While I’m a huge fan of mindfulness and mindful living, I’m also keenly aware of some of the risks that mindfulness entails. Some of the risks of being a regular practitioner include using meditation as an escape from unpleasantness, becoming unnecessarily compliant, or having experiences that trigger mental health issues. A quick search will lead you to explanations for each of these, so I won’t elaborate. Instead, I want to take a deep dive into what I consider the biggest risk when incorporating mindfulness into your life: resignation.

One definition of resignation is: an accepting, unresisting attitude or state; submission; acquiescence.

Many mindfulness practitioners confuse “accepting reality as it is in this moment” with “accepting that this is just the way things are and always will be”.

I’ve written in many of my blog posts that to be fully present requires us to embrace all of our experience in this moment, including the unpleasant parts and the parts we would wish didn’t exist. What that means is that a certain surrender is necessary for complete presence in this moment. If we resist or deny any aspect of our experience in this moment, then we aren’t present to all of it, so in a sense we aren’t really open and embracing ALL THAT IS.

The point that many mindfulness practitioners miss is that this surrender is a surrender to what is present in experience AT THIS MOMENT. This is not about being powerless to change things.

This is a huge mistake and one that leads many practitioners of mindful living to become overly acquiescent and to fail to take action to shape how the future unfolds.

To fully embrace the totality of our experience in this moment does not mean to resign oneself to the way things are, as if one had no personal power to change things. These are two very different ways of relating to reality and yet they are not incompatible.

In fact, some research shows that the act of fully and deeply experiencing an unpleasant state can actually lead to more effective action leading to positive change. For example, getting a smoker to really experience the full reality of inhaling tobacco and feeling its effect on the body can lead to that person more easily quitting smoking.

The biggest risk in practicing mindfulness is thinking that “fully opening to and embracing the totality of one’s experience in this moment” means completely giving up on ever creating a different reality in the future. In actual fact, the opposite can happen. Fully embracing the reality of this moment can reveal information about things that are not working for us, and point the way to making useful and lasting changes.

Mindful living is NOT about resignation! I hope you really get that message, loud and clear.

I will leave you with a question: is there some aspect of your current reality that you might have unnecessarily resigned yourself to? If so, now would be a good time to make a plan, take action steps, and change your behaviour, so that at some point in the future, your reality will be more aligned with your values and your well-being.