I have experienced a psychosis at a 10 day vipassana meditation retreat, it was my second time doing the course. I don’t want to scare you further, but it can happen. I had read a few eckhart tolle books prior to going on my first retreat, and they motivated me to want to learn the trchnique. I sat my first vipassana meditation retreat in 2015, and although it was challenging it helped me a lot. I fell pregnant after coming home and had my daughter in 2016. Late in 2017, I decided to go on another one. After having my daughter my meditation practice kind of went out the window, so I thought it would be good to refresh the skill as it helped me so much the first time around. By about Day 4 of the retreat, I found it difficult to sleep and turn my awareness off, I found I was still practicing the technique while I was laying in bed. My mind started to think up crazy stuff from this point on. I continued to not to sleep. And I remember Goenka saying that the practicing the technique can reduce the amount of time you need to sleep, so I thought it’s okay it’s probably just a side effect of the technique. As the days went by I started to become more delusional and lose track of reality altogether. I started to believe that I could smell the Sankharas as they were being realeased, and I started opening and shutting my door to air out the room. Some of the experiences I had were really overwhelming, so I stopped going to the meditation hall, I even stopped going to breakfast and lunch (stopped eating), I just stayed in room tripping out. Nobody came to check on me! By the 8th day I was in a total psychosis, I went to the assistant teacher I can’t even really remember it but I was talking about crazy stuff like how I was on my last life, and I was dying (I can’t even really remember what I said). The teacher rang my partner told him I need to go home and I’m never to come back, and that was the end of that. I came home before the course ended, I had no idea what was happening to me. (I was still not sleeping it had been 5 or 6 days by this stage). My partner admitted me into hospital a couple of days later, where I stayed for 2 weeks. I was told I have bipolar type 1, and was put on antipsychotic medication and sleeping tablet. I am still on the antipsychotic to this day, I’m too scared to come off it in case I stop sleeping and go back into a psychosis. We want to have another baby so I will probably wean off it soon with psychiatrists, doctor and psychologist monitoring me. It took me months to fully come out of the psychosis I was in, but I managed to do so. I stopped meditating, got rid of all my spirituality books and started focusing on looking after my daughter, and I got a job cake decorating which helped to ground me back into reality too. I just wanted to share my story, to bring awareness to the fact that it can happen. I can’t explain how I had a such a great experience the first time, and a psychosis the second time. All I can put it down to is the lack of sleep. I just want to raise awareness about the fact that meditation induced psychosis can happen, and that the courses are run by volunteers so if anything does go wrong, there may not be a lot of support, like in my case! However I think my experience / situation is fairly rare.