Maintaining Mindfulness

Maintaining Mindfulness—Being Present over the Long Term

Mindfulness is a wonderful practice with a host of benefits. When we engage in mindfulness, the world can seem like a different place—colors are more vivid, relationships more dynamic, and we are more focused on what we’re doing. It can seem like we’re more alive. However, many people who are committed to being mindful struggle with making it a consistent part of their everyday mindset. It’s easy to be mindful if we’ve just participated in a workshop or read a book about mindfulness, but our discipline may wane over time, and we can find ourselves distracted, worried about the future, and in firm control of the monkey mind.

How can we make mindfulness practices a consistent part of who we are? How can we build mindfulness into our psyche so that we don’t have to be on the see-saw between mindfulness and distraction? It can be difficult, but it’s not complicated. Like any habit, it comes down to creating a regular routine and sticking to it. It involves making mindfulness as much a part of your life as eating, working, or anything else you do every day without having to remind yourself.

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Making Peace With Time

Making Peace With Time

People have strange relationships with time. Generally, we perceive time as something we either don’t have enough of or have too much of. How often do you have a day when what you do lines up exactly with the time you have? Even those skilled in time management may be able to align their available time with a specific set of activities, but they may still have a long to-do list that never makes it into the daily schedule. For many people, the workweek is a race against available time. But in certain circumstances, or at a certain age, the balance may shift the other way. You may feel the hours stretching out in front of you with no meaningful way to fill them. Is it possible to influence your perception of time passing?

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Focus on the Good

Don’t Let the Bad Become Everything

Focus on the good in your life. When things are going smoothly, it is easy to focus on what is good. You may still have small headaches and minor setbacks, but overall, life feels steady and positive. It is when things go south that staying positive becomes both more difficult and more important. Focusing only on the negative aspects of your life can become a slippery slope. It may lead to self-pity, catastrophizing, and prioritizing the wrong things. Developing the habit of keeping the good things in your life—both past and future—at the forefront of your thoughts can help keep negativity at bay and allow you to stay focused on the path toward your goals.

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I have to

When “I Have To” Isn’t Enough

Do what you love, and you’ll lead a happy life, right? Well, it’s not always that simple. No one does only what makes them happy. There will always be parts of life we would rather avoid: certain duties at work, housework, commuting, social obligations, and even activities we may feel uneasy about doing. Responsibilities are part of life. But if we look more closely at the things we do because we feel we “have to,” we may discover that some are not as burdensome as we assumed, while others may not truly be required of us at all.

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Growth through connection

How Connection Helps Us Grow

Personal growth can happen in many ways, but it is difficult to attain in isolation. Growth often occurs when we challenge ourselves, remain open to other people’s ideas and values, and explore the edges of our own comfort zones. All of these paths have an internal component, but they also involve engagement with others. To benefit fully from these experiences, you must be intentional about both the inner work and the connections that help shape it.

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