By being mindful, you can create a life that brings you great relationships, enables you to meet your life goals, and sets you free from negative emotions.
Looking around, you can see that people live in many different types of lives. Most people living their lives today aren’t really really conscious of living in the present moment. In addition to this, we are so locked into our day to day routines that we don’t take the time to learn how to live a life for what is best and true for ourselves.
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What Is Being Mindful and Living In The Present
Mindfulness means that you’re specifically in the present. When someone is being mindful, they’re aware of and paying attention to the moment that they’re in, not mired down in the past or future.
When you practice being mindful, you focus your mind purposefully. Have you ever driven from one place to another and at the end of your destination, you weren’t aware of the sights you saw or how you arrived there?
If so, you weren’t practicing mindfulness. This concept is worth examining each area of your life. You can go through life on autopilot. This means that you can sit down and have a meal, but because you’re not being mindful or practicing mindfulness, you won’t even be aware of what you had to eat in terms of the portion or even the pleasure of tasting it.
For this reason, you can have dinner and then later in the evening you can’t even remember what you had eaten for dinner just a few hours ago. The reason that you can go through life and miss things is that the mind has a tendency to blank or go through the motions when you’re doing something you’ve done numerous times before.
Being mindful is putting a stop to allowing the mind to simply wander unchecked. It means that you direct your mind back to focus on whatever it needs to focus on. It may sound counterproductive, but by learning how to practice awareness of your thoughts, you can be less productive and miss out on the incredible life that you could have had.
Techniques Of Mindfulness: Why Mindfulness Is Important For Living
The art of mindful thinking has its roots in Buddhism and the practice has been around for thousands of years. Not only was it practiced to enhance spiritual connectivity, but also to bring calmness, focus, and improve the brain’s ability to think.
Many research papers show how you can create a life worth living by learning and practicing mindfulness. There are physical health and emotional well-being boosts that can be had when you are being mindful
When you become aware in the present moment, it can soothe your emotions and help strengthen your immune system. Many of the concepts of mindfulness are used in different meditation processes, the end result is increased self-awareness and can eliminate negative and repetitive thought patterns in the mind.
Mindfulness helps center the user and cause them to choose to live fully active in today rather than focus on the past or get caught up in what might happen in their future.
How To Be Mindful and Make Better Choices
You might be surprised to learn that some of the choices that you make in life, you’re making without being fully aware of the present moment. When this happens, the choices that you make aren’t really the ones that can give you the best outcome.
This can impact your entire life. But when you living and being mindful throughout the day, you can make better choices and change your life to let it become the one that you’ve dreamed of living.
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One of the areas where mindful thinking can help you make better choices is in the area of eating. You already know how to eat each meal of the day without even thinking, it’s something you learned early in life and it has now become automatic for you.
This is because it’s easy to eat while you’re busy with things unrelated to eating.
It’s easy to eat while you’re reading, while you’re talking on the phone or while you’re watching a movie. What happens then is that you miss being in the present while you’re eating.
This means that the taste and pleasure you can get from the food you’re eating will be missed which can lead you to simply eat food from lifelong habits such as your food choices and the amount of food you eat. This will allow you to eat a much healthier diet which will benefit all aspects of your life.
Plus, when you eat without being mindful, it can be easier for you to not connect the emotions to what you’re eating. If you’re an emotional eater, not using mindfulness when eating, can cause you to overeat and not even be aware of how much you are eating. This can wreak havoc on your health and work towards the body you want to have.
But if you practice being mindful, this practice can help you learn not to link your emotions to food.
Another area where mindfulness can help you is in your relationships. When you enjoy great relationships, you feel better physically and you can enjoy less stress which will have a direct effect on your happiness. Mindful thinking can help you have harmony in your relationships.
This is because you won’t feel as stressed, so whenever there’s an issue, you won’t immediately react to what you perceive is going on. By being mindful, you’ll be focused on being present during the interaction with the people in your life.
What this will do is help you better understand what someone else is saying and feeling. This will help you to not react defensively which is often the main cause of many modern relationship stress issues.
