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Willoughby Britton

lines on the record: 107
first: 2023-11-22
most recent: 2023-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Is also my husband was like, He's the Dalai Lama. He was brought up from like age zero until however old he is now to defend Buddhism. What do you expect? So I think that's a pretty good answer. And also it's very emblematic of it's possible that certain teachers have never heard of any problems because why would you tell them that? You never want to be the one that's like failing the practice that they're giving you or telling them that the practice that they gave you is harming you. Like that would that's just not even like a possibility. So yeah, it is what it is. I left it up there as sort of a historical marker, but I didn't refer you to it because it's kind of a mixed bag.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were some of our best and brightest meditation teachers name any meditation teacher that you can name who's written Dharma books, he was probably in our study and he probably had a meditation related challenge and the Dalai Lama was basically saying that this happened to people because they didn't have enough Buddhist training. So I don't know. You're not really supposed to talk shit about the Dalai Lama. So you might want to cut this one out.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so they're not, but there is a video of me presenting to the Dalai Lama as part of the Mind and Life dialogues. I will let viewers make their own decisions about what they think. I will tell you some feedback that I got. I mean, you'll see me there if you want to watch Willoughby in sympathetic overload. It was a pretty terrifying experience in general. So I don't really remember the feedback as it was happening because I was a little bit like out of my body probably. But there were a lot of people there. The entire like mind and life board was there. And so they gave me some feedback. A lot of people found his response fairly dismissive and also a bit not particularly compassionate. Like he was laughing half the time. And I was like, well, did I tell you that the duration of impairment was three years? And also the people that it happened to.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that I'd like to end just by thanking you for being as open and forthcoming as you have been. I don't know if you've gotten any pushback, but a number of people who share their negative experiences, any kind of negative experience, but particularly ones with meditation, get a lot of kickback. And it's not an easy thing to do. So I'm very appreciative that you've done that and you didn't have to. So I think it's going to be really helpful for people. And, you know, especially this kind of group of people that emulate you in these sort of young male 18 to 30 demographic. So, you know, you're really, in my world, you're really a hero and doing something that's hard. And just so I just want to say thank you.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just doesn't need to be solved. I have heard crazy stories like that. I don't know what to make of it. Will I be investing in smart glass?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People think I'm super grumpy and skeptical, but I'm just agnostic. I don't know. I think just letting the mystery be there is fine.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flip a switch, you can turn it, it has some kind of gas in between it that you can flip the switch and it turns into opaque and that the future will be this glass. And I was like, whatever, okay, that's so crazy sounding. And then maybe like four years later, she called me and she was like, the glass exists and she sent me to like a scientific American or like Discover magazine. And it was like smart glass, I think it's called. She's like, this isn't the exact company, so don't like invest in it or anything. But like, this is. Is the precursor to what it's going to be? She's like, This is the future of what things are going to be made out of. So again, Completely sealed off that part of my life for like, I don't know, 25 years, 23 years. And now I just saw the glass myself.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was like, okay, let's see what you're going on in your brain. But she told me this story about some near-death experiences have, a lot of them have life reviews where they go through their lives and they kind of experience the consequences of their actions from the perspective of who they impacted, which can be very hellish depending on what kind of person you've been. But then if people are sort of dead long enough, they also have flash forwards where they actually not only see the past, but also the future. So this was one of the ones that was a flash forward. And so she told me that she basically saw this city and all the buildings were basically made of this glass. And this is a woman, she's probably like 80 at this time. She's not super like technologically sophisticated. And she's describing this glass that when you”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the first weird thing. So I was like, you know, all of these stories, and I was like a graduate student and all of these stories were very far-fetched to me.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, that's so awesome. Suddenly, this window goes opaque, and it's like kind of foggy. Matt reminded me of this experience that this woman had in my study. She was actually a survivor of a World War II bombing in London. So it was a very long time ago. First of all, she came back speaking another language from her near-death experience.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll tell you a crazy story that happened. This is true, and it happened, the sort of end of the story happened recently. Tell you the end of the story first. So we want to move to Vermont and we're building another off grid cabin. So we're like interviewing builders. And so we went walking around. We met this builder and we were walking around this other house that he built. And he's just showing, you know, he's showing us all the features of this house. And one of the features was a double pane glass that you can just like flip the switch and there's an opaque gas. Maybe you have one of those.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny because I have the reputation for being the grumpiest skeptic ever, and now I'm going to tell you some mind-blowing stories from my near-death experience research. What are you trying to do to my reputation here, Tim?