Living in Full Colour
Part 5 in a 7 Part Series on Integrative Mindfulness
When we are experiencing pain, we want to experience no pain; when we are experiencing fear, we want to not feel fear; and when we are experiencing sadness, we want to find joy. Humans have a natural tendency to embrace pleasure and resist pain, and our subconscious minds have evolved a number of crafty tricks and shortcuts to get us from an unpleasant state to a more pleasurable one.
Our unconscious defence mechanisms might make us feel slightly better for the moment. However, the problem is that our subconscious mind is working in an automatic and unthinking way that doesn’t always consider what will serve us best in the long-term. The unconscious pushes us toward actions that will move us from pain to pleasure as quickly and as economically as possible, but the unconscious has no interest in resolving or addressing the root of the discomfort that we face.
As we push pain, fear, regret, sadness, disgust from our conscious mind we are only repressing it, pushing it back to the furthest reaches of our unconscious, from where it will inevitably rise again in new and potentially more painful ways. But a regular mindfulness practice enables us to be able to notice this internal conflict and the automatic tricks that our subconscious mind uses to make us feel better as…
