Practice Mindfulness To Crush Your Demons

Have you heard about “mindfulness” before but not sure what it means or how to practice mindfulness? While it is easy to understand, practicing mindfulness isn’t always as easy, especially initially. It is, however, an incredibly beneficial practice.

In this post, I’ll cover mindfulness and help you understand how to get started with a practice that will serve you for the rest of your life.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the act of paying attention to the present moment. That is, paying attention to what’s happening around you, including things like paying attention to your breathing and focusing on what you see and hear. You can also think about your sensations, such as the feeling of your feet touching the ground or how it feels when you blink your eyes.

The goal of mindfulness practice is to do all these things with acceptance and without judgment. Mindfulness practice involves noticing what’s happening at the moment without judging it or comparing it to something else.

As a result, mindfulness helps people deal more effectively with difficult emotions like anger and sadness because they’re able to focus on what they’re feeling at that time instead of getting caught up in the “story” that often comes along with these emotions (like blaming someone else, regretting the past, or worrying about the future).

Reasons To Practice Mindfulness

In his famous book, The Power of Now*, Eckhardt Tolle describes how he was seriously depressed for a long time. Then, one day while he was in the midst of another intense round of depression, he had an epiphany. He realized how his thoughts were the cause of his problems with depression. This realization led him to mindfulness. As he started to practice mindfulness, his depression disappeared.

The Benefits of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has some fantastic benefits:

• When you practice mindfulness, it helps to reduce difficult emotions, like stress, depression, anxiety, anger, and sadness.
• Practicing mindfulness enhances creativity, improves focus and memory, promotes emotional intelligence, and increases happiness.
• If you practice mindfulness, it can help you recognize your own mistakes and help you forgive yourself for them (something we all need from time to time).
• Mindfulness increases your sense of empathy for others and helps you act with more kindness towards others.
• Mindfulness improves your relationship with others by helping you understand them better.
• Practicing mindfulnesss may even help you sleep better too.

Looking at these benefits, it is clear that the world could be a better place if everyone practiced mindfulness!

If you think about how mindfulness means to be fully engaged in the present moment and that the present moment is all that you will ever have, it makes perfect sense to practice mindfulness.

How To Practice Mindfulness

The best way to learn mindfulness is through practice.

When practicing mindfulness, the goal is to pay attention to the present moment and observe what’s happening without making judgments or comparisons with the past or future.

Here are some examples of practicing mindfulness that you can incorporate into your own life:

• Take a walk outside. As you walk along, focus on what you are seeing or hearing around you. Perhaps a bird singing in a tree. Or beautiful flowers next to the road. Feel your feet hitting the road.
• When you sit down for a meal, smell the aroma rising from the food. When you take a bite, focus on the texture of the food in your mouth and the flavors being released as you chew.
• Focus on what you are doing in the moment. This might mean washing the dishes while noticing how the warm water feels against your hands or folding laundry while paying attention to each fold and crease of the fabric.
• Watch your breath by paying attention to how the air moves in and out of your body. To make this easier, sit upright or lie down in a comfortable spot and close your eyes. Start with just one minute of mindful breathing, then add on more time as you feel comfortable. (This is what meditation is.)

As you practice mindfulness, you will get distracted from time to time. Your mind is likely to go off somewhere, and you start thinking about something else. The key is to learn to catch yourself when that happens. When you catch yourself, acknowledge that your mind drifted off (with no judgment) and gently bring it back to your activity.

Become The Observer

So what does it mean to not engage with your thoughts?

Imagine your mind being like a house. There are all kinds of activities going on inside the house. Instead of being inside the house and participating in all the activities, you’re standing outside and looking in through the window. You’re not judging or otherwise engaging with anything happening inside the house. You’re only watching. And so it should be with your thoughts. You acknowledge them being there, but you’re only watching them and not getting lost in them.

Mindfulness is not something that you will master overnight. It takes time and is an ongoing process. The more you practice, the better you get at it. Keep practicing until you learn what it feels like to be fully engaged in the present moment.

An Extremely Useful Tool

Meditation is a tool that is extremely useful if you want to practice mindfulness.

There are so many misconceptions about what meditation is. Let me assure you it is not some hokey-pokey practice. It is also not about “emptying your mind.” It is about focusing on something in the present, usually your breathing.

Meditation is helpful because it teaches you to catch yourself when your mind drifts off and allows you to bring your mind back to your breathing. It is a crucial skill when you want to practice mindfulness.

Resources To Learn More About Practicing Mindfulness

There are so many resources on the Internet to learn more about mindfulness, but if I had to recommend only one resource, it would be Headspace. Check it out! Their main product is their meditation app, but they also have excellent articles about mindfulness.

To Wrap It Up

Mindfulness takes ongoing effort, but the benefits are worth it. It’s as easy as paying attention and noticing what is happening right now without comparing or judging yourself or anything else. When you feel overwhelmed by life at times, mindfulness may help reduce stress and negative emotions so that you’re able to focus on what matters most: living in the present moment and making good decisions for today instead of worrying about tomorrow.