Deep State: The New Science Of Advanced Meditation
On a meditation retreat earlier this year, in the gentle hippy beach town of Mazunte in Mexico, I experienced a high comparable only to the feeling of MDMA flooding my system.
I was suffused with a boundless love that felt as if it was rolling through my body and out through my fingertips, flitting through the thick, hot air and into the people around me. The daisy chain of petty jealousies and grinding ruminations encircling my mind seemed to dissolve. I didn’t realise I was crying, but I touched my face to find it sopping.
I’d come to the centre, with its mosquitoes and 40°C heat, in search of something like this. I’d had a not-dissimilar experience while sitting at home and tinkering with YouTube meditations last winter, and had arrived here on the advice of a friend who’s well-versed in this stuff. It worked. I achieved this state after two days spent mostly in meditation of different kinds, eventually trying a practice in which I concentrated, hard, on the centre of my chest. It was this that caused the ecstasy to erupt.
Like most euphoric experiences, this one didn’t permanently shatter the bad stuff in my head. But the experience left a deep impression on me. If I managed to get to that place once, surely I could go back? What even was it? And where were the other people who’d had this experience? Days later, scrolling X, I found people talking about the jhanas.
State Of Absorption
The jhanas are a series of states of intense concentration. There are eight (or nine, depending on who you ask), each one involving a deeper, more focused absorption. Some might enter a jhana and ‘pop’ out rapidly; advanced practitioners might be able to hold the state for longer.
Today, they’re often associated with Buddhism, though some experts point to evidence of the states in writings that predate the religion. ‘Some schools [of thought] teach a lighter version, which is easier to get into,’ says Michael Lifshitz, an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University, who’s worked on a study of experienced jhana meditators, the results of which are pending.
‘Others classify a jhana as not thinking about anything for many minutes or even hours, attention being completely stable on the object of meditation.’
Meditation teachers I consulted for this piece told me my own experience didn’t sound like a jhana, but more a concentrated ‘heart-opening’ experience. However, both sit under the umbrella of ‘advanced meditation’ – and they’re the subject of an emerging field of study.
Over at Harvard University, the Meditation Research Program is working to demystify the brain’s activity during advanced meditation, with the goal of working out how to bring its benefits to more people.
‘We’ve heard stories from advanced practitioners about deep suffering and how they achieved radical healing,’ says Matthew Sacchet, a neuroscientist and the programme’s director. ‘I believe that if someone claims to have transcended suffering via these practices, we need to do our best to understand that.’
He isn’t the only one who thinks so. At University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientist Kathryn Devaney is attempting to identify what the states ‘look like’ in the brain. Last year, collaborative work between Professor Sacchet’s Harvard lab and other institutions saw a paper published on nirodha samāpatti, or ‘cessation’ – a bewildering psychological state in which a practitioner relays that they were able to ‘turn off’ their conscious experience, before coming back.
This isn’t 10 minutes on Headspace: ‘Common mindfulness programmes are focused on the reduction of stress, whereas advanced meditation includes ecstatic bliss states, deep insight into the mind and, ultimately, what we call “transformation” – lasting changes to one’s understanding or way of being in the world,’ says Professor Sacchet.
Next-Gen Meditation
The study of meditation isn’t new, of course. Sara Lazar, a Harvard psychology professor, has been using neuroimaging to examine the impact of the practice on brain structure since the 1990s; and Judson Brewer, a neuroscientist at Brown University, began investigating the neural mechanisms of mindfulness in the 2010s.
But we are currently witnessing a new generation of meditation research. ‘Researchers are getting more comfortable discussing advanced meditation and asking how those deeper stages of the contemplative path work. Can we measure these things? In doing so, can we make them more widely available?’ says Dr Lifshitz.
‘With the pandemic, the incredible burden of mental illness, global political and economic instability, climate change, and also the rise of psychedelics in the mainstream, we are entering a new era of openness towards these sorts of experiences,’ says Professor Sacchet.
It was her own openness to meditation’s benefits that drove Dr Devaney’s desire to study it. A devoted practitioner and teacher, alongside her scientific work, she spent 15 years engaged in vipassana meditation (‘vipassana’ translates to ‘insight’ – the practice focuses on cultivating deep attention and awareness).
In recent years, she started working with eminent teacher Michael Taft in a community of other practitioners. Within six months, she experienced dramatic internal shifts. ‘My experience of being a person in the world was markedly different than it had been at the beginning. I was less stressed and happier to be alive,’ she says. The number of hours of practice it might take to achieve such changes in one’s experience, she notes, is deeply dependent on the individual, as well as your style of practice.
Roger Thisdell, 29, is a meditation teacher living in London. He crafted his own style of meditation practice, analysing books and watching YouTube videos. He began a simple routine – 10 or 15 minutes a day – as a teenager, after reading the work of popular spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle.
A magic mushroom experience at age 20, though, changed things. ‘I realised my mind is vaster and wilder than I could ever have conceived,’ he remembers. Keen to plumb the depths of his internal world, he began meditating for an hour a day – experimenting with new techniques and working out what yielded the greatest results. After months, he felt benefits. There was more space in his mind and he found he was getting less tangled up in ruminations. Years in, he found the benefits to be dramatic.
‘There’s this deep inner equanimity that emerges from doing these kinds of practices long term,’ he says. ‘My mind is much less sticky: it doesn’t get caught up on particular thoughts or emotions, things just come and go.’
