Meditation For Activists
2026 May 27
It seems like a contradiction, meditation and activism. Here’s why it’s not.
- Meditation is well known to help reduce stress along with many other benefits.
- It resources you to keep going.
- It protects against burnout.
- It helps you become less reactive and thus more in control of how you behave.
- It helps you become more aware of projections and so more effective.
It’s stressful to think about climate catastrophe, extinction events, societal collapse, fascism, etc. Without a skillful response to this stress a person can become easily overwhelmed and so, of necessity, try to ignore it all or become fatalistic, a ‘doomer’.
It’s a very good idea to take time out to examine one’s real motivations. So much of what we do and think comes from unconscious sources, often family dynamics, and these tensions can be projected onto situations. For example, how much of a reaction to authority figures comes from resentments that were born in early childhood? If motivations and orientations like these remain unexamined, a person can become impervious to any arguments to the contrary. They are not operating from a position of clear seeing. We often find it easy to see how other groups are being manipulated, like in the case of fascistic propaganda, but if we remain blind to our own projections we’re likely to fall into similar traps. How many progressive projects have foundered on inter-personal conflicts? How many of those collapses have their roots in unseen family dynamics being played out unconsciously?
Meditation in all its many forms offers us a skillful way to try and deal with all this. Perhaps paradoxically, it is warrior’s path. Some people think that meditation is all very airy-fairy, ’new agey’ or ‘woke bollocks’. The ancient Samurai didn’t think so, they were very keen on Zen because it put their minds into a very clear and precise state that was totally willing to do whatever was necessary in any given situation.
The Buddhist, Taoist, Vedanta & Sufi approaches, among others, offer us ways to at least attempt to deal with our internal worlds. Without such ways we fall prey so easily to depression, extremism, burnout & collapse. We gotta keep going! The stakes are too high to give up. We meditate so we can activate!
