Meditation is a big commitment, which I’ve timetabled to fit into my life but not without a lot of struggling! (Posts on that to come). I tried to integrate meditation into my life 2 years ago and it just didn’t work. So I feel you.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that meditation isn’t the only way that I can integrate mindfulness into my life. This was partly because I didn’t see the distinction between the two. I just thought meditating was too hard and so jumped to the conclusion that mindfulness was a fad and not possible for ‘real people’ to do. Let me level with you – not a single person in my meditation class ever always found meditation easy.

What I really enjoy is taking small moments of mindful attention. This can take place during times where you’re not doing anything. Walking down the street, waiting at the bus stop, sitting down at the telly – these are all times where I, if I remember ahaha, try to take a moment.

That could be bring attention/awareness to:

1) the sensation in your body and doing a quick body scan, a guided version from UCLA here (1). If you’re struggling to get started, it sometimes can be easier to bring awareness to the parts of your body that are touching something – I like to think about my feet on the ground and the sensation of the soles of my feet against it and start from there. This idea also works nicely as you are quite literally ‘grounding yourself’. Once you get the hang of a body scan, it is easy to do so without a guided version.

2) your surroundings – some different perspectives to think about to get going could be:

2a) Having a good look at the objects around you or trying to look for something you haven’t noticed before if you’re in a familiar environment

2b) Paying attention to light and shadows. You could think about the affect of light or darkness on an object. Can you see colour, texture that you couldn’t before? Or you could focus only on light, or only on shadows. How does this change your perspective of your surroundings?

3) your breathing. An oldie but a goodie. You could: breathe slowly and deeply; inhale, then hold your breath for a few seconds, then exhale; count to ten breaths etc. There’s a lot of ways you can ‘spice it up’ by bringing attention to the inhalation or the exhalation. Alternatively you can also count a breath before you take a breath, after the inhalation or after the exhalation.

These are just some of the ways to take some time to yourself during the day and practice mindfulness! Here is Psychology Today’s and HuffPost’s accessible and achievable advice on how to do so as well! 🙂

What are your thoughts? Was this helpful? Let us know!

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SOURCES:

(1) UCLA Health. 2019. Guided Meditations. [Online]. [Accessed 3rd September 2019]. Available from: https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/mindful-meditations