Wellness Wednesday - How mindfulness meditation redefines pain, happiness

https://youtu.be/JVwLjC5etEQ

Anyone have any thoughts on the video?

I liked this TEDx talk very much; it was an engaging and accurate description of how mindfulness can help decrease suffering. I like the analogy of meditating being like exercise for the muscles of the mind.

I did Jon Kabat-Zinn's 8 wk mindfulness-based stress reduction course about 20 years ago and have been meditating on and off since then. These past weeks as I work on my 100 Days of Meditating More, I find I am building a little more ability to find that place of calm (which usually helps me get to clarity, contentment, and compassion), decreasing the suffering I bring to myself and the world.

Another way that I like to look at meditation that I've found helpful in keeping up my practice is that meditation is the mental/emotional equivalent of brushing our teeth and hair and getting dressed - it's how we can make ourselves ready for the day (and keep ourselves from mental/emotional cavities). We generally make time for these preparatory activities every day, and thinking of meditation in this light helps me do at least a few minutes most mornings.

Ok, first of all, six months?! Holy moley. That's super intense.

His thoughts on nonresistance gel with my experience a lot. I have a lot of chronic conditions and I deal with not-mild pain daily. If I fight it, if I hate it and frantically look for ways to make it end, it does not go well. It starts to mess with me mentally as well as seeming worse physically. I mean, I do the stuff that I know helps still - taking meds and certain stretches and such - but as calmly as possible. If I just relax as best I can, mentally at least even if I can't manage to physically, and think kind of "this is how it is right now and that's ok, I can be ok within this experience" I can weather the pain a lot more easily. I have a lot of tattoos and I am not one of those "oh, it doesn't hurt much" people. I find getting tats really painful, for the most part. If I tense up and set my mind directly against the pain, it feels really bad. But if I relax and acknowledge the pain but not act on it, and just kind of let the pain just dissipate through my body, it's a lot more tolerable and I can sit in a session for almost twice as long. It seems, for me at least, that resistance is indeed futile