You and your meditation journey: your personal profile
A forecast of your personal meditation journey.
A fter meeting you, people might describe you as kind, warm, sympathetic, cooperative, and considerate. These are good qualities to have and they make you easy to work with and be with.
But like all personality traits they can have their downsides. Sometimes you might feel you are giving too much or are being taken advantage of.
Finding balance in that area is challenging. It asks of you acknowledge your own needs and practice setting boundaries, sometimes simply saying “no”. This is not a selfish thing to do. In fact, it can help you better connect with others and help them more effectively. Meditation practice can support you in developing this balance by nurturing the growth of clarity and natural insights about these dynamics.
Meditation practice can also teach us how to care for ourselves.
How? You might ask. First, some practices can help further grow and encourage natural kindness and care for the welfare of others. In those practices we wish others to be well, and we develop a caring attention. With time, this becomes a habit and is present effortlessly in our daily activities. Meditation practice can also teach us how to care for ourselves. We learn to direct that same caring attention and warmth to ourselves. We learn to better see with kindness both our qualities and shortcomings. We learn to see the unease, the pain we might be experiencing. We learn to get clear about how we are feeling. This allows us to better see moments when we need self-care or help, and to express these needs to others.
This then comes full circle. As we better understand ourselves and our needs, we can direct that new sensitivity and understanding toward other’s needs. By making us more attuned to what needs to be cared for in ourselves, meditation makes us more attuned to what needs care in others and in our surrounding. It makes us a more effective helper and more present to our family and friends.
In daily life you oscillate between a kind, warm, sympathetic and considerate attitude towards others, and a more self-focused and freer way to be in the world. You are able to experience this range of attitudes, from kindness and cooperation, to walking your own path. Both orientations are important ones, and it can sometimes be hard to know how to balance between these two sides of yourself. Meditation can help you find this balance.
First, it can give you clarity on where you stand. When we are excessively involved with others, whether it is with friends or family, when we are giving a lot, we can sometimes forget ourselves. Looking back, we feel we are giving too much or are taken advantage of. In meditation we learn to direct a caring attention and warmth to ourselves. We learn to get clear on how we feel, whether well or unwell. This helps us to see when we are doing too much, and allows us to set boundaries, so we keep some of our energy. This also prevents us from reactively falling in the opposite direction, and completely shutting off once we have nothing left to give.
But there is another dimension the meditative practice brings. As we better understand ourselves and our needs, we can direct that new sensitivity toward other’s needs. This makes us more attuned to what needs care in others and in our surroundings. It makes us a more effective helpers and more present to our family and friends.
You do not typically sympathize much with others. This also means that you are free to function outside the rules that others follow and impose on you. This is a source of great freedom and power: you can think “outside the box” and point others toward new directions, if sometimes in calculative ways. In meditation, this personality dimension often predicts powerful experiences. The kind of experiences that leads to significant shifts in understanding and the discovery of new frameworks from which to approach your life. The focus in meditation practice then becomes integrating these insights into daily life.
How is it done in practice? For some this is supported by a reflection on ethics. We discover that making conscious choices based on values, gives us new powers. Without a personal ethics, we might experience a sense of freedom, the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want. But this is just one aspect of freedom, and by doing that, we still obey a programming, an unconscious one. Meditation makes these impulses and programs conscious, and then allow us to make alternative choices. We learn to see our unconscious drives and take conscious decisions about them. Do I want to act on that impulse? Are there other options for me? What would another path lead me to? This can help us think about what makes a good choice. We can step in this new realm of choice as a person responsible for their actions. This gives us a larger range of choices, a wider range of paths to explore. We access greater freedom.
You have a rich emotional life that reflect a great sensitivity to others and the world around you.
This is not always easy however, and you are likely to experience negative feelings such as moodiness, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, or guilt. Stressful situations might trigger you to react strongly. You might interpret daily situations as more threatening and hopelessly difficult than they eventually turn out to be. While all these emotions might feel like they are too much, they play an important role as guides in daily life and can be an asset when brought into balance.
