How does meditation affect physical health in the United States?

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It can royally mess it up if done too intensely and without care. There are reports, immediately covered up, of people in Vipassana retreats accessing deeper levels of meditation, which retreat leaders are uneducated about and therefore unprepared for.

Meditation is a power tool that operates on the mind. If you use a table saw without knowing how to remain safe, then you’re signing yourself up for a raffle in which the prize is grievous bodily injury.

Meditation can affect you even worse. If you take a chainsaw to your sense of self, then the intense feelings that result can cause you to lose all sense of perspective. You will walk off your job, give all of your possessions away or just let them rot, and wander around with meditation-induced psychosis.

Most people who get into meditation will never access the deeper states. But it’s eminently possible to reach them, if the setting is right and you get “lucky.” Settings that Vipassana retreats are carefully cultivated for. The states aren’t dangerous, if you have a skilled practitioner around to intervene when a deep state crosses the line to being truly dangerous.

Note that seated meditation in the home is unlikely to create these sorts of conditions. There are too many distractions, light levels of trance are easily accessed in quiet spaces, experience with these light trances primes the mind to handle deeper ones. In fact experience with them is needed before the distracting environment of home can be overcome. This dynamic is deliberately eliminated in a retreat environment.

If you are considering a retreat, please educate yourself before you put yourself in a potentially life-threatening situation. The following link points to the best resource on understanding Buddhist practice that I’ve ever encountered.

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book: Daniel Ingram: 9781904658405: Amazon.com: Books