by oyster

I'm reading this book on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and I came across something interesting I thought many people could benefit from. Actually I want to teach MBSR one day so technically I think it could all benefit most people but this part really stuck out to me.

As soon as we open our eyes in the morning, stories are running through our minds that influence the way we see people. We may have preconceptions about who our wife, husband, kid, roommate, or partner is. When we walk out our door, we may already have ideas about who the neighbors, baristas, grocery store clerks, colleagues and even strangers are.

So the question is, do we actually even see the people behind our conceptions of who they are ?

This kind of cemented for me the reason why mindfulness needs to be ongoing because no matter how many times I may have known this in the past the desire to judge people prematurely still returns every now and then. A lot of the time this keeps us from actually seeing the person and in turn seeing what they really need from us. People are constantly growing and changing so even if we think we connect with somebody we might not really. Kind of like when a child grows up and a parent has a hard time coming to terms with who their child is vs. the image they have in their head. Or somebody waking up one day and realizing they hardly know the person they married after years of being together even though they used to know them. Eventually autopilot just fails us.

Any ways, I thought this would be a nice reminder to start the week off with. Also the source is MBSR Every Day by Elisha Goldstein and Bob Stahl because not including the book I got this from would be super rude.