Reclaiming our ability to feel
What violence does to our empathy
In a world where violence floods our lives and screens, how do we protect our ability to feel?
When I first started meditating, I was shocked by how much more sensitive I became.
Small moments—like a stranger offering help to someone in need on a busy New York street—would suddenly make my eyes well up. Even the simplest news story or a well-crafted advertisement would leave me unexpectedly emotional.
I didn’t know if this was a good or bad thing. It made my days feel heavier, more draining, but I also felt connected to, I don’t know, a more human-tender part in me?
Through practice, I’ve learned how to balance that raw sensitivity with a base of equanimity. I still feel frequently misty-eyed by both overt and more subtle forms of heartache, but now I’m able to, more or less, hold my seat.
Looking back, I can also see how jarring this shift was for me, as if the floor was moving beneath my feet. The practice that I thought would help ease my anxiety and depression, was actually revealing how much I had gotten used to numbing.
The constant exposure to violence that many of us face just by looking at our phones undoubtedly takes a toll on our well-being.
We read enraging stories of a single mother pushing herself to the brink, trying to afford a feeding tube for her child with leukemia. We witness the brutal reality of a man like Jordan Neely, choked to death on the subway, then his killer walking free. We see the savagery of bombs falling on homes, hospitals, and schools, tearing lives apart. Children maimed in a world they were just born into.
There’s also a more indirect violence we experience, the kind that sustains our way of life, obscured and distanced by capitalist machinery.
To simply survive this overwhelming deluge of violence, we’ve learned to cope in ways that disempower our most basic empathetic impulses.
Psychologist Melanie Joy writes about the role of psychological schemas—mental frameworks that shape how we perceive and interpret the world around us. These schemas are ingrained through personal experience and societal conditioning.
Joy explains that these cognitive frameworks protect us from feeling psychological discomfort, enabling us to participate in violent systems without fully confronting the emotional toll. Factory farming or cheap clothes manufactured across the world, for example.
In a society where moral compromises are common, Joy argues, “The system teaches us not to feel.”
Joy says the emotional toll of living in such a system is often masked by “psychic numbing”—a defense mechanism that disconnects us from the violence around us. She says psychic numbing operates through a range of defense mechanisms—denial, avoidance, justification, dehumanization—each of which helps us distance ourselves from violence.
These mechanisms are so pervasive they transform our empathy into indifference.
It takes herculean effort to not let the world’s violence harden us.
My first couple of years of meditation were dedicated to healing heartbreak—heartbreak not just from a relationship ending, but a larger unraveling of my sense of self that was unhealthily seeking meaning in all the wrong things—academic achievement, resume building, and intense partying.
I felt disillusioned with the stories I was fed as an adolescent about meritocracy and purpose, while the world felt like it was on fire and most of my peers were focused on climbing the corporate ladder.
I now realize that meditation was helping me in ways I hadn’t expected. I didn’t know it meant slowly relinquishing the self-made shell of angst and numbness I had built around myself.
Regular meditation practice compelled me to confront the ways I had been avoiding the feelings beneath my confusion. Sitting and focusing on my breath helped me reconnect with my body. Continuing to sit still until the timer went off—even when my skin felt like it was crawling—helped me cultivate the courage to tend to my own disillusionment, grief, and heartbreak.
It was excruciating. And it was what I needed.
My coming-of-age meditation story seems minuscule to the onslaught of global crises college-age folks face now.
We live in a time when the stitches of our society seem to be ripping farther and farther apart. And with social media we're more aware of violence and the systems that make them possible. But even while we organize, volunteer, and build more-just systems, it’s imperative we do the seemingly self-serving work of tending to our own hearts.
Whenever I’m less disciplined in my own practice, I can feel the karmic pull of greed, aggression, and delusion creeping back into the crevices of my consciousness.
Coming after me like the cackling wicked witch of the West, my mental habits—to lash out or numb out—are compelling, seductive, they are easy for me to slip back into.
Many of us recognize that what we often perceive as individual mental health issues are actually symptoms of much larger cultural problems. Our social conditioning is powerful—like the iron bull down by Wall Street—and it will indiscriminately pull us into its vortex of apathy if we're not paying attention.
This requires more than intellectual understanding. It demands rigorous spiritual practices that transcend the mind, reach the very fiber of our being, and transform our hearts. If we aren’t actively cultivating the discernment and courage to face the emotions that haunt us, we succumb to the emotional numbness that violent systems depend on.
So much of what Adriana writes expresses my own thoughts and experiences -- about numbing myself to violence, parenthood, and the possibilities of a Buddhist practice which does not replicate systems of inequity and supremacy.
At 55, I still wrestle with balancing meaningful work and sustainable income and have lost too many hours-weeks-months-years of creative productivity due to financial anxiety and insecurity. In fact, like Adriana and her family have done, I am about to move into my own mother's house with my two almost-grown kids. That said, I particularly admire Adriana’s faith in the importance of her work and her belief that it is worth making sacrifices in order to accomplish the work which we’re called to do. Because it is.
I recognize your story in my own experience as a longtime meditator. We manage to so thoroughly shield ourselves from violence that we may not consciously recognize it, yet it still takes a toll. Learning to be open is part of healing and growing.