Your mind can wander off in less than a second, making you unaware of what is happening in the present. Or can’t you relate?
Have you caught yourself reading a book or an article and you are a few paragraphs gone then it dawns on you that you never really paid attention to what you read? Then you miss out on all that the book has to offer you.
One of the factors that helps you to be successful at whatever you do in life is practising mindfulness. If you can learn this, it will change your life for good.
What is mindfulness? Mindfulness, according to Dr. Dana Direnzo, means “Present moment awareness.” It means the ability to be in the moment without judgement.
As simple as this definition looks, it’s not that easy to practise mindfulness without thinking about the past or future, or focusing on the present without judging yourself. It appears difficult, but the beautiful thing is that it is achievable.
Research from Harvard has it that the mind wanders on average, 47% of the time.
Note that the past and future could mean events that took place a day or hours before and events that could take place hours or days after; respectively.
Have you judged yourself for something you thought was unforgivable, or felt a sense of shame and thought that you were not enough? How did you feel? You couldn’t take your mind off it for long, and the feelings and thoughts kept expanding in your mind. Here’s why that happened. What you put your mind to grows bigger and stronger in your mind. In other words, whatever you give your attention to influences your disposition to things in general. That brings us to the heart of the matter. What then should you do? This is where practising mindfulness comes to play.
How does practising mindfulness affect your life?
Practising mindfulness is beneficial and healthy for you. It will affect you in ways that will change your life and transform you positively.
1. Total Health
Practising mindfulness helps you have an improved overall health. You know that productivity is hard when there is no good health. If you are healthy mentally, physically, socially, financially you can approach life better.
2. Handles stress better
When you practise mindfulness often, it would help you and empower you to know how to handle stress sensibly. Remember that mindfulness more than ever before, helps you to focus on the present. With this, you can relatively control your stressors and you are trained to respond appropriately to them as challenges come.
3. Sleep
It helps to keep insomnia in check. Worry can rob you of sleep. Practising mindfulness helps you sleep better and keeps you well rested after waking up.
4. Attentiveness
You’re more attentive to happenings around you, and this would help you healthily approach issues from the past and the future.
5. Priority
It helps you place priority on the important happenings in your life. One thing worry does is that it displaces the important things in your life and upholds the irrelevant ones as a priority.
- Could aid a decrease in symptoms of depression and anxiety
- Helps you build stronger relationships. Makes you more intentional about building relationships.
- Helps you gain a firm grip on your emotions as different situations arise.
- Train your mind to be more involved in the happenings in your life, and also help you position your heart for gratitude.
- You are prone to be more productive when you practise mindfulness.
Ways to practise mindfulness
Dr. Shauna Shapiro once said in a TEDx talk that, “Perfection isn’t possible, but transformation is.” According to her, mindfulness is how people are transformed. Being present or practising mindfulness isn’t exactly a walk in the park because of how easy it is for the mind to wander. It is something that requires a lot of intentionality and requires your attention.
So, how then, should you give yourself to practising mindfulness? By training your mind on how to be present and intentionally not worrying about the past or future.
The mind has the tendency to encourage judgement, sense of shame, the feeling of not being enough, and the thought of not being deserving of good things; maybe as a result of mistakes you made in the past.
However, according to Dr. Shauna, meditating on judgement grows judgement. So, when you meditate on those negative feelings, they grow.
You practise what you want to grow. You practise what you want to expand. You practise what you want to see as results.
Someone might ask, is it not pretentious and silly to act like you don’t have a past behind and a future ahead?
No way, that’s not what mindfulness is about. It doesn’t deny that you have a past and a future ahead. What practising mindfulness teaches is to be kind to yourself. It teaches you to keep worry in check. Because worry doesn’t make you productive. It doesn’t help you handle situations that may arise with your past and future in perspective.
In conclusion, be kind to yourself. Treat yourself gently. Don’t be hard on yourself. Allow yourself enjoy love and kindness from you. Give yourself time to practise mindfulness, and be kind while you are at it.
and then