Mindfulness Archives - Mindfulness Courses Ireland

Kindfulness · Mindfulness

I don’t have to believe everything I think

That line, I don’t have to believe everything I think, jumped out at me from Elisha Goldstein’s 2010 post on PsychCentral’s Mindfulness & Psychotherapy blog, and it still holds true.

Goldstein writes about a correspondent who, in the past, used to slip (like all of us) “into negative self-speak, hurling slogans at myself that I’ve internalized over the years.”

Now, the correspondent says, “I remember I don’t have to ‘believe everything I think.’ I consider that maybe what I am telling myself is merely conditioned thinking.”

Making better choices

This and other mindfulness practices, such as the body scan (you’ll find an audio of one on my audio page), helps Goldstein’s correspondent to ward off depression and to make better choices in the moment.

By the way, it may seem obvious that you don’t have to believe everything you think – but we keep forgetting this and treat our thoughts with great seriousness as though they have never been mistaken or given us a wrong steer!

As I’ve said elsewhere, our thoughts are not necessarily true and they’re not necessarily important. So remember: I don’t have to believe everything I think.

This extract from the Daily Bell might also help:

In mindfulness, you stop assuming that every thought is important. One way to practise this is to say to say to a thought: You know you’re just a thought? What this does is to take the sting out of the thought and give you space to assess whether it’s worthwhile or not.

Try: Practise this with ‘should’ and ‘must’ thoughts like I should do this, I must do that; say ‘You know what? You’re just a thought’ and this will help you to spot whether it’s useful or not.

For more on being compassionate towards yourself check out my 15-lesson True Friend online course.

Elisha Goldstein’s mindfulness blog.

Image by Elizaveta Korabelnikova

24/05/2023

Mindfulness

Je ne regrette rien? The mindfulness approach to regret

‘No regrets’ may be a fine name for a song but it won’t work in real life. To live is to accumulate regrets. What gives regrets their sharp edges is the belief that we could have made things work out differently if we had made different choices and it’s too late now. If I had made this choice I could have spared that person some pain; if I had made another choice I could have brought myself more happiness; if I had thought to say ‘No’ or ‘Yes” back then, everything would have been different and so on and on.

Lessons

It’s useful, indeed necessary, in life to look at the lessons we can learn from our regrets and to take what’s useful from them for our future behaviour. The problem is that having done that we often go on regretting and sometimes that too is inevitable. However, it drags us down without achieving anything useful for ourselves or others. It’s these kinds of regrets, the ones we can do nothing about, which we cannot go back and fix (sometimes we’re lucky and we can, but not always) and from which we’ve already taken any useful lesson they can teach us, that the rest of this article is concerned with.

Three steps

So, since regrets are inevitable, how can mindfulness help us to deal with them in our lives, after we have learned what we can from them? The philosophy behind mindfulness suggests three steps: first, we accept the pain we have to accept; second we drop the tendency to re-live the pain; third, we accept that regret is a fact of everybody’s life.

Regret is made up of physical sensations, memories, recurring thoughts (“how could I have been so foolish, blind etc.”) and fantasies (what might have been). When I take a mindful approach I am willing to experience the physical sensations (for instance a tightening of the stomach, a shortening of the breath) but I allow the memories recurring thoughts and fantasies to pass by. They may arise but I don’t follow them, I return to that physical sensation and allow them to pass. In other words, I let them be.

Two arrows

Think of the old Buddhist metaphor of the two arrows. If you were struck by an arrow you would be in pain, no doubt about it. But if you dwell on that experience by going over and over it in your memory or by entertaining revenge fantasies for years afterwards, then you are shooting a second arrow into yourself.

That sudden awareness of regret, that comes now and then – maybe very often – is the first arrow. Wallowing in memories, fantasies and recurring thoughts about the regret is the suffering we add on. To let the thoughts pass, to let them be, is a skill worth learning and you learn it through practice in the moment: the regret arises, you allow yourself to experience the physical sensation that accompanies it and you return to awareness of your breath or of whatever you are doing right now in the moment.

As I said at the start, to live is to accumulate regrets, so you need to handle it in a way that respects what happened but allows you to avoid wallowing in it, so speak, again and again.

Finally, from the Daily Bell:

‘The best among us think, at such a time, of good intentions half-performed and duties left undone,’ says a character in Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. When brooding on such thoughts remember they apply even to ‘the best among us, and be compassionate towards yourself especially if you can no longer do anything to put things right.

