Emotion and Meditation

Series: Divergent Obstacles, Divergent Gifts

This essay is part of a series on obstacles neurodivergent people might face when it comes to meditation, as well as some of the strengths we bring to practice. Today’s essay explores differences in how we experience and express emotion and asks whether these differences are an obstacle, a strength, or both.

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Recently, looking for an image to use on a website, I came across a photo of myself online, me at the age of twenty or so. If my name had not been attached to the photograph, I wouldn’t have recognised her, one of three young people on a stage – violinist, cellist, pianist – standing with a formal awkwardness that lets me know there’s an audience behind the camera.

Her face holds the ghost of a smile. You can’t tell what she thinks or feels and I don’t think that’s a trick of the lens. From here I see just how unformed she is, how unknowable, how masked. The adjective most often attached to her was ‘calm’ but I remember enough to know that was almost never how she felt. I don’t recognise the two young men. I don’t remember the event or what we played. I don’t remember the clothes.

Such an odd experience, realising that young woman was once ‘myself’. I could walk past her in the street and not know her. Except, I couldn’t because she doesn’t exist any more.

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As my understanding of both neurodivergence and spiritual practice grows, it sometimes feels as if these two pull in different directions. This is particularly true when it comes to understanding the role of emotion in meditation. Since I learned about alexithymia – a difficulty in both identifying and speaking about emotions that is common among autistic people and, perhaps to a lesser extent, among ADHDers too – I’ve had a new word to apply to myself. At the same time, my experience in meditation shows me that, even though we give them names, emotions are not things. They are not fixed. They have no boundaries. This makes me wonder how important it is to become literate in emotion: what the point is in learning words for things that don’t exist? But then, since nothing can be said to exist in any fixed and final way – since both science and spiritual practice show us there are not, in reality, any objects in this world – an argument against learning the words for emotions would be an argument against all words: one that, for obvious reasons, I’m not too keen to make.

Literally meaning ‘no words for emotions’, alexithymia is currently thought to be caused by trauma. Living within systems and communities not designed for us, with sensitive nervous systems that pick this up in high-definition technicolour, it’s common for us to develop complex PTSD, a form of trauma response caused by ongoing misattunement with the world (rather than by a single traumatic event). Alexithymia is best seen as a protective mechanism, a kind of dissociation, that allows us to live with this sense that we are out of tune. We learn not to feel what we feel. We learn not to feel it because it hurts.

Because of this, therapeutic approaches designed to support us often focus on helping us understand our own emotions better, to feel them safely, and to express them accurately. A common tool for this is the emotion wheel, where the crude, basic emotions of anger, joy, sadness, fear and disgust are ever more finely graded to create a greater emotional vocabulary. The idea is that if you can name it you can also feel it.

Autistic psychologist Jennifer Kemp, for example, talks about helping her clients to do this. They learn to link thoughts about an event (x happened so it’s possible that I’m feeling y) with physical sensations in the body, before going on to identify the associated emotion. She gives the example of a client who hasn’t been invited to a party. He finds a heavy sensation in his chest when talking about this. Her role is then to suggest possible emotions – you might be feeling rejected, despondent, hurt – until they find one that resonates.

‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘I’m feeling hurt!’

She says that a lot of her work with autistic clients is doing this over and over, situation by situation, until we learn to do it for ourselves. It can take a long time, she says.

On first hearing this, I can’t help finding it a bit patronising. Surely we autistic people are not so hopeless at expressing our emotions. I’m a writer, after all, I tell myself defensively: words is the thing I can do. But then I remember being at a shiatsu session once, talking about how overwhelmed I was by the responsibility of being a parent, tears pouring down my face. The therapist asked me what emotion I was feeling. When I started to talk some more, she stopped me.

‘Those things you’re saying aren’t emotions,’ she said. ‘Emotions are things like anger, sadness, fear.’

I looked at her. ‘It’s not really any of those,’ I said.

Remembering that clarifies my own experience of alexithymia. It certainly wasn’t a lack of emotion. And it wasn’t a lack of words or thoughts about the situation. But in the middle of the complicated story I was telling, I suddenly felt like a child, holding the simple words she passed me, turning them over in my hands.

‘It’s just a lot,’ I said. ‘A lot and all at once.’

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Photos are strange objects. They make us strange, separating us from ourselves. They show us a fiction, a fixed grin. Seeing photos of myself even now, I clearly recognise the neurodivergent mask, the way I try to smile the right way, to not be found out in an awkward posture or an expression that betrays me. But for everyone, neurodivergent or not, photos objectify us in this way.

I remember hearing there are certain indigenous tribes whose members refuse to have their photos taken, in case their souls get taken too. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it makes a kind of sense to me. I’ve always hated having my photo taken too, hated being fixed in a frame. I always want to take it back, as if it was something clumsy I’d said, something taken the wrong way: I didn’t mean it. But of course you can’t take it back. You can’t take anything back, really, and photos make that clear.

Words can be the same. They might help us communicate our inner states to others, but they also stop the flow of time. We start looking for objects to match the names we’ve learnt. In doing this we miss the ever-changing wash of colour and light that can’t be pinned down with a name.

Not all language works this way. There is a disconnect between who I feel myself to be here, underwater, among these words that seem to flow like music – swimming, seal-like, fat and slick towards my point – and how I appear dressed up in human clothes, out of my element, words clutched in my hands like talismans, words calcified.

Perhaps when you are neurodivergent there’s a sense of barely existing in the world at times. Perhaps we need these masks to fix ourselves in place, or seem to. What if autism is a difference in our ability to believe in ourselves? What if, in the end, this might be an advantage?

It sometimes feels as if neurodivergence and spiritual practice are pulling me in two different directions. I don’t think they really are. I have gained so much from claiming an autistic identity: the opportunity to see my differences as strengths; the ability to recognise kin; a new lens on the world and on myself. At the same time, I want to resist fixing myself in place, to resist naming myself as any thing.

‘Both/and’ seems to be my favourite answer to all sorts of questions just now. Perhaps I’m avoiding a decision. Perhaps I’m sitting on the fence. Or perhaps we all learn, sooner or later, that life is essentially paradoxical, that anything we think we know for sure will turn out to be wrong. If there is nothing to hold on to, if everything is in question then, for all of us, meditation (and writing, and life) is about sensing what is here, in whatever way we can, whether we know the name for it or not.