Emotionless Landscape

[listen to audio version via Cheetah Tracks]

I've always struggled with anxiety. I turned to meditation as a way to turn down the volume of this constant buzzing background noise of preoccupation and anguish. I've always found it hard to face these feelings, as a teenager I wanted to just turn them down and consequently I buried them deep within me.

I discovered meditation when a friend told me that he himself tried it to cope with a personal crisis. He had been fired twice in a short period of time and was desperate and in need of calm, so he tried meditation. I started to meditate shortly after this, although I wasn't going through anything particularly difficult at the time. But I thought maybe meditation could be an antidote to my constant anxiety and anguish, and since I've always been a skeptic of therapy and medication, so I decided to give it a try and learned mindfulness through an app. At first, I felt uncomfortable. When I finally began to enjoy it, it worked like a charm. Almost every meditation session resulted in this inner peace and calmness. I usually fell asleep as a result.

It's been almost three years since I started, and now sometimes I feel this numbness, this absence of emotion.

“I finally managed to get rid of the noise, but the silence is that of a tombstone. ”

There's peace sometimes, and even a slight joy, but I also feel that I don't care about anything, as if my whole emotional life is a big MEH. I'm afraid I have switched off something I can't switch back. I feel I'm trapped between extremes, in this emotional dichotomy of constant anxiety or nothing.

And there's the worst part. Sometimes meditation doesn't work. I've read about the downsides and it's challenging effects. Two things concerned me the most: how it doesn't work that well on men, and depersonalization. Since I'm a male this knowledge builds into my natural rumination and paranoia. And don't even get me started on depersonalization, which I'm terrified of. I'm actually afraid I might have depersonalized myself—hardly a surprise since meditation is a tool to deconstruct your sense of self.

I recently went through a heartbreak, and I needed calm and tranquility so much. I meditated almost daily, sometimes two times a day. And I can't recall another period of my life where I felt such an intense anxiety, with constant and intense palpitations and all. I don't know if meditation exacerbated it or it was just the particulars of the situation, but for the first time, I felt not only that it wasn't helpful, but harmful.

So I don't know what to do. Do I keep meditating? Is this what they call "The Dark Night of the Soul", a challenge which I have to go through by persisting in my meditation practice? What if there's no return from this emotionless landscape? What if this is just a temporal crisis where enlightenment (whatever that means) awaits at the end?

“The only thing I’ve realized by going through all this is that I just want to experience a rich and balanced emotional life. I don’t want to live without emotions. But it seems that in this effort to turn down the “bad” ones, I diminished even the good ones.”

[listen to audio version via Cheetah Tracks] [What is Cheetah Tracks?]