How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life?

Mindfulness is buzzword now, everyone is talking about it. The popularity of mindfulness in the western world has increased exponentially in the recent years. With all the attention given to mindfulness lately, it’s giving results to so many people in reducing stress, anxiety, tension, uncertainty and fear patterns in daily life. Though behavioral scientists are still exploring up to which extent how it’s bringing change in mind-set, people practicing it giving lot of positive feedback and feel that mindfulness is life changing and has made the difference in their quality of life. Mindfulness can change your life and help you transform your mind-set from one of stress and fear and uncertainty, to one that tends to welcome abundance, acceptance, gratitude and positivity.

Does your mind race all the time without stopping to notice much? Are you living your life on autopilot mode and have no idea how to overcome worries about past events and future, negative thoughts, emotions and mood swings? The answer is – you are not living in the present moment. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment. It’s paying attention and noticing your own thoughts, emotions, feelings and sensations – and the surroundings, nature and states of being of those around you, the possibilities inherent in present moment. Living in present and paying more attention to the present moment can improve your mental well-being.

Reminding yourself to observe your thoughts, feelings, body sensations and the world around you is the first step to mindfulness. Here are the 6 ways to start practicing mindfulness and change your life.

Start Deliberately

You need to deliberately start observing psychological and physiological events within you, and people & events in the world around you. Pay attention to your thoughts and feelings on a particular moment. Once you notice them, you need not to be getting carried away with. Visualize them as you are standing on a busy circle and watching the vehicles coming from different directions and going away. You are just observing them as discrete vehicle and not getting in any of them. Vehicles will come and go away. Likewise observe thoughts, they come and go away, do not get dragged away with them.

Pay deliberate attention to the people and events in the world around you. Observe the behavior and response of the people surrounding you, to a particular event. Don’t analyze right or wrong, just observe them.

Notice sensations

Even as you go through your daily lives, you can notice the sensations of things, the food you eat, the shapes you see, the sounds you hear and the air moving past the body as you walk. You can cook more mindfully by noticing color, texture, smells and flavor of foods. While driving you may notice the color of other vehicle. All this may sound very small, but it has huge power to interrupt the autopilot mode you often engage in day to day life, and to give you new perspectives on life.

Make mindfulness a habit

Make mindfulness a habit and integrate it in your life. You may start with including in your morning rituals and further extending it to daily routines. You may attempt to incorporate mindfulness in your daily routines by trying to be fully present when you are driving, working in office, eating, cooking and walking. Incorporating it in your daily activities and making it a habit will result in mindfulness coming to you more and more naturally. And, once mindfulness becomes a natural manifestation of your mind, your life will be transformed.

Have Patience

Mindfulness is not a magic stick which you will touch and all of sudden your all problems or stressors will fly away. Stressors like your kid’s arguments, bad colleagues, work place politics and heavy traffic on the roads still will be there. Nothing will change still everything will be changed; you just need to have patience. Keep noticing all these triggers. It will take time to learn dealing these stressors skillfully.

Thoughts to real life

Try to pull you back from the downward spiral of a whirlpool of negative thoughts to the present real life. Whenever, the downward spiral conjures up negative connotations and you start sinking in the negativity. Be mindful and deliberately think about how energy flows through you. Longer you be unaware about the downward spiral more difficult will be to come out of that. Mindfulness will help you to control your negative thoughts about past and future and bring you back to real life – the present moment.

Be Grateful

Mindful gratitude is one of the best meditation techniques to reduce your stress, anxiety, tension, uncertainty and fear patterns in daily life. It also enhances the satisfaction level and increase positivity. Awareness about the world around you is important part of mindfulness. By practicing gratitude you focus on events, things and people around you and become more aware about them. By and large, this type of awareness will take you in all sorts of new directions. Through gratitude you gain a deeper understanding of the world around you.

In short, through mindfulness, over time, you will be able to carefully observe the thoughts and feelings within you and be more aware about world around you. You will be able to pause and reflect rather than being controlled by them and that’s life changing; isn’t it?

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