With your attention in the here and now

Mindfulness is about living attentively. Most of the time, our attention is in our heads, focused on our thoughts. We think about all the things we still need to do, worry about something we did or didn’t do. However, you don’t have direct influence over yesterday or tomorrow. You do have influence over what is happening right now. That’s why mindfulness directs your attention to the here and now.

This may sound simple, but it isn’t. Your thoughts are persistent; they don’t just step aside. However, there are various ways to practice dealing with them. For example, you can see your thoughts as little clouds. They keep drifting by, never stopping, but instead of grabbing onto them, examining them from all sides, and getting completely caught up in them, you let them drift away, like a little cloud.

Imagine you are cycling to work. You have an important meeting coming up, 150 emails are waiting for you, and a colleague is waiting on a report from you. Your mother needs to go to the hospital for a check-up, and your son has an important exam. Your mind can run wild with all of this: I should have prepared better for that exam with him… Should I have gone to the hospital with her?… That report should have been done by now; what if my colleague gets angry… What if the meeting doesn’t go well… and those emails, will it never end…? This is how the average mind works. But if you are cycling mindfully, you are not focused on what’s coming up but only on what you are doing right now. You become a sort of observer of yourself. For example, you can observe that you have a lot of thoughts.

But you do this without diving into those thoughts. So, you think, you cycle, you take a deep breath in and out, you feel the wind in your hair, you hear a blackbird chattering, you see another cyclist, you feel a bump in the road, you see a father with a child in front of the bike singing, you feel your legs pedaling, and you feel your hands on the handlebars. You are completely in the moment, cycling, just cycling. That is mindfulness.

If you listen to your mind, you will probably arrive at work quite stressed. You worry about everything and go into your workday with little confidence. But if you use your bike ride to practice mindfulness, you arrive much less stressed, feeling good, and ready to start your day relaxed.

Take a few deep breaths in and out. Relax your shoulders and bring your attention to your breathing. Then shift your focus to everything happening around you at this moment. Hear the sounds around you, smell the scents, feel your feet on the ground or your body on the chair. Thoughts will constantly arise, but don’t pay attention to them. Keep returning your focus to your breathing. You will notice that your attention becomes fully anchored in the moment, and as a result, your mind becomes remarkably calm.

Your mind becomes quieter

To truly integrate mindfulness into your life, you can set a few specific times during the day when you consciously practice being mindful. Good moments for this are, for example, brushing your teeth, eating, or doing the laundry. These are activities you often do on autopilot, but try giving them your full attention. By building many of these small moments into your day, you will quickly notice that it becomes much easier to stay present in the here and now, and that your mind becomes quieter.

Love,
Daphne