#Mindfulness

Mindfulness can be described as awareness of one’s experience by paying attention, on purpose and with no judgement, to the present moment. It is a skill that needs work from repeatedly practicing, just like a sport or hobby. I meet lots of people in my therapy room who struggle with thinking they aren’t doing mindfulness “right” and, on investigation, this is almost always down to their expectations of what mindfulness is and what it looks like.

This is what mindfulness looks like on social media - complete peace, no thoughts, everything is perfect. This is just not true of the average experience of practicing mindfulness, so it’s easy to understand why someone may feel like they have failed or feel like they’re not good enough. To make matters worse, images like these can be followed up with attention-grabbing one liners like:

If you do this for 100 days every morning your whole life will change!

I can make your mind shut up in 15 seconds, just watch my content to unlock hidden knowledge now!

if this is your only explanation of mindfulness it can feel like a constant pursuit for perfection, where your mind and feelings switch off. An impossible, and in my opinion, unhelpful state.

For me it’s important for my clients to understand that mindfulness looks like anything. It’s completely accessible and never perfect. It can be practiced anywhere!

Here is here’s 3 words to keep in mind when practicing mindfulness that will help you nurture a sense of understanding and compassion for yourself and will help you throughout your day:

Awareness.

The first step is to pause and notice what’s going on in our bodies, our thoughts and any feelings. It can be helpful to do a body scan (focusing your mind on each part of your body one by one to see if there’s any tension or heaviness), Or think of 3 words or colours to describe where you are now. If someone you trust and love asked you “how are you?” How would you honestly respond?

Acceptance.

Accept the new messages received from your body in a non-judgemental and accepting way. This means trying to move away from “i shouldn’t feel tense/sad/anxious” to “i feel tense/sad/anxious”, removing the judgement. It can help here to remain curious and to breathe slowly and gently whilst considering what is going on.

Finally, its important to remember when we pause like this that we are not our thoughts and feelings - they are happening to us, and they will do that if we notice them or not.

Balance.

The last piece of the puzzle is to aim for a balanced reaction to this new information - how are we going to go forward, knowing what we know about where we are? If there’s feelings of anger or tenseness in the body, perhaps working on breathing right now to relax will help achieve your goals later in the day? This part understands that how we are on the inside can have an impact on what goes on on the outside, so take some time to consider what you need to balance yourself out before moving on. They key here is acting, instead of reacting.

This can be done in as little as 5 minutes, on different times and days, in different places. Not sticking to a regular routine (for example 10 minutes before bedtime) is more helpful because then we can draw on it in lots of different scenarios. Just like anything we practice, we will not get it right most of the time, but sticking with it should bring a sense of calm and choice on what happens next in your day and how you react to it.

If you need support in achieving balance in your life we can focus on mindfuless as one element to achieve this, please get in touch for support.