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Giving Yourself Permission to Feel

© 2026 Parul Somani

From The Path of Least Regret.

Like many mothers, I longed for a peaceful golden hour and a newborn bubble with my daughter. But shortly after her birth, that dream ended when she was whisked away to an acute neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) an hour away. The days following Mira’s transfer to the NICU, I felt suspended between two worlds. There was the physical space of the hospital where I was recovering from surgery, and then there was the mental space I couldn’t escape. It was a constant swirl of fear, confusion, and helplessness. Nothing about our circumstances felt steady or familiar.

This kind of disorientation is deeply human. When we face an unwanted change, especially one that disrupts something as personal and vulnerable as our health or the safety of our loved ones, we begin a process that is more emotional than logical. The emotions are messy and uncomfortable: fear, grief, frustration, anxiety, resistance. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It reflects a fundamental truth about how the human brain responds to uncertainty and loss of control.

Research has shown that perceived control plays a powerful role in how we handle stress and uncertainty. When we believe we have influence over a situation, we are more likely to stay engaged, even in difficulty. When that control is stripped away, our emotional response tends to spike in intensity and our sense of well-being drops. This is especially true in high-stakes, ambiguous situations such as medical crises or major life transitions.
In these early phases, we may engage in behaviors that are temporarily protective but ultimately unhelpful:

• avoid conversations or information related to the change,
• seek reasons why the change isn’t necessary or can be reversed,
• display emotional numbness or detachment,
• engage in excessive rumination and blame external factors or others for the situation,
• seek reassurance from others but feel unsatisfied with their responses,
• procrastinate or avoid decisions related to the change, or
• withdraw, feeling emotionally drained and unable to focus on even daily tasks

These reactions are often misunderstood as weakness, but they are common responses to overwhelm. The brain is trying to regain a sense of stability, even if that stability is only temporary.

On the other hand, when we’re trapped in inertia —those moments when we desire a change but are unable or unwilling to create it—the status quo itself becomes a source of distress. We dislike our job, but don’t know what else we would do. We recognize there’s no future for our relationship, but we don’t know how to end it. We know we need to take better care of our health, but we don’t know where to start. Instead of facing a single disruptive event, we are becoming aware of a source of persistent dissatisfaction. But overwhelmed with uncertainty and the number of potential pathsforward, we remain stuck in indecision and inaction.

When caught in this kind of paralysis, we may:

• rationalize why now is not the right time,
• engage in endless research (analysis paralysis),
• feel emotionally exhausted by indecision,
• seek external validation (poll friends),
• alternate between motivation and avoidance, or
• engage in distractions to avoid making the decision.

Behavioral research supports this. Barry Schwartz’s work on the paradox of choice revealed that when people are presented with too many options, they often feel less satisfaction with their decisions and are more likely to delay choosing altogether. These patterns are attempts to avoid discomfort, not resolve it, and we end up keeping busy without moving forward.

The emotions that arise during these early stages of decision-making—shock, denial, resistance, frustration, guilt, fear, anxiety, risk aversion—are not failures of logic or discipline. They are part of what it means to be human in the face of uncertainty. They reflect the emotional turbulence of change, not the quality of our character.

In her book Emotional Agility, Susan David points to a Harvard study of more than seventy thousand people that found that one-third of participants judged themselves for having negative emotions. This tendency to self-criticize adds another layer of difficulty. We feel bad, and then we feel bad for feeling bad. That spiral only deepens our distress.

But there are no bad emotions. There are simply comfortable ones and uncomfortable ones. The uncomfortable ones are often signals that something needs to be acknowledged. Not suppressed, not bypassed—acknowledged. Discomfort is not a dead end. It is a necessary step on the Path of Least Regret.

Moving On Versus Moving Through

There’s a children’s book I used to read to my daughters every night at bedtime called We’re Going on a Bear Hunt about a family traveling together, facing obstacles along the way. With every new barrier—a field, a river, a snowstorm—the refrain is always the same: “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”

That idea stayed with me, long after my daughters outgrew the story. It holds a truth many of us struggle to accept. When we face emotional pain or unwanted change, there is only one way to truly move forward. Not around it. Not above or beneath it. But directly through it. Still, we live in a culture that encourages the opposite. There is an unspoken pressure to move on as quickly as possible, to look on the bright side. This often comes from good intentions, but it carries a quiet message underneath: Get over it. Just be happy again. Fake it ’til you make it if you have to.

Our discomfort with discomfort leads us to bury difficult emotions before they’ve had a chance to teach us anything. This is what psychologists refer to as toxic positivity—the tendency to suppress, dismiss, or override painful emotions in favor of relentless optimism. Instead of sitting with fear, grief, or disappointment, we rush to replace those feelings with hopeful slogans:

Everything happens for a reason.
You’ll be stronger because of this.
Just stay positive.

When someone is going through something painful, such as a cancer diagnosis, a loss, or an upheaval, we often try to reassure them with what we hope will be true: “You’re going to be fine.” But the reality is, we don’t know that yet. And neither do they. When we say those things too soon, whether to ourselves or to others, we unintentionally shut the door on emotional processing. We skip the steps that allow us to integrate an experience and learn from it.

Saying “Everything will be OK” may offer a momentary sense of calm, but it can also make the person feel more isolated in their uncertainty. It becomes another form of pressure to perform emotional wellness. And that can be harmful.

Dr. Martin Seligman, whose work launched the field of positive psychology, warned about the dangers of distorted optimism. In his research, he noted that excessive positivity can lead to positive illusions, which are overly favorable attitudes about ourselves, our relationships, or our circumstances. While these illusions might help protect our mental health in the short term, they often distort reality. We may downplay health symptoms because we don’t want to believe we’re unwell. We might avoid addressing cracks in a relationship because we’re determined to see only the good. Optimism without clarity becomes denial in disguise.

Addressing discomfort with the Path of Least Regret isn’t about moving on—it’s about moving through. It means making space for the hard parts and allowing the emotions to run their full course. It means allowing yourself to cry if that’s what you need, enabling the release of stress hormones from the body. It means reaching acceptance. And then, it’s about integrating, not erasing. It’s not leaving the pain behind but learning to carry it differently. Over time, the weight shifts. You don’t carry the intensity of those early emotions forever, but you carry their imprint—their insight, their impact, and what meaning you can extract from them.

Some people find it helpful to picture this process. In a 2015 blog post titled “The Stone,” years after losing her child, a mother described grief as carrying a stone in your pocket. At first, the stone appears large and overbearing, and you feel its pain with every movement. As time passes, the stone is still there, but its sharp edges get worn the longer you’ve held it.

The stone can represent something different for all of us. It may not shrink in size, but I’ve experienced how the pain of it subsides as the stone gets smoother. How, as our life grows bigger and we become stronger, the stone’s weight becomes increasingly bearable. And when we do find ourselves with stones to carry, thinking about our struggles in this way allows us to move forward and through with greater peace and acceptance.

