The cat is very cute when it is asleep but when it is awake it succumbs to its natural instincts. The local mouse population live in terror. They are often brought into the house against their will. The cat rarely manages to kill them, seeming to think that maybe her humans would like to play with them too. In fact the cat has been seen to sit calmly as a mouse runs across the room in front of her!
Why is this relevant to mindfulness? One of the benefits of practising mindfulness is to be able to respond calmly to unexpected events, rather than react negatively. This ability to respond calmly was tested this morning as a small mouse ran, repeatedly, towards my feet while I was teaching mindfulness online. My feet moved out of its way, but my face remained calm, as my brain flicked through all the options - and where the mouse trap might be! As the cat is keen to bring its mouse friends home to play with so it was inevitable that this would happen at some point. It made me smile because I have not always been able to handle these small furry creatures quite so calmly.
And why is all this relevant to everyone and everything in 2020? Because almost everything that has happened this year has been unexpected and out of our control. From the shock of the first lockdown in March 2020 to the ongoing uncertainty that still surrounds all of our plans for the festive season and the end of the year, it is the unknown and the lack of control that has contributed to our increased sense of anxiety and stress.
Mindfulness is about learning how to manage the unknown and uncertainty. The human mind has been programmed to continually risk assess for all the possible outcomes in order to keep us safe. However this ability is now exacerbating an already stressful situation.
In practicing mindfulness meditation we learn to focus our minds on the breath or body, or something in the present moment. The mind will always wander but in developing the ability to control that wandering, we are more able to manage the stress of the current situation. If we can keep the mind on something concrete, we can stop it from assessing all possible outcomes. This is the role of meditation in mindfulness, it acts as a formal practice in training the attention. The more we can control our attention, the more we can manage the brain’s natural tendency to risk assess, and in doing so to focus on all the possible negative outcomes.
Then we can learn to apply this to real life. As part of mindfulness training there are various activities that can be done during the day in a mindful way. Maybe cleaning your teeth. Just notice what you are thinking about the next time you are cleaning your teeth - or whether you attempt to multitask, which in my experience never goes well! We all know that cleaning our teeth only takes two minutes and yet people still cut it short or try to do something else at the same time, generally resulting in more time spent clearing up toothpaste.
Maybe try it today. If you spot that you are worrying about something or churning something over, just try to focus on the here and now, and give yourself a break from the stress. Small stress breaks during the day will help to increase your wellbeing as you can stop the tendency for stress or anxiety to spiral. This is particularly useful during lockdown and the pandemic in general when there is so much uncertainty.
We cannot control the situation. We cannot control the restrictions, or many aspects of the pandemic and lockdown, and we cannot control the odd stray mouse that scuttles under our feet.
However, we can learn to control how we respond to these things. We can learn to respond more calmly. We can learn to spot when our minds start to wander towards the issues that are causing us stress and we can learn to refocus them.
In doing this we can learn to live more calmly and also to get more done. Being more aware of where our attention lies, enables us to spot distraction and limit our natural tendency to time waste and procrastinate. This helps us to work more effectively and also to be able to turn off from work.
This is how mindfulness helps us to live better, work better and sleep better.
Contact me for training sessions and gift vouchers now available for Christmas. Give the gift of mindfulness to someone you think could benefit from it, or just give it to yourself. Contact me today to for a more mindful 2021.
contact@pennymetcalf.com