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Embracing your Suffering
Mindfulness for the tough times
As in the above image, mindfulness is so often portrayed as this thing that is all soft and fluffy, perhaps stylish. It is something to aspire to, to be cool with, and it is fashionable. Most of all it is supposed to be pleasurable.
Possibly.
Sometimes.
And sometimes it is the opposite because life is not always soft and fluffy and pleasurable.
Mindfulness does not sort things out so you can avoid the tough stuff. In fact it does the opposite, and that is exactly why it is so important for everyone to practice.
Mindfulness asks you to look deeply into yourself, to ‘Know Yourself’. This is probably the single most important activity any of us can undertake in our lives. If we don’t know ourselves, how can we be our best? How can we get the best out of our potential to create our own life? It’s not about playing games, manipulating others, scheming and visualising. None of those will work well for us and can bring us downfall too, even if — like Trump for instance, or Boris Johnson, they appear to bring interim success. But that success is shaky and unstable. It is often built upon shifting sands and prone to collapse, sometimes spectacularly.
