>According to a new paper, mindfulness may be especially harmful when we have wronged other people. By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.
I'm curious what is meant by mindfulness in this regard. People use the same word (meditation) to refer to many different practices, each with its own intentions and results.
For example in Metta we develop feelings of kindness towards others, in concentration practice we develop concentration (which can be used as a soothing respite from the horrors of life, and from the psychological destabilization of insight practice), and in insight practice we develop insight (in the specific sense that is relevant to becoming enlightened—see Daniel Ingram's excellent book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, available for free online).
If you meditate in a way that suppresses negative emotions instead of confronting them, that seems counterproductive to me—except to the degree that you know you are doing it intentionally to take a break from the hard work of psychological re-integration (shadow work).
My personal aim in meditation is to become lighter, ie. less burdened by feelings of heaviness. I have had a few days and weeks in a state of near-total lightness, and it is wonderful. So my goal is to obtain that state of inner peace more or less permanently.
(As an aside, in such a state I find it effortless to work with complete concentration, am not prone to avoidance, procrastination or addictive behavior, and experience heightened physical and creative energy.)
So, while meditating I will often have to confront some nasty stuff, because until I resolve it, I have to carry it around with me. Sometimes it's about negative beliefs, often rooted in difficult past experiences.
Sometimes it's about guilt. To resolve guilt, I have to make amends. I have to apologize. Then I feel a bit less burdened, as though I've unloaded one of many large stones from my backpack.
Where I ran into trouble was that I put too much pressure on myself to be moral: I tried to live up to the ideal of always doing the right thing, and when I learned that I was unable to do that, that was extremely disturbing to me.
What I failed to realize is that it's a muscle you have to develop. You can't just decide to instantly become perfectly moral, just like you can't decide to be instantly become perfectly fit or fluent in Japanese. Like anything else, your "moral consistency" will improve with time and effort.