Sri Lankan Buddhist Meditation-Related Adverse Experiences

Record summary

Research on intensive Theravada practice in Sri Lanka documents unusual bodily sensations, fear, perceptual changes, sleep disruption and destabilizing experiences sometimes described through Buddhist categories. These reports are valuable for comparing meditation phenomenology with dissociation, anxiety, psychosis-spectrum symptoms and spiritual-emergency narratives. They are not reports of psi. Interpretation depends on retreat intensity, teacher response, prior psychiatric history and local concepts of meditation progress. Case descriptions often involve retrospective interviews rather than prospective monitoring.