3 Benefits of Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the practice of directing attention. Try it out. Start by paying attention to any sounds you hear. Now pay attention to the direct contact your body is making with the chair you’re sitting on. Now pay attention to your breath. Okay, cool. The process of gentle paying attention—typically through the 5 senses—is mindfulness in action.
I’ve been practicing mindfulness, specifically mindfulness meditation since January 2015. I’ve experienced mindfulness as a powerful tool for living with more less anxiety. I’ve found it tremendously helpful for managing emotions such as anger, sadness, and confusion. In addition, over time, the practice has been crucial on my ever-unfolding journey towards connecting to and engaging with life in an enlivening way.
It’s important to mention that I don’t think mindfulness is a cure-all (though some people do). In my own life, I use mindfulness as a tool along with many other modalities including yoga, energy healing, somatic therapy, and herbal therapy which work together to cultivate skillful responses, self-compassion and wisdom. Mindfulness is a valuable way to gain information and self awareness. It is an important practice for healing pain, addictive behaviors, and trauma because it helps us recognize patterns and create space for new patterns.
While mindfulness is a lifelong practice that often bears fruit over time, in the short run, I’ve listed three benefits even people new to mindfulness can experience.
3 Benefits of Mindfulness:
Unravel Thought Loops: When I was in college I had a very difficult time with worry. Tests primarily, were a cause of a great deal of worry. This worry was so vivid, I would lose sleep from the habit. The thing is this: worrying probably didn’t help me do better on tests, if anything it made things worse because I’d arrive on test day anxious and sleep deprived. Mindfulness can help unravel a pattern like worry because you can develop ways to direct attention in constructive ways. You can train your mind to focus on patterns that are conducive to relaxation and ease.
Relate to Emotion with Wisdom: Emotions are part of life. They’re not going away, so it’s best we find ways to relate to emotions and respond to them skillfully. Many of us have habits (some we’re not even conscious of) that distract us from feeling difficult emotions. However, what people often find when they turn to face an emotion such as fear, grief, sadness, and anger, it’s not as scary as they imagined it might be. There’s often a spaciousness and energy that helps us to take care of ourselves and others in the midst of a difficult emotion.
Connect and Engage with Life: Sometimes we feel disconnected to our life or a situation at hand, like we’re going through the motions of life, but not feel engaged or present. I felt this way when I worked at 3M as a research, and I wasn’t very present showing up to work day-to-day because the work often felt repetitive and monotonous. Mindfulness practice helps us to become gently engaged and interested in what’s in the here and now—whatever that may be. This is subtle, but makes life a lot more interesting and fresh. In a pure, mindful moment, there’s always aliveness and freshness. Now that I have a strong mindfulness practice, I usually don’t mind tasks that I used to find boring like cleaning or bookkeeping. Mindful interest is often the cure for boredom.
These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. As the mindfulness muscle strengthens, there are many more wonderful fruits of practicing. One of them being what we’re all probably seeking: an inner sense of belonging.
If you’d like to go deeper into mindfulness, I have a class coming up in Minneapolis October 21st-November 9th at the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis. I also teach these practices in Navigating Heartbreak October 16th-November 4th which also weaves in holistic practices. In addition, I gently weave these into a number of my nature classes and trips!