Embracing Resilience: Lessons from The Mindful Warrior

Mindfulness refers to attention that can be directed inside as well as outside of ourselves. Attention to feelings, body sensations, thoughts, or emotions, for example, is directed inward. Attention to a conversation with a friend, trees in a forest, sounds, or a book, for instance, is directed outward.

Mindfulness refers to attention in the here and now. Attention to the things that are happening in this very moment. This may sound easy, but how many times is our attention redirected by our thoughts? Although thinking is undeniably very handy, as it allows us to make plans and solve difficult problems, at the same time, it often triggers many problems.

Our mind can easily get lost in endless thinking (worrying and rumination). Our thoughts create emotions and feelings like fear and sadness. We lie awake at night because we worry about what might happen tomorrow. We cannot stop thinking about that mistake we made last week. In our mind, we are constantly busy with the things that need to be completed. These are only a few examples of how our mind can make life difficult. Mindfulness teaches us to deal with these problematic thoughts by focusing our attention on the here and now. Mindfulness helps us create a different relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Mindful attention means attention without judgment. Often, sensations like tension or fear are automatically labeled as “bad,” “inappropriate,” or “unwanted.” When we judge a certain feeling (“I experience fear, this is bad, I don’t want to feel this way”), we automatically create a conflict, a conflict between the current feeling (“bad”) and the expected or ideal feeling (“good”). Any attempts to resolve this conflict, for instance by suppressing a negative feeling, require a lot of energy (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998) and paradoxically cause us to feel even worse (rebound effects; Wegner, 1994).

Acceptance plays a key role in mindfulness. Through mindful attention and acceptance, we allow every feeling, emotion, sensation, or thought to be present. They are there anyway. Instead of fighting against feelings or thoughts, mindfulness fosters willingness to acknowledge, allow, and accept these internal states. By letting go of this struggle and fight, we save energy (Alberts, Schneider, & Martijn, 2011) and realize that the things we fight against often fade away automatically, often sooner than when we actively fight against them. As soon as we acknowledge emotion, one can experience it as a temporary state; in other words, the emotion comes and goes. In this way, one becomes an observer of one’s own inner states (through observing the self; Deikman, 1982). One is no longer identified and completely lost in the content of thoughts or feelings but becomes their observer. This observer can still experience emotions or feelings but can now also decide whether he/she wants to be fully taken by them. By observing thoughts without judgment, one can experience their transient nature. In addition, we learn that not everything we think is true.

In sum, mindfulness can help us identify less strongly with feelings, emotions, or thoughts. In other words, we are not our emotions or thoughts; we can simply be aware of our emotions or thoughts as we preserve inner peace and create external harmony.