Mindfulness: It's Time to Wake Up

Anxiety and depression are rampant. Perhaps what the Buddha is supposed to have called suffering, we can easily call anxiety or depression, among other things. Accompanied with that sometimes comes a sense that there has to be more than this. A feeling within us that what we are doing isn’t quite cutting it. A ‘knowing’ that there is something more that we might benefit from. Yet only few of us are fortunate enough to ever find the tools we need to get to that something.

Anxiety, depression, and other issues stem from many other reasons, for sure. We always need to clean house first before we can get to the “something” that I am talking about. And there is really no other way around this. But the gold is in realizing that it’s all the same thing — psychology or spirituality. They're different languages yet attain the same goal if you follow through long enough.

Mindfulness is becoming a buzz word in the West, taking a spot next to Yoga. And thankfully so because people need a tool to train them on how to open their eyes, metaphorically speaking. But the package that mindfulness is being sold in is one of emotion regulation, relaxation, or increased productivity. Although these are all great side effects of the practice, the real goal of mindfulness practice is to help you see. I don’t mean see visually, even though the visual clarity that accompanies it is another welcome side effect, I mean to see experientially, to wake up the cells of your body so that each of them is grounded in Being and can sense the life around you with a new flavor that was subdued due to different levels of dissociation. Technically speaking, mindfulness trains your attention and your relation to phenomena. It is, first of all, realizing that your windshield is dirty and that you need to clean it, and then you slowly start to clean it and are able to see around you. Eventually, you question who is driving the car in the first place to then realize there is no difference between the car and what it is driving through.

Waking up takes work. Avoidance is comfortable. It feels extremely safe while it just as safely keeps you away from feeling fulfilled and at peace. Fighting the fight feels comfortable and familiar. Relaxing involves surrendering to life, and invokes a fight of its own. Yet not relaxing into life is as absurd as not trusting that your body will keep breathing even if you stopped being worryingly hyper vigilant about it.

It feels like we have one life to live. We were born back then and ultimately we will die. It's everything that we do in between that matters. But if we do it all in a half slumber and numbly coast through life, we might as well just have watched a TV show about it. To really have lived is to have felt the pain, to have experienced the love, to have been moved by the expansiveness and the beauty of a setting sun over a lake, or the simplicity of the groundedness of a tree. To do any of this, we need to feel safe. Mindfulness builds that safety, moment after moment, breath after breath. It may take a year or 10,000 years, but ultimately we will wake up and realize that we never die after all, but only if we learn how to live well first.