A Taste of Mindfulness: Fine-Tuning Your Awareness Through Mindful Eating

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raspberriesThe practice of mindfulness involves focusing our attention on the present moment — as it unfolds from one moment to the next.

However, when you’re just getting started with practicing mindfulness, it can be hard to know what to focus on. So many thoughts and distractions come into our minds, and it can be challenging to remain in the present.

To begin to train our awareness to stay in the present moment, we often use different “anchors” — such as our breath, sounds in our environment, or sensations in our bodies (like a cool breeze on our skin or the chair beneath us) — to keep us grounded in the present moment.

All of our senses can serve as potential anchors, helping us keep our metaphorical feet planted in the here and now. One of my favorite exercises for practicing mindfulness — mindful eating — incorporates all 5 of these senses. Read More

Learning to Listen to Yourself

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woman

You know that nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach? The one that says something’s not right?

Or the ease and comfort you have when you’re with someone you really trust? The feeling that says, “This person is safe. I can let down my guard.”

Or maybe you’ve noticed how energized and excited you feel about certain aspects of your work and how drained you feel by others.

These feelings have important messages to tell us if we only listen. But too often, we don’t tune in enough to hear what they have to say. Or if we do, we don’t trust them.

Maybe we did trust them once upon a time — but we’ve been burned.

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Pain May Be Inevitable — But Suffering Isn’t

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wavesYou may have heard this quote before: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”1

Sounds good, right? But when we’re the ones suffering, it feels anything but optional. And to suggest that we’re choosing to feel this way feels pretty insensitive.

So let’s take a closer look at what this saying really means.

What’s the difference between pain and suffering?

In life, it’s true that pain is inevitable. Every one of us will experience not only physical pain but also emotional pain many times throughout our lives. We will experience losses, rejections, and defeats, and they will hurt — there’s no getting around that. To suggest otherwise would be to deny our experiences and our feelings, and no real good comes from denial. (We may push those feelings down in one place, but they’ll pop back up in another — in our relationships, in our physical health, or somewhere else.) Read More

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  1. While there is some debate about the origin of this quote, it’s often attributed to Japanese author and marathon runner Haruki Murakami: Murakami, Haruki (2009). What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, New York: Vintage Books, p. VII. ↩