I love mindfulness. It is such an important area of personal development that honestly is not talked about enough. I understand completely why that is the case. It’s because a lot of people do not know what mindfulness is, let alone how to identify it. Which of course means that they have no knowledge what so ever about how to engage in it, or even the many different benefits of engaging in mindfulness.
Before we dive any further into this post, I want to provide you with a definition of what mindfulness is.
Mindfulness is the mental state of being conscious and aware of something by focusing your attention on the present moment. An important component to engaging in mindfulness is being aware and accepting of your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations completely free of judgement.
Sounds like a lot and that is because it is! Mindfulness is not something that you can easily accomplish overnight. It requires a great deal of commitment, dedication, and consistency to reach a state of being mindful 24/7. I have been practicing mindfulness for years, and mainly because of my inconsistency with the craft, I’m still working towards a point where I am just mindful all the time.
Of course, here on the blog we have talked about mindfulness many times in many different ways. However, today’s post will take a different approach with the conversation. Here’s how…
Mindfulness is such an important skill for everyone to have because it will improve your life in so many different ways. It will improve the type of relationships that you have with others, and even the kind of relationship that you have with yourself. It will improve the way you navigate through your day, the way you identify with your emotions, the way you approach various situations, and so much more.
That’s why in today’s post I want to share with you some mindfulness tips that you can use to improve your overall life. Check them out below!
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Mindfulness Tip #1: Do not identify with your emotions
To be mindful is to be aware. Aware of everything that is happening within you and around you. This includes being aware of your emotions and how they are influencing your behaviors, the way you interact with the world, and the type of relationships that you tend to have with others. While it’s good to be able to acknowledge what your emotions are, it’s also important to not identify with them.
Do not become your emotions.
I recently had a mindfulness conversation with a transformation life coach, who taught me that your emotions provide you with information. They tell you how you are feeling and give you the opportunity to acknowledge where those emotions come from. They justify your reasoning for feeling the way you do, but they do not define your character.
All your emotions do is provide you with information about the situation at hand, and knowledge about how to move forward with that information.
This is why you want to avoid identifying with your emotions, good or bad. When we do this, we are allowing ourselves to become whatever it is that we are feeling. Doing so will take over your entire mindset, your actions, and alter your behaviors. However, when we simply acknowledge them, we are able to more effectively problem-solve what we can do to not allow them to take complete control over us.
Avoiding the impulse to identify with your emotions can improve your life in many ways. One significant way is through the way you perceive and carry yourself. If you are mindful enough to understand that your emotions do not define your character, you will be mindful enough to understand that they are not a direct reflection of who you are.
Remember, emotions simply provide information, they do not display who we are at our core to the entire world.
So, the next time you are feeling sad, angry, upset, or even elated, understand that those emotions are just telling you information about how a specific situation, moment, or experience is making you feel. It is not telling you that this is who you are whenever you are in a specific situation or experiencing something specific.
Having that ability to separate your emotions from your identify will improve the way you present yourself to others. This is because you will understand how to start presenting yourself in a more authentic manner.
Mindfulness Tip #2: Do not identify with your past
Just like you want to avoid identifying with your emotions you also want to avoid identifying with your past. Much like our emotions our past can provide us with information about why we tend to function in specific situations, or respond to certain situations, the way that we do. Don’t get me wrong, our past is very important to understanding who we are as an individual, but it does not have the power to continually define our character.
Using mindfulness when it comes to your past can be very tricky mainly because you want to avoid mentally (and in some cases physically) putting yourself back in that moment in time. You want to teach yourself how to acknowledge the past, take away necessary bits of information, but by all means not return to that moment in time when you were a different version of yourself.
This is where mindfulness comes in hand.
Mindfulness can help you learn how to shift your mindset from one that operates in the past, to one that is operating in the present moment. Yes, our past plays a huge role in shaping the way we behave and think, but it does not control the way we continue to improve ourselves. When practicing mindfulness, you will learn how to be able to visit the past in order to seek out information that is needed in order to help you heal, but to not identify with who you were then.
This can improve your life by allowing you to heal from open wounds or unresolved situations so that emotions related specifically to that point in time, do not hold you back from evolving. This is not an easy task to accomplish and takes many months, sometimes years of practice before you can do so successfully. This is because visiting your past in a mindful way helps you avoid identifying with the emotion of depression (in a non-clinical sense), but instead taking that information and then beginning the process of shifting your mindset around that specific emotion/situation.
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Mindfulness Tip #3: Focus your attention on one thing at a time
This is a huge one! As mentioned earlier a big part of mindfulness is awareness in the present moment. Which means noticing everything around you. Sometimes, we as human beings struggle significantly with focusing our attention. This is largely due to the fact that we are constantly trying to multi-task on a day-to-day basis in almost every moment that is presented to us.
While I understand that this is just the way a lot of us are taught to navigate through the world, I am also challenging you to let this part of your everyday living, and part of your taught behavior and mindset go.
