This week on my Tuesday Talk in my Facebook group “Sustainable Self Care for Passionate and Professional Women,” I discussed the concept of mindfulness. Read on to gain insight into why mindfulness meditation helps us manage our busy lives and fast-paced emotions.
What is mindfulness meditation? It is a PRACTICE of ‘Seeing your thoughts and emotions’ by acknowledging them as they pop up into your mind, and letting them pass. I like to imagine I am driving down a highway and view my thoughts pass as if on billboards, or words written on the sand being washed away with every breath (each new wave is a breath), or even as a leaf floating by on a river that I am looking at when relaxing out in nature. You want to Practice regularly because practicing during focused times allows you to better access the skill during the stressful times of your day-to-day life. I recommend you start your practice with just 2 minutes a day for a week and then move up to 5 > 10 > 15 > 20 minutes. You’ll want to start by setting a timer.
Learning important lessons/patterns about our thoughts and feelings is how to make your mindfulness meditation practice help you beyond your practice time. But below are many other benefits and lessons you’ll learn:
- We gain control over our thoughts
- Emotions come and go as we allow them to
- We can act on our thoughts and emotions as we like, we have power over our choices and responses
- We can make more effective decisions for ourselves to create a sustainable work-life balance and enjoyable life.
*Most importantly – It’s easy to get sucked into the spiral of thought after thought after thought (anxiety or hypervigilance) and mindfulness allows us to see our thoughts and feelings and slow down and choose our response, not just react from our subconscious (based on past experiences) instead we can choose to respond from our conscious mind (based on current thoughts). If we are going thought-to-thought all day and reacting all the time, that is how our busy lives and fast-paced emotions can get overlooked and just persist to the point of burn out and break down.
- What questions do you have about the impact of mindfulness meditation?
- Have you tried mindfulness meditation?
- Have you seen an improvement?
Share about your experience with mindfulness meditation in the comment section below or in my Facebook group. Want to watch the full video on this topic? Join my Facebook group “Sustainable Self-Care for Passionate and Professional Women” here.
