Can Meditation Make You Angry?

Are you finding yourself having mood swings when meditating or even after? You are not alone. In fact, one of the not-so-talked-about obscure sides of meditation is that it can intensify whichever emotion you are feeling. This can serve you positively as much as it can serve you negatively. 

But when it comes to anger, it isn’t just exclusive to intensified emotions, at times, meditation can bring out the emotion in you because you have an unhandled conflict that you turned away from, and today is haunting you almost like a curse. 

Everything starts with acknowledgment and acceptance if there’s a certain emotion or thought we wish to clear from our mind. 

However, feeling angry during meditation can actually be used for your benefit, to channel that energy into something that favors you. 

Maybe it’s a goal you want to achieve. Meditation allows you to view things from a third-person perspective, without attaching any labels to anything you feel. 

So if you were to feel anger, the idea is that you don’t define it as good or bad, but only afterward, choose whether it serves a purpose for you and if it doesn’t, it’s easier to get rid of it, rather than attempting to battle an emotion right away. We can’t fight a problem we haven’t acknowledged. 

Some have a habit of trying to hand-pick which emotion they want to experience during their meditation because there’s this preconceived notion that it’s all about positivity and relaxation when that’s just one of the many things we can feel during or after the practice. 

Embracing The Anger

The idea that we have to embrace anger when it’s present doesn’t sound enticing, but it’s the way we take a step back and understand that we are so much bigger than the anger we are currently experiencing. 

Maybe you’ve had a rough day or an unpleasant memory of a conversation pops up where you think of the ways you could’ve maneuvered it differently, but that’s the ego talking. 

By embracing our anger and allowing it to coexist temporarily with meditation, we can either turn that anger into fuel or motivation to achieve a certain outcome or get rid of it completely. 

Anger doesn’t sound like a desirable trait to have, and in most cases, it isn’t. However, that same anger can be turned into focus by first acknowledging, watching such emotion, and allowing it to transition into something else. 

This is something you can do even outside the meditation, and while it’s not guaranteed to rid you of your anger, it can help you to become more mindful about it, so anger serves a deliberate purpose. 

To the point where the thinking goes along the lines of “I’m feeling angry right now, does the situation I’m in warrant my anger or can I use this anger for something more beneficial?” 

For instance, someone told you that you can’t achieve a certain objective that you’ve set for yourself, anger can manifest and you can use said anger as fuel to work on that goal and achieve the results you set for yourself. 

Meditation is what allows you to channel it, as meditation allows you to better manage your emotion, and, in addition, you will be embracing the shadow part of yourself to work in your favor. You’re no longer denying a part of yourself for such emotion that would seem ugly on the surface but proves useful in certain circumstances. 

However, it’s understandable that not everyone wants to use anger or in any way have anything to do with the emotion, which is completely fine and understandable.

In which case, you can choose to acknowledge the anger, observe it and let go, then rinse and repeat, and over time, anger becomes less relevant. 

Any emotion that gets treated with apathy loses its power over you, and because meditation expands your mind to see things without attaching any labels, anger just “is”, any other emotion. 

Feeling Angry Is Common During Meditation

Among the sensations, meditation practitioners feel when starting out, anger is among the most common ones.

Given that we release our rawest selves without any filters applied by the ego to give a certain appearance to the world, we get to know our true selves and come to terms with our true selves. 

We get a more objective view of who we are as a person, and thus, we’re able to remove any traits we deem as negative, something which happens automatically when we meditate, considering we naturally sustain what serves our purpose and let go of what doesn’t. 

But this isn’t the only reason anger is common during meditation, it’s also worth noting that the mind tries every approach under the sun to stop you from meditating, since the mind is angry it’s been deprived of its ability to think. 

Or so it thinks when in reality, it’s just being enhanced. And much like we need to take a break to improve ourselves through meditation, computers, and phones need to restart to get the latest software in order to function better.

Natural Inclination to Negativity

We have a habit of putting our focus on what’s negative. If everyone is smiling in a picture, and there’s one person showing an angry face, our eyes will naturally gravitate to that person. 

This applies to our anger in our day to day, a bunch of great things could’ve happened but that one bad thing would have shaken our day and made it worse. 

Well, this starts having less of an impact on us once we take awareness that this is happening and by showing any emotional reaction, we are letting such a situation or emotion get the best of us. 

Meditation leads to freedom since you learn to identify which emotions serve you best and allows you to experience them in a magnified way. 

Anger doesn’t define you, so seeing it as an emotion that’s just there, temporarily while seeing the bigger picture helps. And it’s easier said than done, but it’s what the mind naturally gravitates to once we become acquainted with the idea of meditation. 

It’s hard to reprogram the pattern of thinking of defaulting to the negative side of things, but we can move in that direction when meditating, as we’re more prone to see solutions where we otherwise would’ve seen problems. Meditation is a paradigm shift. 

Anger Diminishes Over Time

Of course, there are exceptions, but assuming you are consistent with your meditation practice, you learn to become more peaceful and adopt a mindset that helps you outside your meditation. 

However, anger has to go somewhere, but it can’t be ignored, if it’s ignored, we never learn to tackle or confront something that piles up into something negative, creating a spiral that hinders our progress. By acknowledging such anger or using it, we end up seeing a purpose with the anger. 

Anger can even be applied to problem-solving, as a stepping stone. However, meditation expands our scope of reality and makes us see things in a bigger light, as in seeing oneness with things. Anger becomes such a small part of our lives that it becomes almost insignificant. 

Of course, we can’t get rid of it completely but we can keep posing an obstacle. This won’t apply to everyone, as some will indeed need additional help, other than meditation, but for those looking for a natural way to conquer themselves, meditation is a good avenue. 

Not everyone will feel anger when they meditate, some will feel an intensified sense of doubt while others may feel intense joy. 

No matter which emotion we feel, the more it’s approached with acceptance, the more likely something good can be done with it or the more we can get rid of it without much effort in the way. Almost as if it will slip off by default by staying consistent on a path.