Day 15–30 Days of Journaling for Self-Discovery: What mindfulness means to me
Yesterday’s post was about what self-love means to me and how I can love myself more each day. Today, I’m writing about what mindfulness means to me and how I can incorporate mindful practices into my day.
What does Mindfulness mean to me?
When I first heard about mindfulness, I thought it was just about meditation and breathing as this is what all of the resources I had seen seemed to be about.
As someone with C-PTSD, this version of mindfulness was hard to get a grasp of because I was running on anxiety and my mind was always racing.
Take the time to meditate, sit down, close my eyes, and take a few deep breaths to calm my sympathetic nervous system? Yeah, not happening.
This changed when I started seeing my current therapist in 2021. My therapist made me realize there are many ways of being mindful and present, not just meditation.
Mindfulness is about being aware, aware of self (my actions, thoughts, feelings), of others, and of what is going on around me.
It’s important to note that when I refer to being aware, I don’t mean hyperawareness or being hyperalert to every thought and surrounding. Instead, it’s about understanding what I’m feeling, why I’m feeling it, letting it go, and embracing the present moment fully.
How can I practice mindfulness each day?
Incorporating mindfulness into my daily routine is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
I like to meditate and journal when I wake up (yes I know, as someone who was admittedly anti-meditation, the fact I have gotten to a place where I appreciate and even enjoy meditation is not lost on me).
Recently, while journaling, I wrote about my desire to break free from constant anger. While it’s great that I’m able to recognize my thoughts, patterns, and cycles that I often get stuck in, I wanted to know how I could break them.
It was then that I remembered the STOP method, I heard about this method through my therapist. It was introduced as a way of helping me manage my anger so I could better regulate my emotions.
STOP is an acronym that stands for
- S: Stop what you’re doing.
- T: Take a few deep breaths.
- O: Observe how you’re feeling (body sensations, emotions, thoughts).
- P: Proceed with what you were doing before..
While doing the STOP method one morning, while pissed off beyond belief, I realized the great thing about this method is that it can be used to take note of positive experiences (the things I'm grateful for, and the things that bring me happiness and joy) not just the negative ones.
Yes, it’s great at helping me see where in my body I store stress and anger, but it can also be used to see where i hold emotions like joy, peace, and happiness and taking a snapshot of the experiences that underpin these emotions.
This realization has made me want to take time to fully capture the good oments as well as the bad, so I can fully be in the moment no matter what feelings arise.
Hasn’t A Clue posts on mindfulness
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