Our default response to emotional discomfort often comes from how we were raised. Some of us grew up in environments that welcomed feelings and made room for them. Others were taught— explicitly or not—that emotions were inconvenient. You may have heard phrases like “Boys don’t cry” or “Walk it off.” For some, emotional suppression was a survival strategy. For others, rebellion against emotional neglect became a way of life. Whether we adopted or rejected our family’s emotional template, it influences how we relate to discomfort now.

The key is to ask whether your default is serving you. Are you brushing aside pain out of habit? Are you skipping over discomfort to meet someone else’s expectations? And if so, what would it mean to stop and allow yourself to feel instead of fix?

There’s also a neurological layer to this. Our brains are wired with a negativity bias, meaning we naturally give more attention and weight to negative events than positive ones. A 1998 study by psychologist John Cacioppo and his colleagues demonstrated just how disproportionate our response to negativity is. In the study, participants were shown a series of positive, neutral, and negative images while their brain activity was monitored. The results were clear: Negative images activated significantly more electrical activity in the brain, particularly in regions associated with emotion processing, than either positive or neutral ones. In other words, our brains give more weight to negative stimuli, regardless of their objective importance. This bias evolved to keep us alert to danger, but today it can skew our perception. When combined with confirmation bias, which is our tendency to look for information that supports what we already believe, it becomes easy to spiral. We assume the worst, notice only the evidence that supports it, and begin to act as if it’s true.

That’s why awareness matters. When we recognize these patterns,we can pause, reconsider, and respond with more intention. Neither blind optimism nor fatalism helps us process real change. What does help is learning to name our discomfort, to allow ourselves to really feel it—to walk through it without rushing past.

Keep this in mind: Pain is not the opposite of progress. It is often the first sign you’re well on your way.

Navigating the Discomfort

When we think about courage, we often picture bold action: quitting the job, ending the relationship, taking the leap. But sometimes, the greatest courage lies in choosing not to rush forward. In the midst of emotional turbulence, whether we are facing unwanted change or battling inertia, the instinct to act immediately can be overwhelming. We see movement as progress; action feels like control. Society reinforces this belief at every turn. Productivity is praised. Busyness is rewarded. Stillness, on the other hand, can feel unnatural, like a dangerous standstill in a world that insists we must always be advancing.

I remember how, while I was attending MIT, it sometimes felt like a badge of honor to boast about how little sleep we had gotten the night before, as if exhaustion itself proved our worth. Even today, I love the feeling of checking things off a to-do list—so much so that I’ve been known to write down tasks I’ve already completed, just for the satisfaction of crossing them off! Accomplishment, any accomplishment, felt better than stillness.

But action for its own sake isn’t always progress. Sometimes, it’s avoidance. Like when someone throws themselves harder at a job they don’t exactly love because it’s easier than dealing with the unknown of a new job. Pausing mindfully, on the other hand, is not a lack of action. It is a different kind of action. And it’s a critical tool for navigating discomfort with the Path of Least Regret.

Pausing mindfully creates space to:

• feel the emotions rising within us, rather than suppressing them;
• understand what they are trying to tell us; and
• choose a response that is aligned with who we want to become.

For most of human history, though, reacting quickly was necessary for survival. When faced with a threat, the body instinctively triggers one of three responses: fight (resist or attack the threat), flight (escape or avoid the danger), or freeze (avoid detection). These reactions served us well when the threats were physical and we needed to confront it, run from it, or play dead. But today, when the threat is an unwanted diagnosis or the quiet realization that our lifestyle no longer fits our goals, the same instincts often backfire. The fight-or-flight response floods our bodies with the stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol, narrowing our focus, elevating our heart rate, and shutting down higher-order reasoning.Our prefrontal cortex—the center of logic, planning, and emotional regulation—goes offline.

Research on mindfulness has shown that deliberate pauses—moments of breath, reflection, and presence—reduce activity in the amygdala, the brain’s emotional control center, and reactivate the pre-frontal cortex. This shift enables clearer thinking, calmer decision-making, and more authentic action aligned with our true values. Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, is widely attributed with saying, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” When we pause, we honor the importance of that space and the agency we hold over our response.

It’s in that pause that we get to ask better questions:

• What am I feeling, and why?
• What is this emotion trying to teach me?
• What would a response rooted in clarity look like?

Without the pause, we react based on old patterns. With the pause, we respond based on present values.

Yet, before we can move forward with intention, we must first understand exactly where we stand. In the wake of change, there’s a natural tendency to minimize, distort, or avoid the full truth of our experience. But sustainable, fulfilling change begins with honest reflection—not blame or self-criticism, but awareness.

One of the most powerful gifts we can give ourselves at this stage is to separate assessment from criticism. Assessment asks, What is true about my current state? Criticism asks, Why am I not better?

The former leads to insight. The latter leads to shame. Reflection is curious. Rumination is circular. Reflection asks, What am I learning from this experience? Rumination asks, Why me? To move forward, to exercise the Path of Least Regret, we must cultivate the discipline of compassionate reflection.

Coping with uncomfortable emotions in a healthy way begins with naming them. Brain imaging studies confirm that verbalizing painful feelings reduces their intensity. When we focus on a stressor, we activate the amygdala. When we name our feelings, activity in the amygdala decreases and the prefrontal cortex lights up.

Simply put, naming emotions helps shift our brain from reactivity to intentionality.

But naming emotions with precision can be harder than it sounds. Most of us default to broad categories such as “good,” “bad,” “stressed,” or “fine.” An emotions wheel can help you get more specific. Instead of saying “I feel stressed,” you might discover you feel disappointed, overwhelmed, or resentful. Each of these emotions carries different information and suggests a different response.

Alongside this emotional naming process, I often practice an “out- of-body” exercise. I try to step outside myself and observe my situation from a distance. If I were a friend watching me, what would I notice? What compassion would I offer? This perspective helps me detach from emotional overwhelm and approach the situation with clarity.

Mindful detachment like this is a higher-order tool for emotional regulation, in the sense that it requires self-awareness, cognitive flexibility, and a perspective that isn’t always accessible in the thick of stress. Susan David, whose research we referenced earlier, calls this “stepping out”—creating psychological distance from our emotions
so we can respond rather than react.

There are several practical ways to cultivate this distance:

1. Separate the emotion from your identity. Instead of saying “I am anxious,” try “I’m noticing feelings of anxiety.” This shifts you from being the person experiencing the emotion to being the observer of it—a subtle but powerful distinction.

2. Speak to yourself as you would a trusted friend. Again, ask what advice you’d give someone else in your situation, then offer yourself that same compassion.

