Will mindfulness help me in observing patterns and learning to keep away from a toxic person?
score:3
Good practical question.
First of all, I have to tell you, in (Mahayana) Buddhism there is no such thing as a "toxic person". The other person has impulses and reactions because of their own bad past experiences, and something in you triggers them. Doesn't mean you are bad or s\he is bad, it is just inertia from the past.
If you really think about it, there is no "you" and "other person", there is just a dynamic process of interaction between the two sets of past experiences, from which emerge new behaviors, whether healthy or pathological.
What you call mindfulness allows you (me, us) to suspend our typical impulses informed by the past and act with a new, fresh perspective. When you dance your part differently, the other participants can't help but alter their dance as well. Remember, they are not really choosing how to act, most people don't, but when you change, you create a new setting in which their impulses play out.
That's for one, and second, in Mahayana Buddhism we do not worry so much about protecting ourselves. Protection is an instinct of the ego, which is always vulnerable. To make the ego invincible one has to become a kind of demon, wearing a steel-strong-shell, never showing true feelings, always taking care of oneself at the expense of others. In Mahayana we go the opposite way. We open up and have nothing to protect. When we have nothing to protect we are invincible in a different way, and this way to be invincible is actually stronger than the first.
It's a very different attitude to what you are used in the normal world, takes a while to get used to.
Upvote:1
The truth is that the Theravadin practice of mindfulness meditation can be helpful in a multitude of ways, including pattern recognition. It is important that you understand how this is the case. First of all, you need to understand what sankhara means in plain English. A sankhara is an unconscious mental process that performs one of two functions: (1) It causes you to make sense of what you experience. For example, on the level of perception, it causes you to recognize or understand a set of sensations. On a more complex level it causes you to understand complex situations, what other people are doing or saying, or even understand your own feelings and experiences. Needless to say, a sankhara is a very sophisticated mental process that has had a long developmental process of learning and modification and is subject to error. (2) It causes you to generate and select action-plans that make sense to you in terms of your past experience, memory, and understanding. These definitions are based upon 50 years of practice and study.
The second thing you need to know is that no sankhara is perfect or complete. This is due to the facts that (1) knowledge is based upon evidence that is naturally incomplete and (2) that the world is endlessly complex. Your unconscious mind takes these two facts into account by engaging what I call safeguard processes. These processes have the function of avoiding, detecting, and correcting errors in your understanding and motivation. You have many built-in unconscious safeguard processes that are being constantly engaged for your benefit. Ordinarily, they do their jobs without you knowing about it. However, they are subject to distortion or limitation by your present beliefs, values, emotions, and preferences. This is normal.
You need to know about some of the more important safeguards. One such safeguard process is what I have called (in my book and in papers I am publishing) the does-this-make-sense safeguard. In order to understand this safeguard, it helps to imagine that your unconscious mind is constantly engaging many sankhara and this particular safeguard constantly asks (unconsciously) the question: Does this make sense? When something does not make sense, then some kind of correction process is always (unconsciously) engaged. For example, if a sensory sensation does not make sense, this safeguard may cause you to look again more carefully. If one of the action-plans you are considering does not make sense, then it may be quietly eliminated from your list of possible actions. When it comes to assessing a potential action you may want to perform, this safeguard (unconsciously) provides a very sophisticated analysis of the circumstances, memories of past successes and failures, and the desirability of probable outcomes. Unfortunately, your emotions, ignorance, and false beliefs can interfere with this analysis.
Another important safeguard discussed in the Satipatthana Sutta, is the “body-in-the-body” safeguard that I will call the focusing safeguard because it involves the process of “focusing” as developed by Eugene Gendlin. This is an advanced form of mindfulness meditation that helps the meditator examine and correct the history of a sankhara.
The next thing you need to understand is how mindfulness meditation engages your safeguards to help you unfold towards Enlightenment and overcome suffering. For example, you report that your meditation has reduced your anxiety. Anxiety arises when you (unconsciously) ask the question: How am I doing? An anxious person tends to assess his mental or physical state as being worse than it really is. During mindfulness meditation practice, you become relatively calm and objective in a matter-of-fact sort of way. When you address the question, how am I doing, things don’t seem so bad and you calm down.
If you put in the hours, days, weeks, or months of meditation all of your problematic sankhara come to mind periodically. Your safeguards will deal with the easiest ones first. Deeper problems may require engaging the focusing safeguard. It would take me too much space to explain it here. I suggest to learn focusing from the book by that name. Or you could read my book.
