Meditation Can Make You Emotionally Distressed

In my psychiatric practice, I have recommended meditation to many clients who have been taking psychiatric drugs. In almost all of them, after feeling relaxed for a short while, they start to feel depressed or anxious or paranoid. Their symptoms become worse than before. There is limited information on this aspect of meditation in medical literature. Meditation is supposed to make EVERYONE feel better.

There is a catch in this statement. Not EVERYONE is going to feel better initially on doing meditation. Before we appreciate (or ‘understand’) this aspect of meditation, we need to be aware of a simple law of Nature.

The law of Nature is this- Release and let go of what you have once it has fulfilled your need.

If, for example, you are blessed with wealth, then Nature would like us to give a part of it to others who are less fortunate than ourselves. If you are blessed with knowledge, you need to give it away to benefit others. There is an old saying that ‘knowledge is something the more you give the more it grows’. Recently, I read somewhere-‘ Giver never lacks’. So according to this law there is no point in holding on to anything that has outlasted its usage. Whatever has fulfilled its role is meant to be released, including emotional tension.

On the same note, when we meditate, the body relaxes. In this state of relaxation, it starts to release our fears, our grief and our traumas. In reality, Nature is doing us a favour by letting us experience these feelings. It is only by permitting ourselves to ‘feel a feeling’ that the emotions can be brought to an end. This results in our suffering coming to an end too.

Strangely, when you meditate and start to feel ‘worse’, you go to a family physician or a psychiatrist and they start putting you on medication. They see this emotional distress as an ‘illness’. This is what they are trained to see -illness. From Nature’s perspective, the emotion has already served its purpose and so has to be released. If the release of emotions is so intense that it disturbs your own life or the lives of others around you, then medication is helpful.Medication suppresses these emotions. But the moment you reduce your medication, you will start to feel low or depressed or anxious or paranoid or obsessive again.

Experiencing emotional distress following meditation is a physiological phenomenon. Any person who is withholding trauma or grief or fear or anger WILL be experiencing these emotions when they meditate. The body is simply getting rid of the tension associated with the emotions so that the individual can be happy.

Pradeep K Chadha is a psychiatrist who specialises in helping patients with meditation and imagery using little or no medication. He is the author of The Stress Barrier-Nature's Way To Overcoming Stress published by Blackhall Publishing, Dublin. He is based in Dublin, Ireland.His website address is :http://www.drpkchadha.com

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