Mindfulness: Your Brain Deserves a Break
By Carol Grimes
Our minds are tricky things. They can be obsessive, invasive, or feel out of control at times. Other times our minds will simply not shut up about even the most mundane of tasks or events.
One way to stabilize the mind and simply give our poor minds a break is through the practice of MINDFULNESS, which employs the sense doors of taste, touch, sound, smell, sight, breath, thought, and sensation to help bring us into the present moment.
After all, your brain deserves a break!
By giving your mind short, intentional breaks throughout your day, you will slowly begin to train your brain to pause when needed, creating a sense of spaciousness and relief in between the many thoughts that invade our minds on a daily basis.
Ultimately, this will allow you to think and operate with more clarity and feel less stressed. It will also give you a sense of control over your own thoughts, simply by cultivating the ability to take a break from them when they feel overactive, harmful, or unkind.
Let's explore some simple ways to practice mindfulness through our sense doors:
Touch:
Feel your body touching the earth right now, feel it touching what you are seated or standing on. Rest your hands somewhere on your body and feel the temperatures and textures touching your skin. Feel the air touching your skin. Feel your eyelids touching when they blink, lips touching, tongue touching inside the mouth.
Breath:
Feel the touch of the breath as it enters and leaves the nose. Feel the touch of the breath as it rises and falls in the body. Take 3 deep breaths and allow your mind to rest fully on your breath.
Sight:
Allow your gaze to be soft and observe the quality of light in the room. Observe the patterns of light around you. Look outside and notice the light on the trees and plants, sky, water, etc.
Smell:
Gently smell the air. Pick up a spice jar, flower, herb, vegetable, or essential oil. Take several deep breaths in, staying present with the smell.
Taste:
Swallow a couple of times, run your tongue over your lips, see if you can detect any tastes in your mouth. Place a small berry or morsel of food in your mouth and hold it there for a few seconds before chewing, noticing the bursts of taste in your mouth.
Sound:
Close your eyes and open your ears. Listen for sounds close by, listen for sounds far away. Find a sound to train your ears on and follow the entire length of the sound by gently resting your ears there from beginning to end.
Thought:
Relax your forehead, relax your eyelids, relax the brain inside your head. Create space and emptyness in your mind. If a thought rises up, simply observe it without judgement and allow it to pass through like a cloud in the sky.
Sensation:
Bring your inner gaze into your body. Notice any physical sensations, emotional sensations, energetic sensations. Just be a witness to these sensations, observe them without judgement. See if you can soften and breath into and around these sensations.
Carol Grimes is the Founder of Adosa Wellness