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, wow, I mean, that's a whole other conversation is be a researcher or just talk about charged topics and see what kind of responses you get.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you so much for verifying and proving scientifically with neuroscience because neuroscience can prove anything, right? That heaven exists, you know? And I'm like, I don't think I really did that, but thanks.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's one possibility. The other possibility is that they had a sort of tendency towards hypersynchrony, and that was what caused the experience. But, you know, I was very agnostic about not choosing a position or having an interpretation. I just said this group has a sort of distinct brain activity compared to non-experiencers. And I just left it at that. But what was so interesting was the response that I got from both complete skeptics and from the near-death experience community. So I got the total opposite from no interpretation on my part. And this has been actually like a kind of thing that's followed me from my whole life.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two possibilities. One is that they did not have epileptiform activity and it's a scar. It's like a residue of the experience. Chances are when you have a near-death experience, and these are people that all had their hearts stop. So they definitely had some anoxia, oxygen deprivation, which can cause hypersynchrony and epileptiform activity.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I was like, hey, you guys want to come sleep in the lab and we'll scan your brains and see what's going on there. And so I kind of made friends with the near death support group. And that's how that study happened. So the group was, I forget how many there were, but I don't know, like 20 or something like people who had had near-death experiences. And then we had people who had some type of non-near-death experience control group. I forget if they were trauma survivors. I can't even remember.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I taught a class on death and loss in graduate school. And as part of that class, one of the people I kind of inherited a lot of the guest speakers from like other people that taught the class. And one of them was a woman who had had a near-death experience and ran a near-death experience support group. And I was like, amazing. So I went, started going to the support group. And I was like, there's so many of them.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't have to tell them that. So, anyway, they slept in the lab and we looked at their brains to see whether they had any kind of hypersynchrony. And they did. That was the shocker.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but from an institutional review board human subjects, I'm going to induce seizures in people. So, but like, hey, I'm not doing any induction. I'm just, they're just sleeping.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brain activity because as you go to sleep, your brain synchronizes. And so if you tend to have epilepsy, it will show up in your sleep. You can also use strobeites.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Temporal lobe epilepsy and how people have religious experiences as a result. They call it the sacred disease and there's been speculation that there have been a number of saints that had temporal epilepsy. And so I was really interested to know whether near-death experiencers, well, I was just really interested in the question of whether religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy, if there was an overlap. But near-death experiences are actually One of the few types of spiritual experiences that are actually kind of similar. There's a typography, like there's a tunnel, there's a light, there's a life review. They're kind of similar. And so that's kind of an ideal thing to study. And so that's what I did. And I happen to work in a sleep lab. And sleep is a natural activator of hypersynchrony, so basically epileptiform.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, I wonder what part of my website is going to find and discover. I totally forgot about this. I mean, I think wow, this is a really long time ago, but I was really interested in.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they are being able to talk to someone that this happened to as well, who's also recovered, so they're like, oh my God, I can actually recover from this. And then for the people who are offering care, you know, they're like, wow, I had this five-year hole in my life that was just this thing that is not good for anything. And now I can actually, it's something that's actually a gift I can give to somebody else. And so every moment that they spend with someone else is actually sort of being fueled by that trauma. So it's nice to be able to have that trauma mean something and be useful in some way and not just be a drain on your life. So that's another piece that I think is a nice model that's out there. But yeah, I hear you with the trouble of finding a good therapist. Boy, yeah.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, we, and there's other groups that do this too. We run a peer support model because a lot of people get to the point where they don't trust anyone until they can sort of prove that I was completely undone by this. I understand what it's like to be leveled by this scenario and then are like, okay, you get it. Now I can talk to you because that empathy when you've been leveled that much, this is like one of the silver linings is that you have so much compassion and empathy when you've been leveled. You really understand what that's like to be in that place, to be a puddle on the ground. So that's one of the models that we have at Cheetah House. And I think it really works. It works in two ways. One is that people feel heard and validated and not alone.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that we've learned at Cheetah House is that exactly that scenario that you're describing is that the helper professions can also be the source of harm and trauma. This is called institutional betrayal when people who are supposed to be helping you are actually the cause of harm. What happens when you have not only trauma to meditation, but trauma to all helping professions and helping professionals, it really restricts your options.