Mindfulness, Weeks 5-6 of Your 8-Week Program by Michael Chaskalson

Author:Michael Chaskalson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

This story illustrates one of the central messages of the mindfulness approaches: it is your relationship to what is difficult or challenging that keeps you stuck in suffering – not the unpleasant feelings and sensations that often come alongside difficulty or challenge.

As we saw earlier, a central aspect of mindfulness is that it calls on us to allow what is the case to be the case. We also saw that this ‘allowing’ attitude comes alongside another set of attitudes: kindness, gentleness and curiosity. At this stage in the course, I hope you’re beginning to get something of a flavour of all these attitudes. The aim of this week’s practice is to take all of that one stage further.

Allowing: Letting Things Be

This week, the course asks you to begin to experiment with simply allowing difficult or challenging experiences along with the thoughts, feelings, sensations and impulses that come with them, to remain in awareness without trying to change or get rid of them.

This doesn’t mean that you’re being asked simply to resign yourself to what is difficult. Resignation is quite different. When you’re resigned you don’t want to be having the experience you’re having but you feel quite helpless about changing it, so you just put up with it. ‘Allowing and letting things be’ is much more active than that. It involves a willingness to experience – an openness to life in all of its complexity. It calls for practice, energy and conscious commitment. Instead of being the passive victim of reactive aversion, the attitude of allowing and letting things be invites you to choose how to respond to difficulty – to approach it with curiosity, kindness and interest.

By holding things gently in awareness – curious and kind – you affirm that in some way you can face what is difficult; that you can name it and work with it.

This radical and powerfully counter-intuitive attitude to difficulty is wonderfully captured by the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi in his poem entitled ‘The Guest House’.

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