It is not the case that “mindfulness is always about being in present.” This is a beginner’s view. Concerning the toxic person you speak about, I suggest you learn to find “the body in the body” or the “felt sense” (Gendlin), learn to contact your deeper intelligence, and acquire a deeper understanding of everyone around you. Your problem-solving approach is good but limited until you are able to contact your deeper intelligence. I wish you well.
Upvote:2
Mindfullness, sati, lit. remembering, keeping in mind, reflecting, as taught by the Buddha, does not mean to dwell in the present, but to keep certain things in mind, reflect on them, to possible be able to observe more and more focused.
If interested on more understanding, feel given these short talks and essays:
[Note: This is a gift of Dhamma and not meant for commercial purpose or other low wordily gains by means of trade and exchange.]
More post
- 📝 Is belief in the end of experience wrong view according to the Buddha?
- 📝 How does Buddhism see Islam?
- 📝 What exactly is the logical relation between the links in the twelvefold chain of Pratītyasamutpāda?
- 📝 Could the Buddha have touched goal and gems in the 7 weeks after enlightenment
- 📝 Is there a Buddhist school / tradition wich recognizes the endless cycle of rebirth but doesn't teach that we should get liberated from it?
- 📝 Do Buddhist children from outside of Buddhist countries ever become monks temporarily?
- 📝 Buddha's omniscience
- 📝 While in Jhāna to walk or (reaching) Jhāna is not possible while walking?
- 📝 How to achieve stream entry in this very life?
- 📝 Was the Buddha a bodhisattva (for the benefit of all) before his awakening?
- 📝 Miracles from Lord Buddha vs messages from Gods?
- 📝 Symbolic meanings in Dogen's Fugen zazengi
- 📝 "The Blessed One", is it bad translation?
- 📝 Was the kamikaze against the Mongol empire considered a supernatural event in Buddhism?
- 📝 Color perception in meditation
- 📝 How to stop comparing oneself with others?
- 📝 What does "sandhāvitvā saṃsaritvā" mean in AN 9.12?
- 📝 Misinterpretation of a Pali phrase - Rupan Jirathi
- 📝 What is useless/meaningless speech?
- 📝 What can I do to have my destination confirmed?
- 📝 How do we break an attachment with the Buddha Himself?
- 📝 What caused the Golden Bowl to go upstream?
- 📝 Buddhism is kind of depressing
- 📝 How to increase my potential in daimoku?
- 📝 Is celibacy intrinsic to Buddhism?
- 📝 What is Navayana Buddhism?
- 📝 Conciousness in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta
- 📝 What are the main differences between Buddhism and Ellen Langer's 'scientific mindfulness'?
- 📝 Hesitation between Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta
- 📝 Problem with the logic of karma
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Will mindfulness help me in observing patterns and learning to keep away from a toxic person?
- 📝 What is the difference between learning the Buddhist way and simply learning from life?
- 📝 Will I keep my memories and experience with each passing incarnation?
- 📝 buddha and me (my will to accept all from buddism)
- 📝 Mindfulness and Pushing Away Emotions
- 📝 Mindfulness of breathing - What is meant by "arising and passing away of the body"?
- 📝 What are the differences between vipassana and mindfulness meditation?
- 📝 Strange feelings after meditation and mindfulness practice?
- 📝 Overwhelming thoughts - Mindfulness and awareness
- 📝 mindfulness thinking about future and past?
- 📝 Mindfulness is leading to anxiety and depersonalisation
- 📝 Mindfulness when on the train, underground and bus
- 📝 How to keep balance in the thin line between non attachment to reputation and "not caring about anything"
- 📝 Developing mindfulness doing complex activities like learning or programming?
- 📝 Is there any point in learning meditation from an unenlightened person?
- 📝 Mindfulness of feelings and emotions
- 📝 Could meditation help with reducing memory and concentration problems? As with ADD or ADHD?
- 📝 A question about sitting, movement and mindfulness
- 📝 If A is killed by B due to A's past karma of killing B, will B suffer from this karma of killing A?
- 📝 "When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the dharma will come to the land of the red faces"
- 📝 Are mindfulness and flow related
- 📝 What is the difference between concentration and mindfulness practice ?
- 📝 Mindfulness and mental habits
- 📝 What is the sutra where the Buddha emits fire and water from his body?
- 📝 Living worried about the future and reaching mindfulness
- 📝 Mindfulness : relation between manasikāra and Citta
- 📝 What meditation practice will allow me to sleep less and focus more?
- 📝 When to help and when not to?
- 📝 Iconography in Buddhism - from the Greeks? And why isn't the Buddha bald?
- 📝 Can Mahayana and Theravada learn from eachother?