Most people come to mindfulness looking for the same thing: some relief. A way to feel less overwhelmed, less reactive, less at the mercy of their own thoughts.
That’s a completely reasonable thing to want and for a while, it often works. You start paying attention. You learn to notice what’s happening inside you. Things feel a little clearer, a little more manageable. Progress.
But there’s something that can happen further down the track that nobody really talks about. The practice that was supposed to bring you peace starts to feel like work. Not the good kind of work, either.
The grinding, never-quite-finished kind.
That’s the territory that writer and wellness coach Beronica Parham explores in a recent personal essay over at The Mindful Word, and it’s worth your time to check out.
The trap nobody warns you about
Parham’s essay opens with something a lot of people will recognise: the moment when mindfulness quietly crosses a line from awareness into self-monitoring.
You’re not just noticing your thoughts anymore. You’re policing them. You’re not just observing your feelings. You’re trying to manage them into something more acceptable.
Even in stillness, you’re working.
She describes becoming more aware but less at ease. More informed about her inner world, but somehow more exhausted by it.
How does that happen? Part of it comes down to why many of us are drawn to this kind of practice in the first place.
If you grew up in an environment where staying alert kept you safe, or where love and belonging required being a certain way, then turning your attention inward doesn’t automatically bring calm. It can just redirect the vigilance.
Instead of scanning the room, you scan yourself. Instead of bracing for other people, you brace for your own reactions.
Hypervigilance in disguise
This is the part of the essay that hit the hardest for me.
Parham makes the observation that self-awareness and hyper-vigilance can look remarkably similar from the inside.
The language of mindfulness is gentler, sure. But the underlying question driving the whole thing can be the same one that drove you to stay on guard in the first place: what do I need to fix in order to finally feel OK?
When that question sits at the centre of your practice, even healing starts to feel like a performance. You’re not resting, you’re auditioning for a version of yourself that’s healed enough.
That’s a hard thing to admit, especially if you’ve invested a lot in the idea that you’re doing the work.
There’s a difference between awareness and listening
Here is the pivot point of the whole essay.
Parham draws a distinction that I think is genuinely useful. Awareness, she says, can be sharp. It can be analytical. It can be tense. You can be deeply aware of what’s happening inside you and still be in a kind of low-grade battle with it.
Listening is different. Listening doesn’t rush toward a label. It doesn’t demand that the moment produce clarity or meaning. It just makes room.
She’s honest about the fact that this shift felt unfamiliar, even unsafe at first.
When you’re used to mindfulness being something you do, something that generates insight, something that helps you regulate, something that gives you a sense of being in control, then simply being present without an agenda can feel like standing still after a long run. Your whole system is still braced for movement.
Presence doesn’t offer control. But it offers something else: the chance to actually hear what’s there.
You don’t have to resolve everything
One of the subtler but more useful ideas in the essay is the permission to let things stay unfinished.
The urge to figure it out, to extract meaning from every feeling, to turn discomfort into a problem that needs solving, these are strong pulls. Especially for people who are genuinely trying to grow.
But Parham makes the point that healing doesn’t always arrive as relief. Sometimes it shows up as spaciousness. Sometimes as grief. Sometimes as nothing dramatic at all, just a slightly quieter relationship with what’s already there.
A different way to think about growth
Parham’s reframe on growth is simple and worth keeping.
She used to believe growth meant moving through hard things quickly. That if she was truly mindful, she’d be less affected, less sensitive, less inconveniently human.
Now she sees it differently. Growth looks like staying with yourself without rushing. Noticing old patterns and meeting them with some compassion rather than criticism. Not walking away from yourself just because you haven’t arrived somewhere yet.
Some days mindfulness brings steadiness. Other days it just helps you tell the truth: I’m not OK today, and that’s still OK.
That kind of honesty, she says, has been more healing than any technique she’s tried to perfect.
If you’re tired, that’s worth paying attention to
The essay closes with something that feels important to pass on.
If you’ve been trying to heal and you still feel exhausted, that’s not necessarily a sign you’re doing it wrong. It might mean you’ve been carrying your healing like another item on the to-do list.
Trying to become better instead of trying to become more present.
If that’s where you’re at, the next step might not be more effort. It might just be less pressure.
My Final thought
There’s a version of mindfulness that’s genuinely restful. One that doesn’t ask you to perform your growth or justify your pace or constantly assess whether you’re doing it right.
Beronica Parham’s essay is a good reminder of what that can feel like. And a gentle nudge toward finding your way back to it if you’ve drifted.
Source: When Mindfulness Turns Into Monitoring — The Mindful Word
