My very own opinion of Mindfulness
There is this "thing" in the world that we call "Mindfulness" (here treated in a very broad way) and it consist in a "practice" to apply to our everyday life in order to live it in a "better" way.
Although Mindfulness has uncountable layers and aspects and I'm not going to discuss about them today, it can be summarized as follow:
"Become the observer of your life, detach yourself from your thoughts and from your emotions, and watch as they pass by without being involved with them. This way, you ultimately become aware of your life, you will learn to live the present moment without any judgment and become able to reduce the pain caused by your problems to a minimum if not to zero. You will feel at peace with yourself and, ultimately, feel happy."
Well.. After many years of following Mindfulness, I must admit I'm very impressed by how true this "practice" is and I'm surprised to discover that all I've learnt along the way was something I always knew, deep inside my own mind, it just was buried under years of fake assumptions imposed by society - such as "if you don't think about anything it means you're an empty person", "meditation and introspection are for monks", "if you have a problem speak with a psychologist rather than to yourself", "spirituality is for religious people", blah blah blah - all just lies!
I believe that Meditation and Spirituality in general should be a big part of our everyday life, if not our main priority. There is nothing wrong in trying to understand how our conscious, subconscious, spirit and emotions work, but society doesn't teach us how to do that. So that's why when you hear someone talking about it you subconsciously build a wall against it, but I tried my best to break it and give a try to Mindfulness.. and I can definitely confirm it's revolutionary, eye-opening and useful, even on a practical level.
However, I'm not 100% convinced it works for everybody - or rather, from my perspective, it's been taken way too seriously by some people.
Mindfulness can be a great tool to improve the way we see and live life, but it should NOT stop us from being who we are, our personality is unique and it should not be altered, unless we deeply wanted it to.
So for example, I'm an extrovert person and I like to show off my feelings. But that's not what Mindfulness taught me: it taught me to stop, observe, wait for them to pass and quietly carry on with my life.
Well no, I'm sorry, but I disagree!
There is no way I will give up my true nature just to be a "mindful" person!
Mindfulness teaches you to detach from your emotions, and that's exactly what I DO NOT want to do!
I don't want to step outside my life and just observe it, as if it was some sort of movie. I want to ENGAGE with my life, I want to be its main character and play every single action of it, my own way, I want to be in control of my life!
I don't want to detach from my emotions, I want to FEEL them, I want to FLOAT in them, I want to EXPERIENCE them. I want to feel happiness, sadness, love, anxiety, fear - it doesn't matter which one will come first, I want to feel my heart in all its aspects, the good and the bad!
And I want to express all of my feelings freely. I want to laugh when I'm happy, I want to cry when I'm sad, I want to yell when I'm angry!
This is how I am and like me there are other uncountable people who like the way they are. And there is no Mindfulness that will stop us from expressing ourselves the way we like the most, I think it would not be correct.
***
But does that mean that Mindfulness is wrong, useless or damaging?
Oh no, absolutely not!
Mindfulness can be a powerful tool to "give a rest" to your busy mind, always engaged in overthinking, always ready to offer you a selection of bad and embarrassing memories of the past ten years of your life, making it hard to sleep at night and concentrate during day. If you practice Mindfulness, you can easily learn to recognize when your mind is taking over your consciousness (usually with useless or harmful thoughts) and stop it there. I agree with this practice, it's the right way of living the moment without judgement and be in full control of all your inner and outer senses.
But not only that!
Mindfulness can also be a powerful tool to TAME our emotions, so that we don't EXCEED, we don't go beyond the "morally acceptable" behavior.
So for example, if you're happy, you can laugh as much as you want, but you should not lose your control and demand to be at the center of everyone's attention. If you're sad, you can cry as much as you want, but you should not take the drastic step of jumping outside the window. If you're angry at someone you can scream all the swearwords you can think of, but you should not act violently or raise a finger to someone else.
This and more can be very well achieved by practicing Mindfulness. However, and now I'm speaking for myself, I chose to not let Mindfulness interrupt the course of my personality and ultimately turn me into something I don't like to be. Because it happened.
By constantly detaching myself from my emotions, pretending and convincing myself it was better that way, by constantly stopping my natural inclination to look into events, emotions and feelings, at some point I stopped feeling anything at all, leaving myself in that horrible numb state that I didn't like at all. It was all so.. cold! Not being able to express any emotion, as if I couldn't feel any at all.. not being able to understand what was happening around me.. not being able to tell apart dreams and reality.
It was a very difficult period of my life, but eventually I snapped out of it and then I understood what happened: I've been spending so many months living my worst fears, but I couldn't see it, because Mindfulness was telling me "don't attach yourself to fear, let it pass and you'll feel better".. well it didn't work!
I understand emotions arrive for a reason, I don't believe in coincidence, and just observing them without trying to understand the root cause of them, had the opposite effect on me and I ultimately didn't feel neither at peace nor happy.
Are you proud of all this, Mindfulness?
So I learnt that living your life mindfully can be a very powerful way to reach peace and calmness if you have a tormented soul and mind. But it should not be overused and you should never ever allow it to stop you from being who you really are or want to be.
Because we all know emotions don't last forever. There is no way we can ALWAYS be invaded by happiness, or by sadness, or by any other possible emotion, for an eternal period of time. So just standing there and observing it passing in front of me without getting involved in it, simply doesn't work for me. It implies I'm wasting a precious opportunity to feel joy, sadness, fear etc, for no obvious reason.
Engage with life, float in emotions and express feelings - now THAT'S how I feel alive, I feel like I'm a human and not just an animal or a mineral. Now THAT'S how I live the moment, THAT'S how I feel at peace and HAPPY.
You call it "non sense"? I prefer to call it PARADOX. But feeling emotions, both the good and the bad, makes me feel alive, feeling alive makes me feel satisfied, and it's this satisfaction that can lead me to peace, harmony and, ultimately, to happiness.
***
I'd like to thank my (ex)Best Friend for giving me the opportunity to realize and understand all I wrote so far, and I'd like to send them a hug - though I'm pretty sure they would never like a hug from me, but this is how I am, so here it is: 🤗
***
I also want to thank Steve, who gave me strength during one of the darkest periods of my life with his little masterpiece: his book about Mindfulness - here is a loving kindness thought for him too 🤍
***
Thank you all for the time you dedicated to my post - like any other human, I also need to vent sometimes and share my thoughts 😅
Take care! 🙃
No comments:
Post a Comment