Mindfulness is not: “floating in the cosmos”

If you believe the popular press, you will float out on clouds after a mindfulness session. Mindfulness is just the opposite. We called it "Living in the Maelstrom" or “Full Catastrophe Living” and not "Floating in the cosmos”.

You get a floating feeling by withdrawing from reality with your mind. Some people like that. There are hypnotic techniques that encourage it. The woolly profundities, often associated with mindfulness, along with the accompanying sweet pictures like to paint a fantasy world for us.

As understandable as it is that we sometimes want to escape reality, in mindfulness we make exactly the opposite movement: we face reality.

This willingness to face reality is the essence of mindfulness. That's why in mindfulness we never ask you to imagine something or talk yourself into something. Mindfulness is always about what is.

Sometimes that reality is nice, sometimes it is fierce. It's all part of it. We are not excluding anything.

January 2017

This text is part of a series about misunderstandings regarding mindfulness.
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