Is Your Mindfulness Practice Preventing You From Processing Your Feelings Fully?
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Originally, engaging in a mindfulness practice was done under the guidance of a teacher. As the practice has become popular, it’s nowadays very common to start on our own, maybe after a one-time instruction or under the “guidance” of a meditation app.
The positive of being able to practice independently is that more people are able to try out and hopefully adopt a regular mindfulness or meditation practice; the negative of practicing without guidance is that a lot of us don’t actually really know what to do, beside “focusing on the breath, observing thoughts and emotions that arise, and letting them go.”
Although I got some basic instructions when I first started my mindfulness practice over a decade ago - at yoga classes and later in a Buddhist monastery, I never practiced under the one-to-one ongoing guidance of a meditation teacher. Years later, I came to the conclusion that although my independent practice had been life-changing – and turned me into a fervent advocate – it had also led to imbalances in the processing of my emotions.
When practiced with guidance, and therefore with the possibility of receiving feedback, I believe that mindfulness is the holistic practice that it’s supposed to be. However when we practice with no regular guidance - like I have - we are at risk of falling in the trap of our blind spots, or if we are aware of them, of overcompensating too much in the other direction.
One over-compensation that can happen – and that happened to me – is to use our newfound clarity and acceptance to bypass the completion of our emotional experiences.
Example:
As we’re sitting in our practice, we notice anxiety, either already present in the background or arising as we engage in our practice.
We notice the anxiety, the thoughts and the somatic experience going with it.
We accept it, maybe even validate it.
And then we let it go and return to our breath.
Then we notice something else arising.
We go through the same process.
Finally, we end our practice and go back to our regular business.
And now, what’s happening to the anxiety?
It’s possible that simply noticing it, validating it and letting it go was good enough for that specific emotional experience. However it’s also very likely that more needs to be done after our practice, such as exploring the underlying trigger underneath our experience of anxiety, the story we were telling our self as we felt the anxiety rising, and most importantly the somatic experience going with it. As much as the purpose of mindfulness is to observe what is arising and let it go in the moment, a lot of our thoughts and emotions will need to be revisited and explored after the practice so that we can fully complete them and let them go for good.
Completion requires using our mental, emotional and somatic intelligences to explore, process and integrate what has happened, and this is going to take more time and effort than simply noticing and letting go.
When we use our newfound awareness to let our feelings go too fast, our mind artificially speeds up our emotional processing. We might have great self-awareness and self-acceptance but our body might not have released all the energetic build-up of our fresh emotions, and our mind might not have made sense yet of our emotional experience.
Every feeling or emotion arises with an energetic charge that gets stored in our tissues over time if we don’t release it. Furthermore there might be some decision-making that needs to be done in response to some emotional experiences.
Our mindfulness practice’s roles are to develop our inner observer, hone our capacity for focusing our attention at will and become skillful at shifting from reactivity to response. We must pair this powerful practice with an equally powerful practice of revisiting and processing all the feelings that mindfulness allows us to notice and observe in the moment.
