Comments on “Meditating with emotions”

Hi Drew,

So many people today view meditation as a tool for getting rid of ‘negative’ emotions. It can be tough to navigate conversations about meditation because that view has become fairly ingrained in contemporary culture.

I’ve noticed this understanding has become prevalent too. It concerns me because the failure modes of long-term practice and view that “my experience can be always beautiful, blissful, and harmonious” are awful and predictable. At best people who fall into this trap realize at some point they’ve been deluding themselves and are able to come back to earth and be more human and relatable.

The spiral of ever increasing dissociation into a blissful personal god-realm can take years to play out, though. At worst, the need to cut off “contagion” from people who seem to threaten the bubble increases to the point of paranoia, then there’s a flip or an explosion involving psychological breakdown or acting out the repressed parts of experience against the apparent threat.

I would love to see more practice oriented articles like these.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll see if I can crank up my output and post more frequently!