Hello everyone 🙂
I hope you are all well! I’m pretty good.
Here is the last essay from my writing class. The assignment was to write an eight-page persuasive essay, using seven references. So it’s not a quick read. And it’s deep! But it might contain some gold. Haha, you decide.
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It’s an uncomfortable topic, but it opens the gates to freedom. There are two ways to see that underneath all the smiles and happiness, we suffer.
First, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “Problems with mental health are very common in the United States, with an estimated 50% of all Americans diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in their lifetime.”
Second, just look at people you know best. Are they really as happy as they could be? Or do they each carry around their own personal brand of anger, sadness, fear, or hurt? In an age of positivity, it’s easy to discount these emotions as unimportant. But the ways they pollute humanity tell a different story.
Current approaches to improving people’s mental and emotional wellbeing come with financial limitations and drawbacks. Meditation, however, is free. It’s an effective tool for personal self-development. It should be taught in schools so everyone can learn how to do it. So that the dark recesses of humanity can light.
If we reflect honestly, don’t we find anger, sadness, fear, and hurt within others and ourselves? No matter how small? These emotions linger and overwhelm. They echo and vibrate. They suffocate and fester. They overstay any logical welcome.
Is it worth keeping them? These emotions fuel insecurity, helplessness, addiction, and deceit. They cause betrayal, cheating, stealing, and abuse. They create blaming, judging, impatience, and intolerance. They breed arrogance, contempt, revenge, and fighting. They cause domination, neediness, and selfishness.
Is it worth keeping emotions that cause us to not really listen? To not understand or care? To demand, hurt, damage, and destroy? To isolate ourselves? Is it worth keeping emotions that make us act like we don’t affect each other profoundly? Like it’s possible to find harmony for ourselves without finding it for others?
It becomes clear that this isn’t just about ourselves. It’s about what we’re spreading to others—often to the ones we love most. Our emotions shape our interactions. If we aren’t spreading light, we’re sharing suffering. We all know from experience that even the subtlest amounts are noticed. Even the smallest amounts add up.
If we have even tiny amounts of darker emotions within us, aren’t they worth addressing? If we’re discouraged about the state of the world, shouldn’t we do what we wish others would do? Shouldn’t we address ourselves? Imagine what would happen if everyone took care of themselves this way?
Current approaches to mental and emotional wellbeing include self-help, therapy, and medication. Self-help books are usually written by educated specialists or people who have successfully weathered a storm. Podcasts, blogs, and online or in-person training are other popular options. As long as a person finds the right self-help product, the effort can be rewarding.
For example, when I was twenty-two, I started having panic attacks. When I visited the psychology section at a bookstore, I was overwhelmed by the thick volumes of psychological theory. The task seemed bigger than the cure. But then an assistant showed me an easy read from the self-help section. It taught me a technique that eliminated my problem—a technique I later learned was essentially the same as Buddha’s meditation technique.
It also taught me how involved we are in creating our minds and emotions. We do this knowingly or unknowingly, for good or bad. Self-help can save the day, but it relies on finding the right material at the right time. It also costs money, which limits accessibility.
Therapy is another approach that has proven effective. However, costs can keep it out of reach. Even with health insurance (which is itself a cost), sessions range from $20 to $150. While group sessions are available in some areas—some discounted, some free—you have to travel to therapy. For people with demanding schedules, this alone can keep them away. Some people access therapists online to avoid this, but report the experience as impersonal.
Medication is another popular choice for addressing one’s inner life. While medication can alter states quickly, it has drawbacks. First, it’s not free. Second, medications have side effects: dry mouth, constipation, low blood pressure, kidney problems, decreased sex drive, drowsiness, withdrawal, blurred vision, and potential death when mixed with alcohol or certain foods (Kosslyn and Rosenburg 705). Third, medication doesn’t cure.
Here’s an example: An appetite suppressant can reduce caloric intake and help someone lose weight. But it doesn’t help develop the self-sustaining habits that keep fat away. It doesn’t create toned muscle or fitness. It doesn’t help develop the beliefs, values, emotions, and behaviors needed to exercise and eat well.
Achieving mental and emotional wellbeing requires understanding that we create it—it’s up to us. We’re not broken when our emotions get the best of us, even subtly. We’re simply expressing part of our current makeup. But we’re in charge of who we are. Wellbeing means taking responsibility for our darker emotions. It means owning them and recognizing they’re in our control. Then we practice what allows us to shape and direct our inner being.
It’s possible. Imagine two people and a spider. One sees spiders as dangerous, creepy creatures. The other believes them to be useful and interesting. Notice how their beliefs affect their wellbeing. The first person will likely react with fear, then stomp, crush, or try to kill the spider. The second person’s beliefs create feelings of respect or excitement, motivating curiosity and care.
