Recently I have just completed an 8 week mindfulness based stress reduction programme with my trainer Fiona at the Mindfulness centre in Dublin which has in fact inspired me to further my studies and apply for a masters in Mindfulness in University College Dublin where I gained my initial degree over 15 years previously.
I have just returned from my interview for the masters which went very well (I think) but walking through the doors of the Newman building in UCD the memories of first walking through those doors and drowning in panic on the first day of lectures flooded my mind. I can vividly remember trying to locate the nearest toilet to lock myself in, in order to cloak my distress from my oblivious class mates. Those memories never leave you, you can change your relationship with them but they never disappear.
It’s funny how your body and mind work so in sync with each other as no sooner as that memory flashed through my mind I began to sweat, my heart pounding through my badly ironed shirt (sorry Mum) but thankfully this time it was immensely different. I was able to catch the thought, be comfortable with the memory and use the many mental resources I have cultivated in the last number of years to remain calm and at relative ease.
Walking into the interview I had no hesitation in informing my lovely interviewers that the last time I was in these corridors, they were darker, more intimidating, but now they seemed much brighter, more accepting and represented much more to me than walls of charmless concrete. Returning to a place that held such heavy legacies for me wasn’t easy but at the same time it was a cathartic and important process to engage with.
One of the first questions I was asked by my interviewer was what I found to be the most important message I took from my 8 week MBSR course which if I am being honest, I didn’t expect. I paused for a moment as I didn’t want to return the question with some vague, shallow response to appease their philosophies or belief structures around the effectiveness of such a course. There really was no merit in bullshitting the very people I am hoping to educate me in my masters so I gave the most honest answer that I had.
Part of the course was changing your relationship with pain, painful experiences and emotional suffering. Part of being human is to feel pain, to endure suffering, it’s fundamentally an inevitable core of the human experience yet so often our response is to avert it, run away or repress it, often resulting in self destructive behaviour and negative toxic responses. You simply cannot outrun pain, so your options are to attempt to ignore it, but in reality psychological issues and emotional distress cannot be ignored. Or you can turn towards it, observe and accept it for what it is, a part of being human.
During the course, I began to alter my relationship with negative selective memories and go towards them and soften them rather than avoid them. I would notice how they made me feel, where I felt them, breathing deeply, anchoring myself around the thought or memory in order to reduce the impact it had on me. I can’t tell you how much solace this brought. The idea of aversion when it comes to past experiences that mutate into haunting memories is simply not sustainable. If to be human, is at times to endure suffering then I feel we must learn to live with it and accept it. By doing this perhaps we also see the value of those memories and occasions that gift us happiness and peace, perhaps creating a much more compassionate environment for ourselves and a more empathetic environment for those around us. I condensed this into one simple answer “don’t be afraid of pain, move towards it, soften it and change your relationship with it”.
As I left the interview I only realised walking down the corridors of UCD, how sincerely accurate and practical my answer really was. The walls of the Newman building held many memories for me that I would rather not exist, but they do exist, they happened, they are imprinted into the very core of my mind, but that is all they are, memories. By returning to the very place responsible for these memories I was already turning towards them and softening them, changing my relationship with them. This for me is at the core of my mindfulness education, it has really opened a new avenue of thinking for me when it comes to my own self awareness and excites me to think what more I have yet to discover when it comes to mindfulness.
Check out Fiona’s O’ Donnell’s 4 week Introduction to mindfulness course here on A Lust for Life.
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