How to be mindful in three steps

 

©  Charlie Mackesy

I love this quote from The boy, The mole,The fox and the horse . So much so that I have a T shirt with this on. 

Three steps to mindfulness:

1) Be kind 

2) Be kind 

3) Be kind 

By being kind to our friends and family (quite easy); to ourselves (harder) and to strangers,the wider world and even those who may have wronged us (harder still) we are recognising that observed, considered  responses can bring calm, peace, joy; they can de-escalate a situation; they're the antithesis to drama .

And it can be contagious. 

Tiny steps on a mindful journey

 Compassionate mindfulness

This was the name of the course that we had all been signed up to take part in. I am not going to go through each stage of it here because that would be disrrespectful to the course leaders, but I will attempt to give a flavour of the first session.

**Breathing exercise to focus the group**

**Some background to what mindfulness is- there are a LOT of definitions and different teachers have their favourites. Suffice to say it is a lot more than 'living in the moment' . It certainly is NOT about 'emptying the mind' and it's not a religion.**  This particular course was mostly based on the work of John Kabat-Zinn

Check this webpage for bios of some other leading mindfulness gurus https://themindfulsteward.com/mindfulness/16-of-the-most-respected-mindfulness-teachers-of-modern-day/ 

**some background to research and how brain activity can be positively affected by regular mindfulness practises**

**A guided meditation**

And before you knew it the time had passed.  

Did it feel strange being in my workplace, with colleagues trying to be relaxed. Yes of course, but very quickly the whole point of just accepting that each feeling came and went, each thought came and went and actually allowing oneself to just have some quiet time was pretty fabulous in itself.  

The big takeaway from the first session was to allow yourself to take some time for yourself. I can hear you shouting at the screen right now, but please bear with.  Just a couple of minutes to stop, take a deep breath, let it out. Repeat. And then move back to whatever it was you were doing.

STOP- stop, take a breath, observe and proceed.

OK that wasn't too bad, still had a list of things to do but went home at the end of the day feeling far more energised than I had been at the start of the day.

Next post will explore the next part of the journey on self compassion. If you would like to read up on this before I post I have recently read this and found it to resonate with me. Check it out https://www.mindful.org/the-transformative-effects-of-mindful-self-compassion/ 

Mindfulness? Isn't that just a bit trendy and 'pop-sciencey'?

 If you had asked me what my opinions and thoughts were around mindfulness a few years ago I would have come up with a list something along the lines of:

trendy

a bit like yoga without the moving

colouring

emptying the mind

not for me

another passing fad

You get the idea. To be perfectly honest it wasn't something that I had given a huge amount of thought to. It wasn't something that came up in my family or social circles, it wasn't something that was considered to be especially relevant at work. In a nutshell it wasn't something that I thought would be for me.

My work situation changed and I started to consider alternative career paths. After various conversations, I started an introduction to counselling course.  At the same time it was suggested at work that we would devote a big chunk of our allocated CPD time to a mindfulness course. To give a little context to this - the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns had just come to an end (the lockdowns anyway had ended) and awareness of mental health , wellbeing across the world was pretty much at the forefront of everyone's thoughts.

I was feeling fairly uninspired by the idea of having to spend a day followed by a series of after work sessions on mindfulness; I found it hard at this point to see beyond the irony of mindfulness and being at work. However, it was certainly something that sounded more interesting than some of the 57,000 slide presentations that one has to sit through sometimes ( sorry, I am prone to exaggeration at times but you get the idea)

The dates were set. Compassionate mindfulness. Here goes...

My next post will continue the journey. I am not going to get all evangelical about things, that's not my style (not even sure that I have a style!) but it's a journey that I am so happy to have started and three years down the line feel that it's one to keep on exploring and learning from.