In daily life before we learn to meditate, emotions that don’t serve us can be so ubiquitous in our experience that they go unnoticed or assumed to be a required part of life. Stress can be experienced as a constant or a default state. We ride emotional volatility like it is the rightful controller of our behavior and experience, not knowing that it doesn’t have to be. Even more removed is the idea that meditation for emotional healing is possible.
When we start out with meditation, we become aware of how hard it is to control our thoughts and emotions. As the process unfolds, we start to more closely notice the content of our thoughts and how they cause emotions. The growth of our present moment awareness can make emotions that don’t serve us well quite acute and discouraging.
If we get a glimpse of awareness itself in meditation, we can begin to see how emotions that don’t serve us well keep us from the experience of pure awareness on a more constant basis. When we are caught up in emotional situations, no matter how big or small, we take on the identity of the emotions and cannot be aware enough to consistently experience ourselves as pure awareness.
This is why it is usually quite necessary to address our emotional challenges in order to fully realize awareness itself. Emotional challenges are psychological blocks to awareness itself, and to fully realize awareness itself, we must let go of these blocks. We can do so through a wide range of approaches to meditation for emotional healing.
It is important to note that we are not trying to get rid of all emotions, suppress them, or become emotionless. We are simply finding and letting go of emotions that do not serve us. When we explore our emotional challenges, it can become clear that most of them do not serve us and are unnecessary.
What Are Emotional Challenges That Block Awareness Itself
For the sake of this post, we can classify emotional challenges as minor, significant, and traumatic.
Minor Emotional Challenges
- getting annoyed about a long grocery store line
- getting mad when someone cuts you off on the road
- getting frustrated with a project that isn’t going the way you want
- stress about a challenging day ahead
Significant Emotional Challenges
- being insecure about your looks, the way you speak, or your intelligence
- letting the political climate keep you down, angry, or constantly frustrated
- being constantly disappointed about your career success
- chronic stress that hardly ever ends, no matter the situation
Traumatic Emotional Challenges
Traumatic emotional challenges can include severe depression and psychological issues (repressed, suppressed, or overt) caused by dramatic life changes or incidents like abuse, major injury or illness, death of loved ones, etc that make us feel unsafe and helpless.
This article will focus on minor and significant emotional challenges. If you think you have traumatic emotional challenges, what I am describing here can potentially help, but I would first recommend talking to or working with a professional to guide you through the process.
Emotional Challenges and Awareness Itself
I am sure that a professional in the field of psychology would classify emotional challenges differently, but the purpose of my description above is to give you a sense of range and relevance.
All three of these levels of emotional challenges can be interconnected or independent. Seemingly minor emotional challenges, as well as significant challenges, can be rooted in past trauma. However, it is often the case that minor challenges are rooted in those described above as significant, and they can all be traced to root beliefs and core fears.
All three of these types of emotional challenges block us from being purely aware, and it is often the case that all three need to be addressed to give yourself your best chance of realizing awareness as yourself and in all of your experience. When emotions and related thoughts take the forefront or our experience, the background of awareness is not noticed, and thus we follow the lead of the emotions instead of experiencing reality in a more whole and grounded way.
Approaches To Meditation For Emotional Healing
If you are a do-it-yourself type of person, below are some approaches to addressing your emotional challenges. These approaches can be done as meditation for emotional healing, or outside of meditation, but in a meditative or focused and open-minded state. It is important to note that any of these approaches will be most effective when you are completely, and sometimes brutally, honest with yourself.
Explore the roots of emotions that don’t serve you – This is a technique that I naturally developed in my own process of self-discovery, which assumes fear to be at the core of any emotions that don’t serve us. By finding the root fear of a given surface emotion and deeper emotions, we can face the fear, see its nature, and let it go so it is less likely to negatively impact us. See How To Overcome Fear in 3 Powerful Steps
Stream of Consciousness Journaling – also known as freewriting, involves writing without pausing to edit or revise thoughts and ideas. It’s a powerful technique for capturing raw emotions and thought patterns, often used for personal growth and self-exploration.
