Why I Stopped Meditating and Started Screaming Instead

Somewhere along the way, we didn’t just learn how to feel our emotions; we learned how to present them.There’s a difference. Meditation was supposed to bring me closer to myself. That was the promise. Sit still, breathe deeply, observe your thoughts without judgment. And at first, it worked. It gave me language for things I used to ignore. It taught me how to pause instead of react. It made me feel, in a quiet and controlled way, like I was evolving.

But then something shifted. The more I practiced, the more my emotions started to feel… curated. Not fake, exactly. But filtered. Managed. Interpreted before they were even fully experienced. I wasn’t just feeling sadness, I was identifying it, labelling it, softening it. I wasn’t angry, I was “triggered,” “activated,” “processing.” Everything became something I could explain, package, and, if needed, share. Because that’s what we do now.

We don’t just have emotions, we translate them into something legible. Something acceptable. Something that fits neatly into a caption, a voice note, a conversation where we sound self-aware and emotionally intelligent. We’ve become fluent in the language of healing.But somewhere in that fluency, we lost the rawness.

Vulnerability today is polished. It has structure. It has timing. It often arrives with a conclusion. You don’t just say you’re struggling, you explain why, what you’ve learned, how you’re growing from it. Pain is no longer just pain. It’s content. It's a narrative. It’s something that needs to make sense.

And meditation, unintentionally, started feeding into that. It taught me to observe my emotions, but not always to feel them. To create distance. To sit with discomfort, yes, but also to neutralize it. To turn intensity into something quieter, more controlled, more… presentable.

And yet, maybe that has always been the contradiction. As Labrinth puts it in his song “Something like an Opera”

“They say, in order to heal
You got to sit with that internal chaos
You gotta suffer your demons
Speak on it, verbalise it too
For me, that internal dance
Something like an opera.”

And that is exactly it. We are told to sit with our chaos, name it, understand it, verbalize it, but chaos is not graceful. It is not neat. It is not aesthetically pleasing. An opera is loud. Dramatic. Uncontainable. Which means maybe healing was never meant to be this silent, elegant thing we could perform so beautifully for other people.

Because not everything is meant to be softened. Some emotions aren’t gentle. They’re not insightful. They don’t come with lessons attached. They’re loud, irrational, disproportionate, and inconvenient. They don’t want to be observed from a distance, they just want to be expressed.

But our expression has become uncomfortable. Crying too hard, getting too angry, reacting too quickly, these are things we’ve learned to correct. To regulate. To fix. There’s always a better way to respond. A more evolved version of ourselves we’re supposed to embody.

So we hold it in. We breathe through it. We journal about it. We intellectualize it. We perform stability. And the irony is, we’ve never been more disconnected from what we actually feel. 

That’s when I stopped meditating for a while.

Not because it failed, but because I started using it to avoid something. I was becoming very good at understanding my emotions, but not very good at releasing them. I could explain exactly why I felt overwhelmed, but I couldn’t point to the last time I let myself fully lose control.

So I started screaming instead.

Not metaphorically. Literally. In my car, in my room, into a pillow—wherever it felt safe enough to be completely unfiltered. No structure, no language, no self-awareness layered on top. Just sound. Just release. And it felt… honest.

There’s something about screaming that resists performance. You can’t aestheticize it. You can’t package it into something digestible. It doesn’t translate well. It’s not meant to. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and a little embarrassing.

Which is exactly why it works. It bypasses the part of you that wants to make sense of everything. The part that wants to stay composed, to stay “good,” to stay in control. It lets something out before it’s been analyzed, before it’s been reframed into growth. It reminds you that not every emotion needs to be understood to be valid.

This isn’t an anti-meditation manifesto. Meditation still has value. Awareness matters. Reflection matters. But awareness without expression becomes its own kind of suppression, just quieter, more socially acceptable. We don’t talk enough about that. We talk about healing as if it’s inherently calm. As if it always looks like peace, clarity, and acceptance. But sometimes healing is disruptive. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it doesn’t look like growth at all, it looks like unraveling.

And maybe that’s the part we’ve been trying to avoid. Because unraveling doesn’t perform well. It doesn’t make for a clean narrative. It doesn’t fit into the version of ourselves we’re trying to present to the world; especially in a culture where being “self-aware” has become a kind of social currency. But there’s a cost to always being composed. There’s a cost to always knowing what you feel, why you feel it, and how to respond in the most evolved way possible.

You start to lose access to the parts of yourself that don’t make sense. The parts that are reactive, emotional, intense. The parts that feel before they think. The human parts.

So no, I didn’t stop meditating because it didn’t work. I stopped because I didn’t want to turn my emotions into something that always needed to be understood, improved, or shared in a way that made me look like I had it all together.

Sometimes, I don’t want to have it together.
Sometimes, I don’t want to be calm, or grounded, or self-regulated.
Sometimes, I just want to feel something fully (without translating it into a lesson.)

And sometimes, that feeling doesn’t sound like silence. It sounds like screaming my lungs out, and wow is it freeing. 

Photo Credit @pinterest