Mindfulness: the Cult

-Mindfulness Bites-

Mindfulness: the Cult

By Lise Villeneuve

What exactly is mindfulness anyway? I’ve attempted to explain it many times to family members who are very religious and somehow, they think mindfulness IS Buddhism, or (gasp!) some kind of satanic New Age cult. Therefore, in their eyes, I am headed straight to hell for practising such heresy. But don’t worry, we’re still one big, loving family. Our gatherings are always very lively and stimulating, there is never a dull moment!

But seriously, mindfulness has nothing to do with religion or even New Age fads. In fact, mindfulness is much closer to psychology than religion. By the way, in case you’re wondering, despite my upbringing, I’m not religious at all -in the sense that I don’t participate in any particular rituals from any specific faith. However, I consider myself very spiritual and I do strongly believe in a divine creator or Higher Power, to avoid the label “God.” So whether you’re religious or not, it’s all good, there is no conflict, no contradiction between mindfulness and religion.

What is it? I would say it’s the art of being aware, of paying attention. Paying attention not only to what’s happening in our external world, but, more importantly, to what’s going on in our inner world. Mindfulness develops our emotional intelligence. It’s kind of like the instruction manual we were never given at birth that helps us figure out the relationship between our thoughts, our emotions and our bodily sensations.

I’m not quite sure why this seems to threaten my religious family. Perhaps it’s the meditation aspect of mindfulness that makes them uncomfortable. Meditation makes me uncomfortable too, especially when I have to sit in the same pose for a long time and my legs start to cramp up, but I guess that’s a different kind of discomfort. Meditation is simply a way of quieting the mind and being still. Mindfulness encourages us to practice noticing our thoughts and our feelings so that we can become less reactive, less controlled by them. It empowers us to make wiser decisions with a clear mind.

Why has mindfulness become so incredibly popular over the last few years? Probably because of its many scientifically-proven benefits. Such as? Well I’m glad you asked. There are so many benefits that I decided to incorporate them into a little rap song. I’d like to dedicate it to certain members of my family (all in good humour):

When you feel like a mess, like a big ball of stress

You can always rely on mindfulness

Take a deep breath, fill up your chest

Mindfulness will help you feel your best

Notice your thoughts, notice how you feel

Mindfulness will help you keep it real

Mindfulness will help you keep it real

Mindfulness keeps your brain real sharp

It helps your memory and it’s good for your heart

It lowers your blood pressure, brings down your stress

It helps with depression, it helps with distress

Notice your thoughts, notice how you feel

Mindfulness will help you keep it real

Mindfulness will help you keep it real

It improves your focus and boosts resilience

It makes you feel good so you can show off your brilliance

Improve your health and your self-compassion

With mindfulness: It’s the latest fashion

Notice your thoughts, notice how you feel

Mindfulness will help you keep it real

Mindfulness will help you keep it real

Mindfulness helps in so many ways

It’s like “miracle whip”, you know, the mayonnaise?

It gives life some flavour, it gives it some punch

It helps you cope when you’re in a crunch

Mindfulness really fills your cup

So if it’s a cult, then where do I sign up?

Mindfulness really fills your cup

So if it’s a cult, then where do I sign up?

Thanks for reading, and for more detailed information about the benefits of mindfulness check out this link: https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/benefits-of-mindfulness/
(Mindfulness decreases stress and anxiety levels, improves emotion regulation, induces a state of relaxation, which in turn improves higher brain functioning, increases immune function, lowers blood pressure and heart rate, increases awareness, attention, clarity and focus, it accelerates recovery of the body, decreases depressive symptoms, increases self-compassion, improves general health, decreases reactivity, increases curiosity, tolerance, patience and self-acceptance, it improves academic performance, it’s a buffer against bullying and depression, it boosts resilience, reduces behavior and attention problems in children, improves job performance in the workplace, decreases burnout, and it primes our brain for  better learning and remembering.)

