Mindfulness: What it is and isn't

A lot of people believe that the purpose of mindfulness meditation is to be able to calm the body and quiet the mind. If they are not able to achieve a feeling of calm and focus, many people believe that they must be doing something wrong or that they’re not any good at meditating.

Feeling calm and collected can be a nice byproduct of meditation. However it’s not necessarily the goal. As Kevin Griffin, a Buddhist dharma leader and author of One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps once said, “Anybody who sits down and closes their eyes and tries to follow their breath immediately sees that they are not in control of their mind and body.”

So often in our daily lives, when uncomfortable thoughts come up, we do our best to distract ourselves from them. We try to think of something else, turn on the television, read a book, go shopping, have a drink, smoke a joint, or (as has become increasingly common), doom scroll on social media.

The problem with this strategy is that the uncomfortable thoughts don’t go away. They remain there somewhere in the backs of our minds. Later, when we’re trying to sleep or when a situation arises that reminds us of the discomfort we felt before, the thoughts come up again, often magnified in intensity. This requires more and greater distractions, which magnifies the intensity of the thoughts even more.

In therapy, the primary goal of mindfulness-based interventions is to help clients learn to sit with uncomfortable thoughts, to take a step back and observe the feelings that arise in their bodies, to name the feelings without engaging with them, and ultimately understand that it’s okay to sit with uncomfortable thoughts without reacting to them or trying to push them away.

If certain thoughts or feelings become overwhelming, clients can use mindfulness-based techniques such as counting their breaths, visualizing a natural setting, focusing on a sound or object in the immediate environment, and/or relaxing muscles one-by-one in order to try and return to a state of calm. However, this is not the goal. The goal is to be able to use these techniques to react more mindfully to stressful situations without the need for distraction, to find ways of thinking about these issues in a different way so that we no longer find them uncomfortable.

So, the next time you are sitting in meditation, trying to count your breaths, and your internal monologues sounds less like “Ommmm,” and more like, “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” don’t worry. You’re not doing anything wrong. On the contrary, being able to sit with that feeling without distracting yourself from it means you’re doing it right.