What is Mindful Living?

Mindful living is not just one thing we do every now and then, like smiling at the cashier or doing yoga or getting a massage or making the “mindful” choice of eating something healthy. Mindful living has to be practiced every day, actually: all the time. It consists of being “awake”, being “in the moment”, being “aware” of what you are doing, thinking and feeling in right this very moment - every moment. It is a constant state of mind of knowing what is going on around you and especially inside of you - it is AWAREness. Which also means you have control over the choices you make and the things you do and what you think and the emotions you express or withhold. Mindful living means that your mind is in the present moment rather than in the future thinking of what you are going to do later today or remembering what someone said to you which made you upset or being lost in your smartphone. Mindful living helps to stay grounded, focused and in touch with yourself, with your “soul and spirit”. It keeps your energy balanced and centered around you. Which in the end will help keep you content and happy. Isn’t that what we all desire? Being content and happy with ourselves and our surroundings? Well, we can achieve that by, first, finding contentment within ourselves and, second, creating a happy surrounding around us. There will be times when we forget to be mindful. And that is okay. As long as we remember to be mindful as often as possible and we can even train our brains to remind us. Training our brains is a process, it won’t happen overnight. I have been through it, I can tell you it will take time but it works. And it is so worth it! Here is an example of how to do it: When your thoughts are travelling off to negative memories, remind yourself to snap out of it and to come back to the present or remind yourself to distract yourself by shifting your focus on remembering happy memories. At first, it will take time. Your mind will wander off into negativity, you will be thinking “in the darkness” for a while, you will be going through emotions but eventually you will come back to reality, this will happen automatically. And then you will remember “oh man, I didn’t want to think about this bad stuff!” …but you did… which is normal. Next time your mind wanders off into negativity, you may come back to the present faster and you will remember earlier that you didn’t want to think about the bad stuff… and the next time it will happen even faster… and faster and at some point, you will actually start to notice when your mind is beginning to “wander off” and you will be “aware” of it and you can pull yourself out of letting your mind slip into negativity right away. It will take weeks, months, maybe a year or so… but don’t give up and don’t give in! Keep working on yourself, you will love the reward! Our minds are capable of so much more than what we even think they are capable of. Self awareness is an extremely valuable and important part of it.