Mindful Tips
- Mindfullness is paying attention to the present moment, to things as they are; without judgement.
- Practicing mindfulnesss helps you to see the world as it is; not as we expect it to be, how you want it to be, or what you fear it might become.
- You cannot stop your mind from triggering unhappy memories, negative self-talk and judgemental ways of thinking about the past or the future. But you can stop what happens after that. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding on itself and triggering an ongoing spiral of negative thoughts. You can do this by an alternative way of relating to yourself and the world. If you stop and reflect for a moment, you recognise that our mind doesn’t just think. It can also be aware that it is thinking. This form of pure awareness allows you to experience the world directly. It’s bigger than thinking, and it is unclouded by your thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
- Mindfulness like a high mountain vantage point from which you can see everything for many miles around. It allows you to step outside the chattering negative self-talk, and your reactive impulses and emotions.
- The mind tends to distort reality. It tends to over think, over analyse, and over-judge.
- Mark Twain once said: ‘I have had many troubles in my life, but most of them have never happened.”
- Mindfulness does not say don’t worry or don’t be sad. It acknowledges your fear and your sadness, your fatigue and exhaustion, and encourages you to turn inwards towards the feelings and whatever emotions are threatening to overwhelm you. This turning inwards, with an open awareness of your feelings and emotions, allows them in their own time to lose their power over you. It’s like imagining the monster in the closet and then getting up and turning on the light and realising the monster is not there.
- When you are caught in the world of thoughts, spinning around, rehashing and rehearsing the past and the future, you often are unaware of your own needs and neglect your own self-care.
- Only you can know what you need for yourself, but it is only when you slow down and become mindful of what you need, that you can act on it. Mindfulness allows you to sense more clearly what you do need and what you need to to for your own self-care.
- Mindfullness is about awareness. It is an open acceptance of your life as it is. Paradoxically, with practice, you then have the freedom to choose how to live your life, rather than react to it.
- “Mindfullness is a discipline. Commit to formal practice as if your life depended on it….because the quality of your life does.”- Jon Kabat Zinn
- Be a lamp unto yourself by taking a fresh look at your views and opinions and cultivating a spirit of inquiry into your life as it is right now.
- Do not take this program on faith. Investigate and explore the truth for yourself. The only truths which will hold up in your life are the ones that you yourself have explored.
- Mindfullness allows you to live life fully and with the joy that moment to moment awareness brings.