Being mindful can help you respond to relationship interaction in an appropriate way. There is a great value by being in the present moment with another person, you can put the past behind you and not worry about what may happen into the future with your relationship.
You can give that person all your attention when you are in the present moment with them. Your mind is in the hear and now, not off in the future somewhere. Being mindful helps you tune in to the people in your life.
Being mindful makes you more in tune with how the people in your life are acting by seeing the emotion behind the action and behind the words they speak alowing you to be much more empthetic to their actions.
This will allow you to not become defensive by not reacting to your conditioned thoughts that can wreak havoc in relationships. You can then put your problems aside and interact on a personal level based on truth and not your preconceived ideas.
When you practice and learn mindfulness, it can help you make better decisions that will positively impact productivity. By using mindful thinking, you can stay aware of the present rather than focusing on what’s coming later.
Being aware of where you are in this present moment will increase your focus. When you’re unfocused, it’s too easy to let your mind start to think about what else is coming your way that you have to get done.
Being mindful helps you accomplish tasks by keeping you on track. It can be easy to start working on something, only to start thinking that maybe you forgot to respond to a phone call, or you forgot to write an appointment down on the calendar.
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So off you go to deal with these other tasks and before you know it, you’ve lost productivity. When you experience the “monkey mind” with a cascade of thoughts, this will affect your effectiveness and raise your stress levels because you can’t seem to get anything done.
Staying in the here and now and being mindful, is what mindfulness can help you with. When you can focus, you’ll make better choices and you can create the best life for yourself.
Being Mindful Is Therapy for Improved Mental Health
When you think of how the brain works, mindfulness can help focus the mind on all the good things in your life instead of the negatives that we often put more energy into.
Do you know how an untrained puppy will run around when you take it outside? It doesn’t want to listen because it’s not focused on you. There are too many exciting things outside – like the wind pushing a leaf across the grass, the neighbor’s dog, a car passing on the street, or kids out playing.
In a flash, the puppy takes off after the leaf or the neighbor’s dog or heads toward the street. The puppy hasn’t learned or been trained on how to focus, anything and everything is up for grabs. This could of course end up in the puppy experiencing something other than a positive outcome.
Just like something detrimental can happen with an untrained puppy, a mind that doesn’t practice being mindful can also experience negative consequences. If your mind is allowed to jump to just any thought at any time, most likely those thoughts won’t be productive for you.
Your mind will start to think about situations that caused anger in life. You’ll start thinking about wanting to get even. You’ll feel sorry for yourself that your life isn’t like someone else’s, who seems to have everything.
Next thing you know your mind is completely emersed in negative thinking because it was allowed to exist in that future or past thinking instead of the present moment. The thoughts you have in your mind that you keep thinking of either knowingly or not can either create a good life or a troubled life.
When your mind isn’t being mindful, it can wander off into thinking about things that cause you to feel stressed out. It can cause you to feel anxiety. You may get angry from the stress and become even more bitter.
Left alone, the mind that’s not focused on mindful thinking can lead you to bouts of depression. Learning mindfulness techniques can help you focus on being present and can help you understand how your past actions have affected you.
Mindfulness keeps you centered on today, not yesterday and not tomorrow. There are various techniques using mindfulness that can help improve mental health. Among these are mindfulness stress reduction and mindfulness cognitive therapy.
Common Techniques For Being Mindful: Ways To Practice Mindfulness
There are several techniques that you can use to harness mindfulness. The first one is meditation. Most people understand that meditation is available to them and can learn the basics to learn how to meditate. To learn and practice mindfulness meditation techniques, you need a quiet and comfortable place to sit and learn how to calm your mind.
You will need to become aware of your breath at the moment and center your focus on your in and out-breath. Concentrate on your breath, paying attention to your inhaling and exhaling.
Mindful meditation is different than other meditation methods because when thoughts pull you away from the moment you’re in, you must then concentrate only on your breath, so you can refocus your mind for the rest of your meditation. During this time, you should have a non-judgmental attitude toward whatever it is that runs through your mind.
