Discover what mindfulness is, why it’s so important and simple steps you can take to make it part of everyday life, to transform your experience and help you feel calmer, happier and less stressed.
What On Earth Is “Mindfulness”?
Being mindful is about a state of being – a particular way of choosing to experience life, in the present moment – rather than letting our mind run riot over past mistakes and future worries, whilst sleep-walking through what’s actually going on around us.
Being “mindful”: we’re normally too busy doing “mind-full” to be mindful.
Why Bother Practising Mindfulness?
Because we are usually far too busy running around doing stuff to actually notice what we’re experiencing.
We’re part of a constant, fast-flowing stream of cause and effect – buffeted by the proverbial tides, reacting, reacting, reacting.
Often we don’t even notice that we’re stuck in this cycle, running in circles like an overenthusiastic gerbil in a plastic wheel.
We want to be in control of things, so we develop stress-based behaviours to get things back under control, but that rarely works because we’re still too busy reacting. We try harder and harder, but life still seems to be a like a game of skipping through treacle.
We change our experience by changing the way we see the world.
Being mindful means dragging ourselves back into the present moment – away from the “to do” list, the housework, Aunty Bettie’s birthday card and everything else that normally fills our mind to bursting point.
By getting back into the “now”, we can start to reconnect with the part of us that makes the unconscious choices about how to think, feel and act, in every single moment.
To find out more about mindfulness, including the 4 Principle of Mindfulness and some simple, practical suggestions for how to get back into the present moment, grab your copy of our free mini-e-book “Why Bother With Mindfulness?” by signing up for our regular meditation & yoga newsletter: “Learning To Be”.
If you want to connect with others on a meditation journey, how about joining our Beyond Alchemy Facebook Page?
[…] study’s participants took part in mindfulness practices, for about half an hour per day. The study showed that the benefits the participants reported […]