Emotional instability = worse dark night?

Does pre existing mental instability (depression/anxiety/bipolar etc) automatically tend to lead to a worse/more debilitating DN? Or is the link not that straightforward?

Everyone is an individual. If one has a pre-existing mental instability, it's often beneficial to treat that or support that with therapy or medication before and/or during meditation practice. Meditation isn't a cure for such conditions and stabilizing the condition with the tools available gives you a leg up in developing a solid meditation practice. You could try climbing a mountain naked and barefoot...or you could put on hiking boots and bring food and water for the journey.

Hmm, a couple things come up for me in response to this important question, Joel. But first off I want to acknowledge the value in what Ona (giragirasol) pointed out about addressing issues on their own level.

First, the "dark night" experience can manifest in lots and lots of ways, it isn't one thing, and can be quite powerfully liberating. Second, other major phases in the awakening process such as the a&p and equanimity can, just as much as dark night, be mis-appropriated by the identification process and can form the basis of unhealthy emotional reactions, just with different flavors (mania/euphoria, detachment/spiritual bypassing...).

Second, and I find this is very related to the first thing, once we are able to relate to these phases of practice with less identification and more openness, they all offer important lessons. For me, the difference between these two ways of relating to experience is strongly correlated with my tendency to take my thinking and feeling interpretations very seriously and literally, or else to relate to them in openness as not necessarily being definitively true interpretations. The trick here is that, even if one is pretty stable by nature, once we stop taking these thoughts and feelings so literally and seriously, we will tend to uncover more primitive (and powerful/vivid) thoughts and feelings (or at least, this has been my experience)-- and this can be de-stabilizing. Some of the emotional conditions you refer to involve experiencing these more primitive and overwhelming thoughts and feelings already, without the regulating layer on top, or else a condition of over-regulation in which feelings are suppressed (depression). So these conditions can definitely be directly affected by the natural process of effective practice, both for better and for worse, in unpredictable ways. (con't)

A practical thing I can envision for dealing with such emotional/psychological conditions in the context of practice would be to find a therapist who has some experiential understanding of the practice you wish to engage-- preferably with some degree of awakening-- who can monitor your condition in the context of your unfolding practice experience.

One of the challenges of compartmentalizing, having a therapist who is ill-informed about meditation, to monitor you as your practice develops is the complexity of possible interactions between the emotional condition and the phases of practice, and the possibility that unfolding wisdom can produce uncomfortable experiences or that deepening concentration can produce comfortable experiences, but in each case, the ultimate effect on the emotional condition may by totally non-linear, if you follow. I guess in principle a good therapist would be able to work with these dynamics even if they weren't a meditator, since a good therapist will understand that sometimes unhealthy ways of being 'get worse before they get better' and that healthy ways of being can grow out of going into uncomfortable experiences... if the time is right, and one is well equipped and supported.

"Does pre existing mental instability (depression/anxiety/bipolar etc) automatically tend to lead to a worse/more debilitating DN? Or is the link not that straightforward?"

Automatically worse? No, it's probably not that straightforward.

One thing I've noticed is just >knowing< that there is such a thing as dark night means that many people here have not bought into the symptoms of the dark night and, as a result, have moved fairly quickly through it. At the heart of this is being able to simply experience the dark night sensations/feelings (a necessity) without making in into a personal drama (completely optional) -- yet recognizing we're all human so some of this is probably going to happen, so we make mistakes along the way and learn from it.

It makes sense to be careful - pre-existing conditions or not. Get/have as much support as possible. Consider having a meditation teacher. Consider finding a few spiritual friends or community you can trust to provide honest feedback. Consider getting a therapist for pre-existing conditions or at least have a solid gameplan for finding one if you think you may need it. Finally, take responsibility for your own practice, putting in enough time to make progress and yet reserving the right to back off if your practice seems more damaging than helpful -- this is especially true if you don't have a teacher or community to help you.

If all of those three kinds of support are in place and someone has a solid practice -- that's the shortest path toward awakening. I'm pretty dang sure their life will get better. It might become more challenging, too, but it will be the kind of challenges that we learn and grow from, not ones that leave us traumatized and worse than we started.

Remember the expressions "well started is half done" and "haste makes waste".

A short addition: the smartest and happiest people I know are the ones who face the problems in their life but seek all the help they can get. It's a paradox: "By seeking help, they are demonstrating their self-sufficiency, they are taking care of themselves by asking for other's help."

I learned all of this the hard way. I didn't seek a meditation teacher until late in my practice and I was too proud to seek therapy when I was having difficulty in my earlier life. Who knows if my life would have been different, but I think so. I imagine I probably could have cut off two decades of time in my meditation practice and would have had a lot less mental scar tissue, so to speak, if I worked as hard at finding a good therapist as I did trying to ignore my problems. I simply wasn't brave enough to ask for help and I paid a high price. I was too proud.



Hope this little confession helps. At least it will provide some additional context for my comments.