Riding the Ox Backward: A Reply to The Atlantic on Meditation's "Dark Side"

 There's an old sequence of Zen ink paintings, the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, that maps the taming of an untrained mind. A herder searches for tracks, glimpses the ox, wrestles it, and rides it home. In one telling stage, the ox and the rider both begin to dissolve — the animal fading into landscape, the self that was doing the taming fading with it. Some teachers call this "riding the ox backward." It is not a wrong turn. It is the seventh or eighth of ten pictures, arrived at only because someone who had already walked the sequence was standing nearby to say so.

The Atlantic's recent feature on Willoughby Britton entitled The Dark Side of Mindfulness — the Brown researcher turned meditation-harm specialist — borrows that phrase for a real moment in her own life, a years-long dissociative period her teachers reframed as progress rather than danger. It's a serious, well-reported piece, and Britton's data on adverse effects deserves to be taken as seriously as she's taken it: something like one in ten people who meditate report symptoms lasting more than a month, and that number shouldn't be waved away by anyone who teaches this material for a living, me included.

But the article's frame — meditation as a wellness technique now revealed, embarrassingly, to have side effects — gets the diagnosis wrong in at least four specific ways.

Who Told You That This Was a Nap? 

The piece treats Britton's 2004 finding — that meditators in her study slept worse, not better — as a kind of scandal. It isn't one, if you know what the practice was built to do. The Four Noble Truths open with suffering, not serenity. Vipassana — literally "insight," one of the oldest meditation lineages in the Buddhist tradition — was designed to produce direct, sustained contact with impermanence and non-self, which is a confrontation, not a spa treatment. Zen koan practice aims at what teachers have long called "great doubt" — a state closer to a controlled crisis than a lullaby. Patanjali — the sage credited with compiling the Yoga Sutras roughly two thousand years ago, the foundational text systematizing yoga as a contemplative discipline rather than a physical one — opens with a definition of yoga as chitta vritti nirodhah, the cessation of the mind's fluctuations. That's a demanding stillness, not a pleasant one.

Even the article's own sources concede this, noting in passing that the point was never to relax but to reorient one's relationship to one's thoughts. That concession should have been the piece's thesis but instead arrived as a footnote. A technique built to dismantle your ordinary sense of self was never going to read as calming on a polysomnogram. Calling that a hidden risk is like being alarmed that working out with a barbell makes your muscles sore.

The Missing Ingredient Isn't Caution. It's a Suitable Teacher.

 Patanjali doesn't just describe the path — he warns students about the powers and distortions that surface along it, and repeatedly prescribes guidance from someone who has already walked it. The Buddha didn't scale either. He taught five ascetics at Sarnath, then built a Vinaya — a code of daily conduct — precisely because concentrated states can destabilize people, and a community living in close contact was the mechanism for catching that early. The sangha wasn't a marketing structure. It was a self-stabilizing warning system.

None of that describes an app notification, a ten-day retreat run for two hundred strangers, or a hundred-thousand-follower teacher who will never learn your name. Britton's own dissociation is actually the clearest evidence for this point, not against it: she had teachers who told her to keep going. A bad surgeon doesn't argue against surgery — he argues for better-trained surgeons. The failure the article documents again and again is that teachers are unequipped to recognize the ox-bucking, mistaking a psychiatric emergency for a stage of enlightenment. Someone who became a "yoga teacher" through an online course or an expensive retreat is not a suitable teacher or representative of the discipline. That's a credentialing failure, not proof the practice itself is unsafe at any depth.

Woo-Woo Malpractice 

Nowhere in the ox-herding sequence does the herder promise that finding the ox will fix anything. The pictures document a process — searching, glimpsing, losing the animal again, wrestling, riding home — not a guaranteed cure with a timeline attached. The rider does not get on the ox and, in the unseen 11th frame, arrive at enlightenment and disappear into the ether. The process may repeat itself over and over again. That absence of promise matters, because a good deal of the harm this reporting documents doesn't start on the cushion. It starts with an expectation, planted well before anyone sits down.

Sometimes the practitioner sows these seeds themselves. "This will fix me" or "I must meditate for 30 minutes to have any real results" turns meditation into a transaction with an expected return, and when the return doesn't arrive — or arrives as something harder than what was there before — the disappointment isn't ordinary. It can feel more like betrayal because the failure seems to come from inside your own mind rather than from a mismatched expectation about a technique. Someone who sits down expecting grief to surface and gets exactly that tends to fare better than someone who expects calm and gets grief instead. The gap between promised and delivered does more damage than whatever actually shows up.

But often the expectation isn't self-generated — it's sold. A teacher who tells a room that this practice will cure their anxiety, or heal what's broken in their marriage, is doing something structurally close to a physician overstating a treatment's efficacy to secure a patient's buy-in, minus the license to lose, the malpractice standard to meet, or any requirement of informed consent. Let's call it what it is: woo-woo malpractice. It isn't an enthusiastic sales pitch — it's a hamster wheel that keeps an anxious student escalating, adding hours, extending retreats, chasing a relief that was never honestly in the cards to begin with. Several of the retreat cases in the piece follow exactly this arc. Not someone who wandered into difficulty, but someone who was promised an outcome, didn't receive it, and kept increasing the dose because an authority figure had told them the cure was in there somewhere, if they'd just work harder.

Meditation Is a Limb, Not the Body

Buddhism trains three things together — ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom — and only the middle one is meditation. Of the Eightfold Path's eight factors, exactly two are meditative techniques; the rest govern how you speak, work, intend, and act in the world. Strip those out, and what remains isn't a lighter version of the tradition. It's an amputation.

Modern secular programs did this on purpose — Jon Kabat-Zinn built MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), the eight-week secular course that laid the groundwork for most of today's clinical and workplace mindfulness programs, specifically to remove Buddhist ethics and community from the technique so hospitals could adopt it, and that adaptation has genuinely helped enormous numbers of people. But the ethical code and sangha were never simply decoration. They serve as the container that lets whatever surfaced during concentrated practice be supported, processed, and understood by the experienced teacher and the supporting community, who hold you accountable to both. When a hospital, an app, or a corporate wellness seminar teaches attention training without that structure, it isn't teaching a watered-down Buddhism. It supposes that one part of an engine is the whole machine, then acts surprised when pieces fall off at speed.

Where the Ox Actually Goes

The ox-herding sequence doesn't end at the dissolving stage. It ends two pictures later, with the practitioner walking back into the marketplace, hands open, helping others — a full return, achieved only because the frightening middle passages occurred within a structure built to hold them. Cut out the teacher, the ethical framework, and the community, and keep only the frightening middle part, and you get exactly what Cheetah House's clients are describing: an ox running loose in a stranger's yard. That's not a case against oxen. It's a case for proper herders.

While I take issue with much of Britton's comments, I believe it is a genuine public service, and nobody teaching meditation seriously should read it as an attack to be dismissed as attention-seeking fodder. Is the fix gentler meditation, or a trigger warning on the practice itself? I don't think so. I believe it's time to put the ox back in a herd — with a teacher who understands and practices the discipline in depth, a supportive community that notices when someone goes missing, and an ethical framework strong enough to hold what concentrated attention eventually turns up — which isn't always beautiful sunsets.

Both Bull and Self Forgotten