Developing a mindfulness practice takes, well… practice. It can be a little startling once you start practicing mindfulness. It’s hard to go through our days not really being aware of what’s going on around us, nor what’s going on inside us, our thoughts and emotions. Our society is so focused on the past or the future that staying in the present is tough at first. You will become aware of everything and experience it in the present moment by doing things like meditation, which is my favorite. Let me tell you why I think it’s so important for all my brothers out there to practice mindfulness.
Mindfulness Practice
I think it’s impossible to overstate the importance of self-awareness. Self-awareness is having a sense of who you are, what your values are, what drives you. It’s not about being perfect or making all the right decisions, but it’s about understanding where you are, what you want, and why. With mindfulness comes the ability to make better choices for yourself.
Mindfulness is the first step to living a happy and fulfilling life. It’s not hard once you get started, but it can be challenging at first. Formal practice is taking time out every day to focus on your breath, your thoughts, your body, and your emotions. There are many ways to do this. You can use apps like Headspace or Insight Timer if they help you by providing a structured system with guided meditations of varying lengths. You can spend 10 minutes in the morning focusing on what you’re grateful for and appreciating all the little things that make life great. Or you can focus on a specific time of day—you might see yourself checking your phone ten times an hour if that’s when you most often get distracted. Just try to be aware of how you’re behaving, what you’re thinking, and what’s happening in your life at that exact moment whenever possible.
I know you’ve probably heard the labels associated with meditation. “It’s just some woo-woo hippie stuff.” “It’s just Buddhism.” “They’re trying to get me to stop living in the real world.” It’s not any of that. Meditation is 1) an incredible stress reliever, 2) a way to be more productive at work, and 3) an outlet for all your pent-up resentment, anger, and fear.
Misconception 1. Not Having Any Emotion
When you start to practice mindfulness, you’ll find that it does not relieve you from your emotions. In fact, you’re not mindless about your emotions. Rather, you want to become more in touch with them so that you better understand them without judging yourself or others. Things are not just good or bad- they just are.
It doesn’t mean that the external circumstances in your life don’t change, or that you won’t have difficult times- painful sometimes even. It means that when things get tough, you can be at peace with anything and everything. If you’re experiencing tough times in your life, it can be easy to want to be completely mindless about everything around you. That is not what mindfulness is about.
Because you are actually taking the time to stop and become aware of the contents of your mind, you are becoming aware of and noticing your emotions in a much more vivid fashion. You’ll be surprised by your ability to recognize how you feel will increase as you release your normal defenses. You’ll find that letting go of destructive distractions (i.e. over-eating, mindlessly watching TV or scrolling social media, etc.) will make way for more thoughts about how you really feel. Doesn’t mean you won’t still experience sadness, or anger, or excitement. You’ll be moving in the direction of not being controlled by those feelings and not having feelings about your feelings.
Misconception 2. Wiping Your Mind Clean
By practicing mindfulness you are training your mind to be aware of what it’s doing all the time. You will begin to become more aware of what you are thinking in the present moment. You don’t want to empty your mind or lose your senses. Instead, you’re going to be learning to use them in different ways. To feel a quiet confidence. This isn’t an idea, or a thought, or a concept. It’s a feeling. A feeling that doesn’t come and go. Your other emotions may come and go. This isn’t an emotion. It’s the essence of the mind itself, and it’s with us our entire life. Quiet Confidence is having both the courage and the ease to be with yourself, just as you are. It’s going beyond thinking or any concept of good or bad. It is the result of having the ability to be fully present and fully aware, here and now, just as you are. It takes courage to be at ease with the mind, just as it is.
Misconception 3. Seeking a Blissful Life
Who wouldn’t love to live in a state of utopia thinking that they’ve found their way to being some spiritual being higher than themselves? (and a God-like spiritual is not what I’m talking about) We can feel that way and don’t think that everyone else is struggling within their own reality. A lot of people who practice meditation become distressed when they find their minds wandering. They can feel a sense of agitation or become unsettled when that happens. If you’re practicing Mindful meditation, you allow pleasant states of mind to come and go not holding onto blissful states or rejecting unpleasant ones. Again, it’s being at ease with the mind, just as it is.
