Meditation Is Not Safe or Even Good for Everyone, Here’s Why I Quit

For weeks I set aside fifteen minutes in the morning to sit, crisscrossed on my bedroom floor with my eyes closed, just breathing. Meditation devotees (my New Age friends who are further attuned to their inner peace than I am) assured me that it would be uncomfortable at first, but it would be worth it. The sales pitch was that I would cultivate mindfulness through meditation that could soothe my high-functioning anxiety and even help sharpen my creativity.

Every day during those God-awful weeks, after about three minutes that felt like three hours inside my head, I’d begin to feel heart palpitations because my heart was racing in my chest. My thoughts wouldn’t slide past me with a polite invitation of being merely observed and let go. No, no, they roared through me in an avalanche of worry and traumatic memories that bobbed to the surface like mental trash, spiritually cock-blocking my ability to chill out. On several occasions, I broke out in hives. I would jump out of my skin when the alarm on my phone would signal that my hellish daily routine of inner peace and mental calm was finally over.

I told my friends that I wasn’t getting the hang of it. Just keep going, they insisted. It’s totally natural to have negative thoughts arise; you just have to return focus to your breath and move past the intruding thoughts, they chanted.

This cycle repeated itself so often that I found myself grumbling to my friend that I felt broken and stupid. Why was…