You can not fail at mindfulness!

Don’t agree?

I’ll tell you why I said that in just a moment. But first let me share a great interview with you.

A couple of days ago, Brigid Shulte (Washington Post) published an interview she did with one of our favorite meditation and mindfulness teachers, Sharon Salzberg.

It’s a wonderful interview, covering both meditation benefits, why mindfulness is good for us, people’s fear of being alone with their thoughts, our biological negativity bias, and the importance of consistency.

Here is just some of the benefits she mentions:

Mindfulness helps relieve anxiety and can give us a real sense of connection and fulfillment, as well as insight and understanding. [..] Mindfulness helps us develop a different, kinder relationship with ourselves, to see much more deeply into all of our experience.

And here is the passage I mentioned, about how it is impossible to fail at meditation and mindfulness:

People say they feel like failures. But you can’t fail. When we realize our mind has wandered off like a monkey, it’s in that moment we have a chance to be really different, instead of reinforcing old hanebits. Instead of lambasting ourselves that we didn’t meditate perfectly, we let go and start over. And if your mind wanders in the next ten seconds, you let go and start over. And let go and start over. That’s strength training. We’re practicing resilience.

Don’t you just love it?

I encourage you to read the whole interview for yourself…

After you’ve read it all, please take 10 seconds to share with us your thoughts, in a comment below!