“Negative thoughts can spring forth in long chains of association, populating your mind with unwanted negative emotions. It can be tempting to dam up the spring – to suppress your negativity. But science shows that attempts to block out negative thoughts and emotions backfire. Instead of reducing unwanted negativity, suppression multiplies your misery, mentally, physically, and socially. Perhaps counter-intuitively, being open to negativity is healthier than being closed off from it. Another scientifically tested way to curb negativity’s momentum is practising mindfulness.” – Positivity researcher Barbara Fredrickson, in Positivity.
It is encouraging to know that mindfulness enables us to turned toward unpleasant and difficult mind states with a view to transformation. However, it’s not as simple as that, is it? If you’ve tried to welcome fear, you will know what I mean. Nikāya-style mindfulness comes upon, encounters, or finds much, much more than we set out to discover, for the very reason that life is different than we imagine it to be.
I’m saying that it can be discouraging, this meeting with whatever is unpleasant residing in your experience. The analogy is either a light coming on suddenly, or the dimmer being turned up very slowly; and either way, what comes into view is the mess we have made of our own minds. It can be a shock.
Given this, who would want to begin, if they knew this. And, once having started, seeing this, isn’t it natural is that the mind begins to forget to pay attention? We are very different than we imagine ourselves to be when we first set out on this journey. It is said that one Tibetan teacher used to tell people in his audiences, that if they haven’t begun the spiritual work, they should leave now; because once they get on that train, they can’t get off.
When we know this, then the Nikāya Buddha’s hesitancy to teach what he had discovered – the deathless – is understandable. Of course, people with some kind of ascetic personality will be attracted to such a vision. The rest of us need to recognise that patience and skill is required, and strengthen ourselves. To begin, we can learn to find pleasure in, and to enjoy, ‘work.’
I’ve looked for a long time for a better word to describe the ongoing personal engagement with the ‘mind’ aspect of our lives. What I want the word ‘work’ to do, here, is to suggest several qualities of the kind of energy that we end up bringing to this transformation. Qualities such as persistence, courage, compassion, and. a gentle but penetrating acuity, to name a few. The word ‘work’ also suggests a seriousness.
Obviously, I don’t mean a seriousness that is unhappy, or joyless, or goes around with a furrowed brow. (Quite the opposite. One’s laughter comes more frequently, and it deepens.) No, this is more the kind of seriousness which we find reflected in the word ‘gravitas.’ It’s more that there is concern – concern, in the sense of being moved to respond to life, because you are alive, and life is real after all. This concern happens because we resonate with life. It happens, this responsiveness, because life and ourselves are given together.
Therefore, we need to be proactive in inviting joy – making joy a welcome guest in this body. Positive feelings make us flexible and more able to allow concern to flow in us. Being conscious of present-moment experiencing is a prerequisite, naturally, to noticing positive elements which already arise in our experience. It’s only steps beyond that to be conscious that you are experiencing – and that this fact is extraordinary! To be alive at all is precious.
There is the right kind of suffering to have. There is the right kind of pleasure to be had. Mindfulness of the body helps us know the feeling of a right kind of ‘having,’ the appropriate relationship with experience – appropriate in the sense that it ‘works.’
“My research has revealed that our mindlessness can be very costly and that an increase in mindfulness results in an increase in competence, health and longevity, happiness, creativity, charisma, and makes us more satisfied with our work, to name a few of the findings.” – Mindfulness researcher Ellen J. Langer (2007). On Becoming an Artist.