It might be hard to understand and learn how to keep your mind focused in the present moment. The habit of not knowing how to focus and of allowing your mind to wander will be a challenge when you’re trying to concentrate on your breath and nothing else.
Besides meditation, you can choose to practice the mindfulness technique of deep breathing…
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Taking breaths isn’t something that a lot of people are aware of. We do it without thinking about it. But when you practice deep breathing involving mindful techniques, this can relieve stress, boost your energy levels, and help you achieve calmness.
One technique is achieved by breathing through the nose in short breaths for a few seconds. This mindful method awareness is a practice that helps you to refocus on the present moment only.
Another technique is to count the deep breaths that you take for a few seconds. You would focus on breathing in through the nose and exhaling slowly through the mouth.
The object meditation technique is used in being mindful is to help raise the level of focus that you have. For this practice, you just need to pick out any object in the room and focus only on that object. Experience every aspect of that object learning and noticing anything and everything about it.
Your awareness should only be about that item such as a vase or a chair or whatever object you choose. You keep your focus on that item until it is all that your mind is aware of.
When your thoughts start to drift away, you consciously pull them back to the item that you’re looking at. Walking is another technique used in mindful practices.
Make sure that you’re in an area where you can walk unimpeded. Place your focus on what’s around you. Take in the five senses that are present in your surroundings – such as what you can hear or smell or see.
Breathe normally while walking and be completely aware of how you pick up your foot and put it down as you take each step. Focus your mind on how each foot feels as it connects with the ground.
Pay attention to how your body is working as you walk. Keep your focus on each movement that you make as you are walking, step by step, notice the swinging motion of your arms, how fast you walk, and any other elements around you as you walk.
Being Mindful: Snapping Yourself Out of a Past or Future Focus
What’s already happened is long gone. No one can change the events or emotions that have already passed. It’s human nature to look at the past and feel nostalgic, or even fearful or angry – but the trouble comes in when we focus on the past by allowing it to steer our actions in the present moment. Let it all go and focus on the now.
By living in the present moment, you can create your best life, forget the pain of the past and the fantasity of the future. A life of potential fullness can easily be lost by looking at life in the past or dreaming about the future.
When you focus too much on the past, you can place limits on living your best life, this is the same for when you constantly live in the future as well. The future isn’t here yet. You don’t want to waste the quality of the present on what might happen in the future.
Usually, what you focus on for the future, when it arrives, is different from what you thought it would be. To have the best life possible, you need to aim for keeping your focus solely on the present.
It’s true that everyone can have times where the past or the future seems to be all they can focus on. But you can change that. You change it by living in the now.
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When you’re working on something, don’t work on several things at once. When you have your meal, focus only on the meal in a very mindful way. the food will taste so much better. When you’re spending time with someone, don’t split your thoughts by trying to pay attention to the other person while at the same time opening mail or answering an email.
Don’t always be thinking about what’s coming next. Being mindful in the present and fully aware of your actions. Slow down. Don’t move through life so fast that you are just trying to get it done as fast as possible.
Stop overcrowding your day by multitasking your way through everything. Highly productive people, focus only on the task at hand. Learn how to give your complete attention to the present moment. It will take some time, but successful people do this all the time.
Try to simplify your life – too many items on your todo list or the ingrained habits and a fast-paced life creates mental clutter in your life. This happens when you take on so much that you feel as if you don’t have time to think.
Take a break on purpose. It’s a rare person who can just “be in the moment” unlike most people who are multitasking all the time. For a set amount of time every day, stop. You might have heard the phrase “take the time to stop and smell the roses” and this is the same principle.
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Take the time to stop and be present. During this time, take in every aspect of your surroundings, notice every detail that you put your attention on. Notice the day. The scents on the air. The beauty around you.
When you take the time to practice being mindful, it allows you to not only create the best life you could ever dream of, but you get to savor it, too.
When being mindful becomes apart of your life and you start practicing this process, you’ll notice how many others are not living in the present, and you’ll be grateful that you’re no longer chained to the old way of living.