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The public facing sort of service branch info branch of my lab is at Cheetah House. So that's Cheetah, like the animal house like ahouse.org. And there's tons of information on the website, lots of videos and links to different kinds of symptom-specific resources. But if you're interested in We have we have one a month, and actually we have one today that's on CERT, which is spiritual existential, religious, and theological issues in psychedelic assisted therapies by Roman Politsky. So that's a good one to see today. He just published an article in JAMA about that topic, and he'll be unpacking it for people. So we do meditation-related challenges, meditation-related issues, but also psychedelics are becoming much more of a topic. It's unavoidable, that those meditation and psychedelics are combining.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My brain just kind of got dull. But if I go out there and just use power tools outside in the cold, then I'm like, my blood's moving, my brain's working. That's doing more of what I was hoping meditation would do. And I'm also just like ecstatically happy, which meditation never did that for me.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Imagine me putting on some Carhartt overalls and like getting a weed whacker chainsaw and going out and like doing trail work. And even for like the basic idea of coming back and having to do, you know, writing a paper or, you know, running statistics or something, meditation never really improved my cognition. I always found that I was sort of one of those sleepy meditators. I would just get really, really, really calm and kind of like”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you wanted to paint a picture of what my daily practice looks like, imagine I'm wearing actually my plaid shirt, like sort of in commemoration of my Vermont self.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like this exercise that we just did, if that becomes the practice, replacing the hours a day that I did with Vipassana with a practice like that actually amplifying my positive engagement with the world and what's in it, that that grew into something so beautiful and magnificent as this place in the mountains. And so it's not just a technique that you do at your house in order to perform better. It's just completely taken over my life. So that's where I ended up.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, just like, I don't know, weird tomatoes, things that you can't buy in the grocery store, just things that you can't find otherwise. But basically where I ended up was my husband and I bought 90 acres in an undisclosed mountain area in Vermont. And we built an off-grid cabin there. And it is so awesome that I think I'm going to move to Vermont. Oh, whoops, I just did it on like the...”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I've been doing this resourcing for a long time, this scaffolding. And where it landed me, so I started to realize that this is in some ways not super surprising, but I have a very strong reaction to like living things, like animals and plants. And so I started to realize like how powerfully impacted my gardening. I started getting really obsessed with like rare plants and growing them in a grow light.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dynamics and following any kind of instructions feels like oppression and feeling trapped in sort of some system. If I'm following you and just reflecting back to you what I'm seeing, that can be a little bit more palatable. That's kind of what scaffolding is. And that's what we offer to meditators who have basically developed a trauma response to meditation itself, which can really rule out a lot of things. A lot.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environment. And there's like, oh, wow, these have different flavors of how they're actually impacting me. And so I would spend an hour with you unpacking one particular object. And I would be watching how your hands are moving and you might be like, oh, and there is a story that goes with the sketchbook. And like you might end up on who gave you the sketchbook. And like it's really about that. We kind of go down this rabbit hole together and I'm tracking your physiology with mine. And if you're very, very dysregulated and dissociated and you're one of those people who can't feel anything anymore, I can notice very small changes in your physiology and be like, hey, remember that one thing that you just said because I saw your eyes brighten up a little. I'll be able to like amplify, specifically amplified certain things. But I'm following your lead. And so as somebody who's been very traumatized about power,”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is kind of like the beginning of scaffolding. This is what it's like. Because if I try to say, like, okay, you're going to focus on your breathing, or I'm going to give you an object to focus on 50% of people who are given the breath as an object of meditation find that it's not a safe object and can actually induce anxiety. So if I have you pick the object, I couldn't have picked that in a million years if I got to wander around your house and be like, which thing should I pick? I wouldn't have been able to pick something. You know immediately you have so much going on. And as a meditator, you're able to like feel into your”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so as you're looking at this object, this sketchbook and talking about it, you're noticing that you're having sympathetic activation is decreasing. It's changing your breathing.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So let me just pause there. So, some kind of drop in your sympathetic nervous system. So how is that manifesting? You said you're breathing starting to calm down. What else is going with that? What are other ways that you're noticing?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so maybe more generally, when you look at the sketchbook and you're talking about it and you're thinking about what it can do for you, like what are you noticing that goes with that”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, as I'm watching you, I can see your eyes are kind of going somewhere that's not anywhere in particular, which means you have like some images that are in your mind.