Wellness Journalism: Building More Mindfulness

Attitudes: The Foundations of Mindfulness (Part II)

Taken from Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn
and expanded by Gina Tang, Wellness Journalist

Trust: Developing a basic trust in your experience is an integral part of mindfulness training. Trusting your experience in the moment allows you to experience “reality” in a new manner.

Example: A surprise visit from a family member during the week of midterms means that you aren’t able to adhere to the study schedule you created for yourself. The panic sets in: When will you study? What if you don’t get enough time? What if you have to pull all-nighters trying to cram and then fail your tests anyway just because you’re tired? Suddenly, in a moment of mindful inspiration, your concerns give way to trust—trust that you will be able to manage your time, balancing family obligations with studying. You create a new study schedule that basically outlines a commitment to breathe, study whenever you can, and trust the outcome. As it turns out, you discover several creative new studying opportunities that you never would have thought existed. By test time you feel prepared, and more confident than ever.

Acceptance: Acceptance means seeing things as they actually are in the present moment without trying to change them. Sooner or later, we have to come to terms with things as they are and accept them. This is true even if you don’t like how things are and would like to change them.

Example: It turns out that your new roommate is vegan—a devastating blow to you, an aspiring chef who delights in cooking as many cheesy dishes as possible to share with the household. You fear that this will put a heavy damper on your weekly dinners, because now you’ll either have to make an entirely separate entrée for just one person, or force the entire meal to exist without the gooey goodness that is cheese. Your commitment to your culinary inclinations is such that you consider giving up cooking for your roommates altogether, just to settle the issue, and you mope around the house for weeks. Instead of this paralyzing frustration, however, you could whip up some mindful acceptance—you aren’t responsible for the dietary choices of others; only for your own cooking and eating preferences. It’s up to you whether or not you want to cater to the new roommate or just keep cooking your favorites. Either way, you save yourself a tremendous amount of energy by simply accepting reality.

Letting Go: Our minds get caught by habitual ways of seeing, thinking, and reacting. Cultivating the attitude of letting go, or non-attachment, is fundamental to the practice of mindfulness.

Example: You’ve just gotten out of a year-long relationship. The break-up was tough: a lot of back and forth, failed attempts to reconcile, and exhausting evenings of circular conversation. You’ve been craving peace of mind so badly that finally cutting everything off feels like weight off your shoulders. You’re re-emerging into an autonomous lifestyle, and rather enjoying it. Then an encounter with your ex—in the arms of another—at a party, sends you spinning into a mind-numbing onslaught of pain and regret. It becomes clear at this point that if you cannot let go of the past, your world will be filled with suffering. So you decide that you will not revert back to self-doubt and the torture it presents. Instead, you do what you had once thought of as being impossible: mindfully setting the intention to let the relationship go, once and for all. When you feel your brain reaching for the past (and all of its corresponding ifs/ands/buts, you root down into the present moment (and its corresponding freedom). And, as you gain stability in this new state of surrender, you find that letting go is actually easier than holding on.