When you are walking, walk; when you are sitting, sit.

When you sit, just sit.  When you walk, just walk.  But whatever you do, don’t wobble.- Zen syaing

Mindfulness and mental relaxation are important for our mental health. We can practice mini meditations to relieve stress and to combat anxiety attacks. Here are some ways that can enrich your daily meditation practice or just help you train your mind to manage all those stressing thoughts.

In this post:

• Why mindfulness matters ?
• 7 practical things you can do to live more mindfully
• Conclusions and suggestions

The importance of mindfulness

You can read a lot about HOW to establish morning and evening routines but less is said about WHY would you want to introduce extra things to do in your busy schedule. The main importance of morning and evening routines is to assure that you take out time for yourself each and every day. These routines and habits are all different forms of enjoying some me-time. Isn’t that selfish to take time away form your family & work? It is , but it is a healthy and needed selfishness.

Mindfulness is the skill and ability of being able to focus your attention in an active, dynamic, noisy environment. Most of your attention is automatically moving based on the inertia and momentum coming from the structure of your mind. You can’t do much about that part and you shouldn’t. It is automatic for a reason just like walking. You don’t have to pay attention at each step when you walk but when you are in a slippery, challenging environment you kind of mind your steps more consciously and carefully. This parallel was set up between how you walk and how you pay attention to illustrate the importance of the automatic process in your mental behavior.

You don’t want everything to be under your control when it comes to attention and mental workings because you benefit greatly from not having to pay attention to every detail. You are in the driving seat of this automatically piloted mental force and your mindfulness is about learning to be a good attentive driver, who is capable of being present, looking around and taking control when the road gets bumpy.

The best way known by us so far to develop the attitude and ability to live more consciously and mindfully is practicing meditation. The major benefit of a regular meditation practice is that it helps you practice calmness, awareness and clarity like you would train a muscle. Regular practicing can bring you into a state of greater focus and develop your skills in releasing stress with grace.

Meditation is a powerful mental practice but there are some other easy ways to achieve relaxation, recharging and awareness. The article below gives a bit of detail and introduction to some of the ways I find usefull for relaxing, recharging and bringing my attention back under my control instead of letting it jump around all day pulled by all things noisy and colorful.

7 Simple Mindfulness Practices for Your Daily Life

1.Wake up easy and on time

Waking up late can trigger anxiety from the moment you open your eyes and that isn’t something desirable. You want to go as far into the day as possible without triggering stress or anxiety, so you don’t have to waste your day firefighting emotional flames. Try experimenting with different wake up times until you find one that is comfortable to you and promotes calmness during the morning hours.

Don’t hop out of bed immediately as you wake up. Do a short one minute mini meditation to allow your mind to really wake up. Your mind needs a bit of time to move from the dreamy, foggy waves into the attentive, logical thinking wave lengths. As you are laying in bed and opening your eyes take in your surroundings. You can sit up if it is more comfortable and notice the comfort of your bed, the furniture in the room, the light and darkness, the temperature. Creating a mental list of furniture pieces in your head can bring your mind into a state of focus and presence quickly and efficiently. ( 30 seconds -1 minute)

If you can afford to include some Yoga and/or Pilates practice in the morning it is advisable to do so. A ten minutes stretching flow can bring your awareness into your body and wake up in you the importance of self-care. Your physical body has needs and it is good to remind yourself of that early in the morning.

2. Walk and drive consciously

The idea is to stay present in what you are doing. Commuting, driving and walking are typical, boring everyday activities for most of us and these tasks are so automatic that most of us are doing it on autopilot. That is unfortunate because the mind is programmed to protect us, so without conscious awareness from our part, the mind will tend to focus on possible dangers in the environment and screens out that what is simple and nice. This can result in our attention being driven to notice mostly negative things and almost zero positives. And than we wonder why we feel anxious and stressed all the time.

It is best if you can unplug and take a slow 10-15 minute stroll each day minding your environment and your own thoughts. Choose a different path each time and take the turns you didn’t take before. Look at the trees and the buildings around you. Notice the specifics of the season, the freshness or warmness of the air. Imagine you have to go back and describe what you just saw to a foreigner who has never been in the area. What would you tell about the streets, people, shops, cars, parks around you? What is interesting , unique, original? Ask yourself after doing it: How do I feel? Is it better?

When you don’t have the possibility to walk around just for the pleasure of it, you can use the commuting time for mini meditating and raising presence and awareness. Conscious walking, driving, commuting is a form of meditation because you work on staying present during performing a ‘boring, repetitive act in an impulse rich environment. One way to get lost in thought while walking is when you are notice something that you don’t like and get all enthusiastic around that negative thought and finding yourself arriving home without even remembering the last 5 minutes. You walk home on autopilot while your mind is involved in some mental story inventing, illusionary discussions and fighting with the city authorities. .

Conscious walking is a form of meditation because you work on staying present while walking in an impulse rich environment.

S.K.Benko, anchortobloom.com

One of the most powerful things you can do is for your mental wellbeing is to stay present in what you are doing. When you are fully present things seem to slow down and you can feel more capable to handle whatever comes your way.

