With so much attention being paid to happiness and positive psychology lately one has to wonder why mindfulness emphasizes the importance of attending to not only the good stuff, but the bad stuff too. For a very long time now we have been told that the best way to cope with stress is to ignore the bad stuff and focus on the positive. Whereas this kind of strategy may be a good temporary fix, it inevitably comes back to bite us in the end. I think that there are certain circumstances where a temporary fix is completely appropriate and acceptable as long as it is part of a long term strategy that involves gradually learning how to be present during the stressful times as well. For so many of us who were brought up in a culture where disconnecting for the sake of relief was thought to be the best way to deal with difficult issues, the idea of not disconnecting, but rather staying present and fully experiencing the “bad stuff” seems not just counter intuitive but masochistic.
When I first explain this strategy in my classes the people are aghast at what they are hearing. Upon further examination and review of hundreds of mindfulness studies having to do with our relationship to stress it starts to make sense. In it’s simplest form, mindfulness is the process of bringing ones attention back into the body after it has been habitually forced out due to a built in stress coping mechanism supplied by our DNA. The problems start to multiply when we are chronically disconnected over a period of time. We lose our ability to effectively communicate with ourselves and the world around us and after awhile the system begins to fall apart. In addition to the obvious loss of our ability to communicate effectively, there is a domino effect of other things that happen that are still not fully understood. We do know however that if we reverse the disconnection and attend to the bad as well as the good, the downward spiral of health and wellness is reversed. It’s certainly no fun to experience the bad stuff but there is enough evidence now to convince us that by doing so we will eventually heal the rift that takes place on many levels deepening our discomfort. By doing this we turn the system into a healing mode and reap the benefits of this strategy. So dive into the present moment regardless of the difficulty, stop pretending to experience something that you are not and experience the benefits of this new/old revolutionary approach.