Guilt & Meditation

written by Simone on Monday, April 5th, 2010

The other day a gal who is meditating with us came to me and apologized profusely for not meditating as often as she hoped, “I am so sorry, I have been so busy, I will start again soon, I feel so guilty, I will get back to it, I promise.”  I could literally feel her guilt. I responded, “no apologies, remember we (Meditation Village) are here for you so you can learn how to meditate and enjoy the benefits of your practice.” I should have added, “so you can live more peacefully and free – free from guilt.”

 Guilt can be a helpful marker to bring awareness to an area of our lives that needs attention. But beyond that, guilt is not helpful, and can be harmful.  Guilt can keep us stuck in the very place we don’t want to be. We may even realize guilt has been fueling our actions in an entire area of our lives; living reactively from a place of guilt rather than living from a place of your own choosing, purposefully and passionately. 

We feel guilty about going off our diet, our meditation practice, our new workout routine, our spiritual practices, etc. The feelings that come up with guilt are at the very least uncomfortable and at the very worst unbearable; to remedy these feelings we do the thing we know that will give us a little relief, e.g., eat when we go off our diet, smoke when we have failed at our attempt to stop smoking. When guilt comes up, over real or imagined events, so can the need to punish ourselves, the rigidness that goes hand in hand with punishing thinking can only last so long before we need a reprieve – usually along the lines of f*@% it!

 This reactive cycle (tight rigid thinking and then completely structure-less unconscious thinking) goes on and on, consciously or unconsciously, for a day a week or a lifetime.  

 What meditation does to help stop the cycle is create an ongoing level of awareness in ourselves that brings enough consciousness to know what is happening when it is happening. For example, by simply practicing not reacting to our thoughts for short periods every day (meditation practice) we start to create a more equanimous relationship to our thoughts and reduce the intensity of the negative thoughts and emotions that fuel the cycle.  We realize we have created enough of a pause or gap in our thinking to decide what to do (or how to act) before we “find ourselves” in the next cycle of our habitual reactions to guilt. 

 We meditate because we want to create a strong stable mind that doesn’t allow negative thoughts and emotions like guilt to take us over and propel us into living out a cycle of action and reaction.  So I guess what I should have told our friend is “meditate or don’t meditate but don’t get caught up in the cycle of guilt because guilt as motivation can not last; it will eventually bring us back to where we don’t want to be.”  But meditation can help with this