Mindfulness

Mindfulness is popular term going around in our culture today. Knowing exactly what mindfulness is and how to use it can be confusing. Mindfulness is important because it can help calm us down and ground us as we face our day-to-day, busy lives. Mindfulness can help with things such as anxiety, depression, and stress. Life can be messy and chaotic, and when it is, the biggest thing we can gift ourselves with is 5 minutes of silence and peace. Today I will share with you what mindfulness is and ways to incorporate it in your lives.

The Three Ingredients of Mindfulness

First off, I reference Diane Gehart when talking about mindfulness. Incorporating it into our lives is SUPER hard. It sounds easy initially, but when putting it into action, it can be a different story.

Three major ingredients for achieving mindfulness include:

• Intentionality
• Attention to present experience
• Grace and compassion

There are many ways to do mindfulness, but it has to include those 3 ingredients. Mindfulness is a tool that happens with purpose. It is a disciplined, purposeful habit. Mindfulness is all about bringing yourself to the present moment when you are stressed. Since this is hard to achieve, it includes giving yourself grace and compassion when your mind wanders somewhere else. I always tell my clients easier said than done when using this tool. Before you know it, your mind can wander to the past or present and be thinking things like:

"I wonder what I will cook for dinner?" 

"I have so much work to do. I don’t know how I will get it all done!" 

Or: "That fight with my friend was so stressful…what if she stops talking to me?" 

These are only a few of the places our mind can wonder when trying to do mindfulness, so give yourself grace and compassion for messing it up. We are humans. We are not perfect. Our brain will take us back to the place of worry, fear, or planning for the future. So that nonjudgmental piece of this is so important.

Mindfulness takes time to develop as a life skill. Ideally I tell clients to practice this skill once a day for 2-10 minutes at whatever time of day works best for you. It is like learning how to drive a car or losing weight. This won’t happen overnight. So don’t lose hope. I tell my clients it takes several weeks to months to fully achieve this skill. But teaching your brain how to slow down in our busy society can help physically, emotionally, and mentally with our systems.

Mindfulness Techniques

Here our some ideas for how to practice mindfulness.  Have fun experimenting with mindfulness and finding out what works best for you!

• Focus on your breathing. Focus on breathing deeply enough to move your stomach up and down. Take anywhere between 2-10 minutes to complete this activity. Start small and increase amount the of time you are breathing each time. 

• Focus on counting your breathing. Count deep breaths up to 10. 

• Focus on a word while doing slow, deep breaths, such as peace. Keep focusing on this word until the end of your mindfulness activity. 

• Do a guided meditation: examples include Calm app and Headspace. 

• Look at a particular scripture and focus on the one or two word message while breathing in and out slowly for 5 minutes.  You can even make this a prayer. 

• Breathing in and out for 5 minutes while slowly working on relaxing each tense muscle in your body gradually during that process. 

There are many creative ways to do mindfulness, just remember whatever you do to include the three ingredients of mindfulness: Intentionality, Attention to your Present Experience, and Grace and Compassion. 

Jenna Hazlewood-M.MFT, BA, 
is a licensed counselor 

at Branches Counseling Center

in Mt. Juliet, TN.

She can be reached by email at: jhazlewood@branchescounselingcenter.com