What is Mindfulness?
Often, we might experience stress in our lives; it’s pretty much inevitable. That feeling of tension in our bodies that can make us feel that we just don’t want things to be this way. If only life could be less stressful, easier, more like it was when I was younger, how I imagine it to be for someone else. The reality is that we will all experience some form of stress at some point in our lives, whether that be work related, to do with personal or familial relationships, an illness, or having a sense of low mood. For others this could develop into more serious forms of anxiety or depression. The question is how do we respond to it?
From personal experience, I know that having anxiety regarding work made me feel that I was forever chasing something that felt always just out of reach. Or I would meet one target only to find that something else took its place to ‘really’ mean success. I found myself always living in the future tense – ‘when I complete [insert a whole range of tasks] then I can relax’ or ‘when I get this job, this paper written, this marking completed, then I will be happy’. I felt constantly under achieving, always in a ‘doing’ mode of mind and ultimately unfulfilled. I would also apply this way of thinking to my personal relationships – ‘why can't they do what I want?’, ‘if only they would just stop/start doing that, then everything would be ok’. I was constantly searching for something else rather than noticing the joys in my life at that moment.
Or it might be that we spend much of our time recalling previous events and ruminating over what might have happened; retelling the same story and reliving all of the negative aspects over and over again. This dwelling on past events, often negative, is what I have called the ‘Train to Doomville’ – it’s the experience of suddenly feeling a little bit upset or unhappy about one thing and then whoomph already I'm on my way, traveling at the speed of light back to my negative thoughts about a long ago experience. ‘Why did I do that, what about if I could have done it differently, maybe they really meant this’ etc. I didn’t even notice myself getting on the train and yet here I was returning again and again and again. I felt stuck and all the dwelling on it simply made it worse?
Becoming aware:
What all of these experiences show us is our automatic patterns of behaviour, our reactions, to stress and most of the time we’re just unaware of it happening. We live in the future or the past tense of our lives rather than being present, in this moment, to this experience. This is where mindfulness can be really powerful because it can help explore our relationship to events and how we respond to them. Importantly mindfulness enables us to become aware of our automatic behavioural patterns and enable us to have a choice.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” (Victor Frankl)
Mindfulness can help us to start to see that we aren’t our anxieties, or our sadness, or even our happiness, they are simply all experiences and sensations. If we can start to create a space between a direct experience and how we perceive what that experience to mean we might start to be able to relate to these thoughts and feelings in more helpful ways – as less a threat to us – and just another type of experience, always changing.
Rather than mindfulness being about emptying our mind or being able to block our thoughts off; its really the opposite. Mindfulness is the ability to pay attention to the moment, on purpose, without judgement. This higher level of awareness and acceptance can help us in many ways to support our health and wellbeing. It can help us see things in different ways and this shift in awareness can also help us become unstuck from our automatic patterns of reacting to stress in more responsive and mindful ways
