managing emotions

Okay! So here we come to the end of the Mental Health Week with our last post, and all along we have made it a week of mindfulness for you and for us.

As promised in the last post, we are taking you into somewhat deeper levels of mindfulness since the last two days. In today’s post we will work on mindfulness with emotions and feelings. As in the last six days, we will do a small exercise to help you observe your emotions, mindfully. But before the exercise a little bit more on observing emotions:

How can emotions and feelings be observed?

You know when you are happy, sad, angry, disappointed and so on… Well how do you know? Maybe you will quickly answer “I just know”! But this is mindfulness week remember? We do everything with a pause…so I Invite you to try to not answer immediately! Take a moment and think on how you know what you feel. Think before you go on reading…

We have already discussed in our first post for the mental health week, the exercise of creating present moment awareness through looking, through isolating one sense at a time and focusing on it in order to be mindful, or in the present.

Most of you who have been following the posts this week we are sure are already into the mindfulness groove. Hence for the last two posts for the week, we take you a little deeper into the mindfulness experience. Before I introduce you to today’s exercise, just a little background..

Back with the mindfulness exercise of the day – muscle relaxation. We usually associate mindfulness with relaxation. The idea of serenely experiencing the present, just as it is, without judging or evaluating the moment is soothing and relaxing.

Today, we will take this understanding forward and explain a relaxation technique which is about mindfully watching your body and relaxing it. We’ll call it, Mindful Muscle Relaxation. When most of us say relaxation, we mean relaxation of the mind. Even so, mental relaxation and bodily relaxation are not mutually exclusive. But more on that in a couple of days. For now, in this technique we will exclusively focus on relaxing the body, mindfully. Often our muscles have tensed up even without our knowledge. Pain in the head, back, shoulders is becoming increasingly common. This tension is the body’s way of coping with the continuous onslaught of stress. The body seems to prep up to deal with stress but rarely gets a moment of deliberate intentional letting go. Here is where mindful muscle relaxation can greatly help.

You’ve been reading exercises on mindfulness since 3 days now. Hope you’ve tried some of the tips and techniques we suggested. If you have, you have surely felt some sense of peace while trying what we suggested. Today’s tip is based on mindfulness with children. Can children be trained to be mindful? Would they understand the concept and put it to practice? Yes, they can. If we introduce the concept of mindfulness to children in their way, using elements of their world, they will pick it up, gradually. In fact you’d be surprised to know how mindful children can be!!