Recently, the concept of “mindfulness” has come into common use, but what exactly does it mean and how exactly can it change us and the world around us?
What is mindfulness?
Now there is a lot of talk about mindfulness, comments Elena Ovcharenko. From all sides they are calling for a conscious approach to your life, but what does this mean in practice?
Then awareness turns from “How can I find happiness?” in “I’m happy with my path because I feel everything I do.” Consciousness is respect for yourself, for your choice. It is involvement in your actions.
Are there different types of mindfulness?
Yes there is. Mindfulness is not something holistic. A person can use physical awareness, but not mental awareness. Human beings are made up of complex levels of development and intricate neural connections, so awareness comes in several forms. The bodily (physical) is responsible for the movement and control of the body.
Mental – for the choice of life path, destination. Emotional is responsible for our emotional spectrum of perception of the world and the environment. Intellectual for the ability to evaluate, develop. Behavioral is responsible for our social status, helps us choose ways to interact with the environment.
What needs to be done to develop mindfulness?
You need to develop self-care. Mindfulness is trained and improved through practice. Ask yourself questions: “What am I doing now? How do I feel? How do I react?” Stop, look around, feel. You will be surprised how much new there is in the usual. This is conscious action. These stops allow us to be more empathetic towards ourselves. Try to do them 5 to 10 times a day.
Listen to meditations, do yoga, dance, martial arts, qigong.
Why develop mindfulness?
Thanks to this skill, you can make your life brighter and more fulfilling. And this, in turn, increases your chances in your career, personal life and has a positive effect on health. After all, a conscious person is good at feeling their needs, setting boundaries, and coping with procrastination.
In therapy sessions, clients often ask the question, “How is mindfulness different from attitudes?”
How is mindfulness different from attitudes?
Mindfulness is a “factory setting”, it is there, sometimes it needs to be upgraded, updated. And installations are always “foreign” programs that you use in your life in 70% of cases without realizing them.
Be open to yourself, honest, responsible, contact specialists, “update the system”, add energy “fuel” to your body and brain in time, and then your awareness will effectively influence your life.
Awareness is being in the moment
Awareness is the observation of one’s thoughts and states, returning oneself to the present moment of time, without getting involved in the events of the past and future, says Ekaterina Kuzminova.
Being in the moment, thoughts and body being “here and now” is the deepest practice, having learned which we qualitatively move to a different level of life – from eternal fuss and haste to choosing what we really need, doing it.
Every time I watch myself during my daily activities, I catch myself thinking that subconsciously I am always thinking about something else.
We work on a computer in the office, but we think about the child at school, we play with the child, and our thoughts are occupied with a husband, mother or work. Familiar?
Our mind is always looking for an opportunity to get out of the “here and now” state of what is really happening, and the external culture contributes to this, thanks to the cult of efficiency and multitasking.
And we manage to live on the machine – we combine the absorption of food, having sex, driving a car, working with thoughts about something else from the past or future, thereby missing the importance and beauty of the current life moment.
In actions, the depth, quality and awareness of the whole reality and what is happening in it is lost. Living thoughts in the past or future, we miss the happiness of the current moment, which is sure to be.
Mindfulness makes it possible to live life deliciously (smile, kiss a child, hugs, heart-to-heart conversations) through contact with your feelings and emotions.
This is not the ability of the elite, this is a natural quality inherent in everyone, and through daily practice, focusing on what we are doing, we can easily master and implement it in our lives. And then our memory will be filled with really bright and deep moments.
4 questions
There are a number of quite interesting practices that make life truly colorful. According to Ekaterina Inozemtseva, together with her husband Dmitry Yurchenko, awareness should be understood as a clear answer to four main questions, namely who am I, where and how I am going, namely why. At the moment when another imbalance arises in life, you just need to answer these questions in order to put everything in its place.
The couple developed a practice called “21 Insights”, which can be translated as “21 Insights”. In this case, it may mean a word or a quote, an event, as well as one’s own thought, which entailed a corresponding reflection, and “hunting for insights”, and this process can be done during the day, contributes to the development of awareness. As a result of such practice, one can learn to concentrate exclusively on the important, while at the same time discarding everything superfluous to the maximum, as a result of which the efficiency of life will increase significantly.
To change your own awareness, you should first build an appropriate scale from 1 to 10, where one means making decisions automatically, without being involved in the process, while ten points mean a clear awareness of your life path. The couple came to the conclusion about the multifaceted essence of awareness: mental, bodily, physical, visual, intellectual, and this list is far from complete.
The development of awareness, according to Dmitry and Ekaterina, is the fastest way to make your life much more meaningful, which will have the most direct impact on all areas of life. Let’s get acquainted with the main practices for developing the five main types of awareness, the effectiveness of which can be measured by observing the change in the corresponding index during the day.
Sleep
The practice of sleeping in separate beds opens up an understanding of the most important criteria for healthy sleep, gives a fairly clear understanding of the need to find a compromise between expectations, as well as the formation of a kind of ritual that has a significant impact on the quality of rest.
In this case, you should answer yourself a number of questions in order to find out in what kind of environment and at what temperature the partner prefers to fall asleep, what underwear and position he prefers, whether he likes to read before going to bed. It is necessary to determine the most important things for yourself and your partner, making this the new rule for 21 days.
Emotional awareness
Within seven days, as a response to internal and external irritation, promptly send, with the help of thought, seven compliments, which must be sincere.
Such a step opens up a change in relations, both with oneself and with the outside world, allowing one to acquire the skill of seeing in front of oneself not a specific act, but a person as a whole. It is necessary to carefully monitor thoughts regarding the condemnation of other people and work out the situations of your assessments, which are ambiguous, even through pain, namely, how not to condemn a boor or an alcoholic, or a colleague who constantly disrupts the approved work schedule.
In mastering the practice, the primary awareness of condemnation will help, as well as the prompt search for truly sincere compliments, with appropriate evidence.
Mental awareness
In this case, we mean planning your future based on really realistic goals, while abstracting as much as possible from past experience.
Practice opens, first of all, getting rid of the fear of starting something new, allows you to realize the various ways for self-realization. You need to learn how to negotiate with yourself before launching the next project, convincing yourself that this is just an experiment, and not a life goal that must be fulfilled 100%. It should be said, and several times, that such an experiment is only an opportunity to gain the necessary experience, and it is not at all necessary to show a certain result.
Intuitive awareness
You should turn off all communications and mobile devices for 48 hours, turn off the TV and minimize communication with the outside world.
As a result, it becomes possible to pay attention directly to yourself, shifting the focus of attention from external sources, which will allow you to gain confidence in your own abilities, getting rid of feelings of irritability. You should not make any plans for this time, and in the event that meetings are already scheduled and cannot be rescheduled, you should do without the usual electronic means of communication, relying solely on intuition.
Physical and bodily awareness
It is advisable to choose orthopedic shoes for yourself, and then conduct a thorough thoughtful self-massage of any part of the body, and you can start with the feet.
This practice allows you to open an understanding of the basic needs of the body, and not in general, but in a specific part, as a result of which comes the understanding that joy lies in the details. At the time of the massage, you should listen to your own feelings, after which they should be fixed on paper, comparing physical sensations with the established habit of analyzing with the help of the mind.