In this analogy, the spider can represent anything from certain people to the world at large. Notice that the spider doesn’t change—people’s beliefs do. And what a change it makes! Self-help and therapy both teach ways to identify aspects of ourselves that can be changed. These changes can decrease darker emotions and increase lighter ones. Through human interaction, they have the power to transform disharmony in the world.
When we note that self-help, therapy, and medication all require external assistance, something becomes clear. We don’t have effective, personally accomplished tools to manage, shape, and direct our inner selves. Compare this to physical fitness: If someone is overweight or unhealthy, they know exercise will help. Running, aerobics, walking, swimming, cycling, and sports are all well-known solutions.
But if someone wants to boost themselves mentally or emotionally, the solutions are far less obvious. Outside of seeking self-help, therapy, or medication, they’re almost non-existent. According to Tyson, “The mental health system must innovate to develop more effective models of care, especially for those with mild to moderate illness, who need the tools and support to care better for themselves.” What are the mental and emotional equivalents of exercise?
“Studies suggest that regular meditation can affect a wide variety of psychological and medical symptoms” (Kosslyn and Rosenburg 216). Meditation naturally heightens awareness of one’s values, beliefs, thoughts, and emotions. At the same time, it strengthens one’s ability to shape and direct them. What exercise does for the body, meditation does for mental and emotional wellbeing.
Can you imagine the state of humanity’s physical health if people had to find, pay for, and travel to a personal trainer every time they wanted to exercise? What if so little was known about exercise that people had to search for books just to learn what jogging is? Bodies would be suffering, and physical wellness would be rare. Yet this is the state of our mental and emotional landscape. We don’t have relevant exercises that are commonly known and practiced.
Teaching meditation in schools will help remedy this. It’s easy to teach, easy to learn, and it’s free. Schools already offer mental health days—similar to sick days but for low mental and emotional wellbeing. Shouldn’t we also teach a tool to increase wellbeing?
As Wisner, Jones, and Gwin write, “Studies have shown that the benefits of meditation interventions for adolescents include improved cognitive functioning; increased self-esteem; improvements in emotional self-regulation, self control and emotional intelligence; increased feelings of well-being; reduction in behavioral problems; decreased anxiety; decreases in blood pressure and heart rate; improvement in sleep behavior; increased internal locus of control; and improved school climate” (152).
Some people oppose this idea. They say meditation isn’t for everyone because some people can’t meditate. For example, a fundamental part of meditation is noticing when your attention shifts away from a chosen focus (like noticing your breathing rhythm). Some people complain they can’t meditate because their minds won’t cooperate—their minds constantly wander.
But a wandering mind is largely what the practice addresses. Saying you can’t meditate because your mind wanders too much is like saying you can’t exercise because your muscles lack coordination and it’s tiring. In both exercise and meditation, resistance is as natural as progress.
It’s also important to remember something else. If a person’s negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors don’t cause critical trouble in their lives or relationships, it’s easy to do nothing about them. But lifting the deepest recesses of our beings isn’t just about crisis control. It’s about proactively gaining perspective, patience, tolerance, understanding, compassion, gratitude, strength, courage, maturity, foresight, integrity, calm, and inner peace.
These states don’t just happen—they’re earned. They result from healthy, exercised mental and emotional faculties. Meditation is the activity of exercising these faculties.
Even so, some people argue they’re fine without a wellbeing practice like meditation. It’s easy to discount our own antisocial emotions as unimportant. But how can we be exempt when we can so easily point out unnecessary levels in others? It’s easy to say we’re not part of the problem. But then where do so many of life’s struggles come from?
Impatience, road rage, insomnia, loneliness, comfort eating, compulsions, addictions of all kinds, laziness, obsessiveness, stress-related conditions, phobias, neuroses—and the stories we hear every day about people hurting people. We’re not exempt. Despite our conviction, despite our certainty, despite our sound reasoning, we’re at the other end of other people’s stories. Usually in small ways—little things we could have handled better. Things that hurt others nonetheless. Things that add up. And occasionally some big things.
As far back as 1990, meditation was recognized as a useful stress-management technique (Sdorow 157). Yet most people still don’t know how to do it. It’s time to teach ourselves how to achieve greater mental and emotional wellbeing by teaching meditation in schools. Everyone will have a chance to learn how to do it.
Humanity won’t get better until we do.
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So there you have it. Possibly a bit preach but I really do believe in what I said. This type of thinking has really helped me grow, through thick and thin. I hope there was something in there for you too. And if you’re reading this, you might be one of the only people to have made it to the end, haha. Congratulations. And thank you.
I’ll check in with your again in the new year! Lots of love to you all. May you feel someone’s love, give lot of love, and gain one or two pounds (or kilograms) from some really good treats in the next two months.
PS (I’d love to hear from you!)
Lots of love,
Barrett Preston Busschau
Check out my next blog: An update from September 2021 – January 2022