3. Speak to yourself in the third person, using your own name. Instead of “I feel like I failed,” try “Parul feels like she failed.” Research by psychologist Ethan Kross found that this simple linguistic shift activates different areas of the brain. When we use “I” statements during stress, we trigger regions associated with negative self-referential thinking. But third-person self-talk appears to bypass these pathways automatically, leading to better performance and less self-criticism.

These advanced strategies build on more foundational ones. Lower-order tools can include emotional naming, deep breathing, guided journaling, or simply stepping away to reset. These early techniques create the necessary mental space and stability to begin accessing more complex, intentional responses.

One of the most compassionate things we can do is grant ourselves permission to feel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Parul Somani is a decision strategist, keynote speaker, and author helping people make the decisions that matter most. A graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, she built her career in management consulting at Bain & Company and led teams at technology startups. A series of personal hardships, including a life-altering cancer diagnosis at age thirty-one, however, made her realize were never taught how to move through the emotional rollercoaster of uncertainty, change, and hard choices. Her #1 Amazon bestselling book, The Path of Least Regret: Decide with Clarity. Move Forward with Confidence (Forbes Books, March 2026), combines stories, strategies, science, and self-reflection questions to empower readers. Learn more at parulsomani.com and on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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The Power of Insight

© 2026 Melvin McLeod

Adapted from With a Single Breath © 2026 by Melvin McLeod. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

We all want to lead happy, loving, and meaningful lives in a peaceful and caring world. Yet too often we don’t get the kind of life and world we long for. We suffer in different ways, in mind and in body, and can’t find the happiness we deserve. The world is far from perfect, full of conflict, greed, and selfishness.

Does it have to be this way? The answer is no. When we understand mindfulness as a complete path of life it gives us the tools we need to create the kind of life and world we want. The Complete Path of Mindfulness addresses four fundamental questions we all ask ourselves that strike at the heart of the human journey.

Who am I really and what is this world? You and the world you experience are naturally good. Your mind is aware, your heart is loving, and this world is beautiful and enjoyable. You don’t need to change or improve yourself. You just need to be who you really are, living in the world as it really is.

What is stopping me from leading the kind of life I truly want? There are temporary problems, like confusion, distraction, and misunderstanding, that separate you from your natural happiness and cause suffering for yourself and others.

Is a life of deep happiness, meaning, and benefit really possible? The good news is that when you understand these problems you can do something about them. Because the temporary obstacles can be cleared away and your natural human goodness is always present, the journey is doable, the goal is reachable. The awareness and insight that come from mindfulness practice give you the freedom and power to do that.

Is there a proven, effective path to having the kind of life I really want? By working with your mind, heart, and actions, you can realize your natural goodness and lead the kind of life you want. One effective path begins with the practice of mindfulness meditation. It gives you powerful tools to become more calm, insightful, loving, ethical, and connected to others. Expanded into a complete path, mindfulness positively impacts all aspects of your life.

I have identified five keys to Complete Mindfulness. They touch the most important aspects of our lives, and practiced together they deepen and expand the benefits of mindfulness practice. They are Mindfulness Meditation, Insight, Love and Compassion, Ethics, and Community. Of these five, insight is the catalyst that makes mindfulness a complete transformative path.

Through insight, we see what is true and what is not. We discern what is helpful in life and what is not, what brings happiness and what does not, what makes the world a better place and what does not. When we develop insight, we know how to live ethically, with love, in a good human community. It is insight that makes the mindful approach to compassion, ethics, community, and all of life uniquely effective and beneficial.

Although mindfulness is popularly understood as simply the practice of calming and focusing the mind, which of course has many benefits, it is in fact a two-part practice, which is the secret of its power to transform our lives. The two aspects of mindfulness practice—focusing and insight—reflect the basic nature of mind.

Our Natural Mindfulness

Natural mindfulness is the power to focus our mind on what we are experiencing and use our innate intelligence to understand its nature. Present in all living beings, it is the foundation of life. It defines what we experience and how we know it.

Moment by moment we naturally focus our attention on external experiences, like a sound or a sight, or internal experiences, like a thought or feeling. Then, through the natural intelligence of our mind, we have insight into the nature of what we are experiencing.

The problem is that generally we are not able to benefit from the full power of our natural mindfulness, and that causes us all kinds of problems. Our untamed, unsettled mind cannot focus on things long enough to really understand them, and so we come to all kinds of wrong conclusions about them and make bad choices. We may be lost in thought, fantasy, or distraction and not experience the real life we are living, with all its goodness.

Mindfulness Meditation

Calming and stabilizing your mind in the present is the foundation of the path of mindfulness. You do this through mindfulness meditation, which you can do both as a formal practice and spontaneously during the day. The basic practice is amazingly simple (but not easy).

The practice of mindfulness meditation is intentionally resting in nonjudgmental awareness of whatever is happening in the present moment, including your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the outside world. You don’t judge or analyze yourself or your experience. You simply meet whatever arises with awareness and openness. When your mind inevitably strays into thoughts or distractions, you intentionally return it to the present. You do this gently and without self-criticism.

Through the simple discipline of this practice—returning over and over to what is happening in the moment—you train your mind to rest longer and longer in the present. Because you are not condemning or praising what is happening, but simply seeing things as they are, you experience less stress and struggle. Your mind becomes calmer and more present, but without losing any of its innate intelligence and clarity. Just the opposite.

Developing Insight

Our minds have the natural ability to know reality. But how much can we really understand when our minds are always flitting from one thing to the next, never resting anywhere long enough to look clearly and deeply at what we are experiencing?

Mindfulness meditation is the first step to developing the full power of our insight. Then we give our natural intelligence a chance to explore in depth the nature of the thoughts and feelings we experience inside, and the world we experience outside.

Together, the two parts of mindfulness practice—focus and insight—harness the full power of your natural awareness and intelligence. The great power of the tamed mind you develop in mindfulness meditation is that you can look in a sustained and undistracted way into how things really exist. Because your mind is stable, awake, and unbiased, you can examine and understand the true nature of what arises in your mind and in the world around you.

There are two broad areas in which the insight you cultivate can profoundly benefit your life: insight into the basic nature of yourself and the reality you experience, and insight into what really brings you happiness and unhappiness.

Insight into the True Nature of Reality

Insight corrects the fundamental cognitive errors that distort our experience of ourselves and our world. Generally we don’t recognize how deeply we misunderstand our reality and the problems that creates for us. In that sense, the most damaging form of ignorance is ignorance of our own ignorance. It means we don’t realize how important insight is and what a profound difference it can make in our lives.

Insight into the true nature of reality sounds pretty abstract, but its benefits are real and significant. So many of our problems stem from misconceptions about the nature of ourselves and the world..

