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ABSTRACT
Publications have used pathologizing language when reporting a boom in the popularity of meditation practices: a ‘meditation madness’. I argue that analysing the intellectual roots of the category ‘popular religion’ improves our understanding of debates about the status of meditation and its potential adverse effects. My analyses first provide historical context for portrayals of religiocultural activities of ‘the masses’ as irrational and dangerous. But European ideas about ‘the popular’ are also foundational to the very construction of ‘meditation’ in its current dominant forms. Buddhist studies scholars today critique a new ‘popular Buddhism in the West’ precisely because it, in turn, denigrates common Asian Buddhist practices as ‘popular religion’ dross obscuring the true essence of Buddhism (as transmitted through modern(ist) meditation forms). I find that responses to the popularity of meditation may evoke old dichotomies of popular/elite religion, but they often ultimately express concrete, practical anxieties about the recent rapid spread of therapeutic meditation practices. Psychologists studying ‘meditation sickness’, for example, may be less concerned about ‘unofficial’ than ‘unsupervised religion’. They warn that ‘meditation mania’ risks actually rendering meditators manic, that, without guidance from responsible educated (if not elite) teachers, uninformed meditators can, indeed, experience episodes of mania and other difficulties.
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Notes
1. There are multiple additional designations for this topic, including ‘challenging and difficult meditation effects/experiences’ and ‘unwanted meditation effects/experiences’. Each different way of naming the subject reflects the diverse worldviews and commitments of the various communities that utilise the language. Throughout this article, I will alternate in my use of these different designations as a way of conveying this multiplicity.
2. In a recent meta-analysis, I conducted of English language news articles on adverse meditation practices (Helderman Citation2024 under contract) all but two of the publications began in this manner and those two pieces were published in periodicals aimed at audiences already familiar with meditation.
3. Grant, Adam. 2015. ‘Can We End the Meditation Madness?’ The New York Times. October 10, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/can-we-end-the-meditation-madness.html
4. Delaney, Brigid. 2015. ‘If 2014 Was the Year Of Mindfulness, 2015 Was The Year Of Fruitlessly Trying to Debunk It’. The Guardian, October 18. 2015.
5. Similarly, so prominent have ‘mindfulness’ forms become in this regard that the word is now frequently used interchangeably with ‘meditation’ without precise definition. But over recent decades, other Anglophone terms could have made the same claim including the, again singular, ‘Zen’ or ‘TM’ (transcendental meditation). Scholars like Halvor Eifring (Citation2016) have observed that the category of ‘meditation’ could refer to a vast diversity of practices from divinity visualisations to box breathing relaxation techniques. But when journalists and others declare that ‘meditation has gone mainstream’ or ‘meditation is everywhere’ it is contemporary therapeutic meditation practices that they refer to.
6. For example, in my above-noted meta-analysis, over half of the reviewed publications used these terms (Helderman Citation2024 under contract).
7. As reported, for example, in a recent Harper’s piece on the topic. Kortava, David. 2021. ‘Lost in Thought: The Psychological Risks of Meditation’. Harper’s Magazine, March 31, 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/
8. Scholars of media studies like Sharon Lauricella (Citation2016) quantitatively establish what otherwise might be mere impression. Lauricella analysed 764 English-language print articles in the news media published since 1979 and found that ‘all but six reported on meditation positively’ (1753).
9. From the perspective of sociologist of religion Courtney Bender (Citation2010), ‘recent surveys on Americans’ participation in alternative and complementary health practices demonstrate that this once truly “alternative” way of thinking about health has become quite mainstream’ (202, fn11).
10. Following Whorton (Citation2002), I have previously noted (Helderman Citation2019, 109) the ways that these rhetorical shifts from ‘alternative’ to ‘integrative’ reflect an adoption/co-option of once unorthodox healing practice into mainstream biomedical institutions.
11. It should be noted that psychologists have theories for the origins of a seemingly instinctual aversion to what is popular. Although I will not delve into their hypotheses in this article, psychologists have suggested that popularity activates an instinct towards ‘group polarisation’ and a drive to individuate in the face of a dominant majority.
12. These clinicians view mindfulness as having ‘boomed’ popularity past merely going mainstream to a kind of cultural dominance that can feel stifling. Where funding seems plentiful for research on the health benefits of meditation practice, psychologists like Britton and Farias report that it is difficult to receive institutional support for studies investigating unwanted and distressing meditation experiences. And, upon publication of findings that question wholly positive portrayals of meditation effects, they receive intensely negative reactions from meditation proponents. It may be understandable, then, that such researchers and clinicians have developed an aversion to the apparent popularity of meditation practices.
13. The cohort of scientists warned that ‘eager journalists, academic press offices, and news media outlets – sometimes aided and abetted by researchers – have often overinterpreted initial tentative empirical results as if they were established facts’ (38).
