Why Mindfulness?
Mindfulness can be used in all life situations.
Mindfulness has been shown in many studies to decrease stress, anxiety, depression and addiction. It improves relationships, tranquillity, relaxation and wellbeing. It contributes to the understanding of oneself at all levels. It is also used in sports to improve performance and in therapy to change behaviour.
We could say that mindfulness can support:
Changing a behaviour, whether it is getting rid of an undesired behaviour or strengthening a desired one.
Reducing the suffering associated with discomfort.
Improving the fulfilment that one gets from a pleasurable experience
Understanding oneself at all levels, for example, understanding how your mind and body work.
Whether you want to change a behaviour, reduce the suffering that comes with any discomfort or increase fulfilment with any pleasurable experience, you will most likely need to overcome resistance.
It is resistance that goes in the way of changing behaviour.
It is resistance that causes suffering when you experience discomfort.
It is resistance that decreases the fulfilment that you get from a pleasurable experience.
When you start to get to know yourself better, you discover how resistance typically manifests in your experience. For many people, resistance is expressed through the mind as thoughts and ideas.
We are creatures that navigate the world with our senses to make sense of time and space, but it seems that we over-emphasized our thinking ability. We got lost in the stories that we created to ourselves, individually and collectively.
We go about with our day, and we barely pay attention to the information that we receive from our senses. We spend most of the day in our mind, thinking about the past, the future, remembering important or trivial details, judging ourselves or others, planning, rehearsing or fantasizing. Even when we do simple activities like walking, eating or driving a car, we drift off, daydream and create some impossible stories! Rediscovering our senses may free us from our addiction to thinking.
Most of the day, sensory inputs come and go without us noticing any of them. We may only a few, like a strong sensory event such as a loud sound or an unusual sensory event such as a funny looking thing that wasn’t there before. We are truly unconscious! We are driven by unconscious sub-routines in our operating system that try to avoid pain and seek out more pleasure, based on previous experiences.
Mindfulness offers us the tool to understand and utilize our senses for what they are and at their full potential. Mindfulness allows us to explore and appreciate the information that our senses gather in real-time, as it happens. With mindfulness, we can turn toward pleasant or unpleasant sensory events with curiosity and cultivate a state of non-reactivity.
With mindfulness, you can explore how resistance manifests in your life and resistance may lose its grip. Hence, you can initiate the process of changing a behaviour, you may have less suffering with discomfort, and you may derive more fulfilment with pleasurable experiences. Interestingly, whatever the reason is when you start a mindfulness practice, as you develop your baseline mindfulness, you may also reap the benefits of mindfulness in other spheres of our life!