5 Obstacles to Mindfulness and How to Overcome Them: Part one
Everyone faces them. But few overcome them.
You know what it’s like.
You commit to spending the next five or ten minutes being completely present with your partner or kids or doing nothing but enjoying the sights and sounds as you walk through the park.
But just a few minutes in, you’ve already scrolled through Facebook twelve times and mentally planned Grandma’s 90th and lost pretty much all awareness of where you are and what you were meant to be doing.
It’s bad enough you’ve been lost in thought and indulging your trigger finger. But the disappointment of going against your intention to be mindful can be enough to make you want to mindfully explode.
Being mindful of what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, has become the new standard of conscious living. If you’re not constantly trying to be present and attempting to notice the feeling in your big toes at all hours or the beeping and screeching of the traffic outside, then you’re pretty much already dead.
This phony idea of what it means to be mindful has taken over the West. Likewise, there’s an image floating around of the ideal mindfulness practitioner as being someone who is happy and blissful and equanimous all the time. Rather…