We habitually perceive things as solid, fixed, and separate. That includes ourselves and phenomena in the world. We may know intellectually that things are not this way, but it is how we experience them moment to moment. Our insight into how things really exist cuts through this fundamental cognitive error.

With insight we see that everything is always changing. Some things change quickly, others very slowly, but they’re all changing all the time. When we look deeply at the world with a focused, aware mind, we also see that things have no solid core, identity, or essence. They are made of many parts, and we cannot find anything in them we could call a single, unchanging self. We see that things are not separate from each other, that all beings and phenomena are interdependent in the great web of causation Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing. Everything is caused by other things, and in turn is the cause of other things. Nothing exists independently or creates itself. The universe is a beautiful, living, ever-changing interplay of cause and effect.

When you look inside yourself—at your thoughts, feelings, sense of self, opinions, memories, and hopes and fears about the future—you find the same reality. You see that these mental events are transient, interdependent, and, like the apparent self that experiences them, without a solid core or essence. Thoughts and feelings arise, stay for a while, and then disappear. Their power depends on how much you believe in them, and you are freed from their hold over you when you see their transient, insubstantial nature. With insight into the workings of your mind, you may even glimpse a more open and deeper level of mind, one whose fundamental awareness and well-being are untouched by thoughts, feelings, and the external circumstances of life.

Because we mistakenly believe that things are solid, separate, and independent, we are locked in an exhausting struggle against the true nature of ourselves and our world. But resistance against reality is futile—and painful.

To maintain the illusion of a solid, unchanging self, we must constantly struggle to tend, defend, and satisfy it. We must deny the basic truths of change and impermanence, including the greatest change of all, death. We pointlessly try to hold on to what can’t be held on to and to avoid what can’t be avoided. We place our hopes in circumstances that are unreliable because they will inevitably change.

Insight relaxes this painful and exhausting struggle. With insight you understand that you are intimately connected with all people and things. They are part of you, and you of them. There is balance and harmony in your life and your relationships with others are mutually beneficial. No longer fighting to maintain some separate self, you stop your me-against-them struggle with the world and experience it as enjoyable, supportive, and good. Resting simply in reality, you find that things are okay just as they are.

Although insight is a natural outcome of mindfulness meditation, you can accelerate the process with practices that are designed to help you see reality more clearly. To experience that you are a product of interbeing, here is a contemplative practice modelled after Thich Nhat Hanh’s famous meditation “The Universe in a Single Flower.”

The Whole Universe in a Single Person

You are a manifestation of interbeing. The whole universe is present in you.

Like a flower, you are created by soil, water, air, heat, and light. The whole physical universe supports your life and makes it possible. Take a minute now and look at all the things in the physical world you are inseparable from, all the things that sustain you and manifest in your life.

Now let’s turn to the more complex and challenging question of how other people and society have helped make you who you are.

Of course, that starts with your parents. Of all the things in the universe that live in you, your parents are the most important link in the chain of causation that has made you who you are.

Take some time now to contemplate the ways in which your parents are causes of who you are. What values and attitudes did you inherit from them? What prejudices and misconceptions? What skills and abilities? How did they shape how you think about yourself? To what extent were your needs, hopes, and fears created by your relationship with them?

Now expand your investigation to include all the people, systems, and institutions you are interdependent with and that every day sustain and enrich your life. All the people who produce the food you eat. The people around the world who create the products you use. The educators who teach you and the health care professionals who heal you. The scientists and scholars who advance the state of human knowledge you benefit from. The culture that, for better or worse, shapes your values, needs, ambitions, and views.

What role has your privilege or lack of privilege played in who you are and how your life has gone? What role has your gender played, and your ethnicity and class? You inter-are with all of human society, the good and the bad. All humanity lives in you, making you who you are.

This simple but powerful contemplation shows how you really exist—as part of the great web of cause and effect known as interbeing. Where before life was marked by isolation and alienation, there is now connection and identification with everything. Do this contemplation for even a few minutes every day and you can touch the magic of interbeing.

Insight into the True Causes of Happiness and Unhappiness

As the Dalai Lama has said, we all want to be happy. This common desire is what defines and unites all beings. This is not a problem. In spite of what we are told by many religions and philosophies, there is nothing wrong with self-interest, nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. The challenge is defining what is truly in our best interest—what will actually make us happy and what won’t. What we need is enlightened self-interest, an approach to life based on insight into the real causes of happiness and suffering.

Misunderstanding what really brings us happiness is one of humanity’s greatest problems. Our search for happiness in the wrong places shapes our lives and our society in damaging ways and it diverts us from the things that would actually give us a life of lasting and deep happiness.

This is where insight helps. Here are a couple of standards I’d like to suggest to differentiate what brings real happiness from what doesn’t.

If we look at the things that bring us deep and lasting happiness, like a calm mind, love, healing, good relationships, meaningful work, and a good and caring community, we see they benefit others as well as ourselves. What really brings happiness is always win-win. Conversely, anything that is win-lose will not bring real happiness, even to ourselves. If my pleasure results in your pain, it’s not something that will ultimately benefit either of us. If what benefits me also benefits you, it will bring real happiness to us both.

So much suffering in this world is caused by the belief that happiness is a zero-sum game. It turns our own lives into a competition for happiness. It creates a society driven by short-term selfishness and a winner-take-all mentality in which extreme inequality is built in. But even the winners don’t find real happiness in a world like that.

So if you are asking yourself whether or not something will really bring you happiness, this is a good test: Is it win-win? Will it also bring others happiness? Because what is really beneficial benefits everyone.

There is no self-sacrifice or renunciation required in our search for happiness. We don’t need to be “selfless” or martyrs. Understanding the real causes of happiness and unhappiness, all we have to sacrifice are the false causes of happiness that actually bring unhappiness to everyone. You are right to want happiness—real happiness. All you need to renounce is your suffering.

There is something else that tells us whether something truly brings us happiness. Does the happiness last, or is it a passing pleasure or enjoyment that just makes us want more? If something doesn’t make us happy in a lasting and meaningful way, it will leave a void in us, an empty and unsatisfied feeling that makes us only crave more.

There’s nothing wrong with pleasure and enjoyment, with things that feel good. The problem is not pleasurable things themselves, but our compulsive consumption of them because we want them to do something they can’t—make us really happy. If you pursue something in the hope it will make you happy, but it only leaves you feeling unfilled and wanting more, that’s a sign you are looking for happiness in the wrong place.

This dissatisfaction, and the endless search for more it creates, has terrible effects on our lives, the lives of others, and society itself. It causes people to accumulate wealth compulsively—far more than they actually need—leaving other people with too little. If you consume obsessively, trying to fill a void that material pleasures, success, or prestige can never satisfy, that’s a sign you are looking for happiness in the wrong places.

With these conditions in mind, here’s a series of questions you can ask yourself about what you really want in life, where you are currently looking for happiness, and what you can do in the future to have the real and lasting happiness you seek.

