Mindful Awareness

We all have stress in our lives and many of us are even dealing with extreme stress. Whether it is the demands of a young family, a career, an illness, chronic pain, a loss of income, loved one, or a relationship – there are countless circumstances and reasons why stress shows up in our lives and we all deal with them differently.

Whatever it is that is happening in your life – these are the things that can keep us awake at night, unable to focus or even worse…prevent us from enjoying our life. Over time these stresses, the pain, sleepless nights and joyless days will wreak havoc on our health and our well-being.

Meditation and Mindful Awareness are two practices that have the ability to guide us through difficult times and uncomfortable or painful circumstances.

We will explore Meditation and its benefits in a few weeks.

This week is all about Mindful Awareness.

What is Mindful Awareness?

Mindful awareness is a practice of being fully engaged in whatever activity we are currently doing and it starts with an INTENTION to bring ATTENTION into the present moment.

We can all do this!

We should all do this.

This practice can be brought into any one of our everyday moments. We don’t have to schedule any extra time for this. It can be done with an activity that we love doing, a basic mundane chore that has to be done or a regular routine that has become mindlessly robotic or boring AND once we get good at this (meaning it becomes easier to remain mindfully aware) we can find some joy in our more difficult and/or uncomfortable tasks.

What are the benefits of Mindful Awareness?

There are many benefits we will experience from practicing mindful awareness but here are the top 3;

1. Mindful awareness can calm the over-thinking, over-active and over-dramatic “monkey mind” that causes us so much stress and many worries. These worries and thoughts tend to get more dramatic when we are lacking sleep or facing a particularly uncomfortable situation.
2. Mindful awareness helps us to “practice the pause” so when we are faced with a difficult situation that we typically re-act to and regret later – we now have a tool that helps us to pause and choose a different action. In this pause an opportunity to respond instead of re-act to the situation has been created and in that same moment we have a choice to move the situation towards a solution or calmer, better outcome.
3. Practicing mindful awareness increases our sense of happiness, joy and calm even with the simplest of activities and with practice we can reach these states of calm and happiness even amongst the most trying of situations. Have you ever wondered how someone who appears to have a lot of stress in their life seems to be able to genuinely handle it all? That is because practicing mindful awareness with the simple, joyous and mundane tasks and habits in our life prepare us for the unexpected and the uncomfortable. It prepares us to be in the moment of whatever is unfolding in our life.

Try it

Experience it

Practice it daily

Do it!

Intellectually, we can all understand how mindful awareness could help to calm our over-active minds – however understanding how it could work doesn’t translate into a calmer experience. Only practicing it will do that and we can all practice it and experience the benefits!

How do we practice Mindful Awareness?

1. Identify tasks, habits or rituals you have in a typical day.
2. Choose 1 or 2 to practice with. Start with simple tasks that you enjoy.
3. Set the intention to be fully engaged in the activity.

These tasks, habits or rituals can be any number of things…

• Brushing our teeth.
• First taste of our morning coffee or tea
• Folding laundry
• Washing dishes
• Washing our face/hands
• Petting our dog/cat/animals
• Working out and or stretching
• Driving to work
• Answering emails
• Cooking – preparing meals
• Eating
• Cleaning or other chores

Start with enjoyable tasks or rituals as they are easier to stay present with in the beginning.

Once committed to a practice of mindful awareness on the simple and enjoyable tasks start practicing on the more mundane rituals. Then we can begin to tackle the more difficult tasks that are not as enjoyable to perform in our day.

Curiosity verses judgement

An important aspect of fully engaging in the activity we have chosen is to not let the mind wander off into a story. When this happens we are now judging the experience. We can be mindfully aware that we are judging it though and in that awareness we can bring ourselves back to the present moment.

For the sake of simplicity let’s view judgement as our mind moving into thought (and a story of good/bad/right/wrong). In mindful awareness we move into curiosity, which is observing the experience without judging it. Not an easy task for anyone but with practice we become more observant and less judgment. Another powerful benefit of practicing mindful awareness!

Intentionally move into curiosity. Approach the activity as if it is the first time experiencing it. Observing from a curious, alert mind without analyzing allows us to recognize when we have shifted out of curiosity and into judgement and in this awareness we can then bring ourselves back to being curious.

Use the senses

We can use all of our senses to fully be present with the activity. We can choose one sense to experience it as more of a single-minded focused awareness or we can simply choose 2 or 3 senses to mindfully observe with.

1. Sight – be curious – look through fresh eyes
2. Smell – be curious of all scents
3. Sound – observe all sounds without distraction.
4. Taste – dive into the experience of taste without labeling whether you like it or not
5. Touch – be curious of any sensations felt inside or outside of body

Committing to a practice of mindful awareness on the simple and enjoyable tasks or habits we do every day will allows us to eventually be present with the more difficult tasks that are not as enjoyable to perform in our day.

Once this is a regular practice of ours, we can use this tool of mindful awareness to go into more uncomfortable awareness’s like discomfort and pain. Whether we experience physical or emotional pain, the practice of mindful awareness will present different solutions that go beyond the fears and the stories of the thinking mind. (That will be a whole blog on its own).

Start with this simple practice.

Set the intention to do it every day AND often throughout your day.

It takes no extra time and it will lead you into better states of calm and happiness.

Who doesn’t need that in their life?

If you are interested in group or private meditation or coaching sessions, live virtual yoga and fitness memberships and/or access to many recordings to do at your convenience contact Leslie at leslie@wellnessdefined.ca Call or text at 780 722-3442