Cheetah House First Do No Harm Meditation Safety Training

Research has repeatedly found that social factors in the meditation space may influence meditator trajectories even more than the type or amount of meditation practice. While positive relationships with teachers, community members, and clinicians can lead to better outcomes, negative experiences with these social context can lead to worse outcomes, and lasting trauma symptoms. The first course below reviews how meditation teachers can be both the most helpful and most harmful influence, what makes a teacher helpful or harmful. Other courses investigate how certain forms of meditation, Buddhist ideology and responses to disclosure can cause added harm, disempower, discredit or blame meditators who report meditation-related difficulties. Survivor Sarah Fuss Kessler walks us through how cultic dynamics showed up in her Buddhist meditation community. Cult expert, Dr. Janja Lalich explains coercive control and what to look for when joining a meditation community. Dr. Jennifer Freyd explains institutional betrayal, when helping organizations not only fail to prevent harm, but their response becomes a form of harm in itself.