Envy, anger, malice — is it possible to allow yourself to experience the «wrong» emotions? How to accept our imperfection and understand what we really feel and what we want? Psychotherapist Sharon Martin advises practicing mindfulness.
Practicing mindfulness means being in the present, here and now, not in the past or future. Many fail to live fully because we spend too much time worrying about what might happen or remembering what happened. Constant employment deprives you of contact with yourself and others.
You can focus not only during yoga or meditation. Mindfulness is applicable in all aspects of life: you can consciously eat lunch or weed. To do this, do not rush and do not try to do several things at the same time.
Mindfulness helps us enjoy the little things like warm sunshine or fresh, crisp sheets on the bed.
If we perceive the world around us with the help of all five senses, then we notice and begin to appreciate the little things that we usually do not pay attention to. Mindfulness helps you enjoy the warm rays of the sun and the crisp sheets on your bed.
If you find it difficult to practice, do not be discouraged. We are used to being distracted, doing several things at once and overloading the schedule. Mindfulness takes the opposite approach. It helps us to experience life more fully. When we are focused on the present, we are able to perceive not only what we see around, but also what we feel. Here are a few steps to help you learn to live in the present.
Connect with yourself
Mindfulness helps you understand yourself. We often look to the outside world for answers, but the only way to understand who we are and what we need is to look inside ourselves.
We ourselves do not know what we feel and what we need, because we constantly dull our senses with food, alcohol, drugs, electronic entertainment, pornography. These are pleasures that can be obtained easily and quickly. With their help, we try to improve our well-being and distract ourselves from problems.
Mindfulness helps us not to hide, but to find a solution. By focusing on what is happening, we better see the situation as a whole. By practicing mindfulness, we open up to new ideas and don’t get stuck in thought patterns.
accept yourself
Mindfulness helps us to accept ourselves: we allow ourselves any thoughts and emotions without trying to suppress or prohibit them. To cope with difficult experiences, we try to distract ourselves, deny our feelings or downplay their significance. By suppressing them, we seem to tell ourselves that such thoughts and feelings are unacceptable. On the contrary, if we accept them, then we show ourselves that we can cope with them and there is nothing shameful or forbidden inside.
We may not like to feel anger and envy, but these emotions are normal. By recognizing them, we can begin to work with them and change. If we continue to suppress envy and anger, we cannot get rid of them. Change is possible only after acceptance.
When we practice mindfulness, we focus on what is right in front of us. This does not mean that we will endlessly think about problems and feel sorry for ourselves. We honestly acknowledge everything we feel and everything that is inside of us.
Don’t strive to be perfect
In a conscious state, we accept ourselves, our lives, and everyone else as they are. We’re not trying to be perfect, to be someone we’re not, to take our minds off our problems. We observe without judging or dividing everything into good and bad.
We allow any feelings, remove masks, remove fake smiles and stop pretending that everything is fine when it is not. This does not mean that we forget about the existence of the past or the future, we make a conscious choice to be fully present in the present.
Because of this, we feel joy and sorrow more acutely, but we know that these feelings are real, and we do not try to push them away or pass them off as something else. In the conscious state, we slow down, listen to the body, thoughts and feelings, notice every part and accept them all. We say to ourselves: “Right now, this is who I am, and I am worthy of respect and acceptance — just the way I am.”