Full attention is
the antidote to boredom.
Sometimes people
confuse the concept of letting to of a thought or feeling -- noticing it arise in your awareness but not
pursuing it -- with pushing a painful feeling away by trying to suppress it. But suppression is not mindfulness. Mindfulness hides from nothing.
"The opposite
of investigation is assuming -- assuming that we already know how things
are". Narayan Liebenson Grady
Distractedness is
one sign that we are avoiding the truth of the moment.
When we run through
the same old routines of thought and feeling, there is little likelihood that
much will change. But since mindfulness
see things afresh -- it can open up new possibilities, allowing the potential
for change.
Emotions add the
qualities of pleasantness or unpleasantness to what the mind perceives.
Every coping
strategy is in some way a useful solution to a life problem. They all have, or once had, desirable
aspects. But typically these solutions,
which worked well enough earlier in life, have become calcified, frozen in
place, and are now applied over and over even though they no longer work so
well.
Ordinarily, when we
are swept away by an emotion, our feelings lead us to act without thought about
what we are about to do -- we just react.
But mindfulness allows us to bring to the emotional process a precise
awareness that makes distinctions among the thoughts, the feelings, and the
impulse to act. An enhanced ability to
notice the moment of intention -- the mental movement that comes before we act
-- gives us more choice. Mindfulness gives us freedom at that critical choice
point.
Extremely strong
emotional reactions of any kind are often a clue that what happened carried
some deeper symbolic meaning for you and that the intensity of your reaction
stems from the symbolic reality rather than what was actually happening.
Mindfulness can be
emotionally freeing: it brings an active awareness to our otherwise automatic
emotional patterns, interposing a reflecting consciousness between emotional
impulse and action. And that breaks the
chain of emotional habit.
When we transform
anger constructively, we are left with a clarity about what needs to be done
and an intense energy to achieve our goals.
In general, when we
have a strong, intensely disturbing feeling about something -- especially when
the disturbance is out of proportion to what is happening -- it's a signal that
a blind emotional habit, more than likely a schema, is being triggered.
The tender heads of
our intention are a powerful force that can, with sustained effort, break
through the dense solidity of our schemas.
The process of change starts with an intentional act -- doing something
different, something that alters an old habit.
Each afflictive
emotion has a corresponding positive one that can supplant it in a healthy way.
Anger, for instance, can be alleviated by reflecting on loving-kindness,
arrogance by reflecting on humility, and equanimity offers an antidote to
agitation as well as other disturbing emotions.
Behind the schemas
that drive emotional habits are sensitized feelings that need care and
compassion. Deep beneath unlovability
and deprivation lies a pool of profound sadness; beneath mistrust and
subjugation is a smoldering anger; beneath vulnerability, social exclusion, and
abandonment lurks fear. An anxious
self-doubt drives perfectionism and failure alike. And at the core of entitlement very often
lies shame.
Strong emotions are
messages from the unconscious.
Emotional
deprivation propels people to act like caretakers rather than voicing their own
needs.
The stronger an
emotion, the more useful it can be as a vehicle for awakening -- though only if
one knows how to use it that way.
