Meditation or Dissociation? How to tell the difference

I’ve been circling around this question for years, and I want to think it through here with you. Not as a lecture, more as the conversation I keep having with myself.

There’s a state I think many of us know, where everything looks slightly unreal. You see your life a little from the side, like it’s happening to someone else, and nothing really touches you. What makes it tricky is that this description fits so many spiritual concepts. Oneness, witnessing, non-attachment. “I see what’s happening, and I’m not attached to it.” When someone says that sentence, I honestly can’t tell from the words alone whether they’re deeply aware or deeply frozen. The words are the same. The state, from inside, feels almost the same. That’s the whole problem, and the reason I wanted to write this.

I spent years around meditation. Retreats, an ashram in India, my own daily practice. And somewhere along the way a question settled in me and never really left: how often do we call something awareness when the body has simply switched off?

First, what dissociation actually is, because the word sounds clinical and the thing itself isn’t. It’s a protection, one of the oldest ones the nervous system has. When something is too much, or goes on too long, the body has an exit: it steps back from feeling. You know this from ordinary life even if you never called it anything. The strange numbness after bad news. Driving home and realizing you don’t remember the road. That wasn’t a decision you made. The body made it for you, because staying fully present in that moment cost too much. And it worked. It kept you going.

In spiritual circles, this same mechanism sometimes wears better clothes. There’s a term for it, spiritual bypassing, which means using practice and concepts to step over what’s too uncomfortable to feel. The term always sounded like an accusation to me, and I don’t want to use it that way. What I see underneath is simpler and much more human: a nervous system in survival mode that found a beautiful, socially approved place to stay. Nobody plans this. It just happens, quietly, and the vocabulary is right there waiting.

There’s also research pointing in the direction this whole article points. A 2022 study in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation found that people who went through a seven-week mindfulness meditation training reported fewer dissociative experiences and more awareness of their bodies afterwards. The body seems to be the way back in. We’ll get there.

Now the hardest part, the one I keep bumping into. If you’re dissociating, the part of you that would notice is exactly the part that stepped away. The mind covers the gap with a story, and it’s a good story: I’m calm, I’m aware, I’m beyond all this. I’ve told myself versions of it. So honesty here is almost impossible. Not because we lie, but because the state hides itself from the only person who could check.

I went to Vipassana once. Ten days, eight hours of sitting a day, in silence. For me, coming to it the first time, it was extraordinary. Hard on the body, very hard actually, and it brought up a lot of things. I’m still glad I went.

But afterwards I talked with friends who go back to these courses again and again, and something in those conversations stayed with me. When I asked why, what does it give you, I never got an answer about their life. The answers were all about the state. The state they reach somewhere around day seven or eight, and how to get there again. And I remember thinking: wait. A ten-day silent course with eight hours of sitting is genuinely hard, most people would call it extreme, and you go back every year for a state? I’m not saying they’re wrong. Maybe I’m missing something, that’s honestly possible. But it started a quiet questioning in me about what is actually happening there.

The same questioning followed me from the ashram where I used to meditate. There were people around who had been practicing for twenty, thirty years. I can’t measure anyone’s inner life, and I want to be clear about that. But I watched, and a question formed that I’ve never been able to put down: is this presence, or a very refined, very disciplined way of being absent? I don’t have the answer. I still sit with it.

There is one help here: other people. Sometimes a friend or a teacher sees your state faster than you do. That mirroring is real, and I use it myself. At the same time there’s a danger few people talk about: a whole group can dissociate together and call it depth. If nobody in the room can tell the difference, the group just confirms the escape, gently and with full sincerity. So other people, yes, sometimes, carefully. Which leaves one witness I’d actually rely on. The body.

When I need to check myself, and I do, this isn’t a theory I apply to other people, I go through three doors. The order matters less than the honesty.

I want to end on the other side, because everything above could sound like I distrust stillness itself, and it’s the opposite. There is a stillness I trust completely. It comes after release. I know it best after a TRE® session, but it also comes after certain kinds of dance, after intimacy, sometimes after a long cry. It’s quiet and empty and at the same time completely full. You feel the weight of your body, the warmth, the breath moving by itself. Nothing missing, nothing to reach for. Spiritual books describe this state beautifully, and what I love about it is that you don’t need a single spiritual concept to get there. The body finds it on its own, once it puts down what it was holding.

This is where TRE® fits into the picture, as a tool that works from the right end. TRE® (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises), developed by Dr. David Berceli, doesn’t ask the mind to decide anything. It lets the body release what it has been holding, and presence tends to follow on its own. If you’re curious about the mechanics, I’ve written about how TRE® works in the body and what TRE® is, and answered the most common questions people ask about it.

And if this article left you with the question “which state am I usually in?”, I’d say that’s a question better explored with another person than alone in your own head, for all the reasons above. A free intro call is a simple place to bring it. We talk, you ask whatever you want to ask, and nothing more has to come from it.