Sadhguru Got This One Wrong

I am typically a big fan of what Sadhguru says. Sadhguru is a well-known Indian guru, philosopher, spiritual leader of sorts, and yogi who speaks publicly and often about many topics. In an Instagram post, he was asked, "What is the most important thing you can do for your child?" His advice was:

“Make sure your children never see, at least at home, an angry face, a frustrated face, a dejected face, a depressed face. Make sure they don’t see these things. Let them always see a joyful face, a loving face, an ecstatic face. Not the things you don’t want; don’t make an example of that. That’s the biggest thing you can do for your child.”

As many people look up to him and take his advice and wisdom to heart, I believe a critique of this stance is warranted.

I not only disagree with this stance, but I also believe it is damaging to spread this message to parents and people alike. I want to first be as generous as possible. He says “at least at home,” and in that spirit, he may be speaking from a place of creating a safe and secure environment at home while assuming that other emotions will be experienced and modeled in the outside world. I don’t believe most people listening to him will hear or interpret it that way, but this could be a less dangerous message if that was the underlying intent.

My biggest issue with this advice is that parenting is not about being perfect or even modeling perfection. Parenting is about preparing our children for the imperfect world they will eventually be thrust into. A major part of that preparation is emotional experience, regulation, and expression. Children do not learn emotional regulation by never seeing difficult emotions. They learn emotional regulation by seeing emotions experienced, expressed, and managed in both healthy and unhealthy ways. We don’t want to continually show poor behaviors, but mistakes and repairs bring us much closer to people than a perfect relationship ever will.

First and foremost, not allowing your children to see anything other than joy, love, and ecstasy is not realistic. Every human being, including Sadhguru, goes through emotional experiences. Even if he doesn’t now, due to being incredibly mindful and wise, and possibly above human emotion, at one point in his life he did. Striving for this is impossible, and even if it is possible one day, this is not the path to get there.

Is the world purely joy, love, and ecstasy? No, it’s not, not even close. Our children will inevitably encounter anger, frustration, sadness, disappointment, rejection, and loss. If they never see these emotions modeled in healthy ways at home, where are they supposed to learn how to navigate them?

The statement “not the things you don’t want” is inherently problematic as well. We may not want to be angry, but there are many times when anger is the appropriate response. When you need to protect yourself, when a safety boundary has been crossed, or when your child is doing something dangerous, anger may be the appropriate response in order to keep them safe and communicate the severity of the situation.

The problem is not anger. The problem is unhealthy expressions of anger. It is what we do while angry that can be a problem.

One of the greatest gifts we can give our children is healthy emotional modeling. That means allowing them to see that difficult emotions exist while also showing them how to manage those emotions responsibly. Modeling healthy anger at home—being able to process it and hold it without maladaptive consequences such as hurting people, exploding without control, bottling it up until it becomes resentment, or expressing it through passive-aggressive words and actions—is a skill so few of us were taught.

The amount of hate, anger, and division in the world today is, in my opinion, a symptom of much of this unresolved, unprocessed anger and the incredibly poor emotional regulation skills many of us have. If we learn what our anger is about, we can process it internally. What happens when we don’t is that we direct it externally, which misses the mark. Too often, we suppress our emotions, which in turn leads our emotions to suppress us.

I believe and see that many of us were never taught what to do with anger beyond either expressing it destructively or hiding it. This is where we hurt our loved ones, damage relationships, and turn our anger outward because we do not know how to understand it within ourselves.

When Sadhguru says, “That’s the biggest thing you can do for your child,” that is a loaded statement in a couple of ways.

First, as someone people look up to, many are going to take his advice as truth. This gives his words tremendous power. This is not Sadhguru’s fault. He often speaks about the importance of individual responsibility and not blindly following others, including himself. It is a human condition error where we want answers and are so uncomfortable sitting in a place of uncertainty.

Second, it implies that this impossible environment is the correct or ideal one. This can lead parents, who often second-guess themselves, strongly desire to do the best for their children, and who will inevitably fail at maintaining this impossible standard, to a place of shame.

“I am a bad parent. Or, I am failing because I showed something other than joy in my home.”

Shame is one of the most powerful, yet destructive, motivators. It fuels self-hatred. It motivates us to continue internalizing our struggles because we are internally weak, stained, or ruined. It turns us away from others, which ironically is what we need to heal, and into an internal cycle of shame.

As a therapist, I believe healing does not occur through denying emotions. It is about confronting them, moving with and through them, and understanding what they truly are.

In closing, even if we could get to the place Sadhguru is speaking about as parents, this is the wrong way to get there. Getting to a place of joy and love is through anger, depression, frustration, and dejection—not by ignoring them. Joy is not created by avoiding difficult emotions. It is created through the pain and the hurt. We cannot truly feel joy without the suffering of life.