14. Surely a publication like The New York Times is not intentionally evoking a religious studies category like ‘popular religion’, when it discusses the popularity of meditation practices. And it would require tracing a different set of genealogies to analyse media discourses of pop culture ‘crazes’. I have elsewhere (Helderman Citation2024 under contract) analysed how meditation and its (negative) effects have been portrayed in the media and will not delve further into that topic in this short article. But intellectual histories of ‘popular religion’ and related concepts likely still grants us insight into both the romanticisation and suspicion of ‘the popular’ in media portrayals as well.
15. This ongoing research currently includes ethnographic observation of mutual support resources for meditators-in-distress, semi-structured oral history interviews with a multi-generational and international set of clinicians and researchers of adverse meditation effects and auto-ethnographic observation of therapeutic interactions with ‘meditators-in-distress’.
16. Bruce has made this argument at more length and in direct reference to Asian associated practices like meditation in his Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West (Citation2017).
17. And, as we will see in subsequent sections of this paper, this actually carries forward a construction of the category ‘meditation’ that dates back to the European ‘discovery of Buddhism’ (Almond Citation1988) when it was defined by an asocial ‘self-absorption’ in which the practitioner withdraws from the world.
18. For more on how Žižek’s use of this racialised and racist rejoinder is irredeemable see name Helderman (Citation2022, fn1).
19. I have previously written about this phenomenon for a popular audience, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/therapy-and-buddhist-traditions/201909/the-crusade-against-mindfulness.
20. The scholar-activist Candy Gunther Brown (Citation2019) has been paid by organisations like Alliance Defending Freedom to testify as an expert witness trained to discern what is and is not-religious. Alliance Defending Freedom has argued a number of anti-reproductive rights and anti-LGBT cases in the name of “religious liberty” up to the Supreme Court of the United States. For more information start with https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/alliance-defending-freedom.
21. Although it’s important to note that Ammerman is not using the phrase to describe only what communities engage in outside institutions but instead ‘“lived” religion (what people are doing) is an apt frame for patterns of action both inside and outside religious institutions’ (9). Also see Knibbe and Kupari (Citation2020).
22. Campany clarifies that in the context of medieval China, for example, the term has been used to refer to certain teachings and practices that otherwise resisted easy classification under the otherwise delimited religions of the period, that ‘whatever it might be, “popular religion” was neither state religion, nor Daoism, nor Buddhism, nor Confucianism, but some fifth type of practice’ (580).
23. Bell notes that ‘as a revisionist term, it was most useful for suggesting the existence of social attitudes and practices that cut across the categories of previous analyses. Yet when removed from this historiographical context, “popular religion” either became a trendy substitute for “folk religion”, or it was reified as a third level of social interaction that mediated the poles of the earlier dichotomies’ (38–39).
24. For another recent explication of how concepts of the lived and local have been used to negotiate these boundaries see also Korom (Citation2023).
25. Also see Long (Citation1980).
26. In future work on this topic I further detail the deeply rooted connections one finds in the development of religious studies between: (a) ideas of the primitive racialised Other (to Europeans) at the birth of anthropology of religion; (b) specific conceptions of ‘religious experience’ (e.g. shamanic initiation rites as described by Mircia Eliade); and, (c) ‘madness and civilisation’ and the crucial ways that this triangulation haunts how both religious studies scholars and psychologists have approached phenomena like ‘meditation sickness’.
27. For more on comparisons between contemporary transformations of Buddhist traditions with those in medieval China see Helderman (Citation2015).
28. McMahan clearly views this as a less than positive sociological development. The ‘global postmodern popular culture’ he views this Buddhist form to be an extension of ‘is imperialistic’, he writes, spreading across the entire world in globalisation processes and threatening to ‘assimilate all elements of culture to its banality’.
29. Identifying as socially progressive liberals, meditation proponents often argue that meditation practices will bring liberation from the systemic injustice of individualism and capitalism they are critiqued for perpetuating, that meditation practice will awaken people to social consciousness and into activism. Kucinskas’ more recent research (with Evan Stewart Citation2022) has found that, despite theoretical claims to the contrary, there may in fact be a correlation between contemporary spirituality forms like meditation practices and prosocial behaviours and social activism. But, in The Mindful Elite, she problematises the change model that mindfulness practitioners tend to advance in which one individual’s transformation ripples out to others. And, even more pessimistically, in her theoretical commentary on spiritual practitioners, Andrea Jain (Citation2020) suggests that the progressive rhetoric one hears within these communities against, for example, consumerism is ultimately merely ‘performative’ and gestural.
30. Notably, many of these figures were born to Jewish families growing up acutely aware of Christian supremacy through the experience of already being a religious minority.
31. See, for example, in the popular press, Randy Rosenthal’s (Citation2021) interviews with meditation teachers for Lion’s Roar magazine: https://www.lionsroar.com/can-meditation-actually-be-dangerous/.
33. This is actually consistent with Gramsci’s history of Catholic Church who viewed the longevity of the Church to grow in tension with the development of popular religion, that it would incorporate elements that gained strength in the margins back into the centre. In this case it would simply be consumerist corporate interests preforming this reincorporation.