The Stress Of Success?

[GianKarlo]

Everyone who achieve success have undergone the process of stress. The greatness of stress is that when your totally sick of everything you just stand up and face it bravely. And when that time comes success comes around and its all worth it.

[Bitterballen]

I remember reading an article about soldiers being encouraged to use mindfulness to make them more focused and alert during high pressure situations. At first it surprised and disappointed me a little but I have changed my view somewhat. If it allows them to make more accurate and careful decisions it may be to everyone's benefit!

[Galactic Nomad]

Like most of you here I also consider the competitive advantage of mindfulness to be counter intuitive to what lies at the heart of the practice. However, I also agree that regardless of the path one takes to come to mindfulness the practice itself is so transformative those that truly embrace it will invariably lose those competitive motivations.

Indeed the stress of success is something I’ve been battling personally for quite some time, which then manifested itself into just pure stress. I then established my very new mindfulness practice and have already started to detach myself from the expectations and fears that were driving my state of mind, thereby more present in the moment.

Given how our brains our wired in this information age, to pause and observe was indeed like viewing life in technicolour (to borrow a phrase from BioSattva). It is the accessibility of this beauty that I will talk about when speaking to others about mindfulness, and indeed what will draw me back through the consistency of my practice.

Given my inexperience with the practice, I will need more time to fully appreciate and break free of this concept of striving: striving for success, striving for security, striving for love etc. Releasing this mindset and replacing it with the knowledge that in the moment all of those things are relative concepts is where I find people may struggle. Replacing what they perceive to be as tangible with something that (to the uninitiated) appears to be something quite intangible (even though it’s actually quite the opposite) is quite daunting.

[Simonjk]

I too am relatively inexperienced in the mindfulness journey. But I am not sure that there is anything wrong with people charging and making money from teaching mindfulness as long as its fair.

Yes I appreciated thats a judgement and opinion on whats fair.

Headspace is around £50 per year, that doesn't seem to me to be too bad. I would like to see their staff contribute more in the forums, but it isn't a bad price.

Locally to us here in Bath, 8 week courses are around £240. For that you get 8x 2hr 15 minute sessions and a days retreat. Not too bad depending on the number of people on the course.

Could mindfulness be abused ? Probably, I learnt a bit of NLP more so I could use it as a defence against people trying to manipulate me than as an influencing technique.

Just my opinions....