On Friday late I had a conversation with someone who asked me if Mindfulness makes you a better person and if that means she had to
transform in a Sister Theresa like personality.
I have two answers for this question. Mindfulness makes you a better person and no, you do not transform into a saint.
In our Western world Mindfulness has evolved to a wellness type movement focused on being better, working better, feeling better etc.
In Buddhism the Pali word for "mindfulness" is sati. Sati can also mean 'retention, recollection, or alertness. Mindfulness is a whole-body-and-mind awareness of the present moment. To be mindful is to be fully present, not lost in daydreams, anticipation, indulgences, or worry.
Mindfulness also means observing and releasing habits of mind that maintain the illusion of a separate self. This includes dropping the mental habit of judging everything according to whether we like it or not. Being fully mindful means being fully attentive to everything as-it-is, not filtering everything through our subjective opinions.
Here the big difference is we completely let go of the ego and therefor feel no judgment towards others as we see them not separate from ourselves
therefor love and kindness for everyone becomes possible. What you perceive as yourself you can not harm.
This state of enlightenment is hard to achieve for most of us as we run the treadmill of our Western society and are bombarded with so many things constantly fighting for our attention. That does not mean we can't adopt and integrate the beginnings of these teachings in our lives.
The reason why I share this with all of you is that even those small beginnings do change our life. And no, not to turn us into saints.
Human life is suffering, on top of all things most of us have to go through there is the awareness of our own inevitable death.
This death anxiety subconscious influences our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level.
There is a relation between human violence and death.
Yet in our society aging and death are almost a taboo and we all join the race to ignore it and not talk about it. Infinite youth is a relic and worshiped
as the ultimate goal. And this while facing and/or discussing death can actually be a meditation for living fuller lives.
Mindfulness can not cure any of the challenges we face as human beings but it can help us how to perceive them and how deeply we let them affect us.
If you have a car accident today and your car is wrecked, this can be an example human suffering. In Buddhism the car accident is not the suffering, the car accident
is an experience, what the mind does with the experience is the suffering. You can feel depressed and lost in negative thoughts for a week about your car or
the trained mind would be grateful to be alive, that it was not worse and learned from the experience.
This is two perspectives of the same event.
Most of us do not have the trained minds of Buddhist monks so we will probably feel the more negative experience. Mindfulness can make it less worse, because
we are in the moment and aware of our thoughts and get faster out of that state of mind and at the end perhaps come to the conclusion we are grateful we are healthy and no one got hurt.
This example goes for almost everything in our lives. You will still feel sad, angry and disappointed even if you meditate every day and practice being in the present moment a few times a day. The same misfortune and negative events will still happen to you. Mindfulness will help you perceive them from another angle,
be aware of the thoughts you have and adjust those thoughts to what is helpful.
So this does make you a better person over time and those around you will benefit from it and notice the change in you. It is however a process of win and fail and learning every time. The good thing is every day is a new day to start over ♥
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