The 1979 protocol as a fixed eight-week course: the week, the day's practice, a timer at the published lengths. The adverse-effects screen comes before week one, because the field ran for forty years before anybody counted.
Read this before week one. In 2021 a study that actually asked found that most people who meditate intensively report at least one unwanted effect, that a majority of those were negative in quality or impact, that a substantial minority reported an effect on their ability to function, and that a small percentage reported lasting negative effects. That is not a warning invented for this page; it is the first systematic count the field ran, four decades after the course was designed. Most people are fine. Some are not, and the ones who are not were not being counted. If sitting starts producing fear, unreality, or old material you cannot put down, stop the course and talk to a person. Nothing here is treatment.
The course
Today's practice
45:00
Forty five minutes a day, six days a week, is what the course actually asks. That is the number people are surprised by, and it is the number the trials were run on.
Sessions
The honest limit, stated first. The effect is real, moderate at best, and does not beat an active comparison. The 2014 review of forty seven trials and about three and a half thousand people found effects around a third of a standard deviation for anxiety, depression and pain, and found no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment, which puts this roughly where a decent exercise program sits. The harm signal is neither rare nor small, and it is on the screen above. The field went from a hospital basement to a multibillion dollar industry before anybody ran a systematic harms instrument, which inverts the order in which treatments are supposed to be developed. And the thing that was removed to make it acceptable to a hospital, the ethical and communal frame, is exactly what the older traditions claim protects people during the destabilization that study documented. This page ships the course anyway, at its honest size, because a course you can check is better than a promise you cannot.