Mindfulness: the number 1 characteristic of resilient people

Courtesy of Charmeddesign.com

Mindfulness is everywhere these days, and that's a good thing. I'm a mindfulness practitioner, and it's heartwarming to see mindfulness recommended in a doctor's blog post on the five characteristics of resilient people. Smita Malhotra, M.D., affirms mindfulness as a refuge in difficult times and that has certainly been my experience over the years.

Dr. Malhotra, self-described as a pediatrician, writer, photographer, dog lover, and student of life, writes:

I remember the day I found out that my aunt had cancer. Although she was the most positive person I had ever met, I still worried about how she would handle such an overwhelming diagnosis.
Looking back, now that her cancer is in remission, she continues to be the most positive person I know. But even more than that, she is what I call an elegant spirit. 

Cancer, in my aunt's world, was a small valley hidden amongst the many glorious peaks of her life. While she may have had some moments of despair as we all do when we find ourselves alone in our thoughts, unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, she never showed this to the world outside.
She never complained. During her treatment, she continued to go to work and share her passion. She turned long days of chemotherapy in the hospital into a party with her friends where they would share stories, laugh and play cards. 

Life threw her an arrow, and she, an archer herself, caught this arrow and created her bow. She knew that she could not control the fact that this arrow had come to her, but her bow could hold it stable. Instead of defeating her, the arrow ultimately strengthened her. 

As a physician, I have met many such elegant spirits. Their resilience is awe-inspiring. They have the ability to handle even the most devastating diagnosis. 

How then, do people cultivate such strength? And how can we do that for ourselves?

Here are five things resilient people have in common (mindfulness heads the list):

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"The wondrous diversity of mindfulness practitioners"

Image courtesy of YouTube via Huffington Post.

In her piece at the Huffington Post the other day addressing "the mindfulness revolution," Carolyn Grigoire is obviously annoyed by Time Magazine's recent cover using a "beautiful, white, blond woman" to represent mindfulness practitioners.

Grigoire writes:

2014 has been called the "year of mindful living," and talk of a mindful revolution seems to be everywhere from Davos to Silicon Valley. Most recently, mindfulness was the subject of a controversial cover of TIME Magazine.

TIME's "Mindful Revolution" cover in January stirred up debate among the online mindfulness community, in part for featuring a beautiful, white blonde woman meditating on the cover. As some commentators pointed out, this wasn't the first time that the magazine has portrayed mindfulness this way: Its last cover on the "science of meditation" also featured an image of a beautiful white model.

"It's one thing to feature a young, fertile white girl on the cover of TIME and promote it as 'mindfulness,'" wrote Joanna Piacenza, web manager of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, in a HuffPost Religion blog post. "It's another to do it twice over the course of a decade."

It's undeniable that there is a mindful revolution going on, and that more people than ever before are embracing the well-documented physical and mental health benefits of meditation. But unfortunately, a homogenous representation of mindfulness practices isn't uncommon in the media -- especially in the case of yoga, which is often depicted by a thin white woman with a "Gwyneth Paltrow body." But the image of the serene, young white woman closing her eyes and breathing deeply doesn't come close to telling the whole story of how mindfulness is beginning to transform lives.

Despite the often-exclusionary media representation of mindfulness, the "mindful revolution" is spreading everywhere.

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