As I experiment with Mindfulness, I’ve been getting familiar with the concept of non-reactivity. Much of our feelings and emotional state is determined by external circumstances, things that happen around us in our lives. Because time always keeps on moving and relationships change, feelings like happiness can be fleeting. Nothing is static, things in our lives can be can feel good one day and then bad the next.

Non-reactivity proposes that we try to stop perceive things as good or bad. This idea of non-judgmental thinking is starting to come up a lot in my mindfulness sessions, it suggests that if we can stop categorizing sensations, thoughts and sounds as either good or bad, we can also move away from responding to them emotionally. This saves us the from stress of being tossed around by our emotions ups and downs. I’ll admit it definitely sounds a little too good to be true and also robotic. One of the ways I’ve been practicing to be non-reactive to sensations are is called body scans. Which is essentially slowly focusing on individual parts of the body and their sensations, one at time, from head to toe. Checking in and noticing/experiencing any sensation non-judgmentally and then moving on. Once you have experienced and really focused on the sensation, it is supposedly easier to let go of it. This has implications for chronic pain illnesses, which surprisingly often have psychological origins.