How to Meditate for Overall Wellbeing

Trapped within the limitations of our consciousness, we are not in a position to recognize the connections and the unity of things. The main reason for this is the polarity that characterises our material world. Reality exists in unity, like an all-encompassing cybernetic regulatory circle that operates according to divine law. Everything is connected, nothing exists alone. However, with our limited human consciousness we cannot perceive this unity, only polarity, so the world can only manifest for us in opposites: male and female, day and night, health and sickness, life and death, plus and minus.

The psychotherapist Thorwald Dethlefsen writes: “Humans have a habit of dividing the world into things that are allowed to exist and things that should not exist“. If we refuse to acknowledge that certain parts of reality have a right to exist, we refuse to see a slice of reality. And this will backfire on us, because when we try to suppress reality, a counterforce is generated, which we will soon feel. Dethlefsen warns us against this: “Most human suffering comes from our resistance to our circumstances“.

This mindset forces us to suppress many things within ourselves because we cannot accept their value. Our measures of value are ‘good‘ and ‘bad‘, and therefore we keep a large part of our personality in the shadows, which prevents us from unfolding our inner selves. We become ill because we violently suppress our personality.

The area that psychology calls “shadow” comes from the polar experience of reality. The only way to escape human suffering is to find unity again, so integrating the shadow into our personality plays a significant role. This not only seems like a difficult task, but it is. The good news, however, is that it is precisely in the shadow side that there are forces just waiting to be unleashed, strengthening and expanding our personality.

Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan religious leader who escaped to England, compares “shadow” to waste that must be used as fertiliser for development: ‘But a good farmer collects waste, even if it is stinky or dirty work, and when it becomes usable again, he brings it out into the earth‘.

This is why the shadow side must be recognised and accepted. We need to explore and come to terms with this part of us, because it is about things that belong to us. Only then can we accept both poles of reality and know it completely. This self-knowledge is the fulfilment of the important task that one is given in life. As Thorwald Dethlefsen puts it: “The highest aim of man – let us call it wisdom or enlightenment – is to be able to look at everything and to recognize that it is good as it is“.

Meditation is about self-knowledge and helps you to work through the shadow side. This is why meditation techniques are increasingly used in psychotherapy. The deep calm that comes with meditation makes fears and anxieties disappear. Thoughts and desires that we have been afraid of are made non-judgemental by meditation, giving us the opportunity to face them.

Meditation techniques offer us the opportunity to overcome our dualistic worldview, to connect what may seem to be opposites, to dissolve the common distinction of subject and object, and to create a comprehensive, unified perspective.

Pleasant feelings in meditation are often followed by less pleasant feelings seeking the whole person. Meditation is a huge help in knowing our whole being, because without it we are separated from a large part of our soul. We must be prepared for the fact that meditation, for whatever reason, will always give us more than we expect.