Mindfulness For Me

Mindfulness is often mistaken as a synonym for meditation and meditation, ironically, is too much work. Lucky for me, mindfulness is not meditation and it is an acquirable skill. Mindfulness is the ability to be completely present in the moment, aware of your thoughts and actions, free from judgment and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by anything. It's when you're calmly focusing on your thoughts, without feeling anxious.

This skill allows us to manage stress, be aware of our own emotions and help maintain better relationships with the people around us. It took me a while to understand how this works.

When you're mindful, you're able to detect the exact cause of your anxiety or stress. It becomes a lot easier to calm your nerves when you know exactly what to tell yourself to rationalise your thoughts.

For example, imagine you have a performance later today and you're currently experiencing heightened anxiety. When you're mindful, you'll be able to think like this-

"Okay, I am freaking out. I need to take a minute."

"Why is my brain telling me that I'm going to make a fool of myself?"

"I have practised long and hard, and it will pay off."

"I chose to perform...because I thought this was a good learning experience and would give me a chance to challenge myself."

"Making a mistake is part of the learning experience and I don't need to be perfect."

"Either way, I'll be fine."

I'm probably being wildly optimistic if I say that reaching this stage of self-awareness could ever be easy. I'm barely reaching this stage and I've already experienced so many setbacks and situations where I just couldn't calm myself. But the prospect of having this ability at my fingertips just keeps me going. Imagine being able to calm yourself down in any frightening situation, kind of sounds magical doesn't it? It sure did to me. Having control over those negative thoughts and voices resonating in your head at 100 decibels...Mindfulness can probably get you there.

The great thing about this skill is that it's just about awareness and asking yourself the right questions.

It has helped me a great deal. An easy example from my life is my relationship with my sister. We fight. A lot. And sometimes even physically. A lot of what she used to say to me during a fight used to get to me. I felt terrible for days after the fight and questioned whether she was right about her assumption of me. Truth is, it wasn't her intention to hurt me so deeply. It was merely my insecurity that made it so much worse. I simply asked myself some basic questions to feel better-

"Would she have said that when she was calm?"

"Can I think of an incident to support her claim?"

If yes..."Can I do something about it to become better?"

If no..."Well, then I should probably continue living life as I do."

I've realised that mindfulness is talking to yourself like a crazy person :)

(It may seem crazy to people who haven't benefited from it yet)

I hate how we keep ourselves from experiencing our best lives. Being your own worst critic is horrible because you carry that critic everywhere, all the time and it criticizes EVERYTHING relentlessly.

So try a little mindfulness to rid yourself of that critic. You go this.

I hope reading this helped :) If it did, then yayyy. If it didn't, then well ha I tried...

Byeeee