Meditation practice can help you find that balance between positive and negative aspects of these emotions. Research indicates that with increasing expertise in meditation, this dimension of your personality comes into balance. This is likely because meditation can be beneficial in helping you recover from stress and respond to stressors more effectively.
It can also help you better relate to negative emotions such as guilt or shame by maintaining a sense of self-worth, while acknowledging the signals these emotions provide. Meditation can help you find space around emotions. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, you can find a measure of freedom from them even as you acknowledge them, and act appropriately based on them.
Meditation can bring you to experience a more balanced emotional life, so you are better able to serve others and care for yourself.
You rarely experience feelings such as excessive fear, worry, frustration, moodiness, guilt, or shame. You generally keep your bearings in stressful situations. This makes you well-adjusted in many daily life situations.
This relatively reduced experience of negative emotions could however lead you to misinterpreting situations as less threatening or challenging than they eventually turn out to be. Emotions such as fear, anger, frustration, or guilt, are often seen as negative, but they are healthy when experienced appropriately. They warn us we have been ignoring something we should pay attention to, or that we should have acted differently than we did.
There is significant benefit in reconnecting with these emotions, and meditation can help on that path.
Practices that help you connect with the body, where our emotions live, can support a journey toward a richer emotional life and more clarity and meaning in your life. Practicing along these directions can give you access to the signals these emotions provide so they can be teachers that show your likes and dislikes, your limits and your values. They can help you make meaningful choices, know yourself better, and progress on an ever more fulfilling path
Your emotional life is balanced and oscillates between positive and negative emotions.
It is natural to experience negative emotions such as anger, worry, frustration and stress because they help us make better decisions for ourselves. They warn us that we have been ignoring something we should pay attention to, or that we should have acted differently than we did. Sometimes they can get out of control however, and at home or at work, things can get overwhelming. They can lead us to interpret people and situations as threatening and stressful even when they eventually turn out to be OK.
Some meditation practices can help balance out your emotional life and ensure that the negative emotions you experience are appropriate and healthy ones. Research indicates that with increasing expertise in meditation, this dimension of your personality comes into balance. In addition, meditation can help further cultivate positive emotions which helps elevate day to day well-being. It can enhance your experience of moments of calm, fulfilment and happiness.
Are you interested to go further on your meditative journey?
Whether you wish to find meaning in daily life, to grow self-love, or to expand your inner life and spirituality, meditation can support you.
I help new and experienced meditators interested in growing in these directions.
Recommended readings
On personality
Personality: What makes you the way you are. Daniel Nettle. Oxford Landmark Science.
Amazon | Book depository
On meditation and well-being
Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind. Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. Brain, and Body. New York: Penguin (2017).
Amazon | Book depository
Sources
I care about the quality of the information I offer you and follow strict sourcing guidelines. I rely on peer-reviewed studies and trustworthy secondary sources, never tertiary sources.
Traditional sources
Thanissaro Bhikkhu (trans.) (1995). Half (of the Holy Life), Upaḍḍha Sutta (SN 45:2). Available on-line at https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN45_2.html.
Scientific sources
Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(4), 822.
Exline, J. J., Pargament, K. I., Grubbs, J. B., & Yali, A. M. (2014). The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale: Development and initial validation. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 6(3), 208.
Grubbs, J. B., Wilt, J., Stauner, N., Exline, J. J., & Pargament, K. I. (2016). Self, struggle, and soul: Linking personality, self-concept, and religious/spiritual struggle. Personality and Individual Differences, 101, 144-152.
Hood Jr, R. W., & Francis, L. J. (2013). Mystical experience: Conceptualizations, measurement, and correlates.
Schnell, T. (2012). Spirituality with and without religion—Differential relationships with personality. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 34(1), 33-61.
van den Hurk, P. A., Wingens, T., Giommi, F., Barendregt, H. P., Speckens, A. E., & van Schie, H. T. (2011). On the relationship between the practice of mindfulness meditation and personality—an exploratory analysis of the mediating role of mindfulness skills. Mindfulness, 2(3), 194-200.
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