You Have the Power

An article on the Guardian’s website today makes for interesting reading (if you like that sort of thing), but it’s the headline that particularly moved me to write about it. Can Meditation Stop Me Getting Angry? asks the journalist, as she describes an experience of meditation which does, it seems, lead to a change in her expression of anger.

The curious thing about the story is the presumption that something else has the power to affect our lives – can meditation make you less angry? No, only you can do anything to be less angry. Meditation may be one way by which you are able to take back the control overy our expression of anger, but it cannot do it outside of your own will and desire and capacity to change.

This myth that other people, or other things, can make us feel or do or think anything is a persistent one in our culture – you make me so mad, it made me want to scream, I want to be made a nicer person. None of these things can be true unless we ourselves play some part in that process.

The way this manifests itself in a therapy context is in the dissociation that some clients have from their own capacity to change their situation. An air of futility, particularly in couples work, can pervade the therapy room at times, with clients expressing a covert sense that somebody (or something) else is responsible for their situation and its improvement.

The message that some people find hardest to hear is that only they have the capacity to change their lives-  nothing that I, or anybody else, will make the slightest bit of difference if they don’t take some responsibility for their own change and development. Sometimes this difficulty may arise because people have been told so often and repeatedly that they don’t have any power, they’ve come to believe that their life is at the mercy of other people’s whims and controls. Learning that this isn’t the case can be a long and difficult journey.

As a therapist, Im always clear that I cannot make people problems go away, or wave a wand and give them the secret to a happy life – if I could I’d be doing a lot less work and charging much higher fees! – and that it is only with the active investment of time and energy and a desire to change that anything will be experienced differently in their life.

So if you want meditation to make you less angry, go ahead and give it a go. But good luck with any magical thinking that may trap you into believing that you can be different without actively making those changes for yourself.

And if that sounds scary and unsatisfying, I’d be curious why that’s the case – surely having control over our own lives is a good thing, and accepting that power (and the responsibility for ourselves which comes with it) is a strengthening, rewarding, fulfilling and ultimately positive experience?

www.wayforwardcounselling.co.uk