Journal
You Didn’t Say the Cutting Thing. Now What?
Awareness makes you a better witness. It does not, by itself, make you a better responder.
Contemporary secular mindfulness answers one question with increasing accuracy: what is happening right now? That is its stated scope, and its teachers are generally honest about it. Notice, don’t fix. Allow, don’t decide. Within the practice, that instruction is exactly right, and it is the source of most of the benefit — reactivity falls precisely because you stop managing every arising thing.
The trouble is that a second question follows the first, immediately and universally, and it is the harder one. So what do I do?
Awareness does not answer it. Awareness makes you a better witness. It does not, by itself, make you a better responder.
Consider the ordinary case. You are in a conflict with someone you love. You practise. You notice the tightening, the story arriving, the impulse to say the cutting thing. You don’t say it. Genuine progress; this saves marriages.
Now what? Because the situation hasn’t resolved — it has only been prevented from getting worse. Something is still being asked of you: an apology, a boundary, a hard truth said gently, or the decision to let it go entirely. Which of those is right is not a question a body scan will answer. It requires knowing what you value, what this person needs, what you owe, and what kind of person you intend to be. None of that is visible in the breath.
This is an excerpt. Continue reading the full essay →
Julius Barreto-Lins, MD, MPH, PhD, is a physician and the creator of Logomeditation, a contemplative method grounded in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy.
Teach the answer, not only the pause
Helping someone not react is half the work. Helping them respond well is the other half — and it can be taught. We will send you how facilitators learn it.