Sincerely,

Lise Villeneuve
www.lisevilleneuve.com

Things I Wish I Knew: The Paradox of Pain

Things I Wish I Knew:The Paradox of Pain

I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but I have been searching my entire life for something I only recently discovered. How different things could have been had I known this earlier on! So much unnecessary suffering could have been avoided. I wasn’t even aware that I was trying to escape my pain at any cost.

Just Fitting In

Like everyone else around me, I was just doing whatever I could to avoid feeling those queasy, raw, edgy feelings of discomfort whenever they showed up. Denial, projection, repression and suppression were my strategies of choice to run away and escape from those negative feelings. I kept myself as busy and distracted as I possibly could in order to ignore or numb the underlying pain. I was fortunate enough to have a fairly normal childhood with no major trauma, yet the pain had been building up over the years, simply as a condition of living in a world that encourages and rewards disowning and projecting our negative feelings onto others.

What Problem?

Since I didn’t even know there was a problem - this denied pain I was carrying around everywhere was preventing me from experiencing true joy and inner peace - how was I to know there was a solution that could dramatically improve my quality of life? Why wasn’t I taught this simple solution in elementary school, or in University, when I got my psychology degree? Maybe it was best that I discover these things on my own, when I was ready to truly hear them. After all, I believe everything in this universe unfolds in perfect divine order. My journey into the heart of consciousness has allowed me to grow, to unlearn and to peel off many of the layers of protection I had built around myself. Now, I am happy to be able to share what I have discovered with others. And what is that?

The Exact Opposite Of What We Do

The pathway to true freedom and inner peace is so simple, yet it is counterintuitive and rather uncomfortable. We are all wired to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Evolutionarily, this has ensured our survival. However, we are now at a stage in our evolution that allows us to soar beyond mere survival. Now more than ever before, we have the potential to thrive. We can reach levels of bliss that allow us to transcend the drama and suffering of this world. But for that, we have to stop running from our pain. There is no other way around it. We have to willingly welcome our pain and then let it go. We can learn to see pain for what it is – trapped emotions from our past – not who we are.

Breaking Free

As unpleasant and challenging as it may appear, we can all find the courage to face those uncomfortable feelings that make us squirm, hide, run, blame, judge, and sabotage ourselves. Once we become aware of the many avoidance behaviors or crutches we desperately cling to in order to push the pain away (keeping busy, alcohol, food, sex, television, isolation, projection onto others...etc), we can start to crack the walls of the prison that has been keeping our pain inside all these years. We can stop reacting to life from a place of fear and instead start to see our triggers as opportunities, or invitations to actively release the hurt we have been carrying inside for too long.

Run, Forrest, Run!

So when that queasy, edgy feeling returns, we can stay present with it instead of trying to make it go away. We can observe what’s happening inside our body and let the emotions come out instead of running from them, or demanding that people or circumstances stop poking us where it hurts. Once the negative feelings have been released and we feel ok again inside, all our energy becomes available for problem solving, for simply enjoying the moment or for actively creating the reality we choose.

Healing From The Inside Out

It takes a while to get used to it, but this process of facing and surrendering our pain can be embraced daily. At first it might feel strange and terrifying, but as you keep releasing the negative feelings and then consciously refocus attention on positive things that allow you to feel good, you will heal your life from the inside out. When we are brave enough to face our pain, we eventually become fearless. When we are fearless, all the boundaries and limits we set around ourselves crumble. Paradoxically, fully feeling and releasing our pain is the quickest way to end our individual and collective suffering.

So there you have it. Now I know... and so do you! Thanks for having taken the time to read!

With Love,

Lise

www.lisevilleneuve.com

Are We Being Honest With Ourselves?

Why is this happening to me again?

Did you ever notice that we re-experience painful scenarios over and over again until we finally learn what we need to change in our life? The people, situations and places may change, but we all have recurring issues that keep recreating themselves until we learn our lessons. Life is designed this way to facilitate our evolution.

No, that's not me...

For some, the issues revolve around dysfunctional relationships. For others, it's more about self-worth, or control. Whatever the theme is, we will continue to experience uncomfortable, negative emotions until we get right down to the root of the problem. Denial and suppression of these negative feelings will only work for a short time, since repressed energies get stored in our emotional body and can create illness. We can run, but we can't hide!

