On the Emergence of Perinatal Symptoms in Buddhist Meditation

Abstract

Advanced meditators in the Zen tradition occasionally experience traumatic physical seizures accompanied by powerful, disruptive emotions, a development consistently taken by meditation masters as signs of progress toward enlightenment. Using data from LSD research, this paper suggests that these seizures are emerging birth-trauma memories. Interpreting these perinatal memories as memories of fetal impingement, it then turns to object-relations theory to study the effect of impingement and impingement-generated fear on ego-development in order to understand why embodied impingement memories should manifest in the ego-dissolving context of meditation. It argues that a coherent explanation for the manifestation of these symptoms can be had by combining insights from these two fields with the understanding of meditation and consciousness emerging in transpersonal psychology. XVith the growing number of autobiographical descriptions of the meditation and enlightenment processes available in print, a striking and curious meditational experience has been brought to our attention. Advanced meditators occasionally experience traumatic physical seizures accompanied by strong, disruptive emotions. Even more curious, perhaps, is the fact that these agonizing experiences are consistently greeted by the meditation master as a positive sign of deepening meditation. One such account appears in Philip Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen and provides us with a rather detailed description of the experience: