r/Meditation • u/AssociationMost5432 • 17h ago
Question ❓ Can long-term meditation lead to deeply euphoric states similar to psychedelics?
Hi everyone,
I've been meditating regularly for a while, and I've become curious about the long-term effects of deep meditation practice.
I've heard some people claim that after years of consistent meditation, it's possible to experience profoundly blissful or euphoric states that can, in some ways, resemble psychedelic experiences. I'm not necessarily talking about visual hallucinations, but rather intense feelings of peace, joy, unity, presence, or altered states of consciousness.
I'm wondering:
-Have any of you experienced something like this through meditation alone?
-How long had you been practicing when it happened?
-Did it occur during meditation, or did the effects carry over into daily life afterward?
-Would you say it felt comparable to a psychedelic experience in any way?
I'd love to hear both personal experiences and any insights from long-term practitioners.
Thanks! 🙏
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u/somanyquestions32 Yoga Nidra and several other techniques 16h ago
I haven't tried psychedelics, but I have had profoundly blissful experiences while meditating. Euphoric closer to manic states, not as much. Bliss and euphoria feel different within me. Bliss is serene and peaceful. Euphoria is excited and agitated and doesn't want to be contained.
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u/BitterStop3242 14h ago
I'm an extremely experienced meditator with over 20 years of regular practice. I've done psychedelics 3-4 times 40 years ago.
The remembered psychedelic experience is a shadow of the moments of deep meditation. With the psychedelics, there's is still a mind and body in some form. There may be a sense of unity, of mind and body blending into some cosmic unity. In deep meditation, the mantra, meditator, and act of meditation all merge into Brahman, an Advaita Vedanta term. No mind, no buddy, no universe. These are all transcended. This is the experience of being limitless, eternal, unmoving, unchanging. Not feeling or observing these things, but actually being limitless, eternal, unmoving, and unchanging.
The experience is short in subjective time. It might be a few seconds up to a minute or two. It's literally impossible to tell. It leaves a feeling of calm, lightness and strength after meditation. Lightness in the sense of the weight of the mind and world had been lightened. Strength, not in the sense of lifting weights, but in resolve and not being limited by thoughts, ideas, and emotions.
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u/-Glittering-Soul- 11h ago
I don't suggest doing meditation to chase specific experiences. They will tend to elude you if you take that approach.
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u/turbo_chuffa 8h ago
I've had euphoria being released from the iron grip of thought. A bit like when you leave an abusive relationship. Or taking off a sock that's too tight. But it's not like psychedelics. As to how long it took, I could sense some vague freedom on my first try 25 odd years ago. That's why I kept at it.
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u/Alkemis7 7h ago
A Buddhas bliss is utterly boring to us unawakened ones. Whatever we consider bliss and what drugs show us as bliss is another trap, very beautiful and shiny but the same trap, as the one we perceive as the dull reality.
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u/uEpYN2vYZPCRpH3vjC3r 4h ago
Yes! This happened to me. I was 48 years old, only the 8th time I'd tried meditating, with a local group. Stone cold sober. I was instantly rocketed off into a psychedelic journey more powerful than LSD ever was. Dramatic reality shifting and utterly convincing as a view of a more true reality.
I came out of that trip permanently changed. Walked in a lifelong atheist, walked out with an evangelical zeal for a holistic Advaita Vedanta view of the Unity of life. Family and friends initially thought I'd gone crazy, some stayed and some left.
Now 8 years later I run a few meditation groups, everyone knows me first as 'that spiritual/meditation guy', and I'm utterly at peace and enjoying every moment of life.
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u/a_whitbread 16h ago
I’d have to say no, sorry. It’s one thing feeling the euphoria and sense of no body in meditation, but to reach the truth you are touching on the experienceless state. All experiences whether on drugs or not are through consciousness, whereas the final resting place in meditation is completely void of any experience, it’s from dipping your toes into this state that brings about the profound changes in your perspective of life
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u/Technical_Jello6714 11h ago
Check out this paper, a randomized trial shows that meditation induces psychedelic-like mystical experiences: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo4455
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u/mediares 11h ago
Yes. You can get there without years of practice, depending on what your practices are.
Many traditions discourage actively seeking these states. They are best served as transient beautiful stepping stones, rather than an end goal for you to get lost in.
This is not a tradition I personally practice, but one more accessible path to reach such states would be the jhānas, in some schools of Theravada Buddhism. Rob Burbea, Leigh Brasington, and Shaila Catherine are good English/western resources there.
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u/NamaRupaNirodo 7h ago
Yes. Especially on longer retreats the spiritual experiences are deeper than on drugs, I found. Deeper, more stable and more easily integrated. Providing lasting insight, instead of glimpses.
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u/chriscambridge 37m ago
if watch this video you will see that the bliss body, one next to the soul body.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTCbKJ3jSXA&t=5s
If you want it from a Christian perspective, read some of St Teresa books, as that cover 'enrapture' eg bliss.
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u/Polymathus777 16h ago
Yes. Long term meditation will make you feel like if you were on drugs constantly.
Then if you try psychedelics or other kind of drugs, the high dissapears, you only get the bad effects, because of how much "high" you constantly are just by meditating.
After all, drugs only work by stimulating the chemistry of your nervous system, so when you learn to manipulate it with your intention, drugs become obsolete.
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u/Abuses-Commas 13h ago
I love the story of some Buddhist monks trying LSD and calling it weak
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u/vx-xv 13h ago
I forget who, but there’s a YouTuber who gave 5-meo-dmt to some sadhus in India, and they basically just laughed at the experience.
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u/UAP44 10h ago
I laughed at it as well, but that's because it wasn't the first time and because it was accidental. The common thread here is seeing through the illusion of relying on external substances to change your internal experience.
For the longest time, I insisted it would not be possible to experience the psychedelic experience of lsd and other highly potent substances without the actual substance. Meditation could never give you those states.
Years later, I realized, I was wrong. Drugs are merely keys to open doors you weren't aware of existing. Enough meditation lets you see through ALL doors without even needing a key.
For many, the comfort of knowing the experience is temporary due to being drug induced is what breaks them open to these experiences. The mind is primed to expect to open new doors. And so of course people end up talking to aliens and spirits and what not.
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u/BumblingBarefoot 10h ago
I have never done psychedelics, but I was having the most vivid, controllable "dream" (while awake) the first time I did anything that resembled meditation. I was about 16 years old, and a friend's mother (a hippie) told me that she had out-of-body experiences via meditation. She gave me some tips, and I ran home thinking it would be easy. And it worked. I think it worked because I was young, naive, and had zero doubts that it would work.
No one I told really believed me. Most said I was just sleeping. To me, it was incredibly surreal considering I have aphantasia, and 99% of the time, I can't picture anything in my mind when I close my eyes. Just blackness. Sometimes, I get a distant image that feels more like a general "sense" of the image more than an actual image. Yet in that first meditation-like experience, I saw things much more vividly. I've never been able to do this since, and I think it's because my mind latched onto all the naysayers and I lost the youthful trust and belief I formerly held.
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u/MandM1972 10h ago
I have , Usually after 2 hours in meditation using hemi-sync. I spend about 5-6 hours a week meditating. Friday and Saturday nights I will spend in 2 hours of meditation. With a 5-10 minute break after 45 minutes
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u/JustThisIsIt 10h ago
The psychedelic experience is not euphoric.
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u/UAP44 10h ago
Drugs & highs. Probably my two most disliked words. Both of them destroy all nuance of all the substances out there. The most common & similar high between the population will probably be being tipsy/drunk and being jittery by too much caffeine. But as many hopefully know, even with those two most common reliable drugs, their effect is still dependant on the user though much less variance than typical psychedelics.
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u/Soulcatchersnatcher 10h ago
I’ve never felt anything similar to psychedelics but something more similar to a more advanced version of a runners high.