Try: When regrets come to you today, remind yourself that regrets are a normal part of the human experience, not in order to dismiss them, but to be a little kinder to yourself.

My Easy Mindfulness 15-lesson online course can help you to move easily from thoughts of the past into the present moment.

18/05/2023

Mindfulness

Negativity – it’s not all bad

People involved in wellness sometimes make the mistake of giving the impression that anything negative is bad and that we should aim to feel positive all the time. But that’s not realistic.

Negative feelings often are telling us something that we need to know.

Something you need to do

For instance, if you feel anxious about a particular undone task, maybe there is something you need to do about it.

If you feel guilty, maybe there’s something that you did that wasn’t right, and that you need to try to put right if you can.

If you feel bored, maybe you need to do something different in your day or in your life.

But the key thing is not to get lost in it, not to be overwhelmed by it. We need to be able to step back and see if there’s anything useful here.

If there is, the question then is what could I do about it?

If there isn’t anything useful, you can try to change your focus to something else. For example, feeling very negative over things that happened in the past that you can’t do anything at all about now often isn’t a very useful thing to do. And in such a case, you would try to change your focus to something else.

Mindfulness and stepping back

Mindfulness practice makes it easier to do all of these things. Mindfulness helps you develop the skill of stepping back, through the repeated practice of coming back into the present moment. And that makes it much easier to see what is useful and what is not useful.

That awareness then helps you to, as I said, move your focus to something else; or wait for the feeling to pass by itself; or if there’s something you can do about the issue, to do that something.

So negativity is not always negative, especially when it’s coupled with mindfulness

My Easy Mindfulness online course (15 lessons in your own time)can help you develop that vital skill of stepping back. Payment is by donation, so you can afford it. Learn more here.

Image by LeoHoHo

03/05/2023

Mindfulness

Slow breathing – the simplest way to ease stress

I think one of the most important things to remember about breathing is that it’s a great resource – apart from keeping us alive, of course – in working with our emotions.

Calming stress

And one point I want to emphasize is the importance of slow breathing in order to calm you down. So when you breathe slowly, if you’re feeling stressed, or tense, that slow breathing switches on the calming part of your nervous system (called the para sympathetic nervous system). So it’s a physical process that happens as you’re doing that breathing.

Longer out breath

One way to breathe slowly is to take a longer out breath than in breath. So you breathe in, and then you take a longer out breath.

Do that now for just one in breath, with a longer out breath.

Belly breathing

So if you do that for a few minutes, you will find yourself becoming calmer than you were when you started. It also helps if you do ‘diaphragmatic’ breathing, which could be called belly breathing, and which is really breathing from the area around your belly button.

So just try that now, breathing in and taking a longer out breath. And breathing from your belly button.

So the key point is that even if you’re feeling quite wound up and stressed, if you make a space to do that slow breathing, you will begin to de-stress and to calm down your nervous system.

Mindfulness emphasises the importance of breathing – take a look at my Easy Mindfulness online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like.

19/04/2023

Mindfulness

Gratitude isn’t just good manners – it’s good for you too

We are often urged to practise gratitude to improve our well-being? But does this have any backing in social science? Yes it does and I outlined some examples in my Irish Times column (the column is behind a paywall so here are the relevant extracts) :

“A series of studies reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003 found that people benefitted from spending time deliberately reflecting on what they felt grateful for.

Benefits

“Benefits included a more optimistic outlook – helpful in many domains of life and, in one group, more time spent exercising. Those who practised gratitude were also more likely to help others. Engaging in the gratitude reflection every day for fifteen minutes had a stronger effect than doing so once a week.

“One of the groups studied was made up of adults with neuromuscular diseases. Participants in this group who practised gratitude also found felt more positive than controls, they had less negative feeling, they slept better and woke up more refreshed. The study covered a period of only a few weeks so the results are impressive.

Teenagers

“In a more recent, longer, study, researchers at California State University found children, aged 10-14, who had grown up to be grateful experienced many benefits. The researchers measured the gratitude levels at the start and end of a 4-year period to establish who were the most grateful. Those in the most grateful twenty per cent had a greater sense of meaning, were more satisfied with their lives, were more happy and hopeful and had fewer negative emotions or symptoms of depression. For more see http://bit.ly/gratefulteens

“What all these findings seem to suggest is that cultivating gratitude improves your wellbeing in many ways and that this applies even if you have challenging health conditions.”

How to do it?

How to cultivate gratitude? Try making a mental or written list daily of what you are grateful for. This could include items from today or yesterday or from years ago. If you want to take a really long view you could include events that happened before you were born – for instance a favour that made a big difference in the life of a grandparent and, consequently, to you.

