My name is Laura and I am the owner of Budding Rose Yoga and I’m here today to talk about mindfulness and how we can bring mindfulness into our every day.
So much has changed recently for every single person on this planet. But our individual experiences are completely unique: it’s important that we recognise that everybody is going through the same thing but in a completely unique way. For many of us, we’ve been forced to change so much in terms of how we manage our time. You might be still working but working from home. You might not be at work or you may not have a job at all. You may have kids at home and have recently lost the access to school, to daycare and also to the support of your family for support. So much has changed in terms of how our time is structured and how our time is spent. So I really wanted to talk about how we can really access mindfulness in a way that is totally available to you if you just don’t have the time.
Not everybody has the time to take an hour of their day to do yoga or to go for a long drive or on a ten mile walk.
I want to share with you some tips and hopefully give you a sense of hope so that you know that it is completely doable and having time out for yourself is completely valid.
I think it’s so important that we give ourself permission to take time out for ourself. How many of us feel an awful lot of guilt around taking out time for ourselves? I think it is probably something that we can all really resonate with, especially if we have young people at home, or if we have elders to support people in our family and also in our community. We feel that we don’t deserve that time, we don’t deserve that time out so we end up coming all the way down to the bottom of the list. We become our lowest priority
I’m the same. “If I get five minutes later on, I’ll do something for myself.” And more often than not, that doesn’t happen,
So, what does it mean to look after oneself or to love oneself? What does it mean to be mindful, what does that actually mean?
Our culture tells us to ‘put on a brave face’, to have a ‘stiff stiff upper lip’. We are told to ‘rise above it’, to ‘grow a thicker skin’.
We’re conditioned to think that these feelings and experiences, or the way that we feel, need to be pushed down and we need to rise above that feeling or that emotion and just ‘crack on with what we’ve got to do’. And that’s when we can come into difficulty and start to feel feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, tiredness and exhaustion.
Throughout 2019 I was just so tired all the time, I was just completely fatigued. And I went through an awful lot of processes to try and unravel what it was all about and why I was so exhausted. I came to the conclusion of what was draining my batteries. I kept on saying it to myself that “I’ve got so much to do” and that I was working hard on this and that and became my motto. “I’m working really hard” and by saying this it made me think that I was being effective with my time as I was ‘working’ but in fact what I was doing was, I wasn’t giving myself permission just to ‘be’. By working so hard at everything I was exhausting myself and reinforcing an idea that I wasn’t ‘enough’ just as I was.
Right now, in this very moment, everything’s okay even if there are ten things on my to do list, or the kids are asking for attention, I’ve got dinner to make, the house is a tip, I’ve got to go to work…..
Whatever those things are for you but right now in this moment, if we’re able to access that through tips, different processes, in that moment, we’re able to just to take a breath and to take a pause and to recognise that it’s okay. Even if everything isn’t okay. It’s okay.
“Even if everything isn’t okay. It’s okay.”
And that’s really what mindfulness is about.
It’s about recognising that this is the moment that really matters. And it’s really important that when we do that, we’re not devaluing what is going on in our life. It’s saying that no matter what, no matter what is happening, no matter what is going on for you or going on around you in this very moment you’re okay and that you’ve got a handle on it, even if it doesn’t feel like you do.
By giving yourself permission to access this present moment as we are right now, here today, we can just take a pause and recognise that everything is manageable.
We get lost in our story and we can get lost in the whole drama of life! That story becomes the trailer and then the trailer is the prelude to the movie and before we’ve realised it, the movie is the big finale! The big showdown! And we’ve got completely lost and caught up in that whole story of where we think we ‘should be going’ what we ‘should be doing’ and what we ‘shouldn’t say and should have said’. And so we need to remind ourselves to access right here. And by accessing this moment is going to give us a little bit of space and time just to take a breath and get a hold of everything because that’s when we can start to feel really overwhelmed and mindfulness essentially is is being aware. It’s being awake to the moment right now.
Try these tips:
- Put your phone on silent/aeroplane mode when you go to sleep or best still, turn off your notifications.
- Write how you’re feeling down
- Make a list of what you feel is priority for that day
- Be realistic about the tasks you give yourself for that day
- Do one thing at a time: don’t multi task!
When you wake up, even if you know that your kids are going to need you or you’re in a rush, even if it’s just a moment or 30 seconds, try asking yourself “what kind of day do I want to have today? How do I want to feel? What is my priority today?”
“I want to feel good, I want to feel valued I want to feel happy, I want to feel chilled out. I don’t want any drama.”
Don’t be afraid to set a little statement for yourself and then come back to it during your day, keep reminding yourself Maybe you’re out there every day supporting your neighbours and your community. Make sure that you take that little time out and by setting an intention is a really wonderful way just to bring you back to what ‘you’ need.
You actually deserve to feel good. You deserve to feel loved.
Use a journal if you like to write stuff down. Our mind is a bit like Google; before you realise it, you’ve added three items to a shopping basket in Amazon and you ask yourself “how did I get here?” And it can be the same in the mind so write it down. Get a nice journal and write down what you’re grateful for, what’s happened in your day that you’re thankful for. Showing up to yourself in this way and reflecting on your day can be incredibly powerful and can be incredibly inspiring too. Write down your feelings, however big or small.
I also believe it’s important that we talk. When we feel overwhelmed, more often than not there’s going to be somebody in your community that has been through the same thing, that is thinking the same thing or feeling the same way. So reaching out and and saying “Hey, I’m struggling” or “I really need a chat” is important. Recognising that we aren’t alone and that we are all probably feeling very similar, makes us feel reminded that we are not isolated in our feelings and that we are able to loosen their grip on us.
