13 Mindfulness Practices You Can Start Today
Why mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the practice of cultivating awareness of what’s happening as it’s happening. A regular mindfulness practice is beneficial for physical, mental and emotional health.
Mindfulness practice helps us learn to come home inside ourselves. Life is full of ups and downs, unpredictability and insecurity. Even when we’re at our best, we can feel as though the ground is shifting out from under us. Mindfulness helps us weather transition and engage better in unpredictable and unusual situations by teaching us how to be fully right here, right now, no matter where our feet are planted.
Mindfulness helps us ask the question – What’s this right here? Which is awesome because right here is the only place that you actually are!
13 Mindfulness Practices You Can Start Right Now
You can use these 13 mindfulness practices at any time, in any location and in any language. They’re perfect for creating a sense of presence and awareness no matter where life takes you.
Practice 5 minutes of formal mindfulness practice every day. In other words – meditate. Find a comfortable place to sit and set a timer for 5 minutes, notice your breath as it goes in and out of your body. Your thoughts will wander, opinions and judgments and distractions will pop up. Simply notice them (like clouds passing through the sky) and return to noticing your breath. If you find it difficult to do this exercise while seated, try a formal mindfulness practice that involves movement – like yoga or mindful walking. Check out this article for an in-depth explanation as well as some ideas and even some practice meditations. If you’re ready to engage in some longer meditation practices, try these!
Give a name to the stories you tell yourself over and over again. Do you find your mental wheels spin over and over again rehashing the same stories? Being mindful enables us to see these stories more clearly so that we can either take action or allow them to pass. When you notice you’re stuck with the same argument, analysis, judgment or story in your head – trying pausing for a few seconds, give the story a name (something like “I hate this place story,” or “it will be better when…story”) and then consciously choose what you’d like to do next.
Spend time in your body. Notice what’s happening in your body. Do regular check-ins with your body throughout the day in both resting and active positions. This is especially helpful when you’re in a new place or outside your comfort zone. Your body has an incredible wealth of information to offer you about what feels right and what may need adjustment. If you have time, a body scan meditation can be a good way to learn how to pay better attention to your body. Try this one from the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.
Cultivate mindful awareness of your surroundings. We grow when we’re able to see clearly how things around us change and evolve. When we become more mindful of the world around us, we’re able to develop a sense gratitude and awareness for how and where we fit in. You can practice this by simply setting the intention to notice the world around you when you’re out. Even a few minutes can bring a sense of presence and focus to an ordinary day running errands.
Recognize uncertainty when it’s happening. Practice asking the question – What do I not know here? Life is full of uncertainty. Observing how you feel, what you think and what you instinctively do in times of uncertainty enables you to gain comfort with being between places and helps you learn what skills most help you to thrive even when things are up in the air.
Name your emotions. Mindfulness enables us to tend to the wounds (and gifts) of the heart. If your child scrapes her knee, you teach her to clean the wound, bandage it and nurture it to wellness. The same is true for our emotions. When we practice naming our emotions and tending to them, we gain the skills necessary to nurture, comfort, and celebrate the many ways we feel.
Set your intentions for the day, the week, or the month. Mindfulness is about moving from mindless to mindful, but it’s not simply about an internal journey. When we want to live more mindfully in the world, we can bring that way of being into our lives by consciously setting our intentions on a regular basis. Set aside time in your schedule and mark a place on your calendar where you can create goals and priorities that align with your values. Then check in regularly to re-evaluate and re-align as needed.
Bring mindfulness into a simple daily routine. Practice paying attention while you brush your teeth, dry your hair, wash your hands, or chew your food. Even just for one minute, you can observe the sensations of these every day tasks. You don’t even have to alter your routine. That means even when you’re on the go, between homes or just-off-the-plane, you can still maintain your practice.
Pause to consider your words before speaking. Being authentic and honest doesn’t mean being careless with our words. Taking a mindful approach to the way we speak enables us to consider the nuance of what we want to say – especially in socially difficult or culturally complex situations. If you’re about to say something important, notice what happens if you simply count to 5 before speaking.
Take a moment before responding on social media – even if you’re saying something nice. Practice #9 applies to your fingertips as well as your mouth. Try typing out your response and then counting to 10 before you hit “post.” Are your words aligned with your values? How do you feel about your contribution to the conversation? What happens when you take a moment to notice the emotions and physical sensations behind what you’re about to type?
Engage with compassion for yourself and others. Practice putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. When we cultivate a mindful, compassionate perspective, we see others and ourselves in our true complexity. We raise our awareness of the inherent vulnerability we all face each day – no matter where we come from. When you find your automatic response is to criticize, judge or disregard (again – yourself and others!) pause for a moment to turn towards what’s happening and offer compassion and comfort.
Be curious. Mindfulness is about asking again and again, “What’s here now?” You can engage your curiosity more formally by creating reminders to stop periodically throughout the day and simply check in with what you’re thinking and feeling and with how you’re engaging with others and the world around you. I often remind my clients to be a scientist of the moment.
Practice saying, “This belongs.” I absolutely love this line from mindfulness teacher Tara Brach. Mindfulness is not about feeling happy all the time. It’s not about living a life free from pain, discomfort or uncertainty. We can, however, choose to see clearly what’s there. It is from that place – where we acknowledge that something “is” and must therefore, to some extent, “belong” – that we can begin to heal, to move through and to grow.
And remember…
As you read through these practices, remember that mindfulness is a practice that you build little by little, becoming more comfortable with each passing day as you try new things. Not unlike training for a sporting event, it’s important to start simple and grow your practice as you become more adept. Just as beginning marathon training with 20 kilometers if you’ve never even run two would be fool-hearty, starting a mindfulness practice with an hour of silent seated mindfulness meditation is unlikely to be as effective as starting wherever you’re most comfortable and growing your practice from there.
Another important key is to remember the word practice. Mindfulness is not about arriving at a destination of “most mindful.” It is about coming back each day again and again until you find what’s right for you. And, it’s about doing so with a spirit of acceptance and non-judgment.
