When Meditation Made Things Worse

They say there’s a dark side to meditation. Before I experienced it for myself, I’d naively scoff at this concept, thinking that if they really believed this, they must not be doing it right.

Then last year came along, I was confronted with a shipload of grief.

My husband and I lost three close friends in what seemed like back-to-back-to-back incidents. All of them were roughly around age 30 (give or take), all of them tragic, unexpected departures from Earth that left us devastated.

Once one death settled into my accepted reality, another one hit hard from behind.

Before this time, I’d been awakening to the spiritual side of life. The pandemic had been raging for a few months, and I really began finding peace in spirituality for the first time in my life. It kept me uplifted, even when the world seemed dark.

Then things got darker.

The grief became overwhelming. On the days I was handling it well, my husband was not. The days he was okay, I was losing it. It was a frustrating interplay of yin and yang that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.

When I sit down in meditation, even to this day, it takes me several minutes for my thoughts to settle. In the silence of those first few moments, my mind really wants to chat with me.

After a few swirls of narrative, the dust settles and I find that stillness in the present moment. The thoughts may still be there, but I detach from them, and they’re not as important as the quiet space that lies beyond.

There were times during that year of grief that in meditation, those swirls of thoughts would just pick up speed, becoming full-blown tornadoes of emotionally driven narratives that would shove me out of that sweet meditative space. Frustrated, I would get up and clean the house, screw around in the yard, whatever I could do to distract myself. Distractions were better than being with those thoughts.

I tried walking meditations. It was spring and summer for much of this, so when I’d need a meditative break, I’d throw my shoes on and scurry out the door.

I’d spend time walking around my neighborhood, gazing at the green treetops kissing the bright blue sky, listening to the hums of suburban background noise: Cars humming distantly, dogs barking, lawnmowers buzzing. Sometimes it worked. Other times, I’d feel no different.

One time, in particular, I came home from a meditative walk only to blow up at my husband, projecting angry grief onto him as if there was something he could do to stop it.

I came to realize that being alone with those feelings was hard.

Losing a friend at age 32 is hard enough, let alone three.

As if the grief wasn’t bad enough, there was a pandemic raging on, civil unrest brewing in all corners of the world, and I had other good friends teetering on the edge of the deep end with their own mental health. There were others I feared losing, but that was too much to think about. I forced myself to stay strong, even when I felt weak.

Meditation put me in a space where I was alone with those hard feelings. There was nothing to distract me. As soon as I’d find that quiet, contemplative space, the hard feelings I spent so much time distracting myself from would bubble up with vengeance.

They’d become so overwhelming, I’d fall out of meditation before I had time to feel them.

Before this experience, I thought meditation was for everyone, all of the time, in all situations.

I’d read about the dark side of meditation, believing that there was always a way around it. There are so many different kinds of meditation, I thought, those people just need to try on different methods.

My uncomfortable feelings came from grief. At least the sadness I faced was normal, even when it felt unbearable. I’m not one who’s struggled with severe depressive disorders, facing sadness that comes from nowhere.

Although my meditative practices got derailed during this period, I kept showing up.

Many days, it was only attempting to show up. I’d fall out of practice, then circle back to it eventually.

Slowly but surely, it got easier…

After some time, I began finding that quiet, peaceful space among the chaos once again. My ego-driven thoughts would slowly subside, and I’d find that stillness beyond them. I reclaimed the ability to find stillness in the present moment.

It wasn’t meditation alone that brought me back to this space.

A couple of mental breaks preceded this long period of grief, and then finally finding a really good therapist that I could go talk to regularly. The turning point came when I admitted to myself I couldn’t do it alone and sought out help.

There are times in meditation when uncomfortable feelings come up. Meditation isn’t about suppressing these or running away from them. Meditation is about feeling them. Meditation is about facing those icky feelings head-on, recognizing how they feel in your body, and letting them pass through you.

Meditation is about being human, in all its awkward, uncomfortable realness.

When we face uncomfortable situations, our sympathetic nervous system is activated, kicking in our fight-or-flight-or-faint mode.

Think of emotions like energy. Energy can’t be created nor destroyed. When emotions come up, if they can’t pass through us, they have to go somewhere, so they get stuck inside of us.

That grief may have never left me until I was able to feel it. Feeling it couldn’t happen overnight, so it took multiple times of coming back to those feelings, feeling them over and over, until one day, they passed through.

Even though the hard part of grief passed, it didn't make the losses I’d faced any easier. Their absence from the world still makes me sad, but I know somewhere inside of me that they’re in a better place. Perhaps this was all a part of their journey.

Earlier this winter, I visited the small town in Colorado where I used to live. Part of the trip was to say goodbye to my one friend who had passed in a car accident there last summer.

Although I felt like I had accepted this grief, it overwhelmed me the moment I arrived in that small mountain town.

Had I taken this trip months earlier, the feelings may have been too much. The grief manifested itself as a heaviness in my chest, a tightness in my throat, obvious physical sensations of uncomfortable emotions.

I’d gaze across the lake at one particular mountain peak that he and I hiked one day, hungover as heck, nearly vomiting the entire steep incline to the top. The memory felt heavy, but the view from the top was unforgettable.

As these feelings came up, I felt them, every uncomfortable somatic sensation of hard emotion. That’s what meditation taught me through all this. It didn’t always make the experience better at the moment, but with continued practice, I learned to feel my feelings in a way that I’d never known. The physical sensations that accompanied each heavy emotion moved their way through me, and at the conclusion of the trip, I felt lighter, like experiencing this grief head-on cleared something out of me that had been stuck for so long.

Meditation isn’t easy.

The concept of sitting with your breath might sound simple enough, but it’s about what’s stored inside of you.

There are periods of life where it’s a breeze, blissful even, and as I’ve moved through this particularly difficult period of life, I’ve been returning to that place of bliss.

There are other times when life is throwing us challenges that meditation only makes you experience more deeply. If you’re not ready for that experience, it can amplify the difficulty of it.

It doesn’t mean it will be hard forever.