I feel great!

It's time to be honest with ourselves. What is causing us the greatest sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, frustration or apathy in our life right now? Do we want to keep running away from these negative feelings, or do we want to finally free ourselves from them? Yes, it may be terrifying to face our shadow -our dark side- but it's the only way to remove the phenomenal power it has over us.

Emotional energy drain

Whether we realise it or not, it takes incredible amounts of energy to keep these shameful aspects hidden from our awareness. Instead of wasting our energy trying to deny our wounds, we could release this energy and use it to manifest a fulfilling, empowered life. To be free from the weight of our repressed negative emotions, we first have to accept them, reintegrate them and then release them.

Wound? What wound?

The good news is that life gives us so many opportunities to do this. Each time we feel annoyed, frustrated, angry, fearful, sad or just plain numb, it's because something on the outside has touched our wound on the inside. If we didn't have a wound in the first place, then we wouldn't feel so vulnerable. We wouldn't use projection to blame others for how we are feeling inside. At the core of this wound is a deep fear that we are powerless, that we are too insignificant to make a real difference in this world. Is this true?

Our thoughts create our reality...

What do you  think would happen to the world if everybody started to accept, reintegrate and release their own negative emotions in appropriate ways? If we were comfortable with our own "dark side", we would stop blaming others for theirs. We could help each other to nurture our more positive qualities by tipping the scale from global fear and competition to universal love, compassion, forgiveness and cooperation. Do you think our leaders could get away with some of the things we are seeing today if the majority of humans resonated at the higher frequency of Love? No!

Who am I?

When we respond to events with fear and negativity, unfortunately, we are reinforcing and supporting the old paradigm of separation. It helps to ask this question: who am I? Am I merely a separate, isolated, physical being, or a deeply connected, eternal, spiritual being? When we experience fear, it's usually from the perspective of the ego-self.

The greatest awakener = suffering

The time has come for us to face our individual and collective shadows. We can all see that things aren't right on the planet. We are all well-aware of the collective suffering that seems to be increasing. That's because suffering is the greatest awakener. If we don't learn our lessons and evolve, life teaches us the hard way. Is this the route we are collectively choosing? Unfortunately, it seems like it.

What can I do?

When we each have the courage to face our individual shadow, this reduces our collective shadow, and it reconnects us to the most powerful forces on earth: Love, compassion, forgiveness and cooperation. These are necessary to ensure our survival.We cannot truly be light workers unless we reintegrate, love and forgive our own darkness.

Thanks for reading,

Much Love,

Lise Villeneuve
www.lisevilleneuve.com

My Darkest Time Revealed in a Magazine!

I never would have thought in a million years that one day, I'd be sharing what turned out to be the darkest period in my life with the world - in a magazine recently published in India! Life is funny that way, and I don't regret a second of it!

Click on the link below to read the article. Special thanks to Suzy Singh.

https://www.lifepositive.com/the-wounded-healer/

Love,

Lise Villeneuve

Creator of Conscious Kids and Conscious Health

Free printable mindfulness cards

Should We Slay Our Inner-Dragon?

I had fun colouring this mandala today as I was listening to Pema Chodron's CD "Walk the Walk". She was talking about learning to be gentle and kind with ourselves, because so many of us have such a harsh inner-critic inside. Sound familiar? She was also mentioning how important it is to learn to be alone with ourselves, to be still, so that we can observe our ego-mind, and see how it's at the root of our unhappiness and suffering. Now that I think about it, the colours I picked for the mandala remind me of a fire-spitting dragon, and from now on, I think that's how I'll picture the ego.

Most of us do just about anything we can to keep ourselves busy and distracted from our inner-tyrant. For many, sitting alone in stillness is pretty much the equivalent of torture. Why is that? Why is it so difficult and painful to face ourselves? Because we've become completely identified with our thoughts (which are predominantly negative) and our emotions. We believe that we ARE what we're thinking, we ARE what we're feeling, therefore when we sit there, and our dark, compulsive thoughts and feelings start to make our heads spin, we conclude that we must be bad, or very screwed up people.

