Mandi on Mindfulness: Mindfulness and Coping: What's the difference?

Let’s do this from the bottom up.  Bottom line: Mindfulness should take you into the present moment, not away from it. Mindfulness can be used to ground yourself in the middle of a wave of anxiety or a douse of depression  or a slice of your personal chaos– it can dig your tent stakes deep into the middle of the dry, uncomfortable desert floor. 

Through mindfulness practices, you slow your breath, then your body, then your thoughts, then your feelings, then your behaviors. Following this chain, you will find yourself engaging with life in the way you would CHOSE to, in the way that serves you best and brings you more in line with your authentic self, connected to your “Fount of Living Water” right in the middle of the desert.  Otherwise we are victims of autopilot self-preservation instincts…that path you have been down enough times to know it doesn’t lead where you want to be.

The problem is, we don’t like being in the desert. We don’t like liminal space.  We don’t like the grey.  For a long, long time I tried everything I knew to part with this desert space and enter into the “promise land”.

That is where coping mechanisms come in.  They are for a different purpose entirely.  They distract us from the present moment, from the reality of our feelings. Listen to music, go for a walk, call a friend and get your mind off of it.  These are all totally legal, valid, and completely necessary. 

But they are not mindfulness and if they are all you have in your pocket to cope with, you will avoid the discomfort  but never find that “square shaped peg” that you need for your “square shaped hole” to transform, change, or complete the process of the difficult emotion you are presented with. They also tend to distract us from the Beloved.

It has taken me a while to learn this lesson: the desert...is a good place to be. 

It is actually satisfying to root deep into the packed desert floor and it allows us to store up wells that can last for years without rain. 

It is here that our sightline is unobstructed and our only consolation is the One that we wouldn’t by nature reach for…but the only One that can actually drench and quench our soul, no matter if we are walking through rain forest or desert.

There is an invitation from the Eternal in the book of Hosea that delivers me from hopelessness. 

If we can wait in the desert, tolerate it with skill and intention, stay there a long time, if we can find a way to be still and silent on the inside while the temperature of our circumstances burns our skin, this is the business that goes down in the desert:

Hosea 2:14-16 The Voice (VOICE)

¹⁴     But once she has nothing, I’ll be able to get through to her.
        I’ll entice her and lead her out into the wilderness where we can be alone,
        and I’ll speak tenderly to her heart and try to win her back.
¹⁵     And then I’ll give her back her vineyards;
        I’ll turn the valley of Achor, that “Valley of Trouble,”^[a]
        into a gateway of hope.   In the wilderness of exile she’ll learn to respond to Me
        the way she did when she was young, when I brought her out of Egypt.

¹⁶ And I swear when that day comes, she’ll call Me “my husband” and never address Me again as “my master” as she did those other gods.

Mindfulness practices as well as contemplative prayer practices and living with strong boundaries fortified by integrity are some of the only ways I found to live the truth of this. 

Learning to hold myself in a place I don’t want to be long enough for the toxicity to drain out completely until I realize I am unharmed, more expansive, and abiding in a deeper layer of authenticity and connection to Jesus for having been stretched thin.