Jed McKenna’s “Spiritual Autolysis” – a process of clear seeing, where individuals examine their beliefs and perceptions to uncover truth – In other words, seeing what truly is by stopping the focus on what isn’t. By questioning thoughts and self-reflecting, it leads to a deeper understanding of reality. Book recommendation: Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damndest Thing
Byron Katie’s “The Work” – a cognitive process of self-inquiry that helps individuals address their challenges by questioning the thoughts they attach to external circumstances. It emphasizes that suffering doesn’t arise from the situations themselves but from our interpretations of them. See free resources in her downloads section. Book recommendation (to give you more thorough education about her process): Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
Richard Schwartz’s “Internal Family Systems” – integrates systems thinking with the idea that the mind comprises distinct subpersonalities. Each part has its unique viewpoint, and IFS aims to create harmony among these parts by accessing the core Self and healing wounded aspects. Book recommendation: No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with The Internal Family Systems Model
See emotions in the context of awareness itself – Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry is a very direct way to explore yourself as awareness itself. There are other ways to do so, and you can choose whatever methods are most effective for you to get glimpses of pure awareness. This approach can lead to the noticing and letting go of our emotional challenges simply by seeing them from the seat of awareness itself.
For example, you can ask yourself what it is that is having or judging the emotion you are currently experiencing and notice that the awareness itself is not having or judging the emotion. The awareness is primary to the emotion and will be there after it passes. This helps you see the awareness as more yourself than the emotion(s) and thus it becomes much easier to let go of it and its roots.
How To Use These Approaches
You can use all of these approaches, or any combination of them that suits you. One approach can often help the other, so don’t limit yourself to the confines of each or be afraid to develop your own combination that works best for you.
There are certainly other approaches that can be taken both on your own and with professional help. Explore those that intrigue you and stick with the one(s) that you find most effective in tapping into and uprooting your emotional challenges.
The point is to find a way to openly and honestly invite what it is that blocks you from being purely aware, address anything that needs to be addressed with what you find, and let go of it so that it no longer takes the forefront of your experience over awareness itself.
Expect Layers Of Emotional Healing and Resurfacing
Something important to note before you start this process is that our emotions that don’t serve us can have layers to them, as well as an ability to resurface unexpectedly even if we think we’ve eradicated it.
It can feel very freeing when you let go of a big chunk of your emotional blocks to awareness. It can have lasting effects, but be aware that a given release can be just one of many layers of emotions that can sometimes seem like an endless story.
Also, it is very possible that the bigger emotional challenges in your life will resurface even after you think you have let them go. There’s no need to be surprised or discouraged by this. Welcome it, and try another angle of approach. It may continue to resurface even after trying again to address it multiple times, but eventually you will likely notice that it comes back with weaker impact, and when you see this, it will be easier to let it fade away.
Don’t Get Discouraged
Obviously you didn’t previously know enough about your experience to be able to notice and address your emotional challenges, so there is nothing you could have done about it. Now that you may be gaining some knowledge about it, getting discouraged by it just adds to the blocking of awareness that is already there. In other words, it becomes another emotional challenge that you need to work through.
Facing your emotional challenges and fears is not an easy thing to do. It may be an understatement to say that it is a journey. Because it can take time, and sometimes pain before you start seeing results, it is easy to ignore it. Once you do begin to address it, it can seem like too big of a project.
Look at it as a long-term part of the process of self-discovery and realization. Be open to ways to approach it. Consider letting go of the part of yourself that thinks it will be too hard, or that you can’t do it, or that it might be too shameful.
Most importantly, get professional help if you are unsure about it upfront, or if you run into deeper challenges that you can’t seem to find your way through. There is always a way through.
How To Know If You’re Making Progress
Some good news is that you can start to notice the positive effects of addressing your emotional challenges rather quickly.
To start, just focus on one relatively easy emotional issue that you notice to be consistent in your life. Explore it thoroughly with one or more of the approaches to meditation for emotional healing described above. Take your time with it if you need to. If you feel the need to be aggressive with it, sit with it consistently and invite the emotion to show you all it needs to show you.
Then start to become aware of your reaction in situations that usually trigger the particular emotional challenge. If it continues to persist with the same energy, explore it from other angles and approaches.
With time you will start to notice that there is a gap between the trigger and your reaction to it, and as that gap grows, you will be able to respond in a more tactful way, or not at all. Eventually that particular emotion that didn’t serve you will no longer arise.
Get More Help With Meditation For Emotional Healing and Awareness
Join my free “Key To Meditation” email program to learn how to become aware of your awareness itself, let go of your psychological blocks to awareness (aka emotional challenges), and get the most out of your meditation practices: The Key To Meditation.