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Transparency is not always a helpful thing…
It seems that after many years mindfulness has suddenly become a popular concept. There are articles on it in the press and Women’s magazines, the health benefits that have been known to practitioners of meditation for many years, are now more widely appreciated by the public.
The challenges of living can cause us to feel difficult emotions, exhibit stress related patterns or develop less than healthy relationships to others or ourselves. Over time these can develop into something we think of as the “fence of defence”. In other words we either shut down our emotional reactions to events and relationships or we shut down our awareness of our reactions. In either case we cease to see what is going on inside us and how we are thinking about our experience of living in this world. Our thinking is transparent. Our feeling is transparent. We are no longer able to access the state of ourselves because like a clear piece of glass we can only see the view, not the glass.
Ordinarily in our society transparency is viewed as a good thing. We want our politicians to make transparent decisions on our behalf; we want to have the feeling that nothing is hidden from our view. Paradoxically when we turn attention towards our own inner mind body state, the first task of mindfulness is to make what is going on inside us opaque enough for us to actually see and experience it! Once we can begin to see that we are habitually worrying about our relationship or our job, and that our body reacts to that habitual worry with tension in our shoulders or stomach, we are some way along the path to dissolving these insistent patterns.
Mindfulness therefore begins with spacious awareness. Awareness borne out of this type of curiosity about us has the power to quickly build into a practice that can alter the way your brain is habitually wired. You are never too young or too old to learn mindfulness practice, or indeed to experience the physiological and emotional benefits that it offers us.