Practicing Mindfulness

How many of us can fill an entire page detailing our everyday activities? We're not just jotting down some random notes that look like a shipping list, we're really detailing and describing each event to the fullest. This almost seems impossible to do. Who knows what they did today? The day went by so quickly that we didn't even realize.

When you find yourself questioning your ability to do a simple task such as this you need to stop and ask yourself a question. Am I really living and experiencing life or am I just existing? For the majority of us existing seems to be more of what we do in our daily lives because we are just too caught up in the mayhem of our hectic lifestyles to actually practice mindfulness.

Strange enough we use the term mindfulness without a full understanding of the term and what it means to be 'mindful'. Being mindful is very simple, it is simply being in the moment and experiencing it at that given time. Being mindful can be being stuck in traffic and allowing yourself to take note of how you feel being stuck in your car waiting to move. You observe your emotions. You are agitated, uneasy, upset, angry. Your heart rate is slightly elevated. You look for ways to vent this frustration. You observe the other cars that are alongside you and the other drivers as well as passengers waiting to move. Allowing yourself to observe as well as experience these notions is in essence what mindfulness is. You aren't thinking of what to get for dinner or if your favorite pasta sauce is still on sale at the supermarket but you are in tuned with how you feel at the present moment.

Being mindful is staying and focusing on the 'here and now' in your life. It helps you to deal with the issues affecting you at hand. Mindfulness can also mean just enjoying the moment for what is. One of the ways people have taught mindfulness is n a practical sense, eating. Mindful eating allows one to savor the food that they are consuming without losing focus on everything that food has to offer. Mindfully eating an apple one's focus is on the apple and everything the apple has to offer you.

Observe the color of the apple, the pigments. Observe the texture of the apple, it's smooth surface. Observe the smell of the apple, fresh and subtle. Observe the taste of the apple as your teeth grip the apple and you dive into your first bite. Is it succulent, juicy, mouth watering and sweet? Or is it dry and sour? Allowing yourself to be mindful keeps your mind and body in tune with your emotions as well as your behaviors to different stimuli.

While it is easier said than done, being mindful really does not take up any of our time however, we are programmed to think that allowing ourselves to be caught up in the moment is actually wasting time as we can be doing so much more.
What is more important than becoming more self-aware? Can we even put a time limit to becoming more aware of how we feel and what's happening in our lives?

It is indeed much easier said than done to find time to get our tasks done than it is to get the most important task of all done, figuring out ourselves and working on us. There are the sayings the best things in life are free and it's the little things in life that make us happy. We should therefore stop trying to complicate our lives and take note of these popular sayings so that we avoid creating and perpetuating problems in our life that we have the power to eliminate.