The shadow side of meditation

Today I want to share something that might not be very popular, but that I believe deserves a bit of light. It’s about the shadow side of meditation. When does meditation truly add value to your life and when might something else actually bring you more gold?

Some time ago, I came across this sentence: “Every method has its dark side.”

That line really struck me and got me thinking. Because yes, if you dare to look closely, you’ll see that every method also has its downside, no matter how well-intentioned it is, or how many millions of people it has helped.

I asked myself, “What about the things I use in my own work, like my visual meditations?” I always want to stay curious rather than dogmatic and I believe in communicating honestly about the things I bring into the world. Looking at meditation, I had to admit that it does have a darker side.

Not everything is what it seems

Meditation, in itself, is a wonderful method for creating more peace and clarity in your life. I’m convinced that if our parliament meditated for half an hour every day, we’d have a very different country. Countless scientific studies show how meditation benefits both body and mind and I personally experience its many gifts.

But when you turn to meditation because life feels heavy, full, or too complex, and you make no effort to change anything else, then it becomes an escape. It’s a coping mechanism rather than a path toward real transformation.

I’ve come to see that this coping mechanism is actually quite common in the world of personal development and that’s something we could be more transparent about.

Especially now, as more and more people are becoming spiritual seekers. You can see a growing interest in personal growth, but not everything that falls under ‘personal development’ truly supports real development.

The bypass loop

It’s fun and exciting to try out different methods. We’re all searching and that’s a good thing. Every person carries some degree of trauma and everything we heal in ourselves helps not only us, but also each other and future generations.

I also love diving enthusiastically into a new book or training and I can easily binge-watch videos when someone’s work fascinates me.

What matters is that I don’t choose only the easy methods because I’m looking for a quick fix. If I do that, I might avoid facing the more uncomfortable parts of myself, my surroundings or the world. Then I might jump from method to method, but never truly address my pain.

Always chasing the ‘highs’ often means rejecting the ‘lows,’ even though both are part of life. If I can’t sit with the low energies, I’ll never fully experience the high ones as they’re meant to be. This tendency is also known as spiritual bypassing.

It can be tricky to recognize when something is a bypass, especially when you’re in the middle of it.

What helps me is to ask myself why I’m doing something.

Am I acting out of curiosity and love (‘I wonder what happens if I try this’)? Or out of dependency and fear ‘I can only be or achieve something if I do this’)?

If your motivation comes from dependency, remember this: there is nothing outside of you that you need in order to become whole. The only thing to truly realize in this life is that you already are whole.

‘You are already whole, you were never not whole. You only forgot that you were whole and still are whole. If you are already whole, adding more will not make you any more whole.’
– Kamini Desai

The chicken and the egg

Once you become dependent on something, you hand your power over to it. And you will never find what you’re looking for there, because what you seek is already within you. Marketing messages often play on our pain points and feelings of lack, making us believe we need something outside ourselves. That message is everywhere.

The tricky part is that some aspects of personal development can actually help us reach this realization. So it easily becomes a chicken-and-egg situation, one I’m also still finding my way through.

Being brutally honest with myself is, I think, the key to seeing whether I’m acting out of fear or out of love. Fear isn’t necessarily a bad motivator, as long as I’m honest about it and willing to accept it. I also believe it’s important to approach these processes with compassion. Sometimes, we only gain certain insights through trial and experience. Everything has its place in the cycles we go through.

Transparency

This brings me back to the things I create myself. How does this apply to my visual meditations? Am I contributing to bypassing?

What I find important to communicate is that the things I create can absolutely support someone in their personal growth. But I also want to be very clear that simply engaging with my visual meditations or creative coaching will not suddenly give you a perfect life. It is very deliberate that my tagline says that art is PART of your holistic well-being.

My services are gentle invitations that can raise awareness, soften sharp edges and open up new layers of consciousness that words cannot easily find. But please use this as part of your support system when it comes to stress relief, trauma healing or facing the harder parts of life. It’s up to each of us to take responsibility for our own process. I can’t and won’t carry that for anyone, because that would take away your own power.

Because this topic has been on my mind a lot these last years, I want to communicate clearly about it. If there’s one thing I find deeply important, it’s transparency and honesty about what people can expect.

Promising golden mountains is easy in marketing, but the real gold, as always, is rarely found in what comes easily.

Love, Cora