Healthy Mind – Formal Practice:
The Basics of Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the ability to sit and pay attention to your current moment
– Jon Kabat-Zinn, often considered the father of modern Mindfulness.
In its simplest terms, it’s about noticing, which sounds deceptively simple and like anything important. It may sound simple, but it isn’t easy – until you learn how.
We modern humans are bombarded by huge amounts of information. We think about what we’re just about to do, the things we’ve done, and we kind of flip-flop between the two. We tend not to connect to the present; we can miss much of what we’re feeling, eating, hearing, seeing, and even smelling! (Have you ever absent-mindedly taken a swig of ‘off’ milk before you realised?)
It can be easy to overlook the connection to our body, what we need more of, what we need to let go of, and how we habitually react to things.
Our minds are so busy with this mental time travel that we get lost in it and miss our now. This doesn’t leave much mental space for being beautifully absorbed in our lives’ moments – as they happen.
The Challenge of Autopilot
Most people are running on autopilot to some degree.
You can probably think of journeys, hours, even days where you don’t know where the time went. Autopilot is helpful for everyday tasks that you’re already really good at – so you don’t need too much concentration. You can probably let your mind wander and daydream reasonably safely when you’re out walking, making a sandwich, cleaning the bathroom, and putting out the bins.
However, being on autopilot too much, especially when it’s important, can mean missing the opportunity to control your response, react better, choose wisely, grow, and become a better person.
Building Mental Muscle with Mindfulness
Practising Mindfulness builds your mental muscle, so you spend more time in the moment.
The effects can be extraordinary.
You:
- start to notice how you really feel
- spot opportunities you might otherwise miss, and develop a sharper self-awareness.
- naturally build resilience and manage issues like stress, procrastination, overwhelm, imposter syndrome, burnout, stage fright, and low mood better than before
- notice when you need to ask for help
- find inner strength to speak up when you otherwise wouldn’t have
- work out better ways to do things
- notice your instinctive reactions to certain people and certain situations
You naturally insert a mental pause in proceedings so you can choose how to act rather than impulsively react.
Practising Mindfulness grounds you in a way that puts you back in control.
So you choose can your life, rather than life just happening TO you.
The Power of Wisdom in Mindfulness
A key concept in Mindfulness is WISDOM.
We should take wise actions, make wise decisions, be wise in our intimate relationships, and deal with other people and new people. Mindfulness inserts a pause. The pause creates enough mental space to think before we act and to do the thing that ‘Future You’ would wish they had done.
There’s so much more than that. Practising this skill is key to unlocking incredible possibilities in your life. It sounds like a bold claim, but it’s true.
Practical Applications of Mindfulness
- Olympic athletes practice mindfulness daily to stay focused and grounded.
- Busy business executives practice it to prevent burnout.
- Public speakers practice it to give a nerve-free performance.
- Therapists practice it to be fully present with their clients.
- Studies have found that mindfulness works so well at managing low mood that it is more effective than antidepressants to keep episodes at bay.
We might take vitamins, get medical checkups, and eat healthy food to keep our bodies healthy. Practising mindfulness is the perfect ‘mental health insurance policy’.
Our mind and body are inextricably linked. If you want to achieve your peak health, you have to include your mental health. The body takes its cues from your mind and vice versa, which means you are much less likely to suffer ill health if everything’s well with your mood and emotions.
It’s powerful and can take just a few minutes a day. However, the habit does take a little while to establish, which can be infuriating.
Like any new skill, you only get good by practising. Every day.
Starting Your Practice
Just to confuse you, when we do what we call a formal practice, we ask you to sit with intention and close your eyes. This is often what people think of when they imagine Mindfulness. Still, you can ‘do Mindfulness’ in the supermarket, while hula hooping, on stage, doing sports, or even having a difficult conversation.
To build the habit and the skill, it’s helpful to practice it formally. Within a few weeks of practicing each day formally for about 10 minutes or so, you find naturally, without any more effort, that you start to apply that mindful attention in the other areas of your life.
Everything we experience arrives through our five senses.
It’s useful to think of your senses as communication devices between your inner and outer worlds. Noticing mindfully means paying close attention to the information coming in through your senses, whatever situation you find yourself in. This is how we make sense of and enrich our present moments.
Mindfulness Beyond Religion
Mindfulness is separate from religion. It has its roots in Buddhism, but it can be practised by believers of any faith and non-believers. There is no worship or belief system at odds with any other.
Paying attention and noticing is available to everyone.
Imagine in The Matrix, where Neo slows down time, steps aside and out of danger, then moves to where he should be for maximum effect with all the time in the world. That’s a useful way to look at the effects of mindfulness on someone who has been practising it for a while. They become like Neo, dodging life’s obstacles like stress and worry. They look after themselves better by choosing the things that are great for them and become aware of new opportunities to be wise, make great choices, and get to ‘win at life’.
If you want more on Mindfulness, we’d encourage you to listen to the whole audio course, which goes into much more detail.
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