Emotional ups and downs? Stock market ups and downs? Is there a difference? Can meditation alleviate the inner turmoil of the external ups and downs?

Wow; this site is about meditation in general, and about meditation is the healthcare field in particular. So, what’s this post about the stock market got to do with anything? (<—-For those of you needing advice on the stock market, this post links to Robert Pagliarini’s column. Robert is a great guy who invests his time and resources in the Band of Brothers, previously featured on this site.)

I don’t know about you, but even when my meditation practice feels (close to) “perfect,” my concerns about the future can become out of hand and pull my mind off-center and into left field!

Having worked with our emotions through meditation, we may notice that the strongest emotions can lay to waste our meditation skills, leaving us adrift in the scarred terrain of a desolate landscape of our mind.

So, when the stock market swings, it’s best that our emotions don’t follow it into its upswings and downturns. This is where the integration of our meditation skills is challenged and the very mettle of our mind is put to the test. In a post on this site from last week titled, Why Practice Meditation Every Day? Five Great Reasons, we discussed why we need to be able to bring our meditation practice into our every-day life. Since our financial life is part of our every day life (do other people besides me ever try to separate the two?!) it behooves us to use this charged subject as the basis of our meditation practice, allowing both the down and ups to increase the brilliance of our practice rather than down us emotionally.

Have you ever noticed that even the most terrifying or elating emotions don’t last forever? Granted, they may resurface, or appear whenever the outer circumstances evoke them. Even in that case, what is it that evokes them? Our conditioning and our previous experiences are the basis for most of our reactivity to daily and life stressors. We react the way that we’ve done previously, and will continue to do so until we achieve enough stability within our mind to do otherwise. Wait, can we do otherwise?

It’s said that one of the most wonderful thing about difficult emotions is that they can be transmuted or changed through the practice of meditation. That’s good news! While we may not be able to change the stock market through our meditation – although one has to muse on what the market would look like if peoples’ minds weren’t so volatile?! – we can change how we respond to its swings.

When Black Friday comes
I’ll stand down by the door
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor

 – from “Black Friday,” off the album, Katy Lied by the band, Steely Dan

I remember as a kid being horrified when my father used to tell me stories of how bankers and investors jumped off of buildings during the great stock market crash of the 1930s. I could never understand why people would end their lives just because their cash had vaporized over night. I guess even though I’ve been through some emotional turmoil in my life, where I thought I’d never hit bottom and would never claw my way out once doing so, I now understand to some basic degree how fleeting and impermanent emotions truly are.

When we begin to work with our emotions, we often find that we’ve been swept off into our stories, hopes and fears before we’re able to control them. That’s great! All that we need to do is to acknowledge them and – as quickly as is possible – bring ourselves back to the present, perhaps using our breath as an anchor of our attention. When we do this enough, we’ll see why a regular practice of meditation is so vital to our emotional and mental health.

For more information on how to meditate, and how to tame your emotions, please see the Related Posts below. Also, don’t forget to download the free ebook, Can Meditation Change the Way that You View Your World?, for help with getting started in you meditation practice. Also, you can now download the new ebook, How to Work with the Four Distractions to Meditationto learn how to deal with some of the obstacles to meditation.

NEW – this site has a new page, Media, where you can find articles, MP3 tracks for downloading, and videos on the subject of meditation.

As always, please feel free to share your comments. Let me and others know when you raise your expectations. And, as always, please feel free to contact me if you’d like to see additional content or other discussions on this site.