Mindfulness practices vary wildly. Some of them are quite mundane,  while others can seem quirky or bizarre. In this post, I’d like to take a dive into a practice that can seem counter-intuitive and unnatural: turning towards the unpleasant.

We humans,  like most other animals,  are equipped with two motivational systems: APPROACH and AVOID.

We’re hardwired to crave, seek out and pursue that which is life-giving. Think: water, food, safety, shelter, and sex. This is the “Approach” wiring.

We’re also hardwired to stay away from, hide from or defeat that which is life-threatening.  Think: poisonous snakes, bitter-tasting plants,  predators and rivals. This is the “Avoid” wiring.

The “Turning towards the unpleasant” practice is designed to push you in a direction that is exactly the opposite of your hardwired,  instinctual impulses.

Why on earth would anyone do this?

Because instinctive reactions tend to be automatic and therefore mindless.  We can boost our level of mindfulness by playing around a bit with our instinctual reactions.

Here’s an example: find a smell or flavor that you have a strong negative reaction to.  In this practice,  you would deliberately expose yourself to that smell or that taste, but you would do so in a very special way: with intense curiosity.

Let’s day I tend to react strongly to the smell of dog doo-doo. In this practice,  I would expose myself to that smell with the intention of going past the initial reaction,  by getting curious about what the substance ACTUALLY smells like. I override my instinctual reaction and approach that which my instincts tell me to avoid. 

By overriding my hardwired reaction,  I can actually spend a few moments getting closer to what I would normally get away from ASAP. This creates a slight gap between the stimulus (the smell) and my response to it (avoid, move away).

This type of practice can lead to an increase in my capacity to be present.  I’m gaining a few degrees of freedom. I’m able to choose a response that would not be available to me otherwise. And this can extend to other parts of my life. 

For example,  I  might be someone who avoids conflict at all cost.  By training myself to turn towards the unpleasant  I might gain the freedom to choose when engaging is a better strategy than avoiding. I have a new option that I didn’t have before.

I’ll leave it to you to choose your own unpleasantness to get curious about. It could be anything from an itch to Scandinavian Death Metal music! Just choose something that you would instinctively AVOID and consciously and intentionally choose to APPROACH it instead.

You may be surprised at how this most unnatural practice shows up in other areas of your life.

A friend of mine was complaining to me not long ago that his life was exhausting. He wasn’t sleeping well,  his routine was messed up,  and he felt like he was approaching burnout.  No doubt,  many of the leaders and entrepreneurs reading this will recognize themselves.

Many successful people achieved what they did through hard work. Hard work can often mean highly effective,  concentrated effort,  but it also often can include another element: relentless striving.

My suggestion to my friend was meant to address this second element. His relentless efforts have a positive connotation. To be relentless implies a strong will,  perseverance,  and determination. It’s what I would call a character strength,  and certainly something to develop.

What I suggested to my friend was that he introduce a day of rest into his schedule. It’s a concept found in cultures and religions around the world.  It’s also a recognition that we might not have evolved for unceasing effort. We sleep at night in order for our systems to perform maintenance, both in the body and the brain.  Nature has cycles like this everywhere you look: seasons,  crops, even forest fires.

Athletes train in cycles. Some businesses even shut down completely for a short period of time. During these times,  maintenance can be performed, broken things can be  fixed, inventory can be taken.

A day of rest is not a day to catch up on email or finish a home renovation project. No,  it’s instead a day to put things away. It’s a day for not using tools or technology. It’s not a day for climbing mountains,  either. Hard physical exercise is rejuvenating but it isn’t REST.

Resting means staying put. Not moving. Stillness. Many people never rest. So may I suggest that you give it a try?

One day. 

See how it feels.  If you don’t like it,  you can resume your relentless efforting. 

On the other hand,  you may discover that a day of rest was exactly what you needed.

I’m currently going through a kind of grieving process, not for someone who has passed, but for someone who is fading away. My mother, who recently turned 90, has some form of dementia and is slowly transforming into a very different person. The person she once was is now barely visible, and I find myself grieving her absence. Since grieving is such a universal human experience, I thought I might explore this experience, with full mindful awareness in this week’s post.

As I turn my attention towards the experience of grief, the first thing I notice is the pushing away of reality. There is a very definite “NO!” quality present in grief. My usual mindful, whole-hearted embrace of all that is coming up is replaced by very strong rejection of this particular experience.

I also notice that I’m kind of bracing myself for the inevitable shock that is coming. It’s like I’ve been driving along a busy highway and I realize that I haven’t fastened my seatbelt, so I quickly buckle up. I want to be ready when the crash happens.

Looking more deeply, I notice a very different aspect to my grieving, one which is almost the opposite of bracing myself – I am softening. I am more vulnerable and that vulnerability is also a kind of preparation. I don’t know Aikido, but it seems to me that when this blow strikes me with full force, I’ll be better off if I yield to it rather than trying to firmly stand my ground.

Then, of course, there are the emotions. We don’t all go through the five stages of grief in the same order (if we experience them at all), so this is an exploration of my unique emotional response to the loss of my mother.

The strongest emotion by far that I’m experiencing at the moment is gratitude. Very few of my friends still have a parent alive, so having my mom still here, even if her lucid moments are few, is a wonderful gift. Her frequent “disappearances” make those moments even more precious. And of course, there is the appreciation for all that this woman has done for me, all she has given me over the course of my life.

Alongside the gratitude is sadness. Her fading away is leaving a hole in my life. Something is missing. That something has meant so much to me: being loved, feeling safe, being cared for. The sadness is deep and wide. It washes over me like an ocean wave. And it hurts. The pain is as real as any physical pain.

