Power of Awareness II

This week’s reading is a continuation of the article I started last week by Diana Winston, from Lion’s Roar magazine, “Mindfulness, the Power of Awareness.”

Traditional Buddhist mindfulness approaches are pretty strict: mindfulness is not intended to explore our psychological material and we must avoid analyzing the content of our thoughts and emotions at all costs. However, my experience is that, in practice, it is much more nuanced than that. Using simple investigative processes that are rooted in mindfulness, we can explore the nature and history of our patterns, reactivity, and repetitive thoughts in helpful ways.

First of all, when we are mindful of a thought or emotion, psychological understanding and insight may emerge quite spontaneously. We are sitting with our grief and then a memory of our childhood arises. As we hold that memory in kindness and awareness, we realize that this may be why our present-day grief seems so enormous in comparison to the actual trigger.

We can be proactive too. When our mind is concentrated, stable, and aware, a well placed question can help us find some ease and understanding. For example, with strong repetitive emotions like shame or self-judgement, we might ask ourselves: “What might be the wisdom within this judgement? Can I separate out the wisdom from the reactivity?” Or, “Is there a deeper need I am trying to fulfill? Can I meet this need in some other ways?”

Questioning in this way is very different from ruminating, analyzing, or trying to figure something out. It is also different from psychotherapy. Instead, it is making space for our wisdom to emerge by dropping a question into our mind.

It’s like dropping a pebble into a pond — we wait and look for the ripples.