Befriending Our Emotions

white-envelop-on-a-fence-1216383Emotions can seem very inconvenient sometimes. They can be distressing and overwhelming, and they often appear to get in our way.

Of course, it feels wonderful to experience happiness or excitement or love – so called, ‘positive’ emotions – but other emotions like sadness, anger, or fear are quite unpleasant. We often think of them as bad or frightening. They seem to cloud our judgment or just make us feel bad. No wonder we often want to run away from them or find ways to make them go away as quickly as possible!

However, what many people don’t realize is that the meaning we assign to our emotions (that they are bad or scary) and the reactions we have to them (trying to resist or escape from them) are actually responsible for much of our distress. We tell ourselves that we can’t handle these feelings or that they will never go away – or that they mean something terrible about us or about other people.

On the other hand, if we try to approach our emotions as helpful, (albeit sometimes unpleasant) messengers giving us important information about our own needs, we can begin to have a different relationship with our own internal experience. Read More


Pain May Be Inevitable — But Suffering Isn’t

wavesYou may have heard this quote before: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”1

Sounds good, right? But when we’re the ones suffering, it feels anything but optional. And to suggest that we’re choosing to feel this way feels pretty insensitive.

So let’s take a closer look at what this saying really means.

What’s the difference between pain and suffering?

In life, it’s true that pain is inevitable. Every one of us will experience not only physical pain but also emotional pain many times throughout our lives. We will experience losses, rejections, and defeats, and they will hurt — there’s no getting around that. To suggest otherwise would be to deny our experiences and our feelings, and no real good comes from denial. (We may push those feelings down in one place, but they’ll pop back up in another — in our relationships, in our physical health, or somewhere else.) Read More

Show 1 footnote

  1. While there is some debate about the origin of this quote, it’s often attributed to Japanese author and marathon runner Haruki Murakami: Murakami, Haruki (2009). What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, New York: Vintage Books, p. VII.

An Introduction to Mindfulness

leaf with water dropletMindfulness is getting a lot of hype in the news and media these days. Sometimes it almost feels like it’s just become the next trendy thing, with people promoting it without truly understanding what it is. However, this is a trend that I think is actually worth your attention — so what’s the hype all about?

Mindfulness is not some mystical or mysterious experience. And although it comes out of the Buddhist tradition, it is not inherently a spiritual or religious practice (although it can certainly be integrated into such practices).

So what is mindfulness?

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness is the intentional practice of being fully present, grounded in the here-and-now, and taking a non-judgmental, compassionate attitude toward our experience, whatever it may be. Or, as Jon Kabat-Zinn — founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and author of a number of books on this subject — has described it: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Read More