One of the beautiful fruits of mindfulness is choice.
When mindful, we aren’t susceptible to unconscious, automatic reactions.
Whereas a mindless response to being cut off in traffic may be to slam your horn and reflexively rage about “drivers these days,” a mindful approach sees the event with some remove, notices budding emotions, and selects an appropriate response.
We may not be able to control what happens, even in our own minds, but we can control how we handle negative thoughts and feelings. We can choose how to respond. This is the essence of mindfulness.
But there’s a trap here, and I’ve fallen into it quite a bit.
The trap is sometimes referred to as “spiritual bypassing,” and it’s a fairly common pitfall. It happens when we try to choose our feelings, rather than just how to handle them.
Take, for example, my phone call with the insurance company last week.
As many of these calls go, it was long and spectacularly unproductive. There was lots of time on hold. Several pieces of information I received directly contradicted previous phone calls. More than an hour in, it was clear I’d be hanging up without the pleasure of crossing this task off my list. In fact, the agent was giving me more things to do.
I was frustrated, and as more and more time went by, angry.
My usual response to anger is either lashing out (automatic reaction) or talking myself out of it (bypassing). In this case, I did a bit of both.
I raised my voice. I dropped an F bomb. Then I noticed what I was doing.
I suddenly became mindful of my peaking anger and attempted to redirect — by labeling it “bad,” (decidedly not what I want to feel) and trying to brush it off.
But this doesn’t actually work.
Sidestepping legitimate feelings doesn’t work for little things, like pesky insurance calls, and certainly not for bigger, more emotionally charged situations. Emotions don’t disappear just because we don’t want to deal. In fact, this seems to only make them linger and subtly sabotage us for longer.
I remembered this on the phone and redirected again:
Following a therapist’s advice, I marched up to my room, put the phone on mute, and punched the heck out of my bed.
Maybe I sound like a crazy lady. Maybe I am. But after about 15 seconds of punishing the mattress with all my might, I took a deep breath and returned to the call as an entirely different person. Instead of stuffing the anger down, I let it fully come to the surface, where I realized that I could completely and consciously discard it with my body.
A critical element of mindfulness is allowing ourselves to feel. No judging. No blowing things up. No squashing them down. Let our feelings be — purely, just as they are — with a welcoming and curious spirit. Then, determine how to proceed.
Karla McLearn, who writes and teaches about this subject, says every emotion has a purpose. There’s important information inside our feelings. She says anger, for example, “arises in the presence of something that’s valuable to you, because you don’t get angry about something that has no meaning.”
She suggests asking ourselves two questions when anger comes up: What do I value? What must be protected and restored? (I value my time and have some work to do around protecting my time and energy.) We can only access deeper insights by mindfully allowing our feelings to exist.
Then, again, we can choose a suitable next step.
With all this said, there are times we may land ourselves in negative states for no good reason. I can think myself into a dark place with frightening ease. Sometimes I just need to snap out of it and get my vibes back up. Other times, we can get stuck in a negative feeling and it’s crucial to seek help to break out. Be mindful of when these polarities may come into play.
Genuine mindfulness is a beautiful skill. When we build it up, namely through meditation, we open up greater impulse control, resilience, creativity, leadership qualities, clarity and peace of mind. These are outcomes of properly applying the choice that the practice presents.
Denying, avoiding, resisting and pushing unpleasantness away can be our first impulse, so beware of the trap. Instead dig in, with eyes open, and see what comes from there.