How Mindfulness Creates Equilibrium in Your Life
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering”
Sometimes it can literally feel like everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong...all at once…while other things are going wrong on top of going wrong. Oh, and your house is one fire, and a hobo just shat on your cars windscreen.
Nietzsche was fucking right. Life is hard. It’s a chain of events that contain suffering with some short-lived joy spurts here and there. Juuuust enough joy to keep things interesting. Anymore joy over the recommended amount and you’re probably on drugs.
But alas, some light is at the end of the tunnel:
It’s called presence. Also known as mindfulness. Not Mind-FULL-ness. Mindfulness. The idea around mindfulness is taking your filled to the brim brain that’s swarming with evolutionary thought patterns that you didn’t even conceive because they have been around for millennia and somehow ended up in your genome and make less of it. To put that shit to bed. Goodnight. Bye bye.
Think of mindfulness as a stop-loss strategy in your life. Professional forex traders will tell you that, without stop-loss strategies, their hard earned profit will be evaporated into thin air. When you start your day with a stop-less strategy — that is, meditation, journaling and scheduling — you are erecting the minds presence barriers/magnets to deal with the inevitable crap. Kind of like going bowling as a child and having to put the parallel bars up to prevent absolute mayhem.
I think many individuals focus unwarranted energy on happiness. Yes, it is the goal, but a problem arrises when opposite occurs — unhappiness. You see, as illustrated from the image above, there will always be good and bad times. Thats just life. But, when you are mindful, you are short-circuiting the negative stories you tell yourself when those shitty times pop up. You create a story of meaning instead of destruction.
Meditation and Mindfulness
Let’s isolate meditation as a mindfulness strategy. Many skeptics believe that people who meditate have it all figured out. Wrong. All meditation does, is allow you to get drawn closer to the natural, intrinsic state, of the mind — present state awareness.
When you are present, your thoughts are cohesive and your creativity has breathing room. As a result, your are far happier and pleasant to be around. This compounds because you attract more mindful people in your life who have a positive effect on you and therefore it becomes easier and easier to reach Equilibrium.
The Challenge, However
The greatest challenge, however — coming from a semi-experienced guided meditation app user for over 2 years now — is that each new day you are facing those thoughts of doom and anxiety. As I said previously, these are wired in your brain. It’s your primitive instincts trying hard to tell you that you are in danger and a big fucking rhinoceros is about to stab you to death with it’s nose-horn thing.
But, we both know that this isn’t the case. We are living in the most comfortable time in history and anyone who tells you differently — news sources, friends or co-workers — are brain washed by headlines and fake news. Even in hardship, life is actually pretty fucking fantastic for you if you are reading this (but I will stop now because this a discussion for another blog post).
That, my beautiful people, is where mediation or mindfulness comes in.
You are ‘priming’ your brain for presence when you are mindful. Presence = Focus = Productivity = Happiness.
You simply cannot expect to wake up each day and just be happy. Hey you dumb brain, why are you not happy!? Ahhh, I guess it’s going to be a shit day then :(
No. It takes work. As cliche as it sounds — bear with me — just as your muscles need constant attention at the gym in order to grow and thrive (please just hear me out), so does your mind. Treat it with respect. It’s all you have.
Some tools to Begin:
Additional Resource:
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at hello@joshsnyman.com
Wishing you presence and happy meditating,
Joshy.