The Dark Side of Meditation: urges to behave like an animal?

[WellbeingSeeker]

I've been recently looking into the so-called "Toronto Blessing", which became quite popular for the controversial manifestations reported during the event. In particular, some people were observed and videotaped behaving like animals (walking like a dog, barking, roaring, howling, etc.). Check out this video.

There is a very interesting commentary about the Toronto Blessing phenomenon by Andrew Netwon, a hypnotist. He comments the testimonials of two individuals who experienced uncontrollable urges to 1) fall down and laugh and 2) crawl around and roar. Andrew Newton claims that these are cases of mass hysteria and stage hypnosis. I'm not sure to what extent his claims can be scientifically validated, so I take them with a grain of salt.

For the record, there are cases of people behaving like chickens during stage hypnosis events performed by Barry Jones. However, to my layman eyes these stage hypnosis performances look, well, staged, whereas the Toronto Blessing video appears to be authentic. I don't know. Honestly I'm quite far from being an expert on stage hypnosis, so take my layman opinion with a grain of salt too.

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So, what does any of this have to do with meditation?

Well, while I was looking into all this weird animal-like behavior stuff, I had a flashback: "wait, Leo uploaded a video time ago in which he talked, among other things, exactly about this."

Concretely, in the video The Dark Side Of Meditation, at 24:33, Leo declares:

[...] You might start to behave like an animal. Like literally you might start to scratch yourself like an animal, or, crawl around on your knees, or even howl like a wolf [howling]. Can you imagine that you are sitting there, meditating for weeks, and one day you just have this uncontrollably urge to start howling like a wolf, and as you are doing that, your spouse walks in the door ... yeah, that's pretty awkward ... and now you have some explaining to do. And they look at you like you're going insane. What is this meditation thing you're doing? it's turning you into an animal. So expect that. I'm not saying that it'll necessarily happen to you, but if it does, don't be surprised by it is what I'm saying [...]

Additionally, I was able to find a couple of testimonials describing similar experiences on this very same site, namely, this and this. They both testify about feeling uncontrollable urges to behave in animalistic ways, giving credence to Leo's claims.

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So, my questions for you guys:

1) How common is it to experience sudden, uncontrollable urges to behave like an animal during meditation? Does this happen with certain kinds of meditation practices?

2) Is there any underlying connection between urges to behave like an animal during meditation and the animal-like behaviors reported during the Toronto Blessing?

Let's have an informative discussion.

Edited November 3, 2020 by WellbeingSeeker

[WellbeingSeeker]

Any thoughts on this @Leo Gura ?

[WellbeingSeeker]

Update: changed the title a little bit to be more informative.

Edited November 3, 2020 by WellbeingSeeker