With the popularity of meditation, yoga, and mindfulness practices in the world in recent years, we have started to encounter the word mindfulness in many places. So, what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is not the state of staying positive all the time, contrary to what most people think. It’s not about being in a good or bad mood. Mindfulness is a way of integrating staying in the moment into our daily lives. Thus, by incorporating mindfulness into our lives, we can be better observers in our inner and outer worlds. The goal of mindfulness is to stay in the moment while not suppressing thoughts or feelings.
On the contrary, by increasing our awareness of our emotions, thoughts, body, and mind with mindfulness, we can better understand ourselves. We can get rid of the anxieties that cause us to constantly judge ourselves.
How to Practice Mindfulness?
We can incorporate mindfulness into every area of our lives, in every activity we do. What kind of exercise we prefer and when we do it is entirely up to us. This exercise can be a short meditation practice or a breathing exercise… But how can we incorporate mindfulness into our activities?
- Get your attention: In our world where we are exposed to a lot of stimuli, it can be difficult from time to time to slow down and focus. By increasing the awareness of our sense organs, it becomes easier for us to focus on our physical experiences. For example, while touching a fabric you love to touch, focus on how that moment makes you feel physically and mentally.
- Stay in the moment by focusing on your breath and live in the moment: Organizing and monitoring breathing keep us in the present, not in the past or the future. Especially in stressful and negative moments, practicing this exercise will calm you down. That is why breathing exercises are important to living in the moment.
- Accept your thoughts, feelings, and yourself: Watching ourselves, accepting, and being nice to ourselves is one of the most effective ways to live a happy life that we often overlook. The more we are aware of ourselves and the more we embrace ourselves, the easier we can establish our relationship with the moment.
Mindfulness at Work
The office or work environment, where most of us spend long hours, can be an area where we lose ourselves in the flow from time to time and cannot manage our stress and thoughts. Especially before an important meeting or when we feel lost among many thoughts during the day and our performance has decreased… Therefore, creating a mindful work environment and training our minds to focus can also increase our work performance. For this reason, you can read our mindfulness at work article at work to bring mindfulness practices to business life. In this way, you can make the activities you do before, after, and at work mindful and get more detailed information about the subject.
Mindfulness for Students
Not only work life, but also school life can also be a stressful area for us most of the time. We can’t always find enough motivation for homework to be done, lessons to focus on and exams to study. Thus, we may experience focusing problems. Especially with mindfulness meditation practices, it is possible for us to increase our working efficiency and to cope with the anxiety brought by stress more easily. For more detailed information, you can read Mindfulness for Student article.
Mindful Activities
We can make many activities that we do in our daily life mindful. Thus, since we increase our awareness while doing that activity at that moment, we can both increase the efficiency of the activity and increase the pleasure we get while doing that activity. These activities can be simple activities that we all do many times during the day or that week. But we can acquire new activities to incorporate mindfulness into our lives. Just to give few examples,
- Mindful Eating: We eat multiple meals a day. But how many meals do we become aware of the smell and taste of the food we eat? During how many meals can we only focus on the pleasure we get from eating a portion of food we love? Or are we thinking about the next lesson, the meeting tomorrow, or the housework we must do in the evening? But it’s up to us to change that. If we listen to our body, increase our awareness of our senses, and focus only on the food we eat, we can turn even the basic activity of eating into a pleasurable activity.
- Mindful Walking: Walking is a simple activity that we all do, sometimes for a break, sometimes as a habit, sometimes just as our daily road routine. But most of us lose our awareness while walking. For this reason, we do not understand how the walk is going, and most of the time we are surprised when the distance to walk is over. The biggest reason for this is that our minds are busier than they should be… But why do we let the moment slip by? With mindfulness, we can transform the moment with our awareness. And we can make the activity focusable.
- Mindful Writing: One of the activities that relaxes most of us is writing. Combining meditation and writing, turning it into an activity, can be a way to enrich our experience. Experts say that mindful writing is often an important way to clear one’s mind, embrace oneself, and be aware of one’s feelings.
If you would like to experience mindful activities such as eating, walking, writing, and combining many more daily activities with a meditation experience, you can look at the meditations at Innerjoy.
Benefits of Mindfulness
- It enables us to observe ourselves and our environment better.
- It increases our self-awareness and enables us to better understand the reasons behind our feelings and thoughts.
- It allows us to get rid of unnecessary stress and worries.
- We become happier, more patient, and more compassionate people.
- We can control our anger more easily.
- We lead a more prosperous life.
- We can be more controlled and calmer in times of crisis.
- We can stay in the moment, not in the past or the future.
What are the Differences Between Mindfulness and Meditation?
Most people are confused about the difference between mindfulness and meditation. Let’s get rid of that confusion. Mindfulness is a way of life, a quality filled with techniques to improve one’s awareness. Mindfulness meditation, on the other hand, is one of the practices of mindfulness, an application, and a training area to live a mindful life. If we think of meditation as a tool, the goal is to integrate mindfulness into our lives and improve our ability to stay in the moment.
What is Mindfulness Meditation?
Mindfulness Meditation is a mental training exercise. It helps us to acquire the Mindfulness concept to our very own life and make it usable for our lifestyle. Through mindfulness meditation, the mind gets serene, our focusing power increases, and our ability to stay in the moment improves. Mindfulness meditation includes many techniques, but the fundamentals are taking a deep breath, focusing to breathe, and improving the awareness of body and mind. It doesn’t need any special preparation and it can be done anytime and anyplace. Also, there is no time limit for mindfulness meditation, it can be applied 5 minutes or 40 minutes of practice.
You can download Innerjoy to try mindfulness practices and get more detailed information!
