How can you be more mindful in your life?
You have probably heard all the big buzz words, all the excitement, around mindfulness. I have written several post on it. It has been the success technique du jour for the last couple years.
In truth, it’s been around for a couple thousand years in Asia but this mindfulness revolution has swept the western world. Everybody in Silicon Valley and Hollywood is meditating.
The goal of mindfulness is to realise that you are not your thoughts, and that you can control them.
How can you do it, because a lot of people they are not naturally good at mindfulness. They are caught in these reactive traps. They’re always impulsively reacting to things and they don’t feel centred. They don’t feel peaceful. They don’t feel connected to the moment.
Those are things that take training in the modern world. Maybe those things came to people naturally one hundred or thousand years ago. They certainly don’t today. You’re constantly distracted. Your attention is constantly broken.
So, what could you do to feel a little more of that? Alive. That connection with life that comes through mindfulness?
Here are three tips for you.
1) Observe where you are.
Most persons think mindfulness is a mind trick. As much as we think of mindfulness as the mind (the word is in there), it is the full activation of your senses in the moment. What that means is a lot of persons, for example, walk into a restaurant, they’ll see their friend, walk to their friend, sit down, order and eat a meal, but never actually look around in the restaurant. They never smelled the smells coming out of the kitchen. They never breathe the air in the restaurant intentionally. They were not really in the environment or the situation.
We’ve learned to block out distractions so that we can focus. We’ve also learned to block out life.
Observe where you are. Bring your full senses to your next experience. Observe the setting, the context, ‘Where am I right now? What’s the colour of the walls? What does it smell like? What’s it feel like here? What’s this environment?’
As human beings, we have a natural ability to pay attention to our environment. We need to learn to activate that again. Consciously, notice where you are. The more you do that, the more you start to feel presence in life.
2) Observe how you are
Observe how you’re interacting with the environment. Observe how are you sitting right now. How are you breathing right now. How do you feel right now. Observe that more consistently.
How is being in this relationship right now with this person? How am I speaking to them? How do I probably sound to them?
Observing yourself in situations starts to bring you a more mindful mentality. It also allows us, over the long term, to be more intentional because the more you observe yourself, the more you start seeing things you don’t like about yourself. ‘I don’t like how I talk to her’. ‘I don’t like how I’m missing my children even being in the room with me because I’m not paying attention’. I don’t like how I feel continually I’m always negative’.
Improvement begins by observing it, paying attention to it. Observe where you are. Observe how you are and then specifically observe your impulse of thoughts. Those impulse thoughts that come up. You know, the drama mind. The first immediate reactions to things in the modern world are usually not the best response.
We get all upset about something. But try create distance from stimulus to response. In that space, be intentional. ‘What do I want here? What would serve here? How would my highest self respond here? How would I like to look back on this situation and wish I had responded?
You’ve gotta find that place where you say, ‘How would a better version of myself engage in the situation?’ By asking that, it’s not about guilt, it is being yourself. It’s about growing yourself. It’s about looking for opportunities for you to engage situations less impulsive. That’s being mindful. It’s being true.
You might say that your impulses are just being authentic with how you feel now. ‘I have to speak my truth’. Yes, speak your truth, but know whether your truth is coming from your wounds. Is your upset, your real self, coming from the weak self, the worry, the concern, the fear, the anger, the bad times, the old stories? Is speaking your truth speaking that?
Or is it coming from a level of intelligence? Is your truth coming from place of wisdom or wounds? You need to know that, because speaking from the wound, that’s not mindful. That’s the child mind. That’s the drama. That’s the immediate impulse to protect, when sometimes the immediate impulse should be to engage. We have to know that to bring more intention into it.
3) Learn to meditate
It is good doing all this in real time, observing where you are at, how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, but you’ll never learn to observe your thoughts more and be more mindful than by just closing your eyes and focussing on your breath.
Hear your thoughts but let them just come in and pass. Get to a point where you can find a little bit of emptiness inside it. Create a little blank space inside so all the noise, all the thoughts, are not hitting you, impacting. They are glancing. Then at some point, as you meditate more throughout your life, less and less thoughts pervade. More thoughts bounce off.
Find an emptiness. From that emptiness, you get to experience more. You get to use that more in those moments where stimulus and response are merely happening. You start to find more space in there because you are more mindful of time. Meditative practice opens up that space between stimulus and response. You develop that skill set with practice.
A lot of persons underestimate meditation. Whilst giving you all the mindfulness benefits, it immediately drops your stress levels. It allows you to be in more control. Allows you more self control in your life. Allows you to access more positive ranges of feelings on a consistent basis.
Meditation is practice for real life, in practicing opening up your mind, not letting thoughts hit you. Finding space. Paying attention to your breath. Then, in real life, the stimulus-response time elongates. You find your breath. You find your intention. You find good feelings in that space and now you respond as a more mindful person.
So, go out there and practice. In every moment, as well as put time aside to meditate and practice finding space in your responses.
Enjoy!
Scott
Source: https://podtail.com/podcast/the-charged-life-with-brendon-burchard/secrets-to-mindfulness-how-to-be-more-mindful/
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