Jared R. Lindahl, Nathan E. Fisher, David J. Cooper, Rochelle K. Rosen, Willoughby B. Britton (2017), PLOS ONE 12(5), e0176239 — DOI-10.1371/journal.pone.0176239
Key takeaways
- Among 60 Western Buddhist meditators, purposively sampled for difficulties, plus teacher-experts, meditation-related experiences fall into 59 categories across 7 domains (cognitive, perceptual, affective, somatic, conative, sense of self, social). The same experience can be very positive or very negative, and 73% reported moderate-to-severe impairment in at least one domain, with a median symptom duration of 1–3 years.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-036. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Meditation is promoted for health, drawing on Buddhist sources, but those sources also describe many other effects. The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (VCE) study looks at under-reported experiences: challenging, distressing or impairing ones, or ones needing extra support. It combined qualitative interviews with Western practitioners and experts in the Theravāda, Zen and Tibetan traditions with a follow-up survey on causality, impairment and practice variables. Thematic analysis produced a taxonomy of 59 experiences in 7 domains and 26 categories of influencing factors in 4 domains (practitioner, practice, relationships, health behaviours). Interpretation, valence and severity varied widely even when the phenomenology was similar.
Standing in the record
Filed from the survey of 2026-09-25 of work the anthology set aside as out of scope (tier B): 220 seconds of active reading over 5 sessions in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-036 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Active — the reference taxonomy of challenging meditation-related experiences and worth reading for its codebook and its explicit limits. Its frequencies and its “causality” scoring do not support prevalence or causal claims, and the authors say so.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-036, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — 220 s over 5 sessions, waiting on the social-science word. The taxonomy and headline numbers are captured here, and the rest is qualitative detail.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-036 is that reading):
- A reference taxonomy of meditation-induced changes to self-model, agency and perception, useful for the consciousness and identity clusters (the “sense of self” domain) and for adverse-effects debates.
- Frequencies are within a sample selected for difficulties. A deeper read should not treat them as prevalence and should check the causality-assessment scoring.
- Check the 26 influencing-factor categories (not skimmed in detail), since they carry the practical claims.
Access when seeded: Crossref (published 2017-05-24) and the full article PDF from journals.plos.org (38 pp., open access), which I read: abstract, methods (participants, sampling), results (participant flow, sample, phenomenology coding structure Table 4, duration and impairment), discussion opening and limitations. The article has no author keywords, so the keywords above are my own.