Fundamentally, we're not bad or screwed up, we're just confused about our true identity. We're not the dragon, it just happens to have set up camp in our psyche. The way out of this nightmare is to face that dragon and to shed the light of consciousness onto it. We'll never be able to completely kill it off, but we can domesticate him. We can learn to observe it fearlessly, and it will gradually lose its power over us.

We're experts at either tip toeing around the dragon so that we don't wake him up, or keeping ourselves as far away from him as possible. In other words, we avoid our pain. It's understandable because our hectic, largely unconscious society encourages us to suppress a lot painful emotions in order to appear "functional" on the outside. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions don't just vanish into thin air, they remain in our bodies and resurface over and over again until we are ready and able to heal them. When all our outside distractions dissolve, we are faced once again with our dragon, and these painful signals suddenly emerge from the core of our being.

A profound transformation happens when we realize that the dragon we were so terrified of was our friend, all along. He was simply trying to get our attention so that we could heal our wounds. He knew from the start that any pain we allow ourselves to feel (whether physical or emotional) is an indication of a part of us that wants to heal into consciousness. It takes great courage to face that pain, but if we can embrace it, understand it, love it and release it, we will break free from its shackles.

Warmly,

Lise
Health Coach / Reiki Master
www.lisevilleneuve.com

A Big Pain In The...

...HEART! A Big Pain In The Heart! 

As much as this can be an uncomfortable subject because it forces us to face our deepest fears, I would like to talk about the profound pain we are all carrying. Very few of us even acknowledge that suffering exists in our hearts, but it's there, holding us down in many different ways. Releasing our pain is the key to finding our freedom.

Why don't we realize we are suffering? Mainly because we've never experienced what it feels like not to suffer. Do fish realize they are surrounded by water? It seems obvious to us, but not to them, because they've never been out of water (the lucky ones, at least!). So day after day, we swim in our ocean of psychological and emotional pain thinking this is normal. Our psyches have become hyper-sensitive in this modern world. We are filled with insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt, self-consciousness. It doesn't have to be this way.

The mind is a powerful  tool that wants to help us. It tries to fix us inside -to reduce our fears- by suggesting we do this or that, say this or that, often in a neurotic kind of way!The problem with the mind is that it thinks it can find the solution to our problems by changing our external circumstances. A better job, a different girlfriend, a better body perhaps? However, our root problem is internal: our fears make us feel incomplete, inadequate. The truth is, there is nothing we can change on the outside to fix this permanently. So what can we do, then?

The first thing to do is to fire our minds! Ignore the neurotic chatter box! Don't fight it, just refuse to participate in it. Be quiet inside and watch what your mind is telling you. Be the silent witness and stop deriving a sense of identity from your mind. You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness behind them.

Great, so you quieted the mind, but what about the pain? It's still there. You have been storing pockets of pain in your heart chakra since childhood (Samskara). Whatever you have resisted in the past, you still carry today. Whenever you close your heart to protect yourself from more pain, you actually trap that pain inside:

"Remember, if you close around something, you will be psychologically sensitive about that subject for the rest of your life. Because you stored it inside of you, you will be afraid that it will happen again." -Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

The key to spiritual freedom is learning to become comfortable with pain passing through us. If we are able to see the pain as nothing more than transient energy that just needs to make its way through us to be released, our hearts can stay open and we won't accumulate more pain. When old, painful memories resurface, we get a second chance to open our hearts and release them once and for all. Some people experience a feeling of heat in the heart area when this happens.

So, the next time a form of pain comes your way, (and it will!) instead of fearing it, instead of trapping it inside by closing your heart, be brave enough to keep your heart open and just experience it passing through you. It will probably be uncomfortable, but in the long run, you will waste less time and energy avoiding or reacting to circumstances that trigger those sensitive pockets of pain you have been carrying for so long. You will be tearing down the bars of your internal prison one by one. The question is, how badly do you want this freedom?

Warmly,

Lise

www.lisevilleneuve.com

Join me on Facebook: Conscious Living Solutions