3. Contemplate – Sit quietly, do nothing

The current popular western way of living is focused on action and being active. The western lifestyle is created around the idea of the glorification of busyness. From a general social perspective currently it doesn’t matter what you are actually achieving, the important thing is to look busy. Did you hear you friends saying sentences like “Oh, I had so much to do today. I had to water the flowers, check the emails, take out the garbage and talk to the neighbor (about the game last night.) “It seems like a lot of tasks when you aren’t paying attention but you can easily realize that they actually didn’t have a busy day in reality. They like to present it that way so they don’t look like lazy people.

Taking the time to sit quietly for a few minutes is the most efficient thing you can do for your productivity, mainly on your most busy days. It might sound counterintuitive, but when you take the time to stop and sit down and clear your head for a few minutes, you can recharge your batteries and pick up the tasks with a clearer organizing ability. You can basically just sit on a bench in a park, on the terrace or the veranda. A lot of people use smoking cigarettes as an excuse for taking short 10 minutes breaks. It isn’t the healthiest choice but it still seems like you are doing something instead of just sitting there.

10 minute short breaks can be considered forms of mini meditations because they let you regain your power of focusing. The biggest danger in running around and doing many things is that you get tired mentally and you start to overreact situations, agree to things you normally wouldn’t and impulse buy things you don’t really need. If sitting peacefully and watching the beauty of a tree, a lake is not your thing you can still take short breaks during the work by writing in a notebook. Even if you are drawing puppies and flowers you will still look busy and smart.

4. Eat without distractions

We are used to eating either on the run, or watching the TV/ phone/ tablet screen. That’s not the best habit to practice because proper nutrition and eating are really elemental to our health and wellbeing. When our attention is distracted by a movie, Instagram posts or our own rambling thoughts we a far more likely to overeat. When our conscious attention is engaged in the present moment we are more likely to make more beneficial food choices and stay more conservative with portion sizes.

An interesting experiment is to try eating with your non dominant hand. It is needless to say, I assume, that this experiment is more safe for you to try in the privacy of your home. This will slow down the eating process and engage your interest and attention. You might notice that as you pay attention to what you are eating it seems to smell and taste better. Conscious eating can result in significant beneficial changes in your lifestyle and eating habits. You might notice how easy it is for most of us today to get nutritious food and you might develop a sense of gratefulness over time for all those people involved in producing and preparing your food.

Eating is a repetitive task that we do every few hours, so it is an effective way to remind yourself to stay focused and mindful. Our attention is dragged in thousands of direction during the day so it can be a usefull practice to eat more consciously and to remind yourself that all that business is ultimately to serve and benefit you.

5. Say thank you often

We have a tendency to take good things for granted and pay attention only when things start to go wrong. Counting your blessing and practicing saying thank you raises your awareness when something good happens.

• Say a mental thank you when something good feeling happens. You talked to a friend on the phone and it felt good that they called, say thank you to them mentally.
• You can say thank you to the universe, God, whoever you think is responsible when you have beneficial synchronicities and good timing.
• You can say thank you to yourself when you almost break a glass but you catch it on the last minute before it falls.

6. Take time to bond and hug

Petting a cat or hugging your loved one for 30 seconds has so many positive effects on your health and happiness. Hugging and cuddling can be considered a form of mini meditation because it stops thought, increases the feeling of wellbeing and releases anxiety and stress.

When you are hugging someone you feel like the world stops for a minute. A good feeling hug encourages our muscles to relax, releases tension, makes you feel more loved and secure. In terms of biology what happens is that the bonding hormone oxytocin increases in our system and the stress hormone cortisol reduces and as a result we quickly start feeling better. Petting your companion animal or hugging a person you love is more than just a good feeling chemical reaction in your body.

We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need twelve hugs a day for growth – Virginia Satir

7. Create a bedtime relax routine

Instead of falling down on the bed after a long day take a little time for mental decluttering. You can develop your own wind-down routine to disconnect from the impulses of the day. You can distract yourself with music, stand-up comedies, doing a hobby that needs focus and attention, learning a language, playing games on the computer or watching a series.

The evening hours are the transition time between the active parts of the day towards the passive, relaxing part of the day. For people who are really active during the day it can be difficult to stop just because it is getting dark outside. It is hard to stop the flow of thoughts and the mental agility so a little active relaxation can be a good solution for them to wind-down after a busy day and ease into the peacefulness of the night.

Taking a shower, a warm bath can help in cleaning the skin but also for clearing the mind. A relaxing in the bathtub can feel so relaxing and recharging. The mental relief a shower or taking a bath can offer after a long, busy, challenging day is not just valuable as an act of mental and physical hygiene, but also as an act of emotional self-care.

CONCLUSIONS

taking a warm bath, running , swimming, sauna

Credits and further readings : P1 storyset; P2 diana.grytsku; P3 pvproductions ; P4 racool_studio; 10 Ways to Sneak in Meditation into Your Everyday Life