Your senses are your window to the world; you experience life through your senses. Yet, in your everyday routine, you remain busy in trying to make meaning of whatever you see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This is necessary and an essential part of survival! However, if you think about it, every sensory experience is so rich on its own.
Keeping this in mind, this blog describes a mindfulness exercise that involves paying attention to one sense at a time.
Almost every day, we come across news of murder, assault, rape, and thievery, whether it is in the newspaper, on news channels or through various online media websites. Some people seem to cope with these news reports, some find it difficult to assimilate it. Through this article, we at Inner Space, hope to explain the psychological effects of traumatic news and how we can build healthy coping strategies to deal with these effects.
It is World Mental Health Day!
There wouldn’t have been a better time to talk about one of the most common afflictions as far as mental health is concerned, something that almost all of us face – ‘Anxiety’.
Be it seeing after your children or making it on time to work, several situations give us the “on the edge” feeling.
When we talk of dealing with or managing anxiety, we think about it the mental way. We try to take things easy, we try to consciously ask ourselves to ‘calm down’ and stay focused.
However, what we tend to ignore is that –
Anxiety is as much in the body as it is in the mind
“Maybe you could try to get something done by this week”,
“Maybe you’re trying too hard, you could do with a little bit of letting go”
“There may be a lot more options you haven’t explored”
“It would help if you would stop exploring more and more options and instead focus on one”
“Maybe you could reach out to your partner more”,
“Maybe you could detach a bit from your partner and work with yourself instead!”
Yes I’m quoting myself! What in the world am I trying to do contradicting myself all over???
You’ll soon know!
The New Year has begun! Every new year brings along with it the vibe of a fresh start and of new beginnings. Perhaps, that’s how the whole idea of new year ‘resolutions’ came in. The philosophy behind resolutions seems to be to infuse us with freshness and zeal , to make one change that will see us being happier and healthier in the next year. Some of you may have made your resolutions and are probably trying to keep up with them. Many of us, throughout the year, attempt to form new habits or to break old ones. Both forming and breaking habits involve a whole lot of psychological connotations. For now, let’s pick one habit that many of us share a love-hate relationship with – a food habit. Just about any food habit. Be it a tendency to reach for the chocolate bars as soon as you reach home or munching on fries and wafers for hours together. The importance of eating healthy and caring about food habits stares us in the face everyday, through newspapers, the internet and somewhere, even through our own bodies. What does it take to break an unhealthy food habit? To deal with a craving for food? ‘Self-control’ is what intuitively comes to mind.
Diwali is here-a time of the year for festivity and rejoicing and I love all of that. The sweets, the gifts, the general feeling of gaiety and energy in the air-its invigorating.
There is another image, a slightly different one that also stays with me which I want to share with you. It is the image of the lamps burning away into the night, much after all the noise and the gaiety subsides.
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!!
We specialize in combining psychotherapy with deep wellness practices like mindfulness and meditation and creating a customized mental health plan for individuals and organisations.
We specialize in combining psychotherapy with deep wellness practices like mindfulness and meditation and creating a customized mental health plan for individuals and organisations.
A young woman from another country moved with her family to live for one year in a town near the monastery. When, in the course of the year she discovered the monastery, she would periodically visit to have discussions with the Abbess. The Abbess introduced her to meditation, which became very meaningful for the young woman.
When the family’s year-long stay was drawing to an end, the young woman asked the Abbess, “In my country there is no Buddhism and no one has even heard about meditation. How can I continue to learn and deepen the practice you have started me on?”
The Abbess said, “When you return home ask far and wide for who, among the wise people, is recognized as having the greatest ability to listen. Ask that person to instruct you in the art of listening. What you learn about listening from such a person will teach you how to further your meditation practice.
― Gil Fronsdal, A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path
