We’re often susceptible to inadvertently engaging in what I like to call Strategic Meditation. That is, because we sometimes attain a degree of calmness when we practice, we begin to think that we should meditate in order to change how we feel. Such an approach is particularly ineffective and fraught with danger when we feel highly distressed, panicked, or depressed.
At such times, we’re not really meditating. If mindfulness meditation is the allowing or accepting of all that is arising in our awareness and holding it with kindness and patience and willingness, then using Strategic Meditation to calm down or stop a wave of sadness represents resistance to our feelings, not acceptance. We are adopting a stance of judging the feeling as bad or undesirable or problematic and trying earnestly to make it stop or go away. The problem is that trying to make yourself stop feeling or thinking about something only tends to make the problem worse. What you resist, persists.
The problem is that trying to make yourself stop feeling or thinking about something…