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Misconception 4. Withdrawing from Life
When you practice mindful meditation, you’re not going to become a monk, a nun, or some a hermit dwelling in a cave on a mountain top somewhere. I guess I should say, if that’s the life you want, go for it. The fact is, you don’t need to do or be any of that. Instead, you’re just going to be experiencing moments fully, one moment at a time and you are paying attention to the present.
It can be easy to think we need to try to sustain some sort of “state of mindfulness”, even though the inevitable thoughts, feelings, and impulses that come up in the course of our everyday lives. We can even think that our “state of mindfulness” outside of our meditation is rarely pure – that is to say, free of thoughts and emotions. We then try to work hard to maintain a “second-best state of mindfulness” by staying identified with an internal “observer” who is aware of, but not involved with, those thoughts, feelings, and impulses. It can be easy to get caught in the trap of thinking we need to maintain some sort of detached self-consciousness at all times. Possibly, we can find ourselves making internal comments like, “Oh, look at that, I seem to be experiencing some sensations of anger.”
Mindfulness isn’t some “state” that we are trying to be in or maintain. Mindfulness can give us a way of looking at things differently and enables us to relate to all of the experiences in our life which might be causing stress, anxiety, uncomfortableness, or just preventing us from living our best life. This, in turn, can allow us to understand ourselves better and, if needed, completely transform ourselves.
Misconception 5. Escaping Pain
Practicing mindfulness meditation is not going to take away your pain completely. Rather, it is going to help you to manage it. As you go through your life, you will ultimately feel levels of physical and emotional pain. The more you experience and practice mindfulness, the more capacity you’ll have to understand, endure, and control the pain. Painful sensations are one part of the equation and the suffering caused by the pain is another. In order to alleviate the pain from suffering you need to let go of resisting the pain, protesting the pain, and working to avoid it. This way, you can experience the pain in moment-to-moment awareness and acceptance.
You have your emotions for a reason. They teach us things and allow us to truly and fully experience our lives. Pain, sadness, are vital to our overall well-being. Instead of being detached from or avoiding our emotions, mindfully embracing our emotions, observing them without judgment or belief that there is a right or wrong way to feel. This gives us the space we need to be in the moment, and respond to the thing that is causing the emotion. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
Conclusion
Mindful meditation helps us to enhance our ability to be mindful, to be more present in our daily lives, and to make more conscious decisions. Since most of us have gone so long living in a state of mindlessness – going through each day mindlessly, not really being aware of things going on around us, nor what’s going on inside of us, out thoughts and emotions – it can be tempting to replace that with a “state of mindfulness”.
When we talk about the busy mind, we’re not just talking about constantly thinking about stuff and ruminating. It’s more than that. It is something a lot deeper, and more subtle. It’s that part of us that is looking for something else, wanting to be someone else, wanting to exist in a different world than the one we live in right now. This is what can cause our minds to be busy. Consequently, we also feel that in our bodies – an uncomfortableness or uneasiness. Avoid the traps of thinking that mindfulness is not having any emotions, or wiping your mind clean, or seeking a blissful life, or withdrawing from life, or escaping pain, or even some pursuit of some state called mindfulness. Instead, tap into your inner courage and ease to be with yourself, just as you are. That place of quiet confidence, of awareness where we can simply recognize the mind for what it is.
“Good questions outrank easy answers.” – Paul A. Samuelson (American economist)
- Can you think, speak, and act without that busyness of mind?
- How do these misunderstandings of mindfulness resonate?
- Did you find that you had any of these misconceptions?
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This workbook will introduce mindfulness as a foundation for living a more deliberate, authentic, purposeful life of peace, freedom, health, and fulfillment.
