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Thursday 15 August 2013

Mindfulness is not an anaesthetic

You can feel despair, depression, fear, anger, frustration although you practice mindfulness every day - that’s my experience anyway. Claims that mindfulness will put you into a state of permanent peace are just that - claims. 

It is necessary to be willing to practice mindfulness alongside painful emotions. Mindfulness practice keeps you out of the forest of thoughts, rumination and brooding which worsens any and all of these experiences. Moreover, your day includes good experiences that have nothing to do with negative emotions and mindfulness practice allows you to notice these too. 

So you can allow emotional pain to accompany you through your day so that you do not become consumed by your pain although it is still pain and it is still unpleasant. Thich Nhat Hahn writes somewhere that you should “walk like a free man and not like a slave.”

In a sense, that is what mindfulness of emotional (and physical) pain is about: going through your day like a free person who has pain but who is not a slave to that pain.