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White Bears, Mindfulness and Ironic Process Theory
Exploring the Paradox of Thought Suppression and Its Implications for Mindfulness Practice.
Let us start by doing an experiment. Sit down, close your eyes, and for the next two minutes, imagine a “white bear.” Ready! Now, for the next two minutes, you can think about anything except a “white bear”. What happens when you do this?
And the next exercise. Sit down, and for the next two minutes, just do not think, especially about a “white bear”. Ready! Again, what happens here when you try to do this?
Usually, what happens is that in the second and third exercise, the thought of the “white bear” keeps coming up. Unbecomingly it seems that the harder we try to suppress the thought of a “white bear” frustratingly, it just keeps coming up.
This was eloquently captured by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a prolific Russian novelist on the human condition most known for his novels such as Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Below is a video outlining his life, what he wrote about and his philosophical and psychological outlook on the human condition.
