Mindfulness: A Gateway To Happiness

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Mindfulness is the act of purposefully bringing your attention to the present moment. Many of us are so overstressed in our daily lives that we don't even realize that we are not paying one bit of attention to the here and now. We are usually acting out of the past or planning for the future. 

 Generally, in practicing mindfulness you are taking a few deep breaths to get your racing mind out of reckless driving and down to casual Sunday drive speed, and using the 5 senses to touch, see, hear, taste and smell your way through the present moment, to truly feel. You might make a mental list of 3 things you are experiencing in each sense.

I started practicing mindfulness in conjunction with my gratitude journal. I would write the 3 things I was currently experiencing within each sense and tie it to things I was thankful for. Eventually, I came to realize that in practicing this way I was also noticing the emotional responses being triggered. So I spent an entire day on just being mindful of my feelings and looking at them objectively. What was I feeling? What did the feeling stem from? What was the root? What would I prefer to feel in the present moment? There were quite a few 'Aha! Moments' that came out of that day that ultimately led me down the path to self discovery! I particularly wrote down the situations that contributed to feelings of anxiety, anger, frustration. For example, 3 things I saw that day were:
  1.  Shoes left in the middle of living room floor. I felt frustrated. 
  2.  My dog sleeping next to the shoes in the middle of the floor. I felt love.
  3. The yellowing leaves of a houseplant I hadn't watered since the beginning of time. I felt guilty.
Jotting those things down in my journal helped me see where I could make changes to remedy the negative emotions I didn't even realize I felt, and experience positive emotions more often! By looking at the emotion so objectively I was able to see the thing that caused the emotion instead of being blinded by the emotion. I started thinking very solution based rather than stewing in my feelings. Mindfulness forces you to slow down and focus on the little things. When you slow down in this way, you gain much more clarity on where you're putting you're focus in life, and whether or not your focus is on the things that bring you happiness. 
Much Light & Love,
Gawa