This week's blog post is a bit deeper, and more personal. I've been reflecting on the reasons that I have felt resistance towards mindfulness. In particular, I want to focus on the 'self-compassion' part. It touches on the foundations of personality development, including our cultural context.
Something that has been present both for my clients and in my own thinking, is the idea that we should just 'push through' when we're feeling bad. There's a feeling that if we just get organised enough, tick all the items off the to-do list, smile a bit more, dig deeper for more courage, calm, enthusiasm, focus... We hope that things will get easier, and we punish ourselves when they don't.
This way of treating ourselves mirrors patterns in interpersonal relationships. Think of traditional parenting styles in White, Western society. A child who is expressing difficult emotions is scolded or isolated, conditioning them to behave differently. Later in life, when we experience the same emotions, we inwardly replicate our carers' actions towards ourselves. So, it becomes very difficult to adopt an attitude which turns towards and nurtures these parts of ourselves.
Even with the gentlest parenting, capitalism conditions us to prize productivity. Throughout school we are taught to follow other people's rules and routines. Then, as adults, the idea of reducing the quantity or quality of our output can create a visceral sense of unease.
So, we get trapped in dislike and disregard for the parts of ourselves that get angry, overwhelmed and exhausted. But as these feelings become adversaries, they also become more intense. We then have a dilemma, where self-compassion is the most difficult thing, but also the most essential.
Does this strike a chord with you? I wanted to highlight why mindfulness can be very hard work, and why it is nonetheless an helpful way to break harmful patterns in our relationships with ourselves. I hope you can take a minute today to reflect on how you feel about different feelings.
Perhaps you can make a small change - let yourself be 'difficult' or 'lazy' just for a minute. Try to be gentle with your feelings. If you treat them like messengers, you might find that they have valuable things to say.
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