What Will Really Make Me Happy?

• Complete the sentence: I want a life that is . . .
• What kind of person do I want to be?
• What are the things I value most in life?
• What is my current level of happiness and enjoyment of life?
• Where am I currently looking for happiness? What’s working and what’s not?
• To what extent do I look for happiness in short-term enjoyment or pleasure? Do these satisfy me or only leave me wanting more?
• Are there ways I seek happiness that come at others’ expense? To what extent do I feel happiness is a zero-sum game?
• What are the things in my life that bring me deep and sustainable happiness? Are they things that also bring others happiness?
• Do I feel guilty about being happy? Do I feel it is somehow wrong or that I don’t deserve happiness?
• What are the qualities I need to cultivate in my heart and mind so I can lead a life of real happiness and meaning?
• Now, looking back at my answer to the first question, what do I need to do now and in the future to have the kind of life and happiness I really want?

Misunderstanding Mindfulness

Many of the critiques of mindfulness come from people who do not recognize the insight part of the practice. Because they define it purely as calming the mind, people criticize mindfulness for not including ethics, compassion, or concern for injustice in the world. They talk about companies that offer their workers mindfulness training purely to improve their productivity. In a famous example, they point to the sniper who focuses his mind in order to kill more effectively.

The criticism that mindfulness is morally neutral might be true if it were only focus, which is merely a technique. But when we add in the second part of the practice—the development of insight—we find that mindfulness makes us not just compassionate and moral, but profoundly and skillfully so.

If we look at mindfulness as a complete path, we see that it empowers us—impels us, actually—to live compassionately and ethically. Our insight makes us aware of exactly what causes happiness and unhappiness for ourselves and others, and our compassion inspires us to do all we can to reduce suffering and fight against violence and injustice.

If someone thinks that if people practice mindfulness they will turn off their moral compass, they are in for a surprise. A company may want its employees to practice mindfulness so they take fewer sick days. But since insight naturally arises as people calm and focus their minds, what they’re really going to get are more aware employees who demand better lives and more responsible ethical standards. Anyone who wants to exploit or manipulate people should never encourage them to practice mindfulness. It doesn’t put people to sleep. It wakes them up.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melvin McLeod is author of the new book With a Single Breath (Shambhala Publications). He is editor-at-large of Lion’s Roar and cofounder of Mindful magazine. He is committed both to the deep study and practice of Buddhism and to spreading the benefits of meditation, wisdom, and compassion by teaching mindfulness as a complete and transformative path of life. His ground-breaking approach has been praised by leaders in the field as an important advance in how mindfulness is defined, taught, and practiced.

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Genjō Byōjōshin Gatha

© Brandon Derik Jaeger

Emptiness, openness, nothingness, freedom.
The bones of love
Are hollow
So the rainbow-feathered bird can fly
Everywhere
Throughout our entire world, throughout time.
In the hearts of all beings,
And in our salty tears.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brandon Jaeger has been a formal practitioner of the Buddha way, primarily in the Soto Zen tradition, for 20 years. For the majority of that period, he built and ran a business in Appalachian Ohio, working directly with family farms and running a Certified Organic processing facility that provides the region with staple foods made from locally grown bean and grain crops. He recently sold that business and left his Southeast-Ohio community to pursue a lifelong dream of exploring our global community, visiting Ukraine, Thailand, the Philippines, and Greece, studying other Buddhist traditions and indigenous food and agriculture practices along the way. In addition to poetry, he enjoys writing memoir and travelogues and has a twinkle in the eye for historical fiction, a la Louise Erdrich. Perhaps someday, that dream, too, will become more real than fiction.
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The Guided Imagery Cure

© 2026 Christopher Cortman, PsyD

Excerpt: Where the Brain Meets the Soul — Guided Imagery Resolution Therapy and the Neuroscience of Healing

I have spent more than four decades sitting across from human beings in the most vulnerable moments of their lives. I have witnessed grief that defied language, trauma that had calcified into physical pain, and losses so profound that the people carrying them had stopped believing they could ever set them down. Over the course of more than 85,000 therapy sessions, I have tried nearly every tool in the clinical toolbox — and many of them helped, some of them helped a great deal. But nothing prepared me for what I began to discover when I turned, seriously and systematically, to the power of guided imagery.

What I found was not what I expected. I expected an adjunct technique, a relaxation protocol, a pleasant detour from the harder work of therapy. What I found instead was a doorway — a passage between the thinking mind and the feeling body, between the conscious narrative a person tells about their pain and the raw, unprocessed material stored somewhere deeper. I found, in short, a cure. Not a cure in the reductive, medical sense of the word — as if grief were a rash to be cleared with a cream — but a cure in the older, richer meaning: a caring, a restoration, a return to wholeness.

I call the clinical method I developed Guided Imagery Resolution Therapy, or GIRT. This excerpt introduces the foundations of that approach: where it comes from, how it works, and why — at the intersection of modern neuroscience and the ancient contemplative traditions — it may represent one of the most powerful tools we have for resolving what talk therapy alone cannot reach.

The Problem with Words

Conventional psychotherapy is a largely verbal enterprise. We sit, we talk, we explore, we interpret. And for many people, for many problems, this works. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps people identify distorted thinking patterns and replace them with more accurate ones. Psychodynamic approaches help people trace present pain to its historical roots. Mindfulness-based therapies help people observe their inner lives with greater equanimity. All of these have genuine value, and I use elements of all of them in my own eclectic practice.

But here is what I have learned from four decades of clinical work: there is a category of suffering that words cannot fully reach. There is grief that has been talked about, analyzed, and contextualized, yet somehow never resolved. There is trauma that has been discussed, acknowledged, and intellectually integrated, yet continues to surface in nightmares, in the body, in the sudden ambush of a smell or a sound. There is a class of wound that the talking mind cannot close, because the wound was never stored in language to begin with.

This is not a failure of the patient, and it is not a failure of the therapist. It is a feature of how the human brain processes experience — particularly overwhelming experience.

What the Neuroscience Tells Us

When we encounter something frightening or devastating, the brain’s threat-response system — centered in the amygdala — activates rapidly, far faster than conscious thought. The amygdala does not process language. It processes sensation, emotion, and survival-relevant pattern recognition. When an experience is intense enough, the normal consolidation process that would integrate the memory into the verbal, narrative brain is interrupted. The memory is stored, but not processed. It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in fragments of sensation and emotion that are not attached to a coherent story.

This is why a combat veteran may be doing fine in a grocery store until a car backfires — and suddenly he is not in a grocery store anymore. This is why a woman who experienced childhood neglect may find herself flooded with inexplicable shame in moments that, to the rational mind, carry no threat. The body remembers what the verbal mind never fully encoded. And talking about a memory that was never verbally encoded in the first place is, in a very real sense, trying to read a book that was written in a different language.

Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark work, summarized in his phrase that the body keeps the score, put neuroscientific language to what clinicians had been observing for generations. The storage of traumatic experience in subcortical, somatic structures — rather than in the prefrontal cortex where language and narrative live — explains why talking about trauma is often insufficient for resolving it. To reach the stored wound, we need an approach that speaks the brain’s non-verbal language.

Guided imagery speaks that language.

The Neuroscience of Imagery: Why the Brain Cannot Tell the Difference

Here is the single most important neurological fact underlying the entire method of GIRT: the brain does not reliably distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one.

When a skilled basketball player mentally rehearses a free throw — eyes closed, no ball in hand — the same motor cortex neurons fire as when she actually takes the shot. When a person vividly imagines biting into a lemon, salivation increases. When a patient in a clinical setting is guided to re-enter a traumatic memory through imagery, the amygdala responds as though the event is occurring in the present moment. This is not metaphor. This is measurable neurological reality. What this means for therapy is profound. If we can help a person access a stored emotional wound through imagery — bypassing the verbal filter that has kept the wound locked in place — we can then introduce new elements into that imagined experience: safety, completion, resolution, love. And the brain, because it cannot fully distinguish the imagined from the real, will encode those new elements as genuine experience. The wound, held for years or decades in a frozen state, begins to thaw. The nervous system, finally receiving the signal that the danger has passed, begins to release what it has been holding.

This is not magic. This is neuroplasticity — the brain’s lifelong capacity to reorganize itself in response to experience. GIRT is, at its core, a structured method for delivering healing experience directly to the neural structures where the wound is stored.

The Role of the Default Mode Network

Contemporary neuroscience has also illuminated something that contemplative traditions have long known: the mind has a natural capacity for inward, self-referential awareness that is qualitatively different from focused, task-oriented attention. Researchers call this the default mode network — a set of brain regions that become active when we are not engaged with the external world, when we daydream, reflect, imagine, and make meaning.

The default mode network is not idling. It is doing some of the most important work the brain does: integrating experience, constructing a coherent narrative self, projecting into the past and future, generating empathy and moral reasoning. It is also, interestingly, the network most disrupted in conditions like depression, PTSD, and complicated grief — conditions in which self-referential thought becomes rigid, repetitive, and painful.

Guided imagery, particularly in the relaxed, semi-trance state that characterizes effective therapeutic imagery work, engages the default mode network in a way that ordinary waking cognition does not. It invites the mind to move fluidly between self and other, past and present, wound and healing. This may be one of the neurological mechanisms underlying the well-documented effectiveness of imagery-based approaches: not only does imagery bypass the verbal filter and speak directly to subcortical emotional storage, it also engages precisely the network most responsible for narrative integration and meaning-making.

The Contemplative Dimension: What the Ancient Traditions Knew

I am a psychologist, not a theologian. But I am also a person of faith, and forty years of sitting with suffering human beings has made me deeply respectful of what the great contemplative traditions — in their remarkable diversity — have understood about the nature of the mind and the process of healing.

Every major spiritual tradition in human history has employed some form of directed inner attention — what we might broadly call meditative or contemplative practice — as a path to wholeness. The Christian tradition of Ignatian imaginative prayer, in which the practitioner vividly imagines themselves present at scenes from the life of Christ, is structurally quite similar to guided imagery. Buddhist visualization practices, in which the meditator holds a complex mental image with sustained attention, engage the same neural machinery. Indigenous healing ceremonies across cultures have used rhythmic sound, story, and embodied ritual to access altered states of consciousness in which psychological healing becomes possible.

These traditions did not have the language of neuroscience. They did not know about the amygdala, or the default mode network, or neuroplasticity. But they knew — through millennia of careful observation of human experience — that the ordinary, verbal, discursive mind is not the only mode of consciousness available to us. They knew that healing often requires moving into a different relationship with awareness, one characterized by openness, receptivity, and a kind of attentive stillness that allows what is hidden to become visible.

What modern neuroscience has given us is not a refutation of this wisdom, but a language for it. The altered state that contemplative traditions have cultivated for centuries is, in neurological terms, a state in which the prefrontal cortex’s inhibitory control relaxes, the default mode network becomes active, and the mind becomes unusually receptive to new experience and meaning. This is precisely the state that effective guided imagery therapy seeks to induce. It is the state in which healing becomes possible — not because we have forced resolution, but because we have created the conditions in which the psyche’s own healing intelligence can do its work.

GIRT: The Clinical Method

Guided Imagery Resolution Therapy developed from my clinical practice over many years, refined through thousands of sessions and continuously informed by the emerging neuroscience of trauma, memory, and imagery. Let me describe the essential structure of the approach.

The Foundation: Safety and Relationship

No imagery work, no matter how sophisticated the technique, is effective without a foundation of safety and therapeutic alliance. This is not a platitude. It is a neurological reality. The brain’s threat-response system — the same system implicated in the storage of traumatic memory — is activated by any context that feels unsafe. When the amygdala is activated, the access we need to deeper emotional material is blocked. The first and non-negotiable task of GIRT, as of all good therapy, is the creation of genuine safety.

This means safety in the relationship — the patient must feel genuinely seen, heard, and respected before they will be willing to move into the vulnerable territory of imagery work. It means safety in the structure — the patient must understand what we are doing and why, must feel in control of the process, and must know they can open their eyes and end the exercise at any moment. And it means safety in the imagery itself — we begin not with the wound, but with a resource, a place of inner refuge that the patient can access whenever the work becomes overwhelming.

The Resource State

Before we approach any painful material, we establish what I call the resource state: a vivid, sensory-rich inner experience of safety, peace, and strength. This might be a real place the patient has experienced — a beloved childhood landscape, a place in nature, a room where they have felt wholly at ease. Or it might be an entirely imagined place: a garden, a sanctuary, a place that exists nowhere except in the fertile interior of the mind.

The resource state serves multiple clinical functions. It establishes the patient’s capacity for vivid imagery — some people need coaching to develop this skill, and the resource state provides a low-stakes context for that development. It creates an anchor, a place the mind can return to if the processing work becomes too intense. And it begins to build the patient’s confidence that their own inner world contains resources, not only wounds.

This last point is not incidental. One of the most insidious effects of chronic trauma and grief is the conviction that the inner world is a place of danger — that looking inward means encountering only pain. The resource state begins to challenge that conviction from the very first session. It says: your mind can also produce this. It contains this. You are not only your wounds.

Approaching the Wound

When the foundation is established and the patient is comfortable with the resource state, we begin the approach to the painful material. This is done carefully, at the patient’s pace, and always with the resource state available as a return point.

