Having an emotionally-robust mind cultivated over hundreds of hours of Mindfulness practice doesn’t necessarily free you from afflictive emotions. Even with such a mind, you can still experience the arising of greed, anger, hatred, envy, sadness, etc, and you can still suffer their painful after-effects. What changes is the rate of recovery. The deeper your practice, the more quickly you tend to recover. Eventually, you may reach a point where you recover from most emotional afflictions so quickly they almost have no effect on you. This is the point where you experience emotional afflictions completely, but at the same time, you become invulnerable to them.

I’ve finally found an analogy for this mind. I call it the “Wolverine Mind”, named after the popular superhero, Wolverine. Wolverine suffers pain and injury like mere mortals, but unlike mere mortals, Wolverine’s body heals immediately. That’s how he is invulnerable. Wolverine’s skin and flesh doesn’t stop bullets, but the damage inflicted by the bullets heals immediately.

That, my friends, is what Mindfulness does for you. It buys you the Wolverine Mind.

I may have just found the title of my upcoming book.