Has your mind been full this week? Me too!

Mind full to mindful

This last few weeks have just been so busy, my mind has felt completely full. To the brim, can’t fit anything more in but stuff keeps coming at me FULL. Is it just me? Maybe it’s the time of year I don’t know but it feels like my little brain is very busy right now. So I’ve had this racing busy brain feeling and yet yesterday morning, I made space to further pre-occupy myself thinking about how I should really make some time to reignite my meditation practice.

I spent an entire dog walk with my thoughts cycling through my to do list, my ideas, my unfinished tasks and where will I find time to meditate because I really miss the benefits of being really present and clear minded?! And isn’t it a shame I can’t meditate anymore because I’m so busy. And isn’t it great to be so busy. And I’ve got so much to do I don’t know where to start. And back to my to do list. And oh yeah that idea I had, I should write that down because I’ll forget it. And I wouldn’t forget things if my brain wasn’t so busy. And wouldn’t it be nice to meditate again…so on and so forth.

So it was a really relaxing dog walk lol! Handily, when I got home I remembered that I used to use my dog walks as an opportunity to be mindful. Mindfulness was such an important part of my recovery when I struggled with anxiety during IVF but I remember initially thinking I didn’t have time for it.

Who has the time?!

As a concept, I totally could see the value of mindfulness. When I took time out from work after my miscarriage I found meditation very helpful indeed. I had the headspace app. When I could get in the zone, I found the mediative aspect to yoga such a release that more than once I cried at the end of classes. It’s not that I wasn’t bought in to meditation, I got it! But when I went back to work, when busy-ness resumed, I just didn’t think I had the time.

Fast forward a little and we’d got a dog. This forced me to find time for a daily walk. I remember being in the midst of a cycle and talking to someone about how helpful that daily dog walk was for clearing my mind. I described how peaceful it was just focussing on the dog. On the feel and sound of my feet hitting the pavement. On the seeing and hearing the wind passing through the leaves. On noticing all manner of sometimes interesting and sometimes mundane things as I walked until I was home and back to thinking about the day ahead of me or my injections or whether my lining was thickening. “You know that’s mindfulness” they responded. And I’d never thought about it like that before but yes it was. I’d inadvertently created space in my day for a whole hour of mindfulness. An hour of focussing my mind on the present. When I became conscious that my walks were opportunities for mindfulness, I put a bit more effort into it. I had a daily practice. 

Mindful activity

If you have the time to meditate or be mindful, even a 5 minute daily practice can go a long way to helping you manage overwhelming thoughts. But you don’t have to do what I did and get caught up in the practicalities of “finding the time” to sit quietly and clear your mind. Great if you can find the time but if you really can’t, don’t let that stop you from being mindful. Mindfulness can also look like just making the effort to be truly present in an activity, and it can be any activity at all. If there is something you already do daily, can you set an intention do it mindfully?

Let’s take breakfast as an example, assuming you eat breakfast every day. Some mindful things to focus on as you eat could be;

• Smell
• Taste
• Texture
• The sounds you’re making
• The feel of the food as you swallow
• The growing fullness as you eat

I could write forever on the benefits of meditation or mindfulness (whichever term you prefer to use) but in the interest of writing a brief newsletter not an OpEd, I’ll summarise my thoughts and say this…It’s just a really helpful way to clear your busy mind. And the more you do it, the more reflexive it becomes. 

So all that being said, I’m going to be intentional about bringing back my mindful dog walks. I’m going to focus my mind on the walk and be attentive to my surroundings. If busy thoughts creep in, I’m not going to worry that I’m not doing “mindfulness right,” I’ll just let them float away as I return my awareness to the breeze or whatever I can hear, see, smell or notice. 

Do you have a mindfulness practice? I’d love to hear about it? If you don’t and you decide to give mindful activity a try, let me know how you get on!