The approach in GIRT is not the same as flooding or prolonged exposure, though it shares some structural features. In those evidence-based approaches, the goal is extinction through repetition — the fear response is reduced by repeated exposure to the feared stimulus in the absence of actual danger. GIRT aims at something different: not the extinction of the emotional response, but its resolution. We are not trying to make the wound cease to matter. We are trying to bring to it what it has never received: completion.

What I have observed, across thousands of sessions, is that unresolved grief and trauma are characterized by a kind of incompleteness. Something was interrupted — a goodbye that was never said, a truth that was never acknowledged, a need that was never met. The wound persists not simply because the event was painful, but because the psyche has never been able to finish with it. There is, in the language of Gestalt therapy, an open figure — a pattern that the mind keeps returning to because it has not found its natural closure.

Guided imagery provides the context in which that closure can occur. Not by changing what happened — the past is fixed, and one of the things I have learned in forty years of practice is that trying to help people pretend otherwise is ultimately unhelpful — but by completing what is unfinished. The patient, in the imagery, can say what was never said. Can hear what they needed to hear. Can experience what they needed to experience. And the brain, because it does not fully distinguish the imagined from the real, encodes this completion as genuine.

The Difference Between GIRT and EMDR

Clinicians who are familiar with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, will recognize some parallels. Both approaches aim to process stored traumatic memory in ways that verbal therapy alone cannot. Both involve accessing the emotional core of a stored experience, rather than just its narrative content. Both have accumulated substantial evidence for their effectiveness.

But there are important differences. EMDR relies on bilateral stimulation — typically the patient tracking the therapist’s moving finger with their eyes — to facilitate processing. The mechanism of bilateral stimulation is still debated in the literature, though leading theories suggest it mimics the bilateral processing that occurs during REM sleep. GIRT does not use bilateral stimulation. It relies instead on the depth and vividness of the imagery itself, combined with the therapeutic relationship, to access and process stored material.

More significantly, GIRT is explicitly oriented toward completion — toward the resolution of the open figure — in a way that EMDR is not. EMDR measures success by reduction in the Subjective Units of Distress Scale: the goal is for the emotional charge of the memory to decrease. GIRT measures success by something harder to quantify but equally real: the sense that something is finished. That the door is closed. That what needed to happen, in the inner world, has happened. Patients often describe this experience in almost identical terms: a sense of release, of relief, of being able to breathe. Of having put something down that they had been carrying for a very long time.

In my clinical experience, GIRT can often achieve this resolution in a single session — though the preparation for that session, and the integration afterward, require additional clinical attention. This is one of the features that distinguishes it most sharply from approaches that require extended exposure or repeated processing: when the imagery work goes well, the resolution is not incremental. It is, quite often, complete.

What Healing Feels Like: Clinical Stories

Theory and technique are necessary, but they are not sufficient. What ultimately matters in clinical practice is the lived experience of the people who sit across from us. With that in mind, I want to share two brief composite cases — drawn from my years of practice and carefully de-identified — that illustrate what GIRT looks like in action.

A Grief That Had No Name

Margaret came to me three years after the death of her mother. She had done what she understood grief to require: she had cried, she had attended the funeral, she had cleaned out her mother’s apartment, she had allowed herself to feel sad. She had also, she told me, been in therapy twice a week for two years. And yet something remained undone. She woke at three in the morning, her mother’s face in her mind. She found herself unable to look at photographs. She had, without quite deciding to, put the box of her mother’s things in the back of the closet and not opened it since.

What emerged in our early sessions was a complexity that had made ordinary grief impossible. Margaret and her mother had had a difficult relationship — loving in its way, but marked by her mother’s emotional unavailability and, in Margaret’s later years, a growing resentment that had never been spoken aloud. When her mother died, Margaret had not resolved that resentment. She had lost not only her mother but the possibility of ever resolving it. And she had never, not once in three years of therapy, said this aloud to another human being. Because she was afraid that saying it aloud would mean she was a bad daughter. That it would mean she didn’t love her mother. That it would mean the grief was somehow tainted, and therefore she didn’t deserve to feel it fully.

In our GIRT session, Margaret closed her eyes and, after establishing her resource state — a garden from her grandmother’s house in rural Pennsylvania — I invited her to imagine her mother, not as she had been in her final illness, but as she had been in Margaret’s childhood: a young woman, not yet hardened, capable of being reached.

What happened in the next forty minutes, I have seen happen many times, and it never fails to move me. Margaret spoke to her mother. She said things she had never said. She expressed love and anger and grief and gratitude, in a tumble that was not organized or eloquent but was entirely true. And then she listened. In the imagery, she heard her mother respond — not the words of a ghost or a hallucination, but the words that some deep part of Margaret knew her mother had never been able to say in life: I see you. I am sorry. I love you.

Was this real? The question is less simple than it appears. The words were, in some sense, Margaret’s own — generated by her own psyche, from her own knowledge of her mother and her own longing for what had not been given. But they were also, in the deepest sense, true. And the brain, which does not distinguish the imagined from the real, encoded them as such. Margaret came back the following week and told me she had opened the box.

The Soldier Who Stopped Running

David was a combat veteran in his mid-forties who had been referred to me after his third DUI. He was not, he was careful to tell me in our first session, one of those guys who couldn’t handle it. He had done two tours, seen things he would not describe, and come home and built a life. He had a business, a marriage, three kids who needed him. He was not broken.

He also had not slept more than three consecutive hours in eleven years.

His previous treatment had included medication, which helped with the sleep but not with the dreams. It had included a course of CBT focused on his thinking patterns, which he found interesting but not transformative. It had included a brief course of EMDR, which he had terminated after three sessions because, he said, it made him feel like he was losing control. This last point was important. In our GIRT work, control is never surrendered — it is, if anything, enhanced. I explained to David that the imagery we would use was not about going back to the worst of what he had experienced. It was about going back to a particular moment that, in his words, he could not stop seeing: the face of a young man, barely nineteen, who had died in David’s arms during his second deployment.

What David needed was not to process the horror of that moment — he had processed it, in his own way, many times. What he needed was to complete it. To say the things to that nineteen-year-old that he had never been able to say. To hear, from some deep part of himself, an answer.
The session lasted ninety minutes. When David opened his eyes, he was quiet for a long time. Then he said: I think I’ve been running from him because I thought if I stopped, I’d fall apart. But I didn’t fall apart. I just said goodbye.

He has not had the recurring nightmare since. I do not report this to make an extraordinary claim. I report it because it is what happened, and because it illustrates something I have seen again and again in GIRT work: the wound that persists is not always the most terrible thing that happened. It is often the thing that was left unfinished.

The Integration: Science, Spirit, and the Healing of the Whole Person

Wellspring Institute’s mission — to bring together the best of modern psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative wisdom in the service of well-being — resonates deeply with everything I have tried to do in developing GIRT and in writing this book.

