Mindfulness has been a very popular concept in recent times, and with how hectic we live our lives these days, it is rather understandable. The pace we live our lives brings about a lot of stress, and we find ourselves yearning for the good old days of enjoying the moment.
Unfortunately, mindfulness is something that does not come naturally to everyone. Fortunately, mindfulness is something that we can develop – if we want to. If you being mindful is one of the things that you want to achieve this year, here are some tools that can help you develop mindfulness.
Mundane activities
How can mundane activities be considered a tool to develop mindfulness? Think about the usual things you do every day – taking a shower, preparing and eating breakfast, taking the train to work, and so on. Often, we take these things for granted and our minds wander when going about these mundane things.
Instead of allowing them to become “idle mental time”, why don’t you turn them into tools for mindfulness instead?
Focus on exactly what you are doing. Feel the warmth of the water flowing over you. Smell the luxurious body shower gel you love using. Savor the smell of bacon sizzling in the pan. Listen to the chatter of life around you when in the train. Mundane these things these may be, but they can help you develop mindfulness.
Stress balls
No, I am not pulling your leg. Stress balls can be a great tool to develop mindfulness. While their main purpose is to help you relieve stress physically, with the pattern of flexing your muscles as you squeeze and release the ball.
I suppose you can say that developing mindfulness is a nice side effect to using a stress ball. Instead of merely squeezing and releasing your stress ball in the palm of your hands, why don’t you use it as a focal point for meditating? In this way, you have a more focused way of honing mindfulness. From another angle, you can even have a custom, inspirational message/quote on your stress ball [Here]. Wouldn’t that boost your efforts?
There’s an app for that!
That phrase is overused, but the truth is that there is quite a good selection of apps that help you to develop mindfulness. A good example is the mindfulness bell app which “rings” periodically throughout the day. The goal of this is to help you “get back to earth” at regular intervals so that you can learn to be more aware of what’s really going on around you.
There’s also the Mindfulness App, which is basically a guided meditation app to help you develop mindfulness. A quick search on Google will give you tons of choices – sift through them to find the right one for you.
There’s no clear cut path to mindfulness, so try to experiment and see what works for you.
Originally posted on March 10, 2014 @ 4:08 am
