MINDFULNESS
MINDFULNESS IN ACTION
10
2020 will be a defining year for our society. I know it has been for me. All the pain, anger, and grief of the past year, we have hopefully formed a stronger bond with gratitude for what is. Embracing all of these experiences is a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness has become a buzzword in our culture, for which I am grateful, and with all repackaging of ancient traditions, they tend to get watered down and misunderstood. Mindfulness can be an act and intentional practice, and it is indeed more of a lifestyle and way of being. Deep breathing exercises, meditation, a yoga practice; are wonderful expressions of mindfulness. But, if you judge your posture or compare your warrior pose to the classmate on the next mat, it begins to lose its essence. Consider mindfulness as a perspective and an experience, lenses through which we view the world and ourselves. Mindfulness is focus and awareness with intention in the present moment. We can live this way fully, or at least we can do our very best to try. We can be mindful while cooking dinner, working on our business plan,
playing with our children, having a glass of wine with our close friends, or conversing with a stranger in line at Starbucks. These can all be mindful expressions as powerful as a deep breath. There are a lot of guided mindfulness practices to be found on the web, and I encourage you to find a few that work for you. Let go. Just breathe. Vibrate higher. More buzzwords, while accurate, can be confusing without some behavioral direction. Below I offer ways of thinking about your further development of living mindfully with each moment.
Embrace Change.
It is the one and only constant in our lives. Far too much of our unhappiness is fueled by our resistance to change and attachment to what we believe “should” be. When we work toward acceptance that ALL things change, we can more effectively adapt to changes that occur. Resisting or denying the forces of change in our lives, we disrupt our ability to find the constructive elements of that change. We can
