The Third Way: A Mindful Approach to Emotion

When it comes to dealing with emotions, most of us have learned one of two strategies: suppress them or get swept away by them. We either push the feelings down — “I shouldn’t be feeling this” — or we let them take over — “I am this feeling.” But what if there’s a third way? One that neither resists emotion nor merges with it?

This is where the idea of mindful feeling comes in.

The Two Common Approaches

1. Suppression: This is the strategy of avoidance. Maybe we were taught that emotions are weak or unhelpful. So we try to push them down, ignore them, distract ourselves, or use logic to override them. The problem? What we resist tends to persist. Suppressed emotions often leak out later in unhelpful ways — in the body, in relationships, or in anxiety and burnout.

2. Fusion: This is the strategy of over-identification. We don't just feel anger — we become anger. We don’t just feel anxious — we are anxious. Our emotional state merges with our identity, colouring how we see the world and react. This often leads to impulsivity, reactivity, and regret.

Both paths can lead to suffering — just in different ways.

The Third Way: Mindful Feeling

The third option is to feel emotions consciously, openly, and with curiosity — without trying to change them or act on them. Just feel them. Let them be.

This doesn’t mean wallowing in emotion or making it bigger than it is. It also doesn’t mean using mindfulness as a covert way to get rid of feelings. It means practicing allowing — noticing the shape, weight, energy, and location of emotion in the body, and letting it move through on its own timeline.

You become the container for the emotion, rather than being consumed by it.

Let’s say you feel jealousy. Instead of suppressing it (“I shouldn’t feel this; I’m a bad person”) or fusing with it (“I’m pathetic and broken”) you try something else:

“Jealousy is here. I feel a tightening in my chest, a heat in my face. My mind is telling me stories about what this means. Can I allow this feeling to be here, just as it is, without judging it or needing to act on it?”

This approach gives you space. It gives you choice. And paradoxically, when you stop fighting emotions or feeding them, they tend to pass more quickly.

Why This Matters

Modern psychology has increasingly supported this mindful stance, from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). Neuroscience backs it too: allowing emotion, rather than avoiding or amplifying it, helps regulate the nervous system and build resilience.

It’s not always easy. Feeling without fleeing or fusing takes practice. But over time, it changes your relationship to your inner world. You learn that you can have emotions — strong ones, painful ones — without being hijacked by them.

The “third way” isn’t just the midpoint between suppression and fusion. It’s a different kind of response entirely — a shift in how we relate to emotions, not just a compromise between extremes.

Here’s the distinction:

• Suppression: “I push the emotion away.”

• Fusion: “I become the emotion.”

• Middle Point?: “I kind of suppress it a bit and kind of feel it a bit” — this would just be a watered-down version of both.

That’s not what mindful feeling is.

The Third Way (Mindful Feeling):

“I observe and allow the emotion as it is, without needing to change it or identify with it.”

It’s a stance of accepting awareness, where emotion is noticed and felt in full, but with distance and compassion, not avoidance or over-involvement.

Analogy: Watching a Fire

• Suppression = trying to smother the fire before it burns

• Fusion = jumping into the fire and getting burned

• Middle = standing too close, still getting singed

• Third Way = stepping back just enough to feel the warmth, understand the fire, and let it burn out on its own

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We can actually think about this by plotting two axes: One is emotion (fully feeling emotion vs disassociating/suppression) and the second axis is mindfulness. And what we are aiming for is to be high on both feeling (so we fully feel our feelings), and mindfulness (or we could say low on judging them or being fused with them).