How to Avoid a Lifetime of Tension

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share some thoughts about fighting the present moment and where we can get into some trouble with that. So if we're always fighting, what is present, not liking ourselves for what we feel when we pay attention to what we're feeling, or denying ourselves a moment of sadness in then effort to quickly supplant it with joy, then we're setting ourselves up for a lifetime of tension. Life's full range of experiences, the joy, the pain, the sadness, gratitude, grief, this flow doesn't go away. What we get better at with our mindfulness practice is moving fluidly through these moments, blending with them like water bends around a riverbank.

If we're fighting constantly, what is here, it's sort of like adding extra agitation to the system. At the very least, it's a form of, of secondary pain. We have an uncomfortable experience that we don't like, or maybe we don't want to be here, but then we push against it, creating more pain, more suffering, more frustration. Sometimes we need to go through that pattern many times before we see it's not actually serving us, it's not actually leading to the moment changing or to our wellbeing. But I wanted to at least continue to, to plant this seed in your mind as you go about your mindfulness journey, because it's one of the most common things that we can get caught up in.

Feeling an experience and resisting the experience. Again, it doesn't mean we have to like, what is here, doesn't mean we have to want it to be here, but we recognize that this is what is true right now. And because it's already here, well, I have different ways I can relate to it. I can fight it. I can push it.

I can hate it. What happens when I do that? Most likely more tension, what would it be like to make space for it, to relax into it, to allow it to be here because it already is, and then explore how do we feel when we do. Most likely you'll feel more spacious, you'll feel more open. And what you're doing in those moments is expanding your mind's capacity to full, to hold the full range of what it means to be human. This is big work, but you're doing it.

So thank you for your practice. Hope this gives you something to think about and let's settle in for today's meditation.