Imagine: it’s a sunny morning in 2014. You order a latte from a hipster in a wide-brimmed hat who doesn’t even think to ask you if you want oat milk in it. You’ve never heard of oat milk, or social distancing, as you lean blissfully into a reclaimed mustard velvet chair. You take an unironic picture of your latte art (a leaf!) – that you slap a Valencia filter and a thick white border around before posting on your new favorite app, Instagram. There are no stories, or tags, and simply not enough latte art to scroll through, so you turn to the height of the zeitgeist, Pinterest. After pinning 50 ways to set up a coffee bar with only a visit to the Dollar Tree, you see a calligraphy image of a new word, a word you are about to discover is a cure to all your pre-pandemic (fuck you’re still pre-Americas-Zika outbreak) problems: mindfulness.
Tempting as it seems to go back to that time, before Trump America or Taylor’s version of anything, do you remember how ubiquitous mindfulness was? You could slap mindfulness on just about everything with zero context or explanation. Just walking through Target you were liable to trip over the growing mountain of mindfulness journals. Every pro-Influencer-pseudo-expert and their Arbonne-hawking mother had their top three tips for mindfulness locked and loaded at all times.
I genuinely cannot tell, standing here at the jaded end of 2023, if we have abandoned the mindfulness project or just repeated it into acceptance. Have we survived the mindfulness Thunderdome? Is Tina Turner singing our victory from rock star heaven? Or did we quietly lock mindfulness away with our owl statement jewelry and armpit hair dye?
What I’m trying to say is, I think this word is tired, at this point, and that opens the door for ‘mindfulness’ to mean just about anything, from a clinical therapeutic practice to an adult coloring book. So let’s start our definition with Dictionary.com:
A quick read of this definition would indicate, certainly, that mindfulness could be applied to just about anything. And, well, it can be applied to just about anything. You can interpret mindfulness as the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something, and that something could be anything at all. But it’s the second definition, the awareness of the present moment with the acknowledgment and acceptance of one’s feelings, thoughts, and sensations, that is the real powerhouse of mindfulness. I genuinely believe that this understanding and pursuit are worthwhile, if not necessary for well-being, but if you’ve already tried mindfulness and it didn’t solve all your problems…
… Well, yeah, dude.
The skyrocketing trend of mindfulness in the past decade made or at least implied an endless list of promises. Mindfulness will help with anxiety. Mindfulness will help with stress. Mindfulness will improve quality of life and mental health. All of those things can absolutely be true. The problem isn’t mindfulness can’t make good on those benefits, the problem is that we have an authentically erroneous understanding of what those benefits will look like.
Wellness, like life, is not a zero-sum game. So many of us have wholesale internalized that any negative experience, sensation, or emotion is an indication that things are wrong and must be fixed now, and frankly, that’s just not how reality works. If the end goal of wellness, health, healing, or therapy is to make all our problems go away, then no, mindfulness will not work. And neither will anything else.
Now, if you are a big old fan of mindfulness, you have been ride or die with mindfulness since that first Pinterest post, and you like your coloring books, your zen gardens, your meditation apps, awesome. If they’re serving you, they’re serving you. But if you are still struggling on the mindfulness Fury Road, then witness me:
If you hate coloring books, you can still practice mindfulness. If you engage in mindfulness, and you are still experiencing negative or even unwanted thoughts, emotions, or sensations, you are still succeeding in mindfulness. Mindfulness has been pursued by traditions from Buddhism to baking to IFS therapy, and none of it is wrong.
For me, I find it helpful to think of mindfulness as the sweet spot between two extremes: dissociation and hyper-vigilance. Dissociation is the complete absence of mindfulness, the cutting off of one’s awareness from one’s experience. Hyper-vigilance is a state of constant high-alert and threat-scanning, externally as well as internally (for example, hypochondria). To be mindful is to be in tune with one’s experience, but also aware that we are not the sum total of that experience but the one experiencing it. As with any balance, it’s hard. It’s a process. We don’t nail it one hundred percent of the time. If that is you, that is okay.
TL;DR: Mindfulness is the awareness of the present moment with the acknowledgment and acceptance of one’s feelings, thoughts, and sensations. If you engage in mindfulness, and you are still experiencing negative or even unwanted thoughts, emotions, or sensations, you are still succeeding in mindfulness.
Why I included mindfulness in this series: I do think mindfulness, much like mind-body connection, is a powerful tool in our self and collective care toolbox. I also think mindfulness can be the sleeper agent in toxic wellness’s self-destruction: the more we engage in mindfulness, the more we come to accept ourselves, our limits, and the fullness of our experience. We are not only allowed but meant to experience a full range of emotions and sensations, such as stress, pain, grief, etc. When we acknowledge and accept those experiences, we are less susceptible to predatory consumer hucksters trying to sell us a magic way out of the human condition. Stay mindful.
Intuitive Healing with Glenna 