The dichotomy between science and spirit has always seemed to me a false one, and nowhere more clearly than in the domain of healing. The neuroscience of imagery and the ancient contemplative understanding of the mind are not competing accounts of reality. They are complementary ways of seeing the same reality from different vantage points. The neuroscientist who tells us that the brain encodes vividly imagined experience as real is describing, in the language of functional MRI and synaptic biology, something that every contemplative tradition has known for thousands of years: that the inner world is as real as the outer one. That what we encounter in the depths of the mind is not illusion but revelation.

This is why I have never been comfortable with the reductive version of evidence-based practice that reduces psychotherapy to a set of techniques, as if the person in the chair were a problem to be solved rather than a soul to be accompanied. Technique matters — GIRT has a rigorous clinical structure, and I am insistent that it be applied carefully and skillfully. But the technique is, in the end, in service of something larger: the healing of the whole person, in all their complexity and mystery.

In forty years of practice, I have come to believe that human beings have a deep, innate drive toward wholeness. The psyche wants to heal. The open figures want to close. The unfinished business wants, more than anything, to be finished. Our task as clinicians is not to force that healing but to create the conditions in which it can occur — to clear the path, to hold the space, to accompany the person into the territory where the wound lives, and to trust that the healing intelligence within them knows what to do.

Guided imagery, practiced with skill and care and genuine therapeutic presence, creates those conditions. It speaks the language of the deeper mind. It accesses what words cannot reach. It offers, to people who have been carrying the weight of unresolved loss and trauma, sometimes for decades, the possibility of putting it down.

That is the guided imagery cure. Not a technique for symptom management. Not a relaxation protocol. A path to wholeness. A return to the self that existed before the wound, and a reintegration of the wound itself — not as something to be denied or transcended, but as a part of the story that can finally, at last, be told to its completion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Cortman, PsyD, is a licensed psychologist with over 40 years of clinical practice in the Sarasota/Venice, Florida area.

He is the author of six books, including The Guided Imagery Cure, Keep Pain in the Past, and Your Mind: An Owner’s Manual for a Better Life.

He is the developer of Guided Imagery Resolution Therapy (GIRT) and has conducted more than 85,000 therapy sessions across his career. Learn more at srqshrink.com

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Skillful Means: Eating Meditation

Your Skillful Means, sponsored by the Wellspring Institute, is designed to be a comprehensive resource for people interested in personal growth, overcoming inner obstacles, being helpful to others, and expanding consciousness. It includes instructions in everything from common psychological tools for dealing with negative self talk, to physical exercises for opening the body and clearing the mind, to meditation techniques for clarifying inner experience and connecting to deeper aspects of awareness, and much more.

Eating Meditation

Purpose/Effects

Eating food is one of the places where people exhibit the greatest degree of unconsciousness, grasping, aversion, and indifference. For most Americans, eating is just putting food in the hole while doing something else, like watching television, talking, or even driving! Yet eating is potentially one of the most important things in our life. It sustains our physical body, brings pleasurable sensations, can fill us with emotional joy and satisfaction, and can be a powerful source of spiritual insight.

Furthermore, eating meditation, like any other mindfulness or Vipassana practice, reinforces the core skills of concentration, sensory clarity, and emotional equanimity.

Eating meditation can even increase your physical health, by removing a common source of obesity. Eating too fast usually means that we are also eating too much. The feeling of being full takes a little while to come to our attention, and during this time we may still be loading our stomachs with more and more food, unaware that we are already full. By eating slowly and bringing awareness to our bodies during the activity of eating, we will probably eat quite a bit less food, and therefore not gain as much weight.

Many people report huge personal changes from the simple act of eating meditation.

METHOD

Summary

Pay close attention to the physical activity of eating slowly, while contemplating the food itself.

Long Version

1. At a meal, take a single piece of food (like a raisin, a piece of pizza, a spoonful of yogurt) and hold it in front of you.
2. Pay close attention to the sensual quality of the food. If it is in your fingers, how does it feel? What is its texture? Feel its weight, shape, and physicality. Notice how it looks. What color(s) is it? What aromas does it give off? In every way possible, deeply encounter the food on the level of your senses (without putting it in your mouth yet).
3. Tune in to your emotions around this bite of food. Are you attracted to it? Do you feel in a hurry to get it into your mouth? Are you annoyed at having to slow down and consider the food? Or are you perhaps unattracted to this food, and filled with a sense of disgust and not wanting to eat it? What are you hoping to get out of eating this food?
4. Now consider where this food came from. Think of the farms where it was grown, the farmers who worked to grow it. Think of the sun and the rain it required to grow, the air and the soil which supported it, and so on. Then consider what it took for this food to get to you. It may have been picked, sorted, moved many miles in trucks or trains, sorted, packaged, and so forth. It may have then been shipped to a grocery store, where people unpacked it, displayed it, sold it, and bagged it. Once in your home or in the kitchen, the food then had to be cooked or prepared in some way, even if only by washing. An enormous, complex web of interactions, elements, people, and perhaps animals and machines had to come together, all to bring you this single bite of food. It may even have come from the other side of the planet, all so that you could eat it now.
5. Now slowly and mindfully put the food in your mouth, but do not chew it yet. Simply feel the food on your tongue. Taste how it tastes before being chewed. Take in its smell, and its texture on your tongue. Notice how your whole body reacts and changes to the food in your mouth. Salivation begins. The stomach may become active. Pay close attention to this entire process. You may wish to close your eyes.
6. Next slowly and mindfully chew the food (assuming it needs it). Attempt to chew in an attentive, active manner. As much as possible, remove the robotic, mechanical, mindless aspect of chewing. Instead, make each chomp a conscious act, done with great care and consideration. Notice how chewing the food changes it in many ways. New flavors and aromas are released. The texture and size of the food undergoes a remarkable change. As much as possible, keep your attention on the food and the act of chewing it. Let go of all other thoughts. Again, closing your eyes helps.
7. Feel the food going down your throat. Feel if you can sense it entering the stomach, and the sensations of the stomach receiving the food and working to digest it.
8. Let go and relax, noticing all the sensations that arise from having eaten this bite of food.
9. Repeat this process until the meal is ended.

HISTORY

Eating meditation is a common practice in Vipassana and Zen Buddhism.

Formal Zen eating meditation is different from what is presented here. It is called oryoki.

Prayer before meals could be considered a basic form of eating meditation, by formally stopping all other activities, and bringing our attention to the sacredness of the act of eating.

CAUTIONS

You may wish to do this alone, or only in the presence of other practitioners, as it can make non-practitioners uncomfortable.

SEE ALSO

What Is Meditation?
Meditation Posture

EXTERNAL LINKS

Non-denominational instructions for eating meditation