just takes a toll like people just always you know yeah but yeah but yeah but like it just it's just it's hard it's hard but you know it's I think it's really really important that you're doing what you you do do because if we don't have people like you if we don't have people going out there trying to gently look at things from not from a slanderous perspective but from a

fact-based perspective I think that that is the only way that you protect the things that we love right that that you actually protect the things that because you're not doing this because you you hate meditation right you you you went into this because you were the meditator right you were meditating in Arizona and you saw these negative things and we have to like one of the problems in the world in general so much bigger than what the medit a question we're talking about is that we don't have a shared reality anymore like like we as

humans are social beings we are not Vulcans right we we we we we we we move with our pack because evolutionarily moving with your pack was going to get you let you survive a hell of a lot better than it was to be like well Pac you maybe we shouldn't be doing this bad thing that person got ostracized and kicked out even if they were morally right but we now live in a soci that's so big and so complex that if we can't share a reality if we can't admit what's actually going on you end

up in a situation where well bad things can happen and bad things do happen yeah yeah and I'm I'm not I'm also just not sitting around like saying bad things can happen I have people calling me every day I mean my waiting list is is like three months long because there's so many people that are having problems with meditation that need to come and I see someone every single day I see one a day because that's about all I can handle so let's actually get into that for a little bit cheetah house is you know

that you are the only person that I really know who's doing this at a at a high level like looking into the dark I know there's you have co-authors and there are other people there but like let's say somebody is experiencing the Dark Side of meditation or psychedelics what resources are out there for those people um so for meditation um there is an organization that I founded called cheetah house um and really it was when we published the first paper of the varieties of cont templa of experience study and you know went online there were

so many people that call started calling the lab saying like that's happening to me I need help and we're like well Labs don't really do that it's like not what universities do you know and so I had to start a separate entity nonprofit called cheetah house in order to handle the volume and have that be kind of the dissemination and service branch of the of the lab so cheetah house does all the taking care of people and educating trainings that kind of thing so at cheetah house if you're having problems you can sign up for

a consultation with any member of our care team and the care team is made out of me and other uh researchers on the vce study other co-authors Andor people who have had lived experience of meditation related challenges themselves and so everyone is ex probably like you know the core of the top experts on this on this topic are on our care team um and so you can sign up for a consultation with that we also have support groups and there are also lectures where we invite different researchers and people to come talk about different topics

which is I do some of you know some of my papers that nobody reads I will have a conversation with my husband about them and we kind of read them and explain them to people so you don't have to read them um but yeah cheetah house is kind of the go-to for all meditation related challenges and are you um you said you have like a three-month waiting list do there need to be more cheetah houses do we need leopard House 2 and other ones coming out there or are are can like a therapist your general

therapist out there can they also handle these questions or do you really need a sort of a specialist I mean there is some specialty information unfortunately itely I mean it's a very common narrative that I hear when people come to cheetah house they've been through 10 meditation teachers two neurologists and five therapists like because you know all of those people are still like oh meditation can't have side effects it must be you you know and they get misdiagnosed with all sorts of things or they just they've never heard of this before or they're like you

know often the meditation teachers will be like you need to meditate in order to work with this or you know do you know about mindfulness and they're like H oh my God so um yeah so there does need to be a little bit of Education around it and so we are we do educate clinicians and therapists and meditation teachers as well but yeah it would be great if there were a whole species of clinicians I mean we decided to you to do a pure support model so we're not a clinical model even though a lot

of people on our care team do have clinical degrees that's not the model that we're using because for one reason because a lot of the people that come feel traumatized by the power that's been exerted over their own narrative like when I was talking about like who gets to interpret your experience they that that you know feeling like their their agency has been taken away by either the biomedical you know industry or the spiritual industry that can happen in both you know both kinds of interpretations and so so we decided to kind of try to

level out the the power hierarchy by having a peer support model rather than a clinical model because clinical would be like well I'm the expert I know let me tell you and the peer model is like hey that happened to me too like how are you doing how are you interpreting it where do you want to go from here do you want to hear my story you know kind of stuff and it's much more owering to have peers right you know because if it just does come from your The Authority this is normal like that's

that can be a useful message to hear for sure but it's also yeah when you feel like there is a community of people who've had these issues that that that is where the empowerment comes from could you give me like an idea of like what numbers we're actually talking about who who end up on this dark side of Enlightenment like I know you've got a 300 what was it five wait you say 5,000 or 300 pages on experi experience oh 3,000 pages of of interview transcripts yeah right so so can you give like can you

an understand what the scale of this problem actually is so I did a epidemiological study with Simon Goldberg and Richie Davidson so it's two of the most you know respected meditation researchers in the world and couple different data points came out of that study one was that we we we wanted the den minator to be the lowest possible denominator which would be anyone who's ever meditated even once and so that number was 49% of the U of the US so basically half of all people in the US have tried meditation even once wow that's a

lot that's the highest number so far um the second number was that half of those people so everyone who's half of the people that try meditation even once will have at least one meditation related adverse effect and it might be something like extremely transient and no big deal but it's not zero so you know half of all people but the number that really jumped out at me was one in 10 people that have tried meditation at least once will have a meditation related adverse effect that's associated with impairment and functioning one in 10 wow that's

