Four Ways Mindfulness Develops Resilience
Everyone has a base level of mindful awareness that can be elevated by developing their attention skills.
You can get better at savoring pleasant sensations.
You can also work on the ways you respond to physical pain, emotional discomfort, and confusion.
Investing in both boosts your capacity for resilience.
In her book, Mind Your Life, my colleague Meg Salter describes resilience as “the ability to recover, adapt, and grow in response to threat or challenge.”
Here are a few of the ways mindfulness practice prepares you to respond more effectively to life’s inevitable difficulties.
Staying focused under pressure
When you practice consciously deciding what to pay attention to, you get better at letting distractions play out in the periphery.
No matter what category of perception you decide to observe (sights, sounds, body sensations, thoughts, feelings), the pull to attend to other perceptions remains strong.
Gently and repeatedly returning your focus to what you’ve decided to attend to prepares you to stay more engaged with what’s most relevant during difficult situations.
Scaling down instead of giving up
It’s not possible to sustain our attention for several minutes.
The best we can hope for is to observe a sensation or perception for a few seconds and then do it over and over again for a predetermined amount of time. If you’ve tried to do this, you know it’s more difficult than it sounds.
Waiting for a meditation timer to signal the end of a practice session can be excruciating.
It’s a lot more satisfying to focus on briefly observing one sensory detail at a time: a sound, an exhale—even an itch or a spike of agitation.
Scaling down to what’s observable in any given moment involves seeing through the false sense of control we get from trying to predict how things will turn out.
Building immunity against internal escalation
One of the most impactful things I’ve observed while meditating is the strong tendency to brace myself against possible future pain.
It’s not just that my knee hurts a little right now. It’s how quickly I can overwhelm myself by wondering how intense the pain could get.
As Stoic philosopher Seneca observed, “We suffer more often in imagination that in reality.” This doesn’t mean our suffering isn’t real. It means we don’t realize the degree to which we habitually ratchet it up.
Pain is inevitable. Eroding our resistance to pain takes a lot of counterintuitive practice. But even a little erosion can result in a surprising amount of relief.
Making gradual progress without guarantees
Savoring comfortable sensations can teach us how to respond to uncomfortable sensations with more neutrality and less internal interference.
Inviting discomfort into our mindfulness practice starts to erode the understandable resistance we have to inevitable human discomforts.
What I’m asking you to consider is not a quick or easy fix. It’s also optional.
Making tiny, counterintuitive leaps of faith feels vulnerable. But observing discomfort instead of resisting it now and then, it can lead to taking the pain of personal growth less personally.
When we acknowledge what we can’t fix or control, we increase the odds of discovering how robust our capacity for recovering, adapting, and growing has already become.
Daron
