“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf” Jon Kabat-Zin
“Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realise where you already are.” Jon Kabat-Zin
If you’re feeling stressed, anxious or depressed, you’ve probably felt emotions that just feel too much! Or maybe day to day life is very triggering right now. How much time do we spend trying to stop ourselves from thinking negative, painful, thoughts or from feeling upset by something triggering…. And most importantly, does it work?
Read this sentence very carefully: Don’t think of pink squealing pigs!
….. If you’re like most of us, you just had an image of a pig go through your mind, and that’s around a subject that’s unlikely to hold any emotional charge for you! How much harder is it then to do this for a painful subject. We often try to control our thoughts and emotions when we are uspet, and if we succeed for a while it usually results in bottling things up that then spill out painfully in anger and resentment.
It’s pretty difficult to control our painful thoughts, or our emotions, but we can learn to surf the wave, and mindfulness is a key resource to help us to do that.
- Mindfulness involves using a set of tools to focus attention
- It is often focussed on bodily awareness, using tools like watching your breath, feeling your feet on the floor and body scanning
- There is no need to change your thoughts, and emotions – simply witness them
Then our triggers become less dominating, like white clouds passing over a blue sky. Reading this right now, you may be able to notice the part of you that is conscious of what you are doing – what you are reading, how you are sitting, your surroundings and so on. Not the part that is doing these things, but the part that is aware you are doing them – often called the witness. Right now that is probably in the background. Mindfulness practices help us to move that witness to the foreground. Once it is in the foreground, we are less likely to have knee-jerk reactions to painful events, and things we have found difficult, even overwhelming, become a lot easier. Eventually that witness moves from the foreground to being the space that everything happens in, we can feel ourselves AS awareness or presence, rather than a state of awareness being somewhere we visit occasionally!
- Our habits are to regret the past and worry about the future
- Leading to attention being scattered and unfocussed
- Leading to knee-jerk, habitual, reactions to challenging events
- Mindfulness is waking from life on autopilot
When we are not so ruled by our unconscious triggers, we are much better able to deal with life’s painful challenges. By helping us to feel centred and grounded in challenging situations, mindfulness helps us to do this.
My other posts have tips on how to do this, try this one:
Support for stress and strong emotions:
Ajay Hawkes
