Mindfulness is such a buzzword right now. And we know how good it is for us. But how many of us cannot seem to stay present long enough to actually benefit from it.
Before you start reading this blog, I want you to do a simple exercise. You can do this at any time of day when you feel overwhelmed or just need a moment to breathe.
I just want to invite you to be still now and close your eyes, put your hand on your heart, feel your hand resting there, the warmth; maybe you feel your heart beating, your breath gently going and out of your lungs and just become still. Now, I invite you to take a deep breath in through your nose and exhale through your mouth until your lungs are empty. Even make it a noisy exhale so you hear the breath leaving your body, this is very good for the nervous system.
Do this one or two more times if you need to. I want to end this by inviting you to give yourself a big hug and I want you to say to yourself - you are loved, your are appreciated, you are valued - because sometimes we just need to hear those words, we don’t hear them often enough and we don't say them often enough to ourselves. Our bodies love to receive these messages. They are positive and affirming.
And when you are ready, you can open your eyes start to read. I hope you are feeling nice and relaxed.
So, let's dive in. As a therapist, I know it takes a couple of sessions to help clients get into the habit of practicing mindfulness and it might take longer for them to get used to paying attention to their bodies. So the best I can do in the time it takes to write this, is to leave you with some food for thought, and hopefully, you will have some nuggets to take away.
I would like to start by making some statements that will be a foundation and I will build on this.
Mindfulness is not really a technique. Yes, we can use mindfulness techniques to help ground us and keep us present, but mindfulness is a way of life. It requires us to be present.
Another key to our well-being is our thinking. We need to think positively. For me, positive thinking is present thinking. When we tend to stay thinking about the past and all the things that have happened, we tend to get depressed. When we look ahead and try to figure out the future, we tend to get anxious.
And the last statement - the state of our physiology is always reflecting the state of our nervous system.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a way of connecting with your life and paying attention in the moment without judgment. And I want to add what I heard a therapist once say in a podcast - "as if your life depends on it". Because, in many ways, it does.
Attention allows us to live our lives intentionally, paying attention to our inner and outer world and our response to it. And paying attention to our bodies. In this process of paying attention, we can find ways to be in a better or wiser relationship to what is going on, rather than be at the mercy of our emotional reactions, our thoughts, our fears and so on.
Therefore, to pay attention to our lives, we need to be present.
Now, I know we often spend a lot of time planning and worrying about the future and also reminiscing about the past, the things that happened that were traumatic or painful, the moments of regret, or the people who didn’t treat us well. Our minds are always busy.
We are often very mind full versus mindful right?
Often, our inability to be in the present is influenced by our past experiences, our trauma and stress physiology. We do need to deal with issues of the past that hold us back from being present and being able to navigate what we are currently working through. If we struggle to cope or navigate our circumstances, how we respond is often rooted in the past.
Trauma Physiology
So when we are faced with a traumatic event in our lives, and we have never dealt with our trauma physiology, it will be a lot harder to deal with the stresses.
I want to share a cycling analogy. My husband and I do triathlons and currently we are training for the season. If I am cycling, and the wind is blowing, it becomes challenging to cycle, and if I focus on the wind and start to think, I don’t know if I can do this. This is so hard. Am I going to get through the next 10km? What starts to happen is that I begin to slow down, and it becomes harder to cycle. So what I do is bring myself back to the present, I find a focus point, maybe I look at the front wheel instead of the long track ahead, and I say to myself, "Keep the pace, keep the pace", and this makes me not feel the wind so much or be too concerned about the distance I still need to cover. Now think of this wind as your life circumstances, and when the wind blows, where does your mind go? Do you go to the future and the what-ifs, or can you stay present?
I want you to think back to when you were a child. How did you respond as a child to a situation that made you fearful, anxious, or feel overwhelmed? What did you do? I would go to my room, close the door, and read my books or play make-believe games with my dolls. In doing so, I could shut out whatever it was I was afraid of. So, my go-to was "I am afraid, I need to hide, I need to get away".
So, as an adult, when I would feel stressed or overwhelmed, I would want to escape and for many, this can look like any addiction to food, alcohol or whatever it may be, even shopping, or it can be things like hobbies that we spend excessive time on. All these things are exits from our anxiety-provoking situation. So as an adult think about this - are you still responding as you did as a child?
When we experience something in our body, it starts a lot earlier in childhood. Our body is so smart, and it has all these systems of remembering patterns, recognising these habits that are so familiar—so why change them even if they are unhelpful to our bodies?
Our brain is quite happy to stay with the familiar. Just like we are often prone to do. It will keep doing the same thing as we do because it is comfortable to do that thing.
