Mindfulness has helped me a lot lately. Not in some dramatic way. More in the sense that it gives my mind a little more space. A little more air. It calms me down because it keeps teaching me the same thing from different angles: to step out of my head.

Even that idea changes something in me. When I think about not having a head, or at least not being trapped inside it all the time, I relax. My attention turns outward. I loosen my grip on myself. Something about ego weakens. Something about self-obsession weakens too. And once that happens, social situations start to look different.

The exercise

There was an exercise in the app a few days ago. It said to enter different environments and simply watch what happens to you. Watch how you feel when the people around you change. Watch how your sense of self shifts from place to place. Watch how one room can make you feel open and another can make you feel small. Watch how the arrival of one person can change your whole inner state.

That stayed with me. Because I keep noticing how much control other people have over us, and how normal that seems to everybody. That is the strange part. Not that it happens, but that almost nobody finds it strange. People just live like this. Their emotional strings are in other people's hands and they barely step back enough to notice it.

Look around

Look around. Everyone is worried. Everyone has insecurities. Everyone is unable to fully accept what is. Everyone is pulled around by glances, moods, comments, tension, social atmosphere. Someone says something. Someone enters the room. Someone goes quiet. And suddenly their whole state changes. They do not put any distance between what happened and their reaction to it. It all becomes one thing.

Maybe that is what mindfulness is for me now. Putting a wall between myself and what is happening. Not to become cold. Not to become detached in some fake spiritual way. Just to stop being dragged away by every shift in the external world.

Because life is really just a flow of experiences. One place, then another. One conversation, then another. One version of you, then another. There is not even one fixed life. There is not one fixed self either. Maybe there is no stable self at all, but that is a different subject. Still, it keeps bringing me back to the same question. Why are we so externally controlled?

Why does the state of our mind change so quickly depending on who is in front of us, what kind of street we are walking on, what room we are sitting in, what kind of energy surrounds us? Why does a random person, a random environment, a random interaction get to decide so much about what we feel? And the strongest place I see this is in emotions. In states. How one event can take over the whole day.

Where suffering multiplies

You argue with your sister. The conversation ends. The real event is over. That is the only concrete thing that actually happened. But it does not end there. In your mind it keeps going. You continue the conversation alone. You replay it. You rewrite it. You add things. You defend yourself. You get hurt again. The moment is gone, but your mind keeps feeding it and stretching it into something bigger than it was. That is where suffering multiplies. Not always in the event itself, but in the continuation of it. In the way we let it keep living inside us.

That is why I keep thinking about this more seriously now. After practicing mindfulness more, after getting pulled into the philosophy behind it, after learning new concepts that make me question what the mind even is, I cannot look at my own reactions the same way. When I stop staring from inside my own head and look outward, I mostly just see other people's heads. Other people's minds. Other people lost inside reactions they never examine. And then I come back to myself and ask the harder question. Why am I still allowing this too? Why do I still let external things move me this much? Why is the control so often outside of me?

Because there is always some state I want to live in. A light mood. A relaxed mood. A grounded mood. A state where I am just here, unbothered, stable, in myself. But so often that state gets interrupted by something outside of me. A look. A tone. A room. A stranger. A social setting. A street I do not know. And suddenly I am elsewhere.

For me, this has always been difficult. In new environments especially, but honestly in almost any environment, staying fully with myself has never come naturally. Being so rooted that I am not disturbed by people's expressions, their judgments, their presence, their approval or disapproval. That kind of state has always been hard for me to hold. That is why these mindfulness practices have been helping so much lately. I feel more inside myself. I care less about what is happening around me. And because of that, I feel more confident. More relaxed. Less available to be pulled around.

I think that is the real thing I wanted to say here. Maybe we should all look more carefully at who pulls us where. Which people make us contract? Which interactions leave us heavy? Which environments quietly change our entire nervous system? And why do we allow that so easily? Why do we not place some distance between what happens and what happens inside us? I do not mean escaping life. I do not mean becoming emotionless. Pain is still pain. Awkwardness is still awkwardness. A bad interaction is still bad. But there has to be some space between the world and our surrender to it. Otherwise we are just handed from one state to another all day long, and we call that normal. Lately that no longer feels normal to me. It feels unsettling. And strangely, seeing that has made me calmer.