He offers the example of a stranger being rude to him on the street. ‘Before I put in years of meditation practice, that would have caused me to have a physical reaction – heart racing, hands sweating – and I’d have wanted to engage in some form of verbal conflict. Now, though, I can feel that physical reaction starting, recognise it and process it quickly.’
He’s experienced bliss states, too, including the jhanas, but sees these as a ‘stepping stone’ to the ‘more sustaining benefits of meditation: lucidity, equanimity and peace’. The jhanas, he says, are ‘a surprise the first time round. You’re like, “Wow, I didn’t know I could experience that.” After a while of playing with them, though, you sort of get over them and move on.’
His view chimes with that of other advanced meditators MH spoke to for this piece, who note that entering the jhanas is a profound experience but, perhaps counter-intuitively, totally non-addictive.
Your Brain On Jhana
So what do we know about how meditation impacts brain activity?
‘During advanced concentrative absorption meditation – characterised by deep absorption or becoming “one” with a meditation object – we’ve observed a shift of activity from the anterior to the posterior part of the brain, that is, from front to back,’ says Professor Sacchet. ‘This mirrors a shift from a mind engaged with conceptual thought to one that is increasingly present.’
Meanwhile, Dr Lifshitz’s team – who recorded advanced practitioners getting into the first to fourth jhana over the course of a 10-day retreat – found that, when in a jhana, the way different brain areas communicate becomes more flexible. ‘Over the course of the retreat, we measured people becoming more creative in their thinking and less constrained by habit.’
If you have any experience of alarming mental health incidents such as derealisation – feeling like your surroundings aren’t ‘real’ – then the idea of dampening your sense of self might sound uncomfortably familiar.
Indeed, some people do report scary experiences. Mandy Johnson is a relationship, family and recovery coach at Cheetah House, which is a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping people who’ve experienced distressing experiences born from meditation.
A former mindfulness teacher, Mandy had a destabilising experience on day six of a silent retreat in 2017, just before she turned 50. Childhood trauma resurfaced, her sense of self began to fray and she started experiencing severe tinnitus. Over the course of two years of professional help, she was able to touch the contours of reality again, eventually recovering.
Precise data on how many people might deal with adverse experiences is ‘still rolling in’, says Nathan Fisher, a researcher at Brown University and scholar of comparative religion and meditation, who also offers care to meditators in distress via Cheetah House.
‘Answering how many people deal with adverse effects is difficult. Is it that someone has had a bad session? Or a bad day? Or a challenging month?’ He points to research from academics – including Cheetah House founder and Brown University Psychiatry professor Willoughby Britton – which found that just over 10% of respondents with exposure to meditation practice experienced some form of meditation-related adverse effects: anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing and emotional sensitivity were the most common, with ‘childhood adversity’ leading to a raised risk of negative experiences.
Dr Devaney recommends that anyone with a history of serious trauma explore therapy before beginning meditation. Then, if you do decide to proceed, she suggests finding a trauma-informed teacher, focusing more on loving kindness or metta practice – which have less potential for unravelling one’s sense of self – and trusting your intuition if something feels like it’s not good for you.
‘Move slowly,’ she cautions. ‘If you imagine your whole psychological structure as a game of Jenga, you don’t want to go in there and start pulling out foundational pieces right away. Some people have an attitude of “I’m going to speed-run enlightenment”, but we want to gently explore our experience, not try and pull the rug out from under ourselves.’
Altered Minds
Roger’s practice had a startling development. In 2021, at the age of 26, he says he reached a depth of realisation, which matches descriptions of the fourth and final stage of awakening in Theravada Buddhism (the oldest existing school of the religion, practised widely in Southeast Asia).
This, he says, ‘resulted in the complete dissolving of my sense of a centre at my experience. There isn’t a sense of a “controller” in the middle of my awareness – instead, it’s like there’s the harmony of an orchestra playing.’ How does that feel? ‘The reduction of day-to-day suffering is profound. I have this sense that life is just flowing... It sounds crazy, but I highly recommend it. It is the biggest upgrade to my life I’ve ever had.’
It strikes me that the fruits of advanced meditation – and the fact that they can be accessed by you and me – could be something of a cheat code for life, one that’s long gone unnoticed in our culture.
‘Many Westerners are aware that there’s a “deep end” to the meditation pool, but it’s often assumed to be inaccessible or perhaps incompatible with modern life,’ says Professor Sacchet. Himself a life-long meditator, he firmly believes that routes to a better life exist.
He reaches for a running analogy: ‘It’s not uncommon for someone to go from being out of shape to running a marathon over six to 12 months – and such a radical transformation of mind, rather than body, might be possible on a similar timeline.’
If findings are translated into practical applications, including tech, you might be able to get there even faster. ‘A better understanding of the neural mechanisms of advanced meditation may help us develop neurofeedback or neurostimulation to potentially facilitate accelerated meditative development.’
Four months on from the experience that piqued my curiosity, my interest in the far-out benefits of intense meditation has only increased. While my at-home experiments using instructions I’ve found online haven’t yielded any drastic breakthroughs, my on-cushion hours have helped me to develop a pleasant full-body sensation – one that feels like energy is spooling down from the crown of my head and out through my toes. Being able to access that on tap, alone, feels like a powerful tool to have in my pocket.
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