Meditating with Challenging Emotions

Top 10 Tips about Meditating With Challenging Emotions

  1. Meditating when angry

Start by trying to feel how you are physically reacting to the anger followed by your thoughts and feelings. Understanding your reaction to anger is important to be able to overcome it. Once you understand your reaction, you can begin to analyze the underlying issue without losing control of yourself.


  1. Meditating when afraid

The best way to meditate when scared is by challenging the emotion head on by allowing it to fully consume you. This way you are most likely to understand its cause and be able to move on from it. It’s important to remember that everyone gets scared and you shouldn’t feel ashamed.

Facing Your Emotions Through Meditation

  1. Meditating when sad

Sadness is an important emotion that must be taken into account rather than brushed off. Be gentle with yourself and don’t be afraid to cry as it can make you feel better. Notice the emotions that accompany your sadness and understand that feeling this way is part of being human.


  1. Accept your emotions

Don’t view encroaching emotions as a distraction to your practice but instead invite them in as this will help you work through them more easily. Allow your ability to think mindfully to guide you through any thoughts or images you associate with your state of mind and understand why they come up.

Meditation - Accepting your Emotions

  1. Name your emotions

Once you become adept at following your breath and inviting experiences into your practice, you may want to call out your emotions by name. This is done by repeating the emotion gently with your breath and allows you to accept negative feelings and emotions as a part of who you are.


  1. Be open to all emotions

Allowing your mind to stay open to all emotions will allow you to understand just how many possibilities it holds. Although it necessitates practice to be able to remain open without becoming distracted, this ability allows you to view the understanding of different emotions (even bad ones) as positive rather than negative.

Being Open with your Emotions in Meditation

  1. Increase your awareness

Sometimes our physical body may give us clues that something is wrong; a stomach ache or a tension in the chest, but we don’t know the cause. Increasing your awareness of your emotional self may help to figure out exactly what emotion is causing this physical reaction and how to solve it.


  1. Stop resisting emotions

If you feel an emotion but attempt to fight it off, chances are, it will return stronger than ever. Faced with a recurring emotion, try and understand the cause and why you have found it difficult to recognize in the past. Asking these questions may help face the problem head on.

Meditate to Stop Resisting Your Emotions

  1. Learn from your emotions

Challenging emotions occur when there is a lesson to be learned from a situation that has made you uncomfortable. Letting these emotions in is difficult, but they may hold the key to something you have yet to learn about yourself. If you find it hard, take your time, there’s no rush.


  1. Infuse yourself with positivity

If you’re always falling into negative cycles, try imagining the sun’s light filling you with positivity, even in places that are negative and dark. Put this image of the sun within you and allow it to fill you with light even after your practice. Imagine yourself transformed into a positive being.

Use Meditation to Find Balance and Positivity