The Gift of Mindfulness
Personal Growth is Essential
Last week I introduced the concept of setting intentions as a guide to growth and living a more fulfilling life. As you consider the role that setting intentions might play in your daily life, one aspect of intentions to remember is that they are personal; they are just for you. Intentions can provide a roadmap for navigating the many decisions and plans that we make each day.
Personal growth is essential to leading a meaningful life. Practicing mindfulness and setting intentions are tools that can support and encourage your evolution with love and self-compassion. As you develop your intentional roadmap, there is an important ingredient in committing to authentic intentional practices with fidelity. That ingredient is mindfulness. Mindfulness will provide you with a tool for staying focused in your intentions.
During the month of January, we are surrounded by an abundance of information about self-improvement. The expectation is that at the beginning of each new year, we must make plans to create a better version of ourselves. We are surrounded by media messages that imply that the only way this new year will be great is if we set hearty new goals or commit to resolutions that will lead us to become a more perfect person. What defines these goals comes from outside of ourselves. As a result, these messages often deviate from their intended purpose and what ends up happening is that many of us set goals for ourselves that don’t reflect what we can do to best grow and evolve.
Most of my life has been spent working with small children in an elementary school setting. I have always been inspired by the capacity of young children to begin each new day as though there was no yesterday. For the most part, children wake up each morning with a clean slate. They approach the world with a sense of innocence and a lack of judgment that we as adults eventually learn to abandon. I challenge you to recapture the capacity you once had in your youth to start each day anew. By setting daily intentions and incorporating mindfulness practices into your daily routine you can recapture that valuable quality that was lost from childhood.
By practicing mindfulness, we can alleviate the emotional weight that can come from ruminating about our past. Practicing mindfulness helps us to train our brains to live in the present moment. This sounds so simple, right? While it may sound easy, it is actually difficult for our brains to reprogram patterns that have been embedded over time. Scientific research unearthed by Dr. Kristin Neff reveals that our brains are not wired to live in the present. There is a set of interconnected brain regions called the default mode network. This network defines where our thinking lives when our brain is not actively engaged. The default mode network takes our thoughts to the past and it is programmed to unearth experiences of worry and regret. This phenomenon can be traced back to the origins of brain development when human survival was dependent on an ability to sense and be prepared for danger. To counteract this neural pathway, we can practice mindfulness: we can teach our brains that we don’t need to focus on past experiences of stress and danger. Practicing mindfulness will keep our brains in the present, and will enable us to remain focused on the intentions we have set for ourselves, instead of on unnecessary thoughts of difficulty and strife.
As you begin this new week, consider the role that mindfulness can play in establishing daily intentions. Try to maintain a conscious awareness of the intentional direction of your journey each day. Recording your thoughts in your journal will reinforce the value of these practices over time.
It is a journey of small steps that will lead to enormous growth.
Until we connect again, be safe, be mindful and be kind to yourself.