Finding Your Mindfulness Pathway

Ramblings From The Aspiring Therapist

I’ve been thinking about mindfulness a lot lately. The term is used quite a lot in the regular world, and it might cause many people to roll their eyes. That being said, mindfulness is a great concept to learn, and I’m saying this as an aspiring therapist who sees people struggling to process their emotions.

If it helps, you can prime mindfulness as a gradual reset button where you temporarily forget about your problems and focus on your immediate situations. During this state, your might subconsciously come up with a new solution or way of dealing with a problem, which in turn, improves your ability to process past traumas and future uncertainties.

To clarify, mindfulness is a general universal concept and can be customized to your individual learning needs, whether you have inattention, a lack of motivation, and so much more.

With mindfulness, you can train yourself to think in the present tense more frequently. When you are stressed, fatigued, or simply overwhelmed, it often means that your mind is trapped in a seemingly endless loop that is confined to only the past or even the future.

For example, let’s say you have some deadlines coming up. Walking down the street, you might get so caught up with these deadlines, that you are unable to process your current state, and lose sight of the overall picture. You drown at the mere thought of your deadlines, with no present-day foundation to build that future up.

On the inverse, perhaps you are so caught up with the past, that you fail to realize that you now have people to support you, compared to your tragic past. It’s not your fault that you’re feeling this way, as that’s the unfortunate trick of mental stress — to make you feel hopeless, even when other solutions or ways of coping are out there.

To break out of these negative cycles, you have to remind yourself to jump back into the present tense, in a very manualized way, which is a lot easier said than done. I mean, we have to stay grounded in order to momentarily pull free from the noise inside of our heads.

Some people do this automatically, but for the rest of us, it’s a manual process until it becomes automatic.

Learning When and How To Use It

With the amount of stress that we have in our lives, it’s understandable to have these thoughts and it’s okay to be having them. However, if the level of noise inside our heads is cumbersome enough to have damaging impacts on our relationships and on our ability to work or study, then that’s your cue that something needs to change.

As mentioned earlier, we need to manually remind ourselves to tap out of the noise, and back into present reality. There are many ways to engage in mindfulness, and there are entire communities devoted to the act of mindfulness, such as mindful eating, mindful walking, and many more.

For example, with mindful eating, instead of eating in a hurry, you have a small platter of grapes in front of you. You’re eating each individual grape slowly, and you’re processing the sounds, textures, and sights of the individual grapes before you. You’re also not multi-tasking, like watching the TV or texting your friend. Maybe there’s some light music on.

It’s just you and the grapes.

When we properly unwind, we focus on the immediate task at hand — whether it is you eating that grape slowly, doodling the night away, listening to music, or just taking in the sights and sounds of the path you are walking on. Whatever method you choose, is up to you, but you have to make the attempt each day until it becomes automatic.

Mindfulness can be secular or religious. It can involve music or accompanied podcasts. It can involve lying down and processing each and every sensation of your body. It can involve staring at that cute painting on your wall or at that intricately designed coffee mug on your table.

It can take minutes, or even hours. You can even do it minutes before you head for bed, or be the first thing you do after waking up.

Final Thoughts

The general rule of thumb with mindfulness is that when you catch yourself spending too much time in the past, or too much in the future, then you need to break free and tether yourself to just processing the present. If it’s hard to do mindfulness, stick with the physical objects in your room first, then work your way towards bodily sensations and other present-day situations, but you’ll need to something each day.

Don’t wait until you are utterly paralyzed with fear to be mindful — practice the act of being mindful so that it becomes second nature. It might even become something to look forward to, especially as we deal with more and more things in our lives.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn once said,

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”

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