This Really Inspired Me

The River Roding & The Paradox of Mindfulness

Yesterday, I was attending session 4 of a course my friend is running on Mindfulness for Stress. The theme was Compassionate Acceptance, meaning the ability to turn towards difficult experiences with compassion, acknowledging the reality of them. And my friend (thank you Mythili!) rounded off the session with a story that really inspired me, so I’m going to share it with you.

The Paradox of Mindfulness

The story served to illustrate ‘the paradox of mindfulness’, which is similar to my favourite Carl Rogers quote, which I’ll share again below. The paradox is this:

When we are striving really hard to make things different from how they currently are - in a way that serves to numb the reality of how things currently are - we end up striving and striving and striving, yet remaining stuck. It’s like being in a car stuck in the mud, trying harder and harder to get out, yet spinning your wheels and ending up more and more stuck (and more splattered with mud).

Paradoxically, when we are able to slow down - becoming mindfully aware of the current reality, rather than fighting hard to distract ourselves from feeling it - something changes. In allowing ourselves to notice, feel and acknowledge the true reality of the situation, we free ourselves from the stuckness. Change becomes possible. So for the car stuck in the mud, this is when you stop for a moment, let the engine cool down and the wheels stop spinning, and take a look outside. And perhaps that’s when you find the planks of wood and the people nearby that will help you get out.

“The curious paradox is that when I accespt myself just as I am, then I can change.” - Carl Rogers

Or to use another analogy, it’s like shifting from being immersed in this trance of striving - trying to get to ‘B’ when you’re currently in ‘A’ - to just allowing yourself to become mindfully aware of ‘A’, of what it is that’s upsetting you about being there, and to compassionately acknowledge how that is affecting you. By some kind of magic (and the paradox of mindfulness), once you start doing that, you’d be amazed at how the realities of B, which you were seeking to escape to, somehow start springing up all around you, without the constant striving. The realities of ‘A’ don’t completely disappear, but a wider reality (including what you were striving to find) becomes possible.

The Story of the River Roding

To illustrate this point (so beautifully, I thought), my friend shared the story of the River Roding. The Roding is a river in North East London - one of the most polluted rivers in the UK (possibly the most polluted). Full of rubbish and sewage, it’s not been a place anyone wants to spend any time. With levels of toxic waste not conducive to river life, it was generally considered a dead river.

But some time ago, a man decided to move his boat there, and to get to know the river. He began pulling rubbish out of the river, and gadually other people joined him - they hauled out tons of plastic waste, and even a shotgun and a motorbike! The man decided to plant trees too - 35 for his 35th birthday, and recently 40 for his 40th. He was taking action to create change, but this action was rooted in the deep understanding, awareness and compassion that came from sitting with the real issue, rather than trying to deny it.

Then one day recently, he was sat on his boat in a quiet moment, and looked up to see a kingfisher flying and landing by the river.

How often have you seen a kingfisher? Beautiful birds that we’d love to see more often, and yet by this supposedly dead river, this self-appointed guardian of the river Roding was met by one.

My heart really lifted when I heard this story. Because it so beautifully illustrated how we don’t have to run from the things that trouble us in order for things to get better. And we don’t have to deny them either. It shows us how getting close to what we find difficult (and in this case…literally sitting with the sh*t…sorry to say, and not suggesting it’s for everyone in a literal sense!) allows us to approach our challenges with the energy of compassionate acceptance, which is so much more powerful than that ‘striving and resisting’ energy.

I wrote something on this same theme in one of my first ever Substack posts, and you can read it here:

Hope & Spaciousness

So I left yesterday’s Mindfulness for Stress session feeling hopeful, and feeling spacious. If you’re wondering what I mean by spacious, I mean that - where I had been quite stressed prior to joining the class (it’s been a tiring week, and in my drumming band we are getting ready to go to a carnival in Tunisia - which is amazing but also involves a lot of chaotic logistics and WhatsApp groups and various anxiety-driven large group things that press lots of stress buttons for me!), coming away from class, I felt very different:

By practicing meditation that centred around compassionate acceptance (similar to those I’ve been sharing as midweek meditations here), I felt spacious. No longer feeling overrun by feelings of stress and overwhelm, I instead felt space and perspective and calm. I felt connected with that ‘Self Energy’ I’ve spoken about previously (see below) - easeful, knowing that things don’t matter that much, able to let things go, able to feel present and enjoy the moment. What sweet relief!

And I also felt connected with hope. How incredible that through one man’s passion and care, this heavily polluted river could become an appealing spot for a kingfisher. It made me think about how things can feel so doom and gloom in relation to the environment, but that actually that’s based on expecting things to continue relentlessly in the same destructive direction. We forget that other things are possible, and that things we haven’t even imagined yet will also influence what happens. That nature finds a way and that (as my friend reminded me) we are part of nature, too.

A Mindful Moment

So I’ll leave you with this clip from the dusk walk I went on after class yesterday. The rippling of the water felt so soothing somehow, and reminds me of the feeling of release, spaciousness, perspective - that none of it really matters that much, the stuff we get wrapped up in. It’s totally valid and understandable that we get wrapped up in things - it’s part of being human, and we need to take care of ourselves when we get like that. And in order to do that, it’s nice to enjoy these moments when we realise those preoccupations and anxieties are not everything. There is a whole lot of beauty in the world to help soothe our souls.