How Mindfulness Helps You Benefit the LGBTQI+ Community

Someone dear to me has a good friend who’s realized they’re gender non-binary, and now going by the pronouns they/their/them.

When news of this person entered our conversation I would stumble over their pronouns—essentially defaulting to the conventional ones and getting corrected by my loved one (at first patiently…then not so patiently!). 

This happened many times. I was in a kerfuffle, explaining that 50+ years ago, when I was learning grammar, it wasn’t this way, and old habits are hard to change, it feels like my brain is short-circuiting when I try…etc etc. All true, all legitimate reasons why it was difficult to change. 

I eventually saw what was happening in me, and I gave up my resistance, set the intention to do it right and now I do. Not perfectly, mind you, but right most of the time.

Here’s what I think: for any of us who are over 50, learning how to use they/their/them pronouns in new ways is difficult. We don’t want to do it. “Life is complicated enough as it is—now I have to change my grammar?!?!” We all have our reasons for being resistant to making the necessary changes, right?

However, what it all boils down to is first deciding to set the intention to respect and honor. We all want to do that, don’t we? Setting the intention to respect and honor the request of another human being as to how they wish to be addressed. Resisting is like calling Emily by their previous name—it just doesn’t work.

Setting the intention then naturally creates the motivation to put effort into making the change. Looking back at all the difficult things we’ve done in life, we can likely identify many of them that actually ended up being relatively easy to accomplish, once we stopped resisting and set the intention to do it. The motivation and effort then just flowed.

And here’s where mindfulness comes in. 

Mindfulness practice helps us hear the request. Mindfulness helps us see the person before us as “just like me,” with compassion and empathy, respect and honor. Mindfulness helps us notice our resistance—and perhaps do self-inquiry as to why it’s there. Mindfulness helps us work with our resistance in order to develop the intention to behave more skillfully.

Mindfulness can also help us fully experience the sense of intrinsic goodness in each of us; the goodness that helps us trust each other to take care of each other.

So, in honor of Pride month, in honor of the beautiful LGBTQI+ community that simply asks to be referred to as desired, I would like to invite and encourage, particularly the 50s and older set, to join me in setting the intention to be flexible, open, inviting, honoring and willing to change. We won’t always get it right and we need to be okay with that, allowing ourselves to ‘be with what is’ and learn from that. 

In order to show pride for ourselves and pride for our LGBTQI+ community, it’s worth it.