You could write a letter of gratitude to someone for what they have done for you or meant to you – writing such a letter boosts your mood – even if you never post it.

You could divide your life into three sections (dividing your age by three is an easy way to do this) and reflect on something you feel grateful for in each time period.

See if you can feel that gratitude in your heart or tummy areas – these areas connect to the emotional parts of the brain and so can help deepen your sense of gratitude.

In whatever way you’d prefer to do it, try cultivating gratitude in your life and I think you’ll be glad you did it.

Mindfulness helps us to cultivate gratitude – take a look at my Easy Mindfulness online course which has 15 lessons you can do whenever you like.

Image by Wilhelm Gunkel

12/04/2023

Mindfulness

Thoughts – not always important, not always right

In practising mindfulness we learn to take our thoughts less seriously.

That can seem strange if you’re used to seeing your thoughts as always right and some people do, indeed, see them that way.

But ur thoughts are often less important than we think they are – for instance, their predictions are often wrong.

So while some thoughts are valuable or entertaining we try not to let them rule the roost.

We try to pay more attention to the present moment than to thoughts of past events we can do nothing about. We also watch out for catastrophising which means exaggerating our fears about the future.

Of course, we don’t aim to get rid of all thoughts – that would be neither possible nor desirable – but we see them as part of our experience and not our whole experience.

The world outside our head

One way to prevent thoughts from giving themselves more importance than they deserve is to move awareness more often to what is going on in the world outside our head. that can mean becoming aware of your breathing, your body, sounds, movement, what someone is saying to you, what you see and so on.

Sometimes what is going on in the moment outside your head is just plain ordinary but even so, that can be a better place to be than shut inside distressing thoughts about things you can do nothing about. With practice you can even come to like those moments in which nothing much happens.

From rumination to choices

Having the same set of thoughts going around and around in your head is called rumination and it can bring you deeper into a hole of harsh self-criticism, anger or depression. When these are about some problem or situation that’s coming up it can help to ask what your practical choices are and to select what seems helpful. That’s a more helpful form of thinking than having thoughts circulating around your head like hamsters on wheels.

Sometimes you choose to do what you were going to do anyway but thinking of it as a choice can be empowering.

In summary

In summary, then, we can put our thoughts in perspective by giving more awareness to the world outside our head in the present moment; and a better alternative to rumination is to consider what our practical choices are in a situation.

You learn more about the mindful approach to thinking, and about other aspects of mindfulness, from my 15-lesson online course Easy Mindfulness.

23/03/2023

Mindfulness · Mindfulness Courses

Mindfulness – in the ‘now’ for a better future

We often think of mindfulness as being about the ‘now,’ getting into the ‘now’ maintaining awareness of the ‘now’ as best we can. But mindfulness also has a lot to do with the future.

Distressing moments, calm moments

For instance, if your present moments are, let’s say’ distressing because you’re thinking of very stressful things, then your next moments are also likely to be stressful. But if you’re able to bring a calm, mindful awareness, to your present moments, then your next moments are also likely to be calm and mindful.

The ‘m0ment’ isn’t a static, unchanging event – even as we bring our awareness to it, this moment is changing into the next moment. This moment flavours, colours, the next moment.

A better future

So that’s an important thing, I think, to bear in mind about mindfulness – that we practise being in the ‘now’ as calmly as we can, in order to bring about a better future.

My Easy Mindfulness course can help you to bring more awareness and appreciation to your moments and can teach you the many other aspects of mindfulness also. It’s an online course and payment is by donation so it’s affordable to all. Learn more

Page image from Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

16/03/2023

Mindfulness

Follow your breath, not your thoughts (video)

A key mindfulness approach is to pay more attention to the present moment and less to the stories about the past or the future that our mind wants to tell us. Usually the present moment is a better place in which to be than in the imaginary past or future.

Often our stories of past or imaginings of the future get us lost in old resentments or regrets we can do nothing about or in exaggerated fears.

Moving awareness

But how do you move your attention to the present moment?

One way is to gently move your awareness away from those unhelpful stories in your mind and onto the experience of breathing.

Rest your awareness on your breath

Rest your awareness, so to speak, on your ordinary, normal breathing and keep returning to it until those mind-stories fade away. The more you do this, the better you will be at it.

My online course Easy Mindfulness will teach you this and many other ways to bring calm acceptance and other benefits of mindfulness to your life.

Image by Marek Szturc

09/03/2023

Mindfulness