A few years ago my wife was doing this Qi/energy meditation thing where she was focusing on vibrations or feelings of energy in her body and followed it around her body. She did this for a couple hours each day for a few months. One day she had this weird feeling that someone was talking to do her and over the course of a couple days essentially had a psychotic breakdown where she heard commanding voices telling her to hurt herself and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for a couple months.

The voices were not external auditory hallucinations, but more like internal monologue, except not labeled as self by her brain, so it was like she had multiple internal monologues or maybe even dialogs. These voices or intrusive non-self labeled thoughts are still not entirely gone, she gets them every few days but does not follow what they say, although they tend to say negative things about her and gives her a lot of anxiety. Whenever she has the voices she also has a few other symptoms, she gets bad breath, her eyes looks a bit unfocused and if she closes her eyes they will dart rapidly back and forth like she's in REM sleep.

I am not sure of the exact reason that this happened, so I am askin here if it possible that it was caused by the meditation leading to a dark night stage? She didn't really do vipassana or insight practice, just the Qi thing, but this may have lead to what is called a Kundalini Awakening. It seems the practice to reach that is more or less what she did and what she describes sounds like it may have been that. Doctors thought it was onset due to stress, although there was nothing happening out of the ordinary in her life at the time. The psychiatrists thinks maybe she has schizophrenia, but admit it's also not entirely matching the symptoms and onset. Since she was over 40 with no prior mental health issues, that's usually way late to get schizophrenia and she is also not having any other symptoms than the voices and currently functions well in everyday life. She's taking antipsychotics every day and haven't been off them since the initial episode, so it's uncertain whether or not they're actually having an effect. I've read some people get similar symptoms from doing a lot of meditation, but I am not whether that is just something that then goes away? My wife still has the voices after several years. Are there any other known cases of this? Could it be caused be the meditation or is it surely something else? If the meditation could be the issue, does anyone have any ideas how to make it go away?

Disclaimer: this is just me, so please don't read this as projection onto your situation, but perhaps my words can be interpreted in ways which help you.

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A long time ago I was doing some very intense meditative practices with prolonged physical exertion to exhaustion...

And yeah, I wound up manifesting negative voices commenting on my actions. It is possible to do that to yourself. 

This was incredibly stressful so I saw a psychologist who confirmed that my reality testing was still in tact, I knew they were hallucinatory, even when intoxicated (though probably not a good mix). They sounded real, but rationally I could tell. I caught my throat silently subvocalizing the words a few times. If you still have functioning reality testing, you aren't technically schizophrenic, though you are still halluncinating.

I think I was good enough at meditating that I suddenly became aware of more of what was going on in my head, but wasn't emotionally mature enough to handle it well.

Very slowly I was able to transgress those insecurities, those self judgements, to mentally speak back to the voices in my head as one does with evoked demons, which is more or less what these metaphorically were.

I was self loathing and physically self harming long prior to the onset. 

This was a hellish 6 months. I had to quit all the weed and acid which had been both helping and hurting. I had to develop a more balanced diet and exercise program. Quitting caffeine is probably a good call too. Caffiene induced psychosis is possible, if rare.

I didn't fully get over my self hatred until maybe 5 years later, but in the short term I was eventually able to reject those self judgements which at the time felt like someone else judging me, telling me to do things or to not do things. 

A lot of it had to do with sexual repression. I was still unable to cognitively accept that I'm pansexual (or bisexual, whatever) and gender fluid, and had inherited some bigotry. I hadn't even encountered the word "nonbinary" at that time. I clung strongly to being straight and male. A couple years later I was clinging less strongly to being a transwoman, and eventually I just let go.

Some of it also involved intrusive suicidal ideation which I had for many years prior...

To heal, I had to do things which were true to my heart but which disgusted the wordy part of my mind so that my mind could accept my heart and my heart could soften my mind. In some cases it was enough to only do these things in writing or painting.

I certainly wouldn't ask you to share the contents of these hallucinated voices, but I would suspect that whatever the illusory words are, they are intertwined with some very stressful experiences/attitudes which potentially could be dissolved with skillful and extremely careful therapeutic/spiritual/meditative/ritual practice.

This could also make things significantly worse if it isn't done in a way that is right for the suffering person in their exact context.

This is extremely volatile material you are dealing with, and I just happened to be lucky and persistent, so I hope you don't take my words as endorsement of any specific practices but instead a window of words which I truly hope can help at least a little.

Oh, random thing that worked well for me, and I still use variations of.

I hope I'm not being rude with lack of trigger warnings in this thread, new to the culture here, but the phrase "I want to kill myself," was not uncommon to be heard circulating my aural imagination.

When I would hear it, I would mentally repeat an edited positive version like "I want to heal myself."

This, for me, was not a quick fix in the slightest, but eventually those edited versions replaced their originals.

For me, this hypnotic suggestion technique works better if the new versions sound very close to the original. Definitely the same number of syllables if you can make it work. Sharing consonants, like ending in "L" makes it easier for it to stick also.

Setting the desired phrases to catchy melodies turns them into hopefully helpful earworms. If you already have worms in your ears anyways, might as well add some uplifting ones! (Though in the end I feel that its probably best to find a healthy dewormer.)

And again, I'm not a licensed health professional or anything, so there might be risks about what worked for me that I don't know about, and might be harmful for someone in a different situation.

It's obviously possible to select hypnotic suggestions which help in some ways and hurt in others. A good therapist could probably help write safe affirmations.

Thank you. This does sound really similar. I have strongly suspected it is subconscious thoughts that's always been there, but just haven't been noticed before, like how you can suddenly notice lots of other things too that you didn't notice before, after attention has been trained through meditation.

"I would suspect that whatever the illusory words are, they are intertwined with some very stressful experiences/attitudes which potentially could be dissolved with skillful and extremely careful therapeutic/spiritual/meditative/ritual practice"

This also rings true, but the hard part is finding what therapeutic/spiritual/meditative/ritual practice is the right one and finding someone is actually able to help.

Will try the suggestion of mentally repeating an edited positive version. That does intuitively sound reasonable.

A transpersonal psychologist may be of use

Stop doing whatever practice caused it

​​​​​​​These things can and often do blow over

Oh, yeah, I didn't say it explicitly, but to echo Bahiya, I did stop meditating in that same way until I was comfortable with all of the trauma/anxieties which had been fueling the voices roughly 5 years later. 


So it might be a long road before it's reasonably safe to go hard on the spiritual practices. On the other hand, healing is part of why people do these things, so it's not like I wasn't making progress during those 5ish years, it was just a type of progress I didn't initially know I needed.

In general getting rid of it or avoiding might not be most efficient way to deal with a disturbing mental habit or occurence. There are three things to mental stuff (at least): 1)the underlying structure of causes like unresolved emotions, wrong beliefs about oneself and world, and so on. 2) the stuff itself, like disturbing thoughts, and 3) how we relate to the stuff, how we amplify it, what meaning we give to it, our attitude towards it. Finding neutral or wise ways to relate to painful moments may be best way forward. Perhaps therapy etc can help in finding these new or more helpful attitudes. Mostly a though or an emotion cannot do harm. Also if the causes (like repressed emotions or an agitating life circumstance, etc) of mental disturbances change, the experience may disappear or get less painful. 

But how are you as a close one to the suffering person?

Best wishes from someone who has had both of the roles in life. 

Thanks that makes sense. Some good insights here.<br /><br />I'm doing fine really, but hoping I can figure out how to help better and I think this thread has helped with that.