What Stands in the Way Becomes the Way: Dual and Non-Dual Approaches to Meditation Hindrances in Buddhist Traditions and Contemplative Science

Meditation research often highlights positive outcomes, but negative effects—termed challenging, unpleasant, adverse, or harmful—are more common than expected. Before unifying these concepts, the notion of meditation hindrances must be clarified. Traditional Buddhist texts and modern manuals define hindrances as reactions that impair spiritual progress and access to absorption states. While strategies exist to renounce or counteract hindrances, one influential idea treats a hindrance as the path to liberation, blurring or collapsing the distinction between positive and negative. This questions whether a unified conception of negative effect is possible. The article reviews the concept of meditation hindrances and discusses the problems and potential benefits of relativizing the negative-positive distinction, which could either harm practitioners or become their greatest asset.

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Abstract

Meditation research tends to be focused on positive effects. Recent studies, however, have uncovered a range of potential negative effects, which may be more prevalent than one would expect. Several different conceptions of “negative effects” exist, and such effects are variously termed “challenging”, “unpleasant”, “adverse”, and “harmful”. Before work on a unifying conception of negative effects can begin, the notion of “meditation hindrances” needs to be clarified. Research on meditation hindrances is very scarce. Traditional Buddhist texts and more recent meditation manuals treat different kinds of meditation hindrances, defining them as reactions that impair or halt spiritual progress generally and access to absorption states specifically. Different strategies have been devised as means to renounce or counteract hindrances. However, one influential idea consists of taking a hindrance as the way to liberation, which either makes the distinction between positive and negative ambiguous or collapses it. This makes it questionable whether a unified conception of “negative effect” can be maintained at all. This article gives an overview of the concept of meditation hindrances and discusses both the problems and the potential benefits inherent in the idea of relativizing the distinction between negative and positive effects. Such an idea may be either harmful to practitioners or their greatest asset.