The Real Purpose of Mindfulness

Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast, your space to deepen your presence, elevate your mindfulness teaching, and embody mindfulness with confidence, authenticity, and integrity. Join us as we explore insights and tools to transform lives, including your own. Hi, I'm Sean Farco. In today's episode, we're going to explore an important yet often misunderstood topic. Mindfulness is not what most people think it is. Many of us begin our mindfulness journey with this idea that it's about stopping certain thoughts or avoiding certain emotions, or that we need to be calm. But true mindfulness invites us to meet whatever arises without judging it to be good or bad, without resisting it, or needing to fix it. Whatever arises is an object of mindfulness, including judgment, resistance, or agenda. So in this episode, we're going to unravel what mindfulness is, what it isn't, and how it can transform not only our meditation practice, but also our everyday experience. This took me years to start to realize. And it's not just the jumping ahead by a minute, it's like way more than this. You know, mindfulness is not just like coming back from somewhere, it's meeting this. There's a difference. Mindfulness is not like stopping something to start this, jumping. Feels like this. And come back to feel relaxed with breathing. Or I have to scan my body to see if I can notice what the bones feel like. Or I have to feel meta. I need to feel love. There's nothing wrong with feeling love. Nothing wrong with feeling bones. Nothing wrong with breathing. But am I doing those things in order to not feel all these other things? Or because I think I should be doing this thing, or that I shouldn't feel those things, or that mindfulness is about transcending all these other things. In our journey, cultivating breath awareness is a great first step. Doing the body scan as a meditation. Awesome. You know, opening the heart, beautiful. There are these practices that we're practicing in meditation that can be helpful later on as a tool. You know, I can practice the body scan, even walking down the sidewalk or waiting in line at the grocery store to feed it, find a sense of groundedness, centeredness, get a sense for what's going on in the body. I can cultivate the heart and notice what's getting in the way of the heart opening, or just cultivating a remembering of connection, care. But oftentimes we use these tools as the focus so that I don't have to feel all these other things. Like, oh, I better get back to the tools, or I need to ironically like distract myself from life to get to the tool that's meant to help me connect to life. If something's feeling overwhelming or too intense, then yeah, back off, find some uh find a safe way of being, take care of yourself, ask for help, etc. Mindfulness is tending to whatever arises. So if jumping ahead is what's arising, notice the energy of jumping ahead. If rage is arising, tend to the energy of rage and the layers of that, etc., etc., etc. And so it's kind of one of the beauties of mindfulness is that, like as facilitators, coaches, guides, teachers, in a way it's kind of easy to work with people. Whatever they say or whatever's coming up for them, any emotion that they're presenting, if they give you a three-minute monologue of what's going on in their lives, we can invite an exploration of how that feels right now. How does that feel in the body? How are we holding ourselves? Are we breathing? Are there judgments? Can we explore this moment for you? You know, on this list of physical descriptors, what can you feel in different parts of the body? On this map of emotions, what specific emotions are present? And can we practice noticing them moment to moment without trying to feel a certain way? You know, like Jack Cornfield often leads a meditation in which we're grounding in the body, we're just kind of breathing, sensing in the body. And it's basically a mindfulness of breathing practice. We're just kind of noticing the belly rise and fall like waves of an ocean. And he makes it very clear that if a strong emotion arises, or if something predominant comes into the mind that's kind of pulling you away, or that's really top of mind, or something strong is arising for you, that it's okay to not tend to the belly as you breathe. It's okay to tend to those emotions. Meet whatever's arising. You know, if it's a jumping ahead, meet that. Notice what that's like. If it's a strong emotion, yeah, open to that, notice the energies of that as it unfolds moment to moment. See, notice how it's changing as you bring this gentle awareness to it. And then if that energy of jumping or that emotion, if the energy of that dissipates, which it will over time, then we can come back to breathing in the belly. But outside of a meditation, like if we're not practicing mindfulness of breathing, and this strong emotion comes up, a lot of us will have this reflex to go to breathing. Oh, I better meditate on an object, like a concentration object or a part of the body that you know I tend to feel relaxation of. Even though if we were meditating beforehand and the emotion arose, the invitation would be to meet the emotion. But outside the meditation in daily life, if that predominant emotion arises or that energy of jumping arises, the practice is not to go to breathing. I mean, it it can be a good practice if it's appropriate, or if we want to attend to this later for some reason, that's fine. We can go to breathing. But the main invitation, the primary invitation is to meet that emotion rather than jumping to a tool to not meet the emotion. I hope this is making sense. It it takes most people years to really appreciate this. So if if some of you are not quite there on an experiential level, that's totally fine. It may sound confusing because you may sound like we're sending mixed messages, but the main invitation is to meet whatever's here, whether it's in a meditation or not, including jumping or whatever, you know, planning. Oh, yes, planning feels like this. It's not bad or good. It's just that's what planning is. And and the more we sit with planning, the more we can sense into the layers of what's underneath planning and the patterns of planning. And is there a line between when planning is say wholesome or detrimental? Am I holding on to planning maybe a little too tightly? And what does that feel like to need to plan a lot all the time? Does that get in the way of holding things a little bit more lightly, allowing for mystery, being self-compassionate? Yes, there are reasons why I plan a lot. And I'm not saying you plan too much, but like for some of us, maybe we do plan too much. Oftentimes it's out of a need to think that we can control something, which often comes from a fear of many things. But so is there layers of fear? Is there a sense of control? You know, at what point is planning really helpful? What does it feel like to plan sometimes? Maybe it's super wholesome, super helpful. Just kind of sensing into the patterns and the feelings of planning. Thank you for joining me in this exploration of mindfulness. Remember that mindfulness is not about transcending or avoiding or trying to be a certain way. It's about meeting life however it is, with openness, curiosity, and gentleness. If today's discussion resonated with you and you'd like to learn more about how to bring these teachings to others, feel free to check out our Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification at mindfulnessercises.com slash certify, or we'd be grateful if you left us a five-star review on wherever you get your podcast. Thank you for joining us, and I wish you well. Until next time, stay present, stay grounded, and continue showing up with authenticity and compassion. Thank you for listening.