Question: Whenever I meditate I always end up crying. Is this bad? What can I do to stop this?
Years ago when I started meditating on death, I specially meditated on the death of my mother (she’s still alive, but I was contemplating on when her time would come). For the longest time, I cried almost every time. My dearest mother, the person who brought me into this world, who raised me and loved me through all I have done and become, the person whom I love the most – just thinking about her dying made me extremely emotional. Then I meditated on the death or my father and sisters, and the rest of my beloved family. I would get out of meditation and ask myself why would a grown man cry over something that hasn’t even happened yet? I knew that worrying about the anxieties of the future is worthless, because we can’t predict or know what the future will entail. But, I meditated on death for two reasons: 1) to prepare myself of death, and 2) to realize that death is a natural and necessary process of life.
We try so hard to live for as long as possible, we protect ourselves from danger, harm and pain, but we rarely realize that all these are inevitable and when we put so much energy and effort into avoiding them, we end up missing out on the true happiness and beauty of the world.
So whether or not you were meditating on death or not that caused you to cry, sometimes meditation, if we’re doing it correctly, will reveal a lot of closed up emotions and feelings within us. So when we meditate and find the door that all these hidden emotions are locked behind, they can flood to the surface and bring up a lot of different feelings, whether it’s happiness, anger, jealousy, sadness, etc. Crying isn’t bad, but you need to figure out why you’re crying and try to pinpoint the reason it happened so you can directly deal with that reason and fix it (if it needs fixing).
Smile and be well!