In part one we spoke about a few of the attitudes of Mindfulness and how they could be applied to life in general.
There’s one I want to talk about today that can be really helpful for happiness and life satisfaction.
Imagine this: you’re not happy with where you are. Maybe your business isn’t doing too well; maybe your relationship is going through a tough patch; maybe you’re not happy with your house. You keep thinking “I’ll be happy/successful/fulfilled when (this) happens. This = making a million dollars; having the perfect relationship; owning a big house on the beach. (I think for most of us our dreams might be a bit smaller but you get the picture).
There’s a very definite goal that we hold very tightly. We’re attached to it turning out exactly as we want it. And anything less will be failure or too massively disappointing to contemplate.
Feeling like this robs us of our right to feel good now. If we can only feel good once this is satisfied, we’re going to have a whole lot of feeling crap.
If instead, we adopted the Mindfulness attitude of Non-striving, things might look a little different.
Holding tightly to an outcome is striving. We push to make it happen. There’s no relaxing into it.
Using the attitude of non-striving, we would see these goals as a direction to move in. That we’re aiming roughly for that goal without having everything hanging on achieving it.
This would open us up to be more flexible when life inevitably throws a curve ball. With more flexibility we wouldn’t be so disappointed when the curve ball took us momentarily off our path. And without the disappointment we would be free to enjoy the journey.
There are plenty of good moments in amongst the crap ones. If we’re constantly looking to the future and the fulfillment of our striving, we miss the good moments happening now.
And because we’re human and this is what humans do, we’re probably unlikely to feel happy/successful/fulfilled when we achieve our goal.
What are you striving for? Could you try to relax the necessity of having it turn it just how you want it, in the time frame you want it in?
Keep an eye for more of the attitudes. There are still three to go.
Related Tag: Psychologist Gold Coast
