Mindfulness is about intentional living your life in the present (Mindful living). We should always want to feel things as if it were the first time. When I say feel, I mean using the 5 senses we have: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Doing some quick mindfulness exercises every day will help you appreciate all your senses.
Check the mindfulness exercise video ⏬⏬⏬ below if you do not like reading 🤣🤣.
We, as humans, are used to letting our mind wandering from past to future. Studies show that, on average, we spend 40% of our time thinking to the past, 40% thinking to the future, and only 20% focusing on the present.
What is wrong with that, you might ask. Well, thinking too much about the past, might encourage the development of depression or regret. Focusing on the future might develop more and more anxiety and fear. What the heck, let’s work on taking the present moment into our minds!
Mindfulness is all about exercise and practice. Focusing on the present is not easy at the beginning, after years of wrong habits. Today we would like to propose an exercise to help your mind focusing on the right things.
It is an easy exercise, and it will require a bit of commitment. Anyway, as we said in other videos, do not set your commitments to something you will not be able to keep for more than 2 or 3 days!! So, take it easy and plan to do the following exercise a number of times that you think is really not that much… like a couple of times a day. Then, if you feel like it, you can of course do it three, four, or even more times. But set a minimum of one or two.
So what you have to do is set the alarm of your phone to ring 1 or 2 times a day, when you think you’ll have a couple of minutes for this quick Mindfulness exercise.
When you hear the alarm, just give an answer to the following easy questions.
Mindful Living Exercise
List 5 things you can see
This is an easy one: just look around from where you are, then list five objects, persons, or details that you can see and that maybe you did not notice before. For instance, you are in the middle of a meadow and notice a small ant in the grass, or a nice branch on a tree behind you, and so on. No need to write those down, just notice them and offer them some of your time.
List 4 things you can feel or touch
Probably you did not notice the texture of your socks on your feet till now today, right? Why should You? They are both hidden in your shoes! Well, that is specifically the goal of this whole exercise: noticing things you normally don’t. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the teeth above your tongue, and so on.
List 3 things you can hear
Now it is time to let your ears do the work, you can close your eyes if you like: Just listen, focus on the background noise. You will discover a number of different noise sources you never realized were there. isn’t it great? You’ll probably be able to list much more than 3.
List 2 things you can smell
Your nose is already tickling, right? Now let him blow your mind: can you smell the coffee your neighbor is drinking? or the grass just cut in the garden? Just focus on this, appreciate the feeling, and take note, mentally.
List 1 thing you can taste
Now, either focus on your mouth and feel what is inside it, or grab something to eat and focus on the taste.
That’s it, wasn’t it easy? Right, once you have given an answer to all these questions, you can take some time, if you like, to think about your experience. Did you enjoy it? Any feelings? Are you going to change your habits with Mindful living? As we said, Mindfulness is about exercise. Keep on practicing this 5 4 3 2 1 exercise and after some days or weeks, you will observe great results.
If you are still undecided, note that Mindfulness was invented by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts to treat the chronically ill.
