Mindfulness buys you time
16th December 2021
Our faults are cured not by will but by attention
So much has been written about mindfulness and its benefits. So I won’t bore you with an exhaustive guide to all that it can do for you, instead I would like to hone into one aspect of it that can make a big difference in your life.
We’ve all got things about ourselves that we know we want to change. But more often than not we use it as a stick to hit ourselves with. Our faults are not there to show us where we’re going wrong but rather what direction we would like to go in, because after all, if we didn’t see them as faults we wouldn’t be able to shine a light on them and get them sorted.
Finding fault with something is an opportunity to do something about it, rather than an opportunity to feel bad about yourself. Be glad you can see it, as in so many instances we’re totally blind to our psychological blind spots. That’s why it’s so much easier to see faults in others as they’re so much more obvious when looking from the outside.
So instead of regarding our faults as something bad, we can use mindfulness to draw attention to them every time they happen so we can choose a different outcome for ourselves in the moment. Doing something wrong, taking it personally and then feeling bad about it, doesn’t lead to change. Instead creating a practice of noticing when the ‘faulty’ behaviour happens and analysing when it’s happening and any other factors that may be contributing to it and/or any thoughts so we can get to know what’s really going on and make the growth possible.
Mindfulness comes in here, because without a regular practice of mindfulness we can’t carve that parentheses when the moment comes. It’s almost like being able to slow time down so we can give ourselves the chance to make a better choice instead of being prisoner to the psychological automatic pilot that runs the behaviour we’re trying to change.