This is mindful grieving, at least for me, right now. When you inevitably experience your own version of grief, may you remember to turn toward it with mindful awareness.

A common metaphor for mindful awareness is the mirror, which reflects all light and everything before it equally. The mirror rejects nothing. The beautiful is reflected and so is the ugly. The mirror doesn’t judge.

It’s a useful metaphor and one that I like to share. However, the mirror metaphor can cause us to overlook something very important: the mirror is not alive.

To be alive means that some of the things that you come across are life-giving and some are life-threatening. The ones that are life giving you are compelled to pursue. The life threatening ones, you avoid.

Adaptation and response to the environment are key characteristics that separate what is alive from what is not. Its very lack of reaction is what tells us that the mirror is not a living thing!

Why does this matter for those of us who want to develop our human capacity for mindful awareness? Because we must recognize that mindful awareness is unnatural. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense for a living creature to observe things without reacting. Yet that is standard operating procedure when we meditate.

Add to that the fact that we practitioners of mindfulness develop the capacity to be aware that we are aware – what advantage would that confer for survival? It takes extra brain energy to maintain mindful awareness. It doesn’t help you find food or a mate or run away from a predator. It makes no sense!

Yet here we are. We sit and observe the mind and watch the flow of experience, without reacting. And as we develop this capacity, it expands to actually INCLUDE our reactions. And gradually we find we can observe our reactions without reacting to our reactions. We observe our thoughts and feelings ABOUT things. We make room for all that arises, without judgment, without resistance, without rejecting any of it.

And we do it on purpose! We practice diligently for decades to master our attention. Why? From the point of view of survival, it makes no sense. It simply isn’t natural.

No, we do it because it transcends mere survival. The capacity for waking up which we nurture through our practice is about a whole lot more than finding food, reproducing and then dying. It’s about a realization. It’s about awakening.

Through practice, we come to realize that there’s more going on than meets the eye. The physical eye sees only creatures struggling to stay alive. The awakened mind sees infinitely more than that. The awakened mind sees beneath and beyond the struggle to stay alive. It doesn’t deny the ongoing struggle to stay alive – that reality doesn’t change. But the awakened mind knows something else.

That knowing has no survival advantage. It’s a bizarre twist in the story of evolution. You could say that evolution becomes aware of itself. Life becomes aware of itself.

The mirror becomes aware of itself.

As I sat down to write today’s blog post, I noticed a beautiful pattern of sunlight dancing on the wall in front of me. This led me to take a moment to appreciate the beauty of what I was seeing and also to feel grateful. I felt grateful for sunlight, for colours, and for my eyesight. This is pretty typical for me and is a kind of mindfulness practice that I tend to do many times a day.

Then I got a muscle cramp – the kind that seems to happen for no reason as we age. It lasted maybe thirty seconds and disappeared completely. It’s not a big thing to get muscle cramps, but it’s annoying. Then a new thought came to me: what if every annoyance could be turned into a mindful gratitude practice? How might that change the quality of my experience?

Stuff happens that annoys us all the time. Things break. We get delayed. We spill things. People are rude to us. What if, every single time something happens that annoys us, we used that as an opportunity to feel gratitude? It would be much harder to stay annoyed. We would be consciously replacing a negative state with a more positive one. The effects of doing that would accumulate throughout the day.

Here’s an example: the “Check Engine” light went on in my car. Annoying! I ask myself what could I be grateful for that is related to the annoyance. I have a car in the first place. I spend a few moments feeling grateful for having a car at all, what it allows me to do, the freedom it gives me.

Another example: I need a prescription renewed. Annoying. I ask what can I be grateful for around this? I have access to doctors for free. I have access to life-saving drugs. I have health insurance.

It’s a simple practice and one that doesn’t require anything other than some annoyances (and life provides those on a regular basis, for free!)

Try it yourself and see if this little practice shifts your experience of your day. I suspect it will. I’ll be practicing this one for the next week. I’ll report back in here next week.

Remember: string enough mindful moments together and you have a mindful life!

I really thought I would enjoy making videos and posting them on Youtube. I excitedly started my channel, called it “Mastering Mindfulness with Pierre”, and posted two videos in the first two weeks. Then…nothing.

What happened?

Quite simply, I reflected deeply and found that I wasn’t pleased with the finished product. Upon further reflection, I concluded that I lack the skillset to improve the look, feel, and sound in my videos. My first attempts are not slick. They’re very amateurish. “Alright,” I thought, “I will learn to do these things”.

Then I became aware of a subtle resistance. Something wasn’t clicking inside and I explored that feeling. What I found was that I didn’t want to learn. Not this, anyway.

I know, of course, that over time, I could learn the skills of setting up, shooting and editing videos. That being said, I consciously chose NOT to do that. I chose to NOT learn.

Instead, I decided that I would play to my strengths, and do what comes naturally and effortlessly: write.

Learning is a joy, but not all learning is necessarily valuable. Sometimes, the time and effort can be used in ways that create more value for ourselves and for others. That’s why I’m choosing to NOT learn how to produce professional videos. Instead, I’ll use the time to produce more blog posts, and continue working on a book that will capture what I have learned over the years about living mindfully.

In conclusion, this blog is now officially resurrected. I’ll be posting more of my thoughts about mindfulness and sharing practices to develop the “muscle” of paying attention to attention.

I hope you’ll benefit from them.

Reflection: what is something that you think you should learn that you could actually choose to NOT learn?

Hey folks! Check out my newest mindful moments video here: https://youtube.com/shorts/b3GGqf-EMrU