Nonreactivity as an avoidance strategy

There’s a common meditation instruction for working with challenging emotions: “focus on the physical sensations of the emotion without trying to change them.” The idea is to pay close attention to the raw feelings (e.g. sadness, anxiety), rather than the mental stories around them—whether they’re good or bad, why why they arose, or what they say about you.

Over time I have shifted my view from thinking (1) this is the best instruction ever, to (2) this is bad because it’s a form of avoidance, to (3) it’s actually mostly good. This is the story of how that happened.

When I first learned to meditate, “focus on the sensations” felt like a magic pill for relieving suffering. When I looked more closely at the sensations underlying an emotion (say, sadness), the feeling of overwhelming intensity would dissipate. I would notice that the emotion was more nuanced than I thought, and that it changed much more than I thought. This was especially salient with the experience of physical pain: I found that if I was feeling intense pain during meditation, if I just directed my attention to the exact area where I felt the pain, it would no longer feel so unbearable. I would notice that it’s a constantly shifting feeling, and that there’s a mixed up bundle of both pleasant and unpleasant sensation there, and that it’s possible to separate “the pain” and “my resistance to the pain.”

Over time though, I became less convinced that it’s a good idea to just “focus on the sensations” when faced with difficult emotions. I realized I was sometimes using this technique as an avoidance strategy. When I felt an intense emotion like anger, I would focus in on the feeling itself and the emptiness and impermanence of it, and then it would feel like my problem is solved. But somehow, a week or two later, the same problem that originally triggered the anger comes up again, and I feel the same anger, possibly even more intensely. There were certain moments where I was convinced that my entire meditation practice was a sophisticated way of avoiding intense emotions (by “noticing them in my body” so that they go away) and avoiding actions I didn’t want to take in my life.

Around the same time I became acquainted with the ideas of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, and various other schools of therapy which view emotions as adaptive patterns of behavior. Your sadness is not just some negative experience to tolerate, it is a signal of some unmet need. Anxiety is a strategy for minimizing the odds that you’re disliked. And so on. When you take this view, it makes less sense to respond to all emotions with “let’s feel this clearly and notice the emptiness and impermanence of it.” Instead it seems wiser to ask: What is this emotion asking me to do? What bad situation is it protecting me from? If I acted or felt differently, what does my subconscious mind expect will happen?

Fast forward another few years, and I’m at a meditation-related hangout with Michael. Despite having worked on reducing my social anxiety pretty intently with the “what is this emotion protecting me from” approach for a long while, I found that I experienced a surprising amount of social anxiety at this hangout – heart-racing, difficulty thinking clearly, and so on. Michael, who happens to teach meditation, started giving me some instructions: What is the feeling like, without story? How bad is it on a scale from 1-10? How is it compared to breaking your ankle?

My first reaction to this instruction was resistance, because I thought “this whole approach is bad because I’m avoiding the actual problem.” But then after a few more moments of actually following his instructions I realized something that I felt like I’d forgotten for a while: oh yea, the feeling itself is not so bad, and my stories about it are only making it worse. If I just feel anxiety as anxiety, it’s just a bunch of sensations. I had trouble squaring this with my long-held belief that “just focusing on the sensation itself” is bad. Is “being with the emotion without reacting to it” secretly a kind of avoidance?

On a literal level, no. Just feeling into the actual sensations of the emotion is the opposite of avoidance. You’re bringing yourself closer to it, both the good and the bad of it.

On another level, it can be a form of avoidance, but that depends on many more factors than the meditation technique you’re using in that moment. It depends on higher-level features of your psyche, like what is motivating you to meditate in the first place. If your motivation for meditating is increasing your sense of control over your inner life—which it was for me early on—then shifting your attention to the sensations can be a form of avoiding the “bigger problems.” You don’t actually want to leave the situation that’s triggering these emotional reactions, so you’d rather just learn how to tolerate the emotions.¹ At the same time, it is generally true that building up more psychic resources for enduring unpleasant emotions (which is one byproduct of doing a lot of meditation) not only helps you deal with emotions but also helps you act in response to them skillfully, because you’re not as bound by your habitual reactions and stories.

Ultimately, having gotten back into this practice recently, I’m convinced that getting better at simply being with unpleasant experiences as they arise is generally going to be useful. There are specific situations in which it might cause you to tolerate difficult situations for longer, which you theoretically could have gotten out of sooner. But—and this is crucial—making changes to your life also requires an ability to tolerate unpleasant feelings. Indeed, you might notice that when you use meditation as an avoidance strategy, the thing you are avoiding is yet other feelings that you don’t have the capacity yet to tolerate. No matter what you change about your life you can’t get away from some amount of pain, sadness, and discomfort altogether. So it helps to build an ability to sit with them.

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Thanks to Dennis for comments on a draft.