Author Archive | Therese Sheedy

Are you searching for the perfect world?

By Therