In a world that is continually moving faster and providing more and more distractions to pull you out of the present moment, it is more important than ever to learn how to be aware of the present moment. A person can lower stress and enrich their life experience by cultivating this awareness. In this article, I will try to explain what mindfulness is and give some examples of how to practice a mindful life.
Understanding Mindfulness
Mindfulness is defined as the state of being engaged and fully present in the moment, right now. Judgment or attachment is not present in relating to your thoughts, emotions, or current external circumstances. One tries to be aware of the thoughts and feelings every situation brings into our lives from external stimuli and internal thoughts and responses to whatever is happening, and accepting it.
Today, mindfulness has become a mainstream practice and is widely studied and adopted in fields like psychology, medicine, education, and corporate settings. It has proven to be an effective tool for enhancing overall well-being, reducing stress, improving focus, and promoting emotional resilience in the face of life’s challenges. The integration of mindfulness into various secular settings has made it accessible to people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs, making it a universal practice that transcends its original origins.
Benefits of Being Mindful
So many positives come to you when you understand the present moment is all you have. It will help you reduce stress and anxiety because you are eliminated regrets about the past and worry about the future by existing in the only thing you have, the present moment.
By doing this you will also improve your Mental clarity and focus. Rather than having your thoughts bring up uncontrolled images of yesterday or tomorrow, a person can focus on what today is bringing into life, good or bad, and accept it as a part of life’s experience. Rather than resist it because it doesn’t match your perception of what life should be.
Our emotions also benefit from the practice of mindfulness, because we start to be aware of the feelings we are experiencing in the moment. We can learn what each emotion actually is and what thoughts or experiences have brought it to the surface. Without mindfulness and awareness, we will be a servant to these feelings. Understanding and acceptance puts the power in your hands, so you are in control of what happens.
What you are aware of you control, and what you are not mindful of controls you. That is the way many deal with their emotions throughout their lives. The practice of being aware of your experiences throughout the day will enhance the quality and experience of your life.
Awareness- knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.
We are all required to become more aware of everything in these incredible times. Awareness is vital to your consciousness. Your perception of people, information, and events will determine just how conscious you are. What we are aware of and aware of determines our core belief system. Things exist all around us, and unless we pay attention to them and understand how they react to our lives, we are not in control. Once we do develop an awareness of forces influencing us, we are then able to control our thoughts, emotions, words, and actions resulting from them. A toxic relationship, a negative attitude, low vibration entertainment, limiting beliefs you carry from your past, or even negative self-talk are examples of places awareness can change your life positively. It all starts with noticing your thoughts, words, and actions in your life.
Awareness Building
Our subconscious can take in a large quantity of information, and our conscious mind can only interpret a small portion of that at any one time. Awareness is what we choose to understand. Choosing to exit a negative relationship or to direct your thoughts toward something more positive is understanding awareness and using it to make your life a more positive experience. Each realization we have, brought on by greater awareness, is a building block toward self-evolvement. A higher level of wisdom and freedom is waiting for you to understand better all factors influencing your life.
To increase your awareness, there are active things you can do. First, practice compassion toward other people and yourself. A general concern for the suffering in life and how you can alleviate it will raise your awareness. Second, spend some time understanding and respecting different points of view. Rather than judge and dismiss them. You don’t have to agree but spend time understanding them. Awareness of the world and others grows, so does your consciousness. Third, seek out moments for honest reflection and solitude. Away from the noise of life, determine for yourself why you think and feel the way you do about things. Shine the light of awareness on your thoughts and honestly assess if they push you forward or hold you back. Finally, spend time with people who will sell your attention ahead—supportive, understanding people who will enhance your appreciation of positive things.
With each new realization, your power to be a positive force in the world increases because your beliefs will change for the better, and once that happens, what can limit you?
Beliefs Are the Thing
The result of what we are aware of is our beliefs. Our ideas about life, other people, the world, in general, will dictate what we are capable of achieving and experiencing. They result from our experiences, observations, or deliberately influenced, but they are not permanent and can be adjusted and changed as new information comes to us. Awareness is that further information will allow you to either grow to your capability or shrink from it.
Deliberate indoctrination is the formation of beliefs we want to ourselves. When an organization or society forces a conclusion onto you, it lacks awareness and should be scrutinized and questioned. Blindly the following anything is a loss of control. If you are not going to use your mind, someone else will. The question is, is this true? Moral? Ethical? Or even better, who benefits the most from me accepting this belief? Answering these questions will build your awareness, and then you can decide for yourself whether a view honors you or not. Making more influential ideas that carry a positive message about your abilities, worth, and life will enhance your experience and accomplish more.
Finally, Be Yourself
The ultimate goal of life is to be your true self. This honesty will happen when your awareness of what makes you feel happy and satisfied is a part of your life. Look at the fundamental positive aspects of your nature. What has always made you feel joy? Do that more. What makes you happy? Do that more. What makes the world better? Do that more. They will all fall from the tree that is you and who you are. We are all born with a passion for life and have a gift to bring to the world. Life is spent remembering what that is and bringing it into the world. Awareness is a tool to do this. The things we are supposed to follow and create feel right to us. Follow them. It all starts with being aware of your thoughts, words, and actions in each moment of the day.
Are you aware of how great you are?
“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“The day you decide you are more interested in being aware of the thoughts than you are in the thoughts themselves, that is the day you find your way out.”~Micheal Singer
In all lives, there are two forces always fighting for control, fear and love. What is fear really but the thoughts about things that will cause us to suffer? We all deal with these thoughts to some degree. Some people who are consciously aware of the moment are not affected very much because they avoid the two traps of fear. At the same time, those who do not contemplate their thoughts and see the moment are ruled by fear and all of its cynical cousins, judgment, anger, selfishness, and a lack of empathy. Look at yourself today and see where fear is sitting in your consciousness. Is it front and center, or have you conquered it and placed it safely in a cage in the back of your mind. Remember, we all feel fear at some point; the key to life is how we deal with it.
Fearful History
There are two ways that fear enters into your thoughts and pervades your feelings and actions. One is when we think of bad things that have happened in the past—remembering painful experiences from earlier days in our life experience. When you feel fear and have a conscious awareness of it, many try to push it away, bury it deep in ourselves and not deal with it. For a while, that can work, but eventually, it will pop out when you least expect it, outside of your control. The original episode of fear could have happened when you were five years old, or 30 years old, when the concern arises rather than pushing it down, invite it to stay.
Look at your fear and face it back to its origin. Something occurred, which caused you to suffer. It could have been a lack of care, a break in trust, a physical or psychological pain that you have pushed down and never dealt with before. Let the fear enter your mind, get to know it, and face it head-on. Investigate them. Where did they come from to visit you? Accept them and forgive those who might have caused the suffering, including yourself. The past is over and dead, and nothing can change what has happened. Letting it control your experience right now is a waste of time and effort. Face the fears of the past, allow them to exist, and leave you alone.
Future Fear
Fears’ other big weapon is the future. Unlike the past, the end has not happened yet and is wide open to possibilities. Fear and worry rob you of your freedom as you live your life hiding from problems created inside the fertile walls of your imagination. Your imagination is a powerful tool, it can guide you to great things, or it can paralyze you and rob you of your potential. Worry and fear of the future is a misuse of your most powerful tool of imagination. Creating scenarios that will lead to suffering but never really existed. These worries will stop people from following their dreams and doing what they want because fear says they might look foolish, or not someone else might think poorly of them.
Fighting your imagination is a tricky thing, but it works similarly to facing your past. Embrace the fears and follow them to their source. Fear of abandonment, loss, being alone, or the biggest one of all, dying. All people fear something. Learning to deal with it actively, embrace it, and face your fear will take you to its source. Conscious awareness of your concerns and their origins will free you to use your valuable imagination for good in your life. In your imagination, great things reside, which once thought we could bring into reality. They are creating the best future for yourself and the world you can. Only when we conquer our fear and move forward.
Society of Fear
We are inundated with messages of fear continually in our community. If you watch the “news” from a significant network, their job is to create fear in your mind. It is not to keep you informed because they choose what you hear and how the message is presented. People who are afraid are easy to control and manipulate. Don’t allow others to control you with fear. Live in the moment. Are you in danger at this moment? If not, then don’t let fear move you to stereotype or label anyone else as an immigrant, Russian, Korean, or anything else. People are people just like you with worries and desires all on their own. To see anything else is a manipulation of the facts.
We are inundated with images of the perfect physical body, or the perfect home, perfect marriage, perfect relationship, perfect this or perfect that. Perfection is impossible, and feeling fear about not measuring up is delusional. Looking inside yourself and being the person you were meant to be is most important. Put the fear of what others think of you or how you measure up to the fake standard of our society. Be the best you that you can that is good enough for everyone.
Finally
To lessen the impact fear has on your life, invite it to the surface of your life. Look at it and analyze it rather than push it way down inside of yourself. Shine the light of reason on it, and it will cease to be fearful to you. We all have fear in many areas of life because we want to avoid pain. Pain is going to come when it comes; often, its anticipation is worse than the actual situation itself. Face your fear with courage and thought, seeing its origins, and you will rise above it.
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”― Plato.
“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson.
“Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.” ― Marie Curie
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”― Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Silence and space are two of the factors that allow all things to exist, but they are there lying in the background of life largely unnoticed, unappreciated, or even unwanted. But without them, we could speak no word, or we could bring creation into existence. I am taking a moment to appreciate both the silence and space with all of their magical capabilities today. There is a power in the silence of a moment that many feel we need to fill with some noise to be comfortable. The same can be said for space, and we often go through our days paying no attention to space all around us. We focus on the things that exist, not seeing the opportunities all around them. Let’s focus today on the power of silence and the space in our lives.
Hear the Silence
It is normal to pay attention to the sounds we hear. For example, a voice brings us information, a song that touches our soul, the dialogue in our favorite shows, or just the sounds all around us. But to focus on the silence all around us makes all of these sounds possible. Pay attention to the quiet and ignore the sounds for just a short time every day. When you pay attention to the outer silence, you pay attention to the extreme silence. You create an inner silence inside of yourself. This allows your mind to become still.
By bringing your mind to stillness, you can see and feel everything around you calmly. The outer silence creates the palate for sound to come into being. The inner silence provides a canvas for the clear internal words and noises to be spoken as well. Honest thoughts of value can come to you out of the silence of your mind. The answers to questions asked, the route to find your happiness. Stillness inside starts with paying attention to the silence without. You can’t pay attention to outer silence and not become still inside, and that contains within it the possibilities of all things.
Wide Open Spaces
For anything to come into being, there has to be a space for it to exist. The power and value of a room are not the four walls but the space inside the walls. It is the same for everything and every place else. It is the absence of things that creates the potential of our world. A blank page is an ultimate playground for great.
Do you see an empty room or a room full of potential?
art of all kinds, writing a story, a thought, or drawing a picture. The space we see is the potential for everything to exist. Space itself has no actual existence, but it allows all other things to exist.
Become acutely aware of the space all around you. If you look closely, you will become aware of the space and the feeling of no thinking, which allows all thoughts to come into your head. Look at the nothing in the room and see its potential. You might see the potential in the space inside you as well—space for creation, caring, and kindness. There is no limit on the number of these things you can create. Like the silence, space is still and infinite in potential. Look for your creations in the space in your life. It can be shaped into what you need or desire to create.
Connections
Both space and silence allow you to calm and silence your thoughts and allow for the things inside you that are a gift to the world to rise to the top and be shared with all. The cap on the bottle can be removed by becoming still with the silence or empty like space. It allows for things to come out hidden by the sounds or lost behind the things that we already are occupied with. Change your focus from the sounds you hear or the things you see to the silence behind the sound and the space surrounding everything in the world. This observation is a doorway to creativity and understanding yourself.
“Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.” – Eckhart Tolle.
“Let silence take you to the core of life.” ― Rumi
“Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.” ― Richard Yates
Seasons- each of the four divisions of the year (spring, summer, autumn, and winter) marked by particular weather patterns and daylight hours, resulting from the earth’s changing position concerning the sun.
It is a fortunate thing, to be experiencing the spring of the year! A wise person once said there is no way to stop the seasons from changing. That is true in nature, and it is true for your life as well, just like the planet rolls around each year, inevitably bringing an awakening, a vibrant life, and slowly a return to a darker cold slumber. So do our lives move as well. The sad part is that there are over 7 billion people globally, and a tiny fraction ever evaluates their existence in any thoughtful manner at all. The seasons provide us with a natural lesson on how to appreciate things. Do you pay attention? Or are you caught in your own thoughts? Look at the seasons of life, and you will appreciate the experience more. This begins with really looking at the thoughts you entertain, the words you speak, and the actions in life you take because of all of these things.
Season of Eyes Shut
It seems like people live their lives and flow through the seasons with their eyes closed to the change that is coming to them. Each year the seasons move by and with them a lesson. Still, the young person is too involved in the physical world and what other people think of them to pay real attention to the knowledge the world offers—a chance to love, enjoy, and find experiences that color our lives. Very rarely do young men and women remove their conscious thought from what they want to accomplish to imagine how it all fits into the big picture.
Worrying about your relationships, jobs, and living arrangements dominates thoughts. Life passes you by, and all you try to do is collect as many things as possible. The value of things is temporary, but the value of experience stands the test of time. Youth is wasted on the young, and the spring is wasted on selfish, individualistic behavior. As you get older and time becomes shorter, you realize there is a reason for this, and you become envious of the time you had that is now gone. Unfortunately, others are frittering it away with their eyes tightly shut, looking at themselves and ignoring the world.
Enjoy the Seasons
It is common in the area I live to look ahead to spring during the winter. It gets dark early, there are major snow events, and the temperature is frigid. But it provides a unique experience people in areas which are warm all year don’t get. There are cold hard moments that come in winter. If you pay attention, they will wake you up to the soft, warm moments that will come as the calendar moves toward spring and summer. We all need to appreciate more warm, soft moments. Winter creates this appreciation.
Spring brings hope and renewal, and summer brings vitality, fall brings sober acceptance of change, and then we are back to winter again. The seasons mimic the experience of our lives. As we age, we go through seasons, but most don’t notice these things are happening. We are young in the spring, and our summers are spent doing, going, collecting, competing. Fall is the time you realize there is an end in sight, and winter is that end, like it or not. We all hope our winter is a long way away, but………………we never know.
Be in the Moment of the Season
There is nothing as inevitable as the passing of time, and the human experience is a finite thing. Our seasons are flying by, and all you have to ask yourself is, are you making the most of it, or are you wasting your time? It really doesn’t matter what you do. The human experience is a gift. Think of the magic of experiencing a snowfall or a warm summer day with a cool breeze blowing. Or the fall when the leaves are changing, and the crisp weather is a harbinger of things to come. The wonderful hope of spring that revives us.
Please pay attention to your life and the people in it. Spend your time and money accumulating experiences rather than things. Things are finite and provide joy for a short minute. Experiences lead to growth and sharing and a life to be remembered.
So spend a little time in your day to be a little more conscious of the seasons occurring inevitably on your calendar and life. It all starts where you focus your thoughts and what you appreciate about life in every season—the words you use to express this appreciation to others and the actions which result. So look at your seasons and take a moment to enjoy them all.
“Nature gives to every time and season unique beauty; from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it’s just a succession of changes so soft and comfortable that we hardly notice the progress.” ~ Charles Dickens
Wherever in the world you may find yourself right now, we are about to enter a new season.
“The beat of drums and the blustering of summer fade away. Everything becomes quiet, more introspective, sad. Autumn always comes with such beauty.” ~ Jaak Drees
In a world that is continually moving faster and providing more and more distractions to pull you out of the present moment, it is more important than ever to learn how to be aware of the present moment. A person can lower stress and enrich their life experience by cultivating this awareness. In this article, I will try to explain what mindfulness is and give some examples of how to practice a mindful life.
now. Judgment or attachment is not present in relating to your thoughts, emotions, or current external circumstances. One tries to be aware of the thoughts and feelings every situation brings into our lives from external stimuli and internal thoughts and responses to whatever is happening, and accepting it.
