I realised yesterday that my default mode is ‘striving’
The definition of strive/striving is:
1) make great efforts to achieve or obtain something
2) struggle or fight vigorously.
Hmmm - a double edged sword…
In life, if we don’t ‘strive’ we won’t achieve anything.
Striving is necessary.
BUT if we are constantly striving there is a danger we end up ‘struggling or fighting vigorously’ - often with ourselves. And this surely cannot be good for us.
Yesterday I had a headache. I woke up with it and it would not shift.
I had assigned a number of things on my ‘to do’ list and I pretty much achieved none of them.
I could feel brain fog moving in and a familiar feeling of stress beginning to bed in for the day.
But I persevered - my ‘striving’ brain kicked in and I continued to do nothing but feel worse.
My husband came home from work and told me to go and lie down. I preceded to begin to tidy up and pointlessly shift around work bags and ‘stuff’ from one place to another. I NEEDED to have a tidy room.
“Your problem is that you don’t know how to do nothing” said my husband.
And he’s right. I realised that doing ‘nothing’ feels like a lack of achievement - a waste of valuable time spent ‘achieving’ something , even if the thing(s) I am trying to achieve are really not that important in the grand scheme of things….
I find myself continually striving for a perceived ‘ideal’ of things that will make life better.
One of the qualities of Mindfulness is the opposite to my default mode.
When we practice Mindfulness, we aim to have an attitude of non-striving.
It’s easy to strive to have a completely calm and relaxing experience when meditating or to strive to be able to use our meditation to leave difficult feelings behind.
But as soon as we start striving, we lay ourselves open to self criticism and feelings of failure when we don’t achieve what we are striving for in our meditation - we don’t achieve the desired ‘outcome’
The attitude of ‘non striving’ enables us to be non judgemental about our experience . If we find our minds are really busy and we find it difficult to ‘settle’ in a meditation - struggle to find that sense of calm in the here and now that we so desire, it’s easy then for our self talk to be self critical.
The attitude of ‘non striving’ means that we can just be okay with however things are without trying to change them - without ‘struggling and fighting’ against how things are.
Instead, we can just allow things to be how they are and be okay with that.
Removing striving in this sense enables us to just ‘be’ - just as we are in a particular place and time.
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