Out-of-control thinking can keep you from sleeping and can make you anxious. It can cause you to avoid being alone or avoid having quiet times. It can lead you to be dependent on always needing someone to be with you or lead to your attachment to having a TV on all of the time. The out-of-control thinking controls you and keeps you from being able to relax.
Mindfulness is directing your focus to the experience of the present moment without judgment. It can be a meditation, or it can be a way to fully enjoy a moment, or it can be a way to manage thoughts and emotions. It is a way to experience reality just as it is without influence from past experience or worries about the future.
Mindfulness is a skill.
It takes ongoing practice or consistently increasing exercise like working out to build muscle. To make effective use of mindfulness, you have to train your brain. This is what is taking place in the Karate Kid movie scene of “wax on, wax off” or the time in Star Wars when Luke is in the swamp training with Yoda. It takes time and practice to develop automatic focus and concentration.
The basic way to do mindfulness is to observe with your five senses the things around you as well as your feelings and physical sensations. As you observe these things, you do so without judgment. This means you don’t think about if you are doing it right. You do not criticize what you are doing. You do not think about if you like or don’t like something or if it is good or bad.
During mindfulness, you leave opinions out. You only observe what you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you touch, and what you taste - the five senses. This is not easy to do because our brains are constantly categorizing which is a type of judgment. So, you cannot be mindful all of the time because a functioning brain needs to make judgments. You practice mindfulness for a minute or two and try to build up to longer amounts of time so that you can be mindful when you choose.
Use mindfulness to cope or to improve experiences.
You can choose to use the skill of mindfulness at important times, like when you want to sleep, or you want to calm your mind from distressing thoughts. You can choose to fully experience an enjoyable moment which helps you enjoy living. And let me emphasize again that you have to practice regularly for it to work when you want it to!
Let's talk about using mindfulness for sleep as an example. What needs to take place is the body relaxing and the thinking brain to slow down and let thoughts go. The practice of deep, slow breathing is usually combined with mindfulness. With practice, this form of breathing signals the brain to shift into relaxation.
A typical mindfulness practice session starts with a few slow, deep breaths and then continuing the breathing and focusing attention on the breath coming in through the nose and out through the mouth. The senses notice the coolness of the breath coming in and the warmth of the breath being exhaled. It is possible to feel the breath in the back of the nose and on the top of the tongue, for example. And there is the sound of breathing. There might be a scent picked up. Usually, people close their eyes to reduce incoming stimulation.
To counter a stream of thinking, you can give the brain enough to do to keep it busy but not enough to prevent mindfulness. This can be done by counting each breath, or counting the seconds of inhaling and exhaling, and a simple word can be added to the exhale, such as thinking “relax.”
Mindfulness helps to fully experience an enjoyable moment.
The combination of practicing gratitude and fully enjoying pleasurable moments is what leads to enjoying life.
I am on my computer a lot, as most people are for work or scanning social media or watching videos, and so forth. How much does this keep me from enjoying my life? I tend to eat lunch or dinner while looking at my computer screen. Lately, I have been consciously choosing to turn away from the computer and be mindful when I take a bite of food. I am always eating something I like; why not give it my full attention?
Another thing I have been attending to is my time with my pet. I have a cat because I like petting the soft fur and hearing the appreciative purring that cats produce. In the morning as I am waking up, my cat generally hops up on my bed and lies near me purring his deep, rumbling purr. How often do I go down the road of streaming thoughts without noticing my cat? I have been consciously choosing to be mindful in these moments. I focus on the feel of his fur, the sound of the purring, the warmth of his body, the small vibrations his purring creates. This is a simple moment of joy. Why would I deprive myself from experiencing this moment?
Summary
Mindfulness is a skill which you must practice regularly to train your brain to focus when you want it to. You can use it for important moments to fully experience something good or to put a stop to endless thinking or to break free from worries or guilt by focusing on the now without judgment. Use mindfulness to increase your joy in living. Try to be mindful for short moments of time on a regular basis and build up to more.
Take a moment to check out my website at www.ldonreed.com
No comments:
Post a Comment