Change is hard. To be present is hard. To notice things we need to deal with or are not coping well with is hard. It is easier to dissociate or exit. But the thing is, our body doesn’t exit. You can do with your mind what you will, but the body is always present. The present is the only time we are fully alive, fully present. We can smell, taste, touch feel, and hear now in the present. We cannot be in the past and we cannot be in the future.
We may carry trauma or PTSD symptoms as reminders of smells or sounds, but they are memories looping in your subconscious that have not been processed. Remember, for everything we go through, the body is always the first entry point because of our senses.
Then there is this process of neuroception that plays out all the time - it is our nervous system scanning for safety, threat or danger. When we feel safe, we can connect with others; our social engagement system helps us regulate. So just like when we spend time with friends and family that are safe, and have a laugh and share connection, you co-regulate with each other and so are all in a happy space. You feel calm and at peace.
When we are faced with something threatening, like a bad health diagnosis, or a relationship issue, our threat system is on high alert, and we start to respond. So we either want to go into fight or flight because we are getting ready for action—we are hyperaroused. Or we freeze or collapse under the weight of what we are facing. We don’t connect or regulate very well and we want to isolate when we are in that space.
When we start paying attention to our own mind and body, we can reclaim our lives.
Our Thought Life
We start this by paying attention to our thoughts. Our thoughts are so important to pay attention to because what we think and what we speak over ourselves is what will be. Remember, as a man thinks in his heart so he is. Our body is listening. Our words are powerful, as are our thoughts; they create - as they contain frequency, and that will affect your body and disrupt your circuits if our words are negative, it will lower the frequency of our body, and this can lead to health issues.
We were taught in the school system to think, and we need to think right, but we should have been taught also to be aware. Most of the time we are up here in our head, but we don't want to go anywhere near our bodies. But awareness is just as powerful as our capacity for thought. But we do not get training in this. We have no neural pathway laid down for it. So, awareness is something we need to practice, as repetition is what builds the pathway.
It is easier to stay with our thoughts, and most of the time, we believe what we think to be true. We never stop to analyse those thoughts to ask ourselves, is what I am thinking true?
Will it play out? Will it happen? We don’t have the answer, so we can think ourselves into a very dysregulated state.
When we need to be mindful of what our body needs, being in a state of hyperarousal is not great for the body as it puts more stress on the body, dropping high levels of cortisol.
This is toxic, and so the body, instead of attending to what it needs to help you fight sickness or disease, for example, now has to direct its attention to this trauma state you are in, stealing energy from where it is actually needed. So this is one incentive to practice managing your state of being, being aware, and responding to what is most needed at that moment.
Your nervous system is like your body's bodyguard. When you activate the Sympathetic nervous system, you are in your emotional brain and you are in a trauma or stress response, unable to regulate.
What you want is to engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps you to calm down and brings your body to rest and digest. When you are trying to escape a threat, you don’t need to digest food as much as you need to get away - but when you are calm, your body can function as it was designed to.
Whatever you are going through, it could just be the multiple roles we carry, whether it be a health crisis or a relational one. We need to start building the awareness pathway and work on changing our usual responses to stress if they are not healthy ones. We need to start living mindfully.
We need to stop the process of our thoughts leading to an emotion and the emotion leading to an action that will not be helpful to us. That is our cognitive working model. If we can stop the thought from escalating, half the battle is won. Sometimes we also want to escape the feeling that comes to us when we feel overwhelmed or stressed.
Take A Moment
Instead of escaping, I want to invite you to sit with that feeling, allow yourself space to feel it and be curious. Remember, in the beginning, I said don't be judgmental. Don’t judge it, feel it, sit with it, and ask yourself why you feel this.
Does it remind you of anything from the past - are you reliving a past event, because what is happening in the present reminds you of it. Think about this.
Let the feeling flow through. Sometimes, we smell smoke, but we think it is a fire. So, we need to be able to give time to understand what we are feeling.
You could even imagine a river in front of you, and that feeling or thought as a leaf, and let it flow down the stream, watch it go, then come back to the present.
Check in with your body. Close your eyes and check in. Start with your head and scan all the way down to your feet - do a body scan, feeling where that emotion was sitting in your body and allow yourself time to do some deep breathing, three counts in and six counts out a few times, and then check in again see if that place in your body feels better. Do it a couple of times if need be.
What I want you to take away is don't try to escape, pay attention to the present, allow yourself to feel and learn to manage that by allowing your body to speak because if you do not give it space - it will make its voice known through physical ailments.
Be blessed today as you continue to practice being present!