The power of Mindfulness

 

Mindfulness has been one of the key mental health management/ self help advice that I have ever received. While at university, I undertook a course all about mindfulness. Its focused on using a book called ''Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World' by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. I highly recommend this book for anyone who fancies giving mindfulness a go after reading about it today. It really changed my perspective. 

I once thought of mindfulness as a little wishy washy. I thought that it was for people who sat crossed legged and emptied their minds. I imagined it to be an almost impossible thing to achieve this calmness. I always thought 'how do they not think anything?' and 'don't they get bored?' I was very wrong. Throughout the weeks, I learnt more about its power and the use of meditations. I found that I could understand and manage my emotions better. I noticed a change in my mood that I was not expecting. Things that once felt overwhelmingly stressful only caused a little concern. 

So, what is mindfulness? 

“Mindfulness is the state or quality of being mindful or aware of something”

That is it. It is NOT complicated to do or understand. Mindfulness is about watching your thoughts and feelings as they pop up. The important misconception to correct is that you need to clear your mind. You don't. You just need to watch them.

I shall tell you a story using this drawing that helped me to understand the simplicity of mindfulness. You are the elephant. You have come to sit by the river to observe. You are sitting on the bank watching the stream flow gently past you. You watch as lanterns of thoughts, emotions and sensations pop up and you watch them drift down stream. You do not swim in the river and become overwhelmed by the current. Equally, you do not try to build a barrier to stop the flow. You sit peacefully and watch them. The mind spontaneously creates thoughts that we can sit back and watch. Most of our days we are running on our autopilot and take all of these thoughts as being 'us'. However when you sit back, you get to notice how they are created and disappear. 

The boy represents someone who is practising mindfulness more actively. They may be walking to work or cooking the dinner. They too are practising mindfulness. Instead of watching all of their thoughts and feelings from the sidelines, they are watching and choosing which ones to interact with. For example, you need to be able to look for cars when crossing the road but you don't need to worry about the meeting at 4pm. 

I'd now suggest that you have a go yourself. Set a timer for 2 minutes and find a quiet spot. Take a few deep breathes and then just sit. You can choose whether or not to close your eyes. What is important here is to sit like the elephant and watch. Do not become frustrated if you find yourself being sucked into a thought (you swim after it). Instead, when you notice, just smile to yourself, be kind, and get back on the bank and watch. To start with you will swim in that river a lot, but over time you will stay drier and drier with each practise. 

The power of mindfulness:

Hopefully you now have a greater understanding of what mindfulness is. Now its time to look at why this is important. Mindfulness has been shown to have a multitude of benefits including but not limited to; 

• It can help to enhance your attention span. Practising mindfulness can help us to focus our attention on one thought at a time. It helps us to become more aware of the distractions our mind can produce. 
• Its helps with emotion regulation. In a very similar way as it helping your attention span, mindfulness can also help people to better identify and interact with their emotions. Emotions can be very powerful when we don't understand them properly. Our emotions can rule over us and make us act in certain ways. Mindfulness can help us to take that step back and decide logically what we want to do next. Due to this, mindfulness can help people with anxiety and depression.  
• Mindfulness can reduce the effects of illnesses such as chronic pain and IBS.
• It can help combat stress’ impact on the immune system. You can read more about stress here 'Breaking the Stress Cycle'. 

How can I practise Mindfulness?

There are many different ways that you can practise mindfulness but they all feed into the same idea 'observing'. You can eat mindfully and walk mindfully. You may sit with your morning coffee and just notice. Notice its taste, the light reflecting off the rain drops running down the window pane. Smell the bitterness of your coffee mixed with the sweetness of your breakfast berries. Mindfulness really is easy to practise, but, you do need to practise. 

Sitting down once to do mindfulness wont have a large impact. Its something that becomes more effective with time. Like anything, you get better at it the more you do it. Also, it helps if you complete it both sedentary and actively. So for an example; 

1. I start my day by drinking my morning coffee mindfully
2. On my walk to work I make sure to put my phone away and just be
3. On my lunch break I take a deep inhale and am present
4. I catch the bus home and decide to sit in a different spot to usual (this helps to break your auto pilot) 
5. I cook my dinner mindfully. 

So as you can see, Mindfulness can be done in a lot of ways. As mentioned before, I would highly recommend 'Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World' as it helps to get you started on your journey. 

To end I would like to share a quote that I think nicely rounds up the importance of managing your thoughts. 

"Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny." Lao Tzu 

Lozzy