"Go inside and listen to your body because your body will never lie to you. Your mind will play tricks, but the way you feel in your heart and in your guts, is the truth." Don Miguel Ruiz
Living Mindfully means living with awareness and being authentic. It means that what you say and what you do are in alignment with your true nature. Mindfulness teaches us how to be our own best friend, to be self-kind and compassionate. Working with Mindfulness, Hanna Somatic Body Awareness and the Mythoself(r)Process my work guides clients to experience calm and ease in bodymind, to stress less and make healthy decisions and be fully engaged in all aspects of their life.
Embodied practices give us the skills to:
Regulate emotions
Reduce stress
Foster inner calm and a strong sense of self
Maintain good mental and physical health
Helps focus and decision-making
Improve sleep
Enhance physical and mental health and well-being
Improves relationships, especially the relationship with yourself
Be authentic
Sandcastles If you've ever watched a young child build a sandcastle, in the moment, senses alive and totally focussedon the task at hand. One moment they are overjoyed at their masterpiece, then if someone knocks their sandcastle, they wail and cry and then, hey presto... they're on to the next thing. They are authentic and life is a natural flow.
As we grow older it seems this natural flow gets interrupted. We forget, as Sharon McDowell says 'how we were before the world got it's hands on us" and we are reminded at times, perhaps when taking a walk in the forest, engaged in an interesting work project, playing sport, listening to music, times when we feel engaged and connected. As we grow older we have to retrain our brain to be more mindful on a daily basis. Instead of living on automatic pilot where the body is in one place (driving the car) and the mind in another (next weeks commitments) we learn to be in the moment attending to the task at hand, body and mind in one place.
The good news is, retraining is possible. It just takes practice, commitment, and a little time to attend to yourself. Then, rather than the tendency to be on automatic pilot or running on a hamster wheel, you know how to self-calm, self-regulate and how express yourself with ease and authenticity. Link: Centre for Mindfulness.
The Science. Imagine, with a little daily discipline we can positively change the structure of our brain. Science has shown that after eight weeks of Mindful Meditation, grey matter in areas of the brain associated with stress, fight and flight reduces and in areas of the brain associated with calm, ease, focus, well-being, and decision-making grey matter is increased.
It's pretty amazing that we have it within us to change the structure of our own brain. That with Mindfulness and Meditation we can empower ourselves to better mental and physical health, that we can breathe and live a little more lightly.
