Today we’re going to visit the dark side of mindfulness. Muah ha ha...

Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic…

Mindfulness will definitely lead to all kinds of “good” stuff, but (And you knew there was going to be a but.) being mindful also means that you’re fully aware of and present for EVERYTHING that’s going on in our life. And life isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. Sometimes it’s painful, frustrating, and downright uncomfortable. 

Often when we first begin practicing mindfulness (Or a decade into it…), it may seem like there’s no benefit to being mindful. It’s just making our life worse. We feel SO much more anxious, sad, lonely, stuck. But we aren’t actually…

It’s just calling attention to everything we were avoiding before.

This is where we often give up. I mean, who wants to feel all that crap?

BUT...if we can stay as present as possible with that discomfort, I swear it will shift and change and move through us so that it lessens and ultimately we get to all that “good” stuff. 

Depression, anxiety, and long standing anger are stuck emotions. We aren’t allowing the sadness, fear, and anger to move through us as they present themselves. Emotions are meant to be transient. They’re meant to provide us with information so that we can take appropriate action. So if we push them away and avoid them, they don’t actually going away. They still want to tell us something so they’ll stick around bugging us. Quietly at first, but becoming louder and louder until we’re left with no choice, but to pay attention. 

It’s like if there was a Zombie Apocalypse and our neighbors were running to our house for shelter. They’re going to keep knocking until we let them in. 

Or the Zombies get them. 

But just like Zombies, we don’t want our emotions to get the best of us. We want to welcome them, feel them, and deal with them so we can move forward. 

There have been some recent studies coming out warning about this dark side of mindfulness and I’ll be honest, I haven’t read through them enough, yet, to know if there actually is a dark side. I personally have some doubts. My initial impression is that they seem to be riddled with judgment that our so-called “negative” emotions or experiences, such as anxiety, depression, or panic attacks, are things we shouldn’t be experiencing. Many also seem to define mindfulness in different ways so that makes it more difficult to know if we’re even talking about the same thing. 

Perhaps at some point I’ll do a more thorough review of the research on this, here, but for the time being, I want to emphasize that there are not actually “good” or “bad” emotions or “good” or “bad” experiences. At least from a mindful perspective. Of course, some are more comfortable and preferable than others, but ultimately, all emotions are important and exist to share information with us and those around us. Labeling them as good or bad can create unhealthy relationships with our emotions, leaving us stuck. 

I’m saying all this as I want to share more information about mindfulness of emotions since emotions are one of the most difficult experiences to be present with. There are A LOT of misconceptions and myths floating around about them. And our society likes to avoid them in any form. For good reason. They can be quite physically uncomfortable. But we’re gonna make friends with them anyway. Because like anything else, if we avoid the darkness, we don’t get to experience the light. 

Ugh, that was so cheesy!

But seriously, we can’t know joy and peace without sadness, fear, and anger. And there are times to distract ourselves discomfort, which I’ll also get into at some point, but too much distraction becomes avoidance. And we can’t avoid forever. We’ll just experience all those things we don’t want to anyway, just much more intensely and for longer.

So if you’d like to learn more about your emotions, how to be mindful of them, and transform them, tell me what you’d like to know in the comments below and subscribe to this blog to be the first to know when the next article is posted.