Does Meditation Make You More Sensitive?

Meditation is one of the best habits someone can form, but it brings the question of whether too much of it can cause the opposite effect of what is intended. 

Meditation defaults your thinking to be less reactive and more receptive to what’s around you, in that way, it can make you more sensitive, without the emotional attachment that pulls you in one direction or another. 

This is the beauty of letting go, you get more control of your destiny and you better understand your environment. The more understanding you have of something, the more you can adjust said things to favor you. 

However, many who engage in meditation become less ambitious, unless they set a goal with meditation. Meditation expands the consciousness to see beyond the plain material reality we’re presented with daily. Once you learn about your reality, you can live in denial or navigate it in a way that suits you. 

Happy meditators tend to be characterized by their ability to adapt and remain at peace, regardless of what circumstance they are facing. Of course, feelings of sadness and anger, as well as any low vibrational frequency are still present, but not to the same degree as before. 

Short Term Sensitivity to Meditation

Over the short, you are likely to become more sensitive to your emotions and thoughts during meditation. Some would confuse this as a bad thing and mistakenly believe meditation is having the opposite effect. 

After all, if meditation is making us so happy, why are we reacting so strongly to a particular thought or emotion? 

There’s a part of meditation that’s known as shadow work, or confronting a darker side of ourselves and learning to accept ourselves. It’s usually the threshold between giving up and continuing, where people’s ability to meditate is put to the test. 

Beyond the physical aspect of just sitting there with thoughts, there’s a psychological aspect to meditation where there’s a test of endurance and discipline. 

If you find yourself reacting to your thoughts, but you’re still able to bring back your attention to those thoughts and transition the reaction to mere observation, it’s a sign that the meditation is working for you. 

Meditation has a learning curve if we talk about the psychological aspects that are put to the test when we first start meditating. It’s like a detox process, often influenced by the mind as a way to advertise meditation as something bad for you, when it isn’t. 

The mind will use any means necessary to fight that same thing that’s trying to put it under control. It’s over the mid to longer-term where your mind has less control over you, and no longer feels the urge to engage in short-term pleasures. 

You’ll be extra sensitive to this at the start, because you’re doing something you’d never done deliberately before, and it takes time to adapt to change, it takes months for the brain to physically be changed by meditation. 

Becoming Aware of Your Reality

There’s a reward system in you, that your mind knows perfectly how to exploit to get you to do what it wants, even if you know said thing is bad for you. 

For instance, overeating or drinking alcohol, or any habit that only produces short-term gratification without giving you anything in return that would help your daily life. 

However, with meditation, you become more sensitive and aware of this. You become more aware of your reality. 

Once someone sees life for what it really is, some call this Nirvana, they enter a limbo between two choices. 

One of which touches on the darker sides of meditation, such as nihilism where they think everything is pointless. Or they accept what’s wrong and change it for the better. 

Reality isn’t always pleasing, but the beauty of meditation is that it helps us see things objectively, without judgment, only to later on hand pick what we want in our life. 

Understanding this on a deeper level makes many less likely to give in on the temptations of the mind, as to reach this point, you usually are a bit in the meditation, where, if you push through, you’re more likely to reach a deep state of calm you haven’t experienced before.

You redefine what pleasure is and start finding joy in small things that you previously had ignored, for instance, nature. 

That’s right, the beauty of meditation is that it increases your sensitivity to things that were already there, but it gives you a different picture of things, and this is the type of good sensitivity we experience in the long term. 

Upon meditating, many start practicing more gratitude, which leads to seeing abundance where others see scarcity. Or, in other words, seeing solutions to things others see problems with. 

Problems will always exist, but the thing we focus on grows, so if we focus on the solution more often than note, we can, despite being aware of our present reality, turn the present into something pleasant to keep the mind from escaping to a fictitious place in the mind, where we falsely portray the future. 

It happens to millions of people, anticipation is a form of worry that can be disguised as something exciting. 

It’s common as many are happier before they achieve what they’re about to achieve vs. when they actually achieve it. It has a lot to do with expectations, something we let go of when meditating. 

Sensitivity To Your True Self

There’s the true you and there’s the skewed image of you the ego has. Meditation is a way to set the ego aside, but the price of that is seeing ourselves for who we really are, rather than the filtered perfectionist version of us. 

Not only that, but meditation teaches you self-acceptance, after the stage of sensitivity to strong thoughts or emotions. The release of these thoughts and emotions may spark anger because we’ve either been repressing them or they’ve been ingrained in the subconscious. 

Most people don’t take a step back to reflect on their day-to-day life, which ultimately causes negative thoughts and emotions to accumulate. It’s common to see meditators get angry, at least over the short term. It happened to me during the short term. We experience emotions at a deeper level because of our focus and because we’re let alone with our thoughts.

 Even this is a side we need to accept in ourselves in order to move on to becoming a better version of ourselves. 

Accepting ourselves and our reality creates the perfect combination to feel oneness, and makes us better able to connect with others. Another way people feel oneness is by meditating together. 

A skewed view of ourselves and our reality may make us feel good, but it’s not a desirable type of feeling good, unless your philosophy is that of hedonism. 

There’s nothing wrong with hedonism, but when the ego gets in the way and skews our view, we’re ignoring a part of ourselves that upon confrontation, would provide temporary pain but long-term peace. 

All in all, meditation does make us more sensitive, but not in a way that would set us back or keep us from progressing so long as we learn acceptance.