The Art & Science of Mindfulness in Mental Health Awareness Month

Mercy is Love’s Response to Suffering

The topic of Emotions is a difficult one to write about.  Afterall, we all have feelings, and one might think that nobody understands their feelings as well as they do.  Feelings, much like thoughts are uniquely individual.  They are contextual, they occur in real-time, and they shape our very presence at a given point in time.

Unfortunately, for the past 2 and a half years, that context has simultaneously felt both, global and insular. Global in that the pandemic was not a local, regional, provincial, or even a national problem – it was global!  It also felt insular, in that many people cocooned, and withdrew socially, becoming myopic in their perspective thereby inhibiting prosocial emotions.

Mental Health Awareness Month could NOT have come at more opportune time.  We all appear to be beginning to breathe a sigh of tentative relief in coming out from the shadow of this existence-altering phenomenon. Yet, we do so with the uncertainty of a groundhog on the morning of Feb. 2nd – speculative, cautious, and hyper-vigilant of our surroundings.

The landscape appears to be shifting somewhat.  We have gone from an isolationist mentality where we were told to stay home, distance socially, and wear PPE, to a more laissez-faire attitude & an “everyone is eventually going to get it – so just live with it” mindset.  Nonetheless, the stresses and strains of the past two years are becoming more evident, pronounced, and dare I say, going to be with us for some time to come?

The polarized debate these past few years has damaged relationships, fractured families, and squandered any reserves of sympathy, empathy, and/or compassion. It is my sincere hope that this next month (May), which also happens to be Mental Health Awareness Month, we will take the time to replenish those prosocial reserves.

We know that when our emotions run high, our reactions may be skewed and not representative of our true thoughts or feelings. This in turn, may leave us in greater turmoil and more depleted.  All the more reason for us to tune into our psycho-physiological responses to the emotions we are experiencing – enhance our interoception (internal sensations of biological processes) and take actions to restore our energy levels before responding in a maladaptive way.

I suggest reading “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van der kolk.