that's a when you say impairment and function what does that mean like does that mean I'm stuttering for the for months or what does that what does that look like well I mean in that particular study we didn't necessarily Define what that meant the person had to decide whether that applied to them or not in the vce study we did ask those questions and people have you know everything from I had to take uh you know I had to drop a class because I couldn't carry you know a class of five classes or I had

to take a leave from school or I had to take a leave from work or I was hospitalized for a month or I had my children taken away from me so it can go like all the way like to the worst possible case scenario and it can also be like you know even in my in the I'm an I'm actually a mindfulness teacher and I taught in a clinical trial and we had retreats in that clinical trial and we had adverse effects that I found out about later um but one of them was that on

The Retreat Day a number of people after meditating all day felt like kind of spaced out yeah and they didn't feel safe to drive they didn't tell me because I'm the teacher right they didn't want to tell me so they were walking around you know Brown University trying to sober up before they before they drove home that's a really good example of like something it's not a big deal that didn't really you know it didn't lasted maybe like an hour but they just felt kind of not 100% to drive wow yeah that's fascinating what what

do you think the the the flip side is of that equation if not if if 10% of people have a negative um effect what percentage of people have a a positive or and an overwhelmingly Pro positive effect I mean I think the numbers are positive enough to have it always be something that's worth a try MH you know like my general my general kind of recommendation contrary to popular belief that I'm like just a hater of all things meditation I do think it's worth a try for most people you know you know in small doses

with reput you know reputable programs to like give it a try I don't think we know I mean that's just not the way that data are represented so right often data again are represented by averages and there's going to be people that have really really strong effects people that have no no change and then people who have negative effects and they're all mushed there together and if you're if you're if you're bigger if you're more positive effects are more positive than they are negative then it appears like your treatment quote unquote works or you get

quote unquote significant statistically significant results but that doesn't tell you like what the what the ratios are and this is actually a problem for you know translating scientific data into individualized protocols for clinicians like to be actually applying the the the research and so actually a number of really high-end journals are requiring them to to display the data differently and it's called it's called a reliable change index and it's so smart it's just like well What proportion of your group that got the treatment got like significantly better and What proportion like didn't get you know

didn't change at all and What proportion got significantly worse and just have those numbers for every single outcome like okay that was so easy why does it everyone do that right that's not you know and so instead we just when you get the p is less than 0.05 number you're like oh the meditation work quote unquote works and then it you have this idea that like it worked for everyone in the group but that's not what happens and and like there's actually data I've seen data sets including my own where it was like four people

had these miraculous lifechanging events right and they just skewed all the data and so I got huge effect sizes right but there were lots of people that were like ah that was fine like yeah most people are probably eh is fine with anything that they do you know even probably people who do like I know I I was going to say like what what do people always have a universal chocolate right people who eat chocolate there's going to be a lot of people like H me you know even though chocolate's pretty good in the world

um it's interesting you say that because you know I noticed this in the in the comments on my these Wim Hoff videos I do where obviously there you have these cases of people who are like yeah my autoimmune analist went away my cancer went away I mean you have these like huge like big effects that are attributable supposedly to the Wim Hoff method and maybe like there's some science there not GNA delve into that right now but then there's these other people who most people are probably like I did a couple ice spast and of

breath work but I then I went on to something else and then and then there's the downside of people who were like I got permanent T tentis tenius from this and and it never went away and and again in the comments on those videos it's always but this cured cancer this cured some guy's autoimmune illness this you know did this guy's crippling suicidal anxiety he went away and like well and this is the problem with the asymmetrical representations because you're only going to see these these positive outliers but if you're going to play that game

then you really need to see the negative outliers too like they all need to be up there and but the you know but the truth is actually most often way in between those right yes right yeah most people are most people are probably met to everything like yeah it was cool you know that's why that's why only 50% of America has tried this because you know the other 50% was doing other things like they they had they had to go you know take care of their kids and they couldn't get to meditation that day uh

and that was more beneficial for them um willby this is such a fascinating conversation I feel like we're going to chat again because I have a plan for talking to you again and I'm gonna tell you after I turn this off because I can't tell the people on the podcast what I actually plan yeah thank you so much for talking to me and for everyone who wants to find you you can you can Google Willoughby Britain and it will come up you can Google cheetah house and will come up but what's your url that you

want people to specifically go definitely go to cheetah house if you Google me and you write me it might be years before I get back to you because um I get a lot of emails so can I I can attest this is absolutely true Wilby takes at least three weeks to respond to an email yeah um don't do that because a lot of the ones that I get are like oh my God please help me now and I'm like okay that one goes first so you're never gonna get to me you just go to cheetah

house we'll take you know go to go there first yeah awesome well everyone go to cheetah house thank you so much for um tuning into this I think this was a really really important conversation share it with somebody who you think needs to hear it because apparently one out of 10 people need to hear this one out of 10 people need to hear this thanks Willoughby really love being here