Can Meditation Make You High?

Upon starting meditation, many expect the practice to be a certain way, not aware that attaching expectations to the meditation is more likely to make it how they desire. In the end, meditation is just being, rather than doing something. More specifically, being present, where a range of things can happen.

The mind is not used to such high levels of tranquility, so when it experiences these states, the response can vary from person to person. However, what you experience during a meditation session is completely natural, and, many times, a sensation that resembles being high. 

Now, that begs the question, can meditation actually make you feel like you’re high? Yes, but it’s a natural kind of high, devoid of any dangerous side effects such as addiction. Meditation can be done at command, especially once you master the practice. 

Meditation Can Make You Disassociated

This is generally a good thing, even if it doesn’t sound like one at the surface. When you’re disassociated, you start to question if what you normally experience in your day-to-day is real, often as a result of long sessions of meditation. 

During long sessions, you tap into territory that would otherwise be inaccessible through external substances like grass smoking or perhaps alcohol. While these make your mind feel “good” temporarily, these sensations are temporary and end up hurting in the long term, whereas with meditation, you’re producing a peace from within that was completely foreign to this point. 

You allow this peace to coexist with you without needing to wait for a specific circumstance for said peace to manifest. 

This is liberating in the sense that, no matter your present situation, you can experience a certain high that leads you to think much bigger, and it translates to better thinking as well as an expanded inventory of possibilities when tackling a problem you’re facing day-to-day. 

We often have this notion that things need to be a certain way for us to feel at peace, but that’s an illusion, and we don’t see it’s an illusion until we have a first hand experience of that. 

Meditation pushes you out of the boundaries established by your comfort zone, making you realize there’s more to life than what you initially thought, and at times, this translates into a feeling of being high. 

Either because meditation brings levels of peace that you’ve never experienced before or because meditation produces these feel-good sensations that mimic the sensations of alcohol or any external substance to get high, without its negative side effects. 

Now, novices aren’t as likely to experience these as those who have been meditating for a while, which is why meditation needs to be given a solid timeframe to properly judge its effectiveness depending on person to person, but many describe this feeling of highness in conjunction with a feeling of disassociation. 

Disassociation makes you question everything you knew up until this point, because logic can only take you so far before you start having experiences as you’ve never had before. 

Whether that be in the forms of an out-of-body experience, a lucid dream, or simply as a deep feeling of tranquility that reaches a new degree, which is the most common kind of “high” reported by deep meditation practices. 

Disassociation is good because it breaks the paradigm of accepting things as they are without any possibility to change them, but meditation changes your brain in a way that the rewards can often be unique to what you need. 

If you could experience the same benefits you experience from alcohol through meditation, without the negative side effects and for a longer sustained period, would you trade drinking alcohol for meditation?

Logically, this makes the most sense, and no one in their sane judgment would deny this trade. Well, in an indirect way, meditation allows you to do that,  there is a possibility for alcohol no longer being something you’re attached to. 

It’s a bold statement, and meditation alone won’t help many to help them get rid of their drinking habits, but the disassociation you experience can mimic the sensations without the side effects of addiction or it being something harmless to you. You don’t have to worry about meditating too much, unlike drinking alcohol for instance. Now, this doesn’t only apply to alcohol but anything external you rely on to escape this reality. Meditation can be an alternative to that.

 Will You Always Get High When You Meditate?

You won’t always experience being high during meditation. But it can happen during a deeper, concentrated state of meditation where you’re fully immersed in the experience, where your mind opens up to unlimited possibilities. 

However, it’s helpful to enter meditation without any expectations whatsoever, even if you have a goal with meditation. Expect the progress to be long and boring, and try to learn to fall in love with the process, and as a byproduct, you may experience getting high in the most natural way possible without ever suffering any bad effects. 

Getting high in meditation is often called a Transcendental State. A state where it’s believed your consciousness surpasses the waking, sleeping and hypnagogic state where you reach a standalone state devoid of any anxiety or stress and have a high level of tranquility.

Now, if you come in with meditation with the goal of escaping this reality and reaching such a stage, you may be disappointed as you’re not guaranteed to experience it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth engaging in the practice. 

At the end of the day, it’s not as important the motivation to get you started as what keeps you going. Meaning there are no wrong reasons to start meditating. 

If you’re not experiencing a feeling of getting high through meditation, one of the major reasons could be that you’re not ready for it yet. 

Everything has a due time in meditation, and because it’s a personal experience, it’s more tailored to your personal experiences and thoughts, as well as what you’re meant to experience in order to grow.

Being High But With Awareness

Unlike other substances people use to get high, meditation gives you full awareness throughout the entire session. 

The same can’t be said for those using something external to trick themselves into thinking they’re escaping their reality, their awareness is entirely controlled by such a substance. 

So, apart from having control over yourself during a meditation session, you don’t lose your awareness in conjunction with getting high, you preserve it and retain your focus. 

This is something that we take for granted, but by consuming something external, we surrender control of ourselves, and many don’t realize their unnatural feel-good sensations are being traded for something that’s gonna backfire later down the line. 

While you’re not guaranteed to experience being high during meditation, you don’t need to to feel fulfilled by the practice, the only thing you need is to experience a flow state of deep concentration which can be equivalent or render the pleasure aspect obsolete. 

Such tranquility may be translated into a feeling of being high or something that closely resembles it. Nonetheless, with meditation, you’re in control all the time and your awareness is in place all the time.