By Leo Babauta
If all is going well, you’re committed to the Grounded Challenge (if you haven’t, sign up now!) and practicing our first method of mindfulness with your difficulties.
Let’s talk about evolving that method. If you’ve practiced the first method for at least 5-6 days, you have a good solid foundation of mindfulness now. If not, keep practicing, you can do this!
With a good foundation of dropping into the body and staying present with whatever is coming up, without judgment and with gentleness and curiosity … you can play with other possibilities. Not that you have to — the first method is enough for the whole month, and for the rest of your life. But there are other things you can try as well.
Some possibilities to try this week, once you’ve practiced with the basic method:
- Hold the pose. If you have a usual way of coping with your difficult feelings (food, porn, social media, TV, games, shopping, complaining) … try not running to your coping mechanism. Instead, hold the pose of staying with your feelings, mindfully, and being with them gently and with curiosity. Try one of the methods below too … but the main idea is not to run. Hold the pose, even when you want to run. Hold the pose, even when you’re rationalizing giving up. You are stronger than you believe! You only need to hold the pose for a minute or two longer than you think you can for it to be a success.
- Give yourself compassion. As you’re staying with the difficult feeling, in your body, try giving it some compassion. Imagine if a friend were hurting, and you sent them a wish for their pain to end. You might feel a genuine desire in your heart for them to have peace, for them to be happy. Try to cultivate this same feeling for yourself, imagining a hurt child inside yourself, sending compassion to that child as you would to a loved one. Stay with this practice for a minute or two, allowing yourself to fully give compassion. This won’t necessarily end the difficult feeling, but will help you transform your relationship with the feeling.
- Let your consciousness open wide. This is an expansion of our mind, in the present moment. When we drop into our body and notice the sensations, we’re placing our attention on a small part of our current experience. In this wide-open consciousness method, we’ll try expanding our awareness to everything around us, wide open, taking in all of our surroundings (and our bodily sensations) with a wide-open consciousness that rests in openness. Imagine your mind is a vast blue sky, and any thoughts and sensations are just the clouds. This wide open blue sky is bigger than anything in your experience, and can contain everything in your awareness, even opening beyond what you can see, taking in your entire neighborhood or city, wide open and restful. Your difficult feeling is still contained in this vast blue sky awareness, but it isn’t everything. It’s just one part of your experience. This can be a very restful practice, and can be done at any time.
- Practice friendliness with your experience. This is similar to the compassion method, but it’s simply having a friendly attitude to whatever your present experience is. Often our attitude to whatever we’re experiencing is to reject it or avoid it: “I don’t like feeling this way, I hate it, I want it to end, I need to get away from it.” Imagine if you said this about a good friend — that wouldn’t be a very good relationship! It’s the same way with our experience — we often have an unfriendly relationship with our feelings and whatever we’re going through. Instead, try being friendly towards whatever you’re feeling — say to your sensations and difficulties, “It’s OK that you’re here. I’m happy to have you in my life. Thank you for reminding me to practice, for reminding me that I’m alive, for touching my heart so that I may open it to you.” It can take practice, so don’t be discouraged if you’re not getting it. In fact, if you are discouraged, practice with that feeling!
These aren’t the only possibilities, but I do suggest trying at least one of these. They are all amazing practices! Try one for a few days, then if you’re so moved, you can try another. At any time during this challenge, you can practice any of these methods, or just come back to the basic method.
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