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Incorporating Mindfulness Effectively in Everyday Life
Writer / Mariam Ballantine
Photography Provided
Just about everyone can agree that meditation is good for you. It is a great way to calm the mind, reduce reactivity to stress, and promote overall well-being. But if you ask people how their own practice is going, many will say “I don’t have time,” or “I can’t sit still,” or “I’m not good at it. I can’t seem to empty my mind.”
The truth is, meditating does not have to mean sitting on a cushion for an hour and banishing all thoughts from your brain. Starting a meditation practice and reaping the benefits is easier than you might think.
Why start meditating?
Reasons to start meditating usually involve a desire for greater peace of mind, more living in the present moment, and even improved health. Ironically, spending some time in quiet reflection actually helps you connect more with other people. Meditation creates compassion for yourself and for others. You become more emotionally resilient and better able to separate feelings from facts. Together, these skills have a positive impact on your relationships with other people.
“Mindful meditation has been truly revolutionary for me,” says Sarah Davasher-Wisdom, president and chief executive officer of Greater Louisville, Inc. “I highly recommend it for anyone wishing to develop a greater sense of internal serenity or a stronger understanding of self.”
Meditation also helps in the following ways:
Focusing on slower, deeper breathing can cause your brain to release endorphins, reduce stress hormones and lower your heart rate. When you feel like you’re going 100 miles an hour, being able to stop the rush for even a short time can help you regain a sense of control.
Slowing down gives you time to think more deliberately and creatively. Instead of habitually reacting to a situation, when you notice that there’s a gap between the stimulus and your response, you have a better chance of choosing an appropriate and innovative course of action.
Feeling a sense of peace spreads to the rest of your life. Once you’ve learned to slow down and take a few minutes to observe your mind during meditation, you can begin to experience this same sense of peace as you move throughout your day.
What if meditating is too hard?
Experiencing the benefits of meditation has a lot to do with managing your expectations. You might secretly hope mindfulness is going to be a tranquilizer that instantly calms your mind, but mindfulness doesn’t come automatically to most of us. It takes practice, so don’t allow the flittering mind to become a problem. It might be annoying, but it’s just what minds do. On average (an unofficial estimate), beginning meditators can pay attention to something for about 1.2 seconds, then the mind darts off or attention fades away.
Father Joe Mitchell, a Passionist priest who founded the Earth & Spirit Center, explains more. “When you sit to meditate and try to focus on the breath, you’ll notice how quickly the mind gets lost,” he says. “In fact, your awareness will probably get lost over and over again. Don’t get upset. This is the normal default setting of the untrained mind. During meditation you get a firsthand glimpse of how incredibly busy the mind is.”
You might have discovered how easy it is to obsess about things and replay the past from a biased perspective. It’s also common to anxiously imagine what the future might or might not be like. What a beginning meditator soon realizes is that the mind is focused on almost anything except what’s happening right now.
As soon as you discover your mind has wandered, don’t try to banish the thought. Let go of entanglement with the thought or emotion and refocus your attention on the breath. Take delight in letting go. Relish the freedom of not being kidnapped by a thought or emotional scenario.
The goal is not to stop the flow of thoughts. Thoughts are bound to keep arising. What you are putting effort into is avoiding becoming carried away by them and instead returning to the breath.
What’s involved in starting a practice?
Any healthy step you take is more likely to “stick” if you can make it a habit. “Increasing your motivation can make a big difference,” says Tony Zipple, Ph.D. “Building any habit benefits from some ‘nudges’ like visual reminders, support from friends and family, and small rewards. We can also increase motivation by taking a moment to pay attention to the good things we get from meditation, like the feeling of calm and centeredness.”
Mitchell suggests setting aside a specific time to practice each day. It’s helpful to keep in mind your reason for meditating. Is it about reducing particular stressors, or cultivating a sense of calm that enables you to ride the roller coaster of daily life? Think about what it looks and feels like to reach your goal. How enjoyable is your life with less anxiety? How does it feel to respond rather than react to difficult situations? Keep this motivation in mind and let that drive your commitment to meditating regularly.
Do the best you can. Your focus is on cultivating the habit of mindfulness meditation, not getting it perfect.
How to Give It a Try
“Most of us had very little instruction growing up about how to relate with equanimity to our thoughts and feelings,” says Karen Newton, MPH, an instructor at the Earth & Spirit Center. “We often learn hypervigilance, worry, and problem-solving skills. It’s not surprising that we believe we have to pay attention to all our thoughts. So, it is really important to get connected with solid teachers when you’re learning to meditate. Plus, there’s big value in starting with a group where you can hear about other people’s experience, and how they’ve handled the challenges that come with starting this practice of changing our relationship to both thoughts and feelings.”
However, there’s a short form of meditation you can try on your own: a one-minute meditation that takes just 60 seconds to focus your mind and breathe deeply. This practice can be done anywhere, at any time, making it a convenient tool for managing stress reactivity and anxiety throughout the day. Here’s how to do it:
- Find a space where you can sit or stand comfortably. This could be at your desk, in your car – anywhere that’s quiet.
- Close your eyes and take a deep breath in through your nose, breathing deeply and feeling the abdominal muscles expand.
- As you breathe out, slowly exhale through your mouth and let go of tension or stressful thoughts.
- Repeat this breathing pattern for 60 seconds, doing your best to focus on your breath sensations, noticing that thoughts arise but you can gently return to breath awareness, over and over.
- When the minute is up, take one last deep breath and slowly open your eyes.
Incorporating one-minute meditation into your daily routine is a simple and effective way to promote mental and physical health. Taking 60 seconds to breathe deeply and focus your mind can make a world of difference.
How Meditation Influences the Rest of Your Life
“If you can be successful at never making a problem out of whatever occurs during meditation, you can be a successful meditator,” Mitchell says. Then, you start to take this skill into your daily life. “The moment you step out of the raging stream of thoughts with awareness, your experience of them changes,” he says. “You’re learning to observe thoughts with the calm dispassion of a bystander. You witness a thought or feeling but don’t attach to it. Simply observe it and let it pass down the stream.”
What you practice in meditation becomes a new way of living – mindful living. You’re training your mind to practice seeing your emotions and what’s really happening, without participating in them. Becoming a detached observer allows you to make decisions based on facts without the confusion of emotions in the way. Spending short periods of time practicing this detachment helps you start incorporating this approach into your day.
Your cultivation of mindfulness doesn’t have to be restricted to the meditation chair or cushion. Throughout the day, bring your full awareness to whatever you are doing – walking from your car, standing in line at the grocery, eating lunch, drinking water, showering, talking on the phone. Be present to whatever you’re doing as you do it.
The Earth & Spirit Center is located at 1924 Newburg Road in the Highlands in Louisville, on a 27-acre campus and nature preserve. There is a wide variety of meditation, social justice, Earth-care programs and classes offered each spring and fall, including Camp Odyssey offered in the summer for elementary-school kids. In addition, the Center team has created the Institute for Applied Mindfulness that customizes mindfulness practices for organizational leaders and leadership teams. Please visit earthandspiritcenter.org to learn more and to register.