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you're scanning the environment, when I ask you, notice something that's meaningful, there's a salience gloming on to different objects, skipping over certain areas, but glomming on to certain objects. But it's not that the salience has a different flavor for each one. So if you were going to think about, I'm going to take my nervous system in that direction. I'm going to take it in that direction. You could actually start to chart where you could go, different options, just by looking at these different objects. They're kind of telling you, oh, this will be activating, this will be energizing, this will be calming, this will be strength-inducing. So pick a direction. Where would you want your nervous system to go and then pick an object that goes with that?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, what I typically do is actually ask you to look around where you are right now and pick something like a tangible object that's in your. Immediate vicinity. That's something that's meaningful to you. Unrelated to medicine.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so for people who have been traumatized by meditation or meditation systems, any kind of system is also A form of Ideological power over them. Even like CBT as a system, any kind of therapy or model is a system. And so that also becomes something that they're not able to work with because it feels controlling. It feels like some kind of value system or model that's being imposed on them. So how do you work with that? And so we have to start with, so this is called person-centered approach. So if you're my pretend client, I would ask you like before you started meditating or just outside of your meditation life, what is something that is a resource for you?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, half of the mental health world just becomes inaccessible to these people because they go to a therapist and the therapist is like, oh, you need to do mindfulness. And they're like, no, not mindfulness, please, anything but mindfulness. So we have to figure out a way to like help people, you know, build their own practice. And I think the other piece that I wanted to unpack with you is, you know, after I heard your podcast was the term ideological power. And so ideological power is the power to control meaning, language, and which concepts are available and how they're used. The power to interpret your own or others' experiences, behavior, or feelings, and the power to silence or undermine. The important thing here is that trauma is associated with powerlessness and a lack of options and a lack of agency.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beginning of Cheetah House, it is now entirely online and it is helping people recover from meditation related challenges. And a number of them, they are not able to meditate at all. They're not able to engage in anything that looks like meditation, all the trauma cues and associations are around everything meditation. So sitting with your eyes closed, sitting on the floor with your legs crossed using a soft voice and guidance. Like all of that triggers the response”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a plan words, it's a play on the Sanskrit term chitta, which means loosely mined. When we started doing the varieties of a contabative experience study, we were interviewing a number of people who were having meditation-related challenges. And some of them had just gotten out of the hospital. And, you know, they're like, I'm 27 and I'm living with my parents. Like, can I live with you? And so I live at Teetah House. So this is like, you know, my house. It's a big Victorian house with lots of floors. And so there was an entire floor where meditators could live and kind of recover from whatever was happening. So that was the.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For people who come to cheetah house, and let me just back up a little bit about the cheetah house sort of origin story. I mean, the actual cheetah house started as a halfway house for brown students who wanted to become monastics because of our contemplative studies program. So kids will get meditation training in school as part of college. They get so inspired by it that they want to go to India and ordain as monks and going there and coming back and living in dorms as celibate, non-intoxicant taking college students doesn't really work. So they lived at Cheetah House. That was the sort of the original function of Cheetah House was to support sort of semi-monastic brown students.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you look at the HPPD literature, it's actually a lot more than just visual changes. There's a whole lot of different things going on. So, yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. How they compare, but also with whether somebody's a dual user and whether it's changing that way.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we don't really know. That was actually a study that we're in the middle of collecting data on. So I'm glad that you mentioned that there's a lot of overlaps because I'm also seeing them. And a lot of people that have had both experiences are mentioning that there is a lot of overlap. So the study that we're conducting is basically looking at basically seeing how much they overlap and whether there are systematic differences. If I had to guess, I would say that the perceptual changes that HPPD like changes would be more common in the psychedelic world. I do think there's something neurological going on there that might be not happening in all forms of meditation, but we definitely see like visual snow and there can be some perceptual changes that are enduring visual changes that are enduring.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't like to hear about this So, a lot of people get shunned by their communities. Sometimes their teachers get irritated with them. And then there's also trying to go to work and trying to explain why you can't function. So there's all sorts of social dynamics that go with that. That was kind of the quick and dirty overview of the 59 categories. And I will say that within that particular study, the varieties of contemplative experience study, we looked at duration of symptoms and duration of impairment. And duration of impairment, the average was one to three years. So it was quite a bit of time and it ranged from a few days to more than a decade. So this can be, and I think your experience, you can kind of understand why. It could be a quite a long time before you recover if you don't happen upon Jack Hornfield for a while.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT