So What's With All This Mindfulness Stuff, Anyway?

You may notice that my blog isn’t exactly going to be scientific. I don’t have a degree in psychology, although I did pretty well in it in college. I’m not an expert on Buddhist teachings, although I am familiar with many of them. I’m not a therapist, although anyone with friends or relationships with other people are often unpaid therapists in a way.

I am a guy living in Missouri, who has been through a lot of junk and am still going through a bunch of it. I have a psychologist who works with me using mindfulness. So while most books on the subject sound like textbooks, I’m going to write this my own imperfect way. Sometimes I will ramble or use incorrect sentence structure or grammar. But if I get too far off track, throw something at me and get my attention, will you?

Also, while Mindfulness touches so much of my life, my introduction to it was due to a troubled marriage. So relationship applications will often be my focus.

I have to admit, I wasn’t really sure what all this “mindfulness” stuff was at first. My doctor simply tried to teach me the foundation without really putting a label on it.

Mindfulness pretty much sits on a foundation of Eastern Religion. If you see Buddhist monks, you see some folks who are generally being Mindful.

My doctor noticed that some of his Christian patients might have some trouble with mindfulness therapy concepts, so he went through and found Bible passages that highlighted the same concepts. I found that if I just looked at them as principles, it didn’t matter to me where they came from. They just worked for me.

Here are the big fundamental Mindfulness pillars in my mind:

·         Acceptance (instead of resistance)

·         Being Present (being in the Here And Now)

·         Detachment (experiencing emotions but not becoming those emotions)

·         Faith (not really religious faith, though)

·         Boundaries (knowing how to be in a relationship but not lose who I am as an individual)

There may be more concepts that I’ll run up on later, but this blog is going to focus on these things primarily.

There is a lot of focus on meditation in Mindfulness. But really, those of us in the West don’t really grasp it too well unless we take classes or read books about it. I don’t set aside specific time for meditate at this point. Maybe I will one day, but with kids and work and occasional showers, it just isn’t part of my daily time budget.

Instead, I find that I do my little meditations as a sudden intervention on myself when anxiety strikes.

 Anxiety – I Can’t Stress It Enough!

My problems really stemmed from a lot of unresolved junk growing up and from bad coping mechanisms. I didn’t handle stuff very well at times. I would react strongly when I was faced with anxiety triggers.

Triggers for me were sometimes people, and sometimes events. But I am a Virgo and have a black belt in worry. So sometimes I would find anxiety firing up in my brain just over things I thought could happen.

For crying out loud, I could get myself all worked up over running through a bad scenario in my mind that I made up! That’s a train you really don’t want to leave the station.

In some folks anxiety causes them to erupt, and that is an obvious clue about what’s bugging them. Downtown traffic, looming deadlines at work or school, money problems, and anything else that might be no big deal to others but for that one person it’s a mountain.

But in my case, and for so many others, anxiety gets held inside. It causes more pressure to build up inside, and it if doesn’t find some decent release then it will begin to morph into depression. Ugh. Welcome to my nightmare.

My wife would tell me I needed to stop bottling it up so much. But when I vented it, she usually either responded with complaints of how I was always complaining about her (hmmm…. Is that a warning alarm I hear there?), or worse she would simply escalate the issue with her own eruption.

I learned to just keep my mouth shut. Unresolved anxiety led to depression. In time I was getting vaguely suicidal thoughts, which in time became a lot less vague!

Mindfulness would have helped me deal with the situation. In fact, it would have prevented much of what I experienced. But I was raised as a boy with Mid-American notions, and I just didn’t know there were alternatives. So I continued to be miserable.

In the next post, I will start looking into the first Pillar – Acceptance.