When We Suffer: Meditation for a Broken World (part 1)

Do you know what Ontological Anxiety is? 

Ontological Anxiety is what we feel when our state of being or our existence feels unsafe and/or threatened. Over the last several years, I’ve noticed that my meditation practice, which started out as a way to help me feel less stressed at work, has really morphed into a practice that helps me mitigate my own ontological anxiety.

Every new crisis - pandemics, mass shootings, environmental, political - creates the exact same feelings in my body. Equal parts heartbreak and terror. 

This isn’t new or exclusive to one generation. These aren’t the only fraught times, scary or unknown times…

This has been true for all of human existence. 

In Buddhism, the very first of the 4 Noble Truths is that suffering is an innate part of human existence. 

In a myriad of spiritual texts, we find commentary on the fact that the universe itself contains good and bad, positive and negative states, life and death. Suffering is not a mistake; it is simply built into the system. 

The tension of opposites is not an issue to remedy. It simply is the truth of existence. 

Meditation can’t make you feel better about school shootings.

Meditation can’t make you feel better about hate-based violence being perpetuated over and over again.

Meditation can’t make you feel better about political decisions you disagree with.

What meditation can do is help us acknowledge and allow how we feel, and in a way, this does make us feel a bit “better”.

Meditation is an invitation to 

• Acknowledge what you feel 
• Stop being afraid of what you feel 
• Release the need to fix what you feel

Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute as we lean into our meditation practice as a support for suffering. As always, we have a brief discussion followed by a 20-minute guided meditation. Join me!

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