Multi-tasking does not allow you to be fully present in the moment. Which means that you are never really truly 100% focused on any task at hand that you are doing. Instead, you’re splitting your attention which is not providing you with the focus needed in order to complete the task efficiently.
Mindfulness is a skill that will teach you how to provide your undivided attention to one task at a time. This is because in that moment, while completing the task, you are training your brain to notice everything that is right in front of you. You accomplish this by engaging your five senses to really take in every little detail about whatever is right in front of you, and not allowing your focus to waver until the task is complete.
This will improve your life by teaching you how to better use your time, engage in certain tasks and activities, as well as how to effectively use your senses at every given moment. All too often we tune in and out of our surroundings, and use our senses for survival and/or enjoyable purposes, but very rarely do we ever just zone in on one specific thing and spend time in that moment.
Using the skill of mindfulness will help you train your brain to start noticing and to stop glancing. After using this skill in this way many, many, many times you will begin to notice a huge change in the way you fix your attention on everything that is presented to you.
Mindfulness Tip #4: Notice, Describe, Participate
This is a big one that my friend Christie (the transformation life coach) taught me during our mindfulness conversation. If mindfulness is something that you have been wanting to learn more about so that you can start implementing it into your life, these are the three steps that you need to start doing first.
The first thing you have to do is notice whatever is happening. Whether that is an emotion, a thought, your behavior, or something specific in the moment, notice whatever is happening so that your brain can take note that you have acknowledge the change in the atmosphere.
The second thing is to describe what happened. Describe that feeling, that thought that is invoking a specific feeling, or maybe even the situation that is causing you to have the thoughts and emotions that you are experiencing. Describing helps you mindfully assess the situation so that you can then begin to move forward with the task at hand.
The third and final thing is to actively participate in whatever needs to be done to get from point A to point B. Maybe this will require you to meditate, to talk to somebody, to go on a walk, to engage in self-care, or to distract yourself with something that will help push you in the direction you need to go. Participation not only sets your mind in motion, but it also helps you mindfully see where necessary connections can be made in order for you to move forward in a very mindful direction.
This will improve your life by changing the way you approach various situations. Instead of being so quick to react, you will have the skills needed to help you respond appropriately.
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Mindfulness Tip #5: Exist at a calm state
Last but not least, if there is anything that you take away from this post, I hope it’s that mindfulness is about existing at a calm state. A state mentally and emotionally where you are not over stimulated, overwhelmed, doing too much or too little, feeling pressured, or even stress. Just a state where you are present and aware and engaging appropriately.
This is not easy my friend because it requires you to understand yourself from the inside out in a way that only you can truly understand, and using that information to change the way you interact with the world. Only you have the power to allow yourself to think or feel something specific about a situation, a comment, a moment, or even an experience. Only you are in control of whether you react or respond and the manner in which you do so.
Once you acknowledge this truth and step into the power of owning this truth, it will be hard for your peace to be disrupted. This is because you are not only choosing to exist in a space that is completely your own, but are also existing in a calm state mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
In order words, you are constantly engaging in mindfulness where you are actively engaging in the steps of noticing, describing, and actively participating so that your thoughts and emotions do not gain control or power over you.
Conclusion
Mindfulness is a very hard skill to develop but not one that is impossible. With a great deal of patience and commitment anyone can live their lives in a mindful way. There are various mindfulness practices and skills that you can start implanting into your life today, such as the ones mentioned in this post.
While it will not immediately take you to a state of being mindful all the time, it will help shift your mindset to one that is constantly operating from a mindful state.
Mindfulness is good for the soul. It’s good for all areas of our health, and it’s a very effective skill that is designed to help you continually evolve into a better version of yourself. This post reveals only the surface of what this amazing practice can do for you, believe it or not there are so many more areas and facets of this technique to explore.
If you would love to learn more about mindfulness and how it can improve your overall life, please check out my mindfulness conversation with my friend Christie on YouTube. During this conversation Christie explains what mindfulness is, how it can be used to positively influence various areas of our lives, and she shares various mindfulness tips that can help you start walking the path of being mindful today.
And if that’s not enough for you, Christie and I also had a conversation about mindfulness and how it influences various areas of our everyday functioning as humans. You can check out that conversation on my Instagram!
Also, as part of the mind + body + spirit transformation program mindfulness is one of the key skills that we focus on implanting into your toolbox, so that your transformation is not only sustainable, but also easy to maintain. If you would love to learn more about this program reach out to me today to schedule a free clarity call!
No matter what you may or may not know about mindfulness one thing that is true through and through, is that it is an act of being present in the current moment, and aware of everything. This is not a skill that you can achieve overnight, so as you embark on this new journey and teach yourself this new skill, be patient and kind with yourself, because you will have many setbacks, but only you have the power to either give in or to keep moving forward.
And I hope you choose to keep moving forward. Always.
-Xo
Kimora