Meditation and Suppressed Emotions

We've all heard about the benefits of meditation for our emotional and mental health, but what exactly is going on here? How does meditation help? How does it make us grow and process our ‘stuff’? It comes down to the idea that emotions become suppressed or repressed within the mind and tear us apart from the inside. Meditation lets them out. This heals us. Let’s look at how this works. 

When a significant event happens in your life (well actually, any event, but let’s stay with significant events for now), there are corresponding emotions. A break up, the loss of a loved one, a new job, the birth of a child. All of these events make us feel emotional in some way or another. The ‘good’ emotions we cherish and revel in, and we often try to hold onto them for as long as we can. The ‘bad’ ones we tend to push away because we don’t like how they make us feel. Maybe we’re crying at a loss and we think, “Hey, don’t cry, don’t be a child”, and so we try to make ourselves stop, bottling the emotion up and pushing it down inside. 

The thing is, emotions have to be able to run their course for healthy processing. Whatever the energy of that emotion is, it needs to be able to dissipate and integrate into our mind, body and the rest of our life. With the pleasant emotions it’s easy, because we like to hold onto them until we can’t feel them anymore. But the unpleasant ones we like to suppress because they naturally don’t feel nice. We push them down inside ourselves before they have naturally run their course and dissipated, and that energy remains within us, hidden and dormant in the recesses of the mind and body, sometimes for many years. 

Often, this phenomenon is especially common with children who are told that certain emotions are “bad” or “unacceptable”. "Just be quiet!" or “I’ll give you something to cry about” are phrases that only serve to teach children that their emotions are unwanted and unwarranted, and children will readily learn to push their emotions down and out of the way. 

Inside the body, those suppressed emotions run the roost, they subconsciously dictate how we live our lives, and we do everything we can to avoid feeling them and letting them to the surface. This can have massive implications for our relationships, mental health, and how we live our day-to-day lives. 

Suppressed emotions can: unconsciously affect our relationships and make it challenging to connect with people on a deeper level; increase stress and anxiety, which can have flow-on effect on our physical health, especially through inflammation; decrease our emotional awareness and create disconnection with our environment; and significantly increase the risk of addiction and depression. I think it wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that basically all mental health issues result from suppressed emotions somewhere along the way. 

The good news is it's never too late to start expressing emotions healthily, and one of the best tools we have to do this is meditation. When we practice meditation we slowly start to quieten the mind. When we do this we slowly but surely create space for unresolved emotions to gently make their way to the surface. That space wasn’t there because the mind was busy. Now, in the quiet of meditation, all that stuff naturally bubbles up. This, combined with our non-judgemental awareness, allows us to peel back the layers of our onion and understand all of our causes and conditions without creating new emotions about it. This can seem daunting at first–some of our baggage is pretty heavy stuff–but this is a healing and cathartic process, and it always feels better in the end. 

Meditation also has a funny way of only revealing what you can actually deal with at any one time, it is very gentle medicine. But it is also medicine that targets the deepest roots of the problem, so when you rip those roots out, the problem (driven by underlying, unresolved emotions) will be gone for good. With this medicine, we process our emotions in a healthy and accessible way, building a pathway on which to move forward in our lives with agency and resilience. 

So let the emotions out! They are what are keeping you locked in the same cycles of suffering, and meditation is a brilliant tool to help them bubble to the surface. Let’s heal ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to live the most emotionally healthy life we can. 

Additional Reading

Two books on this subject I highly recommend:

• Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender. Dr David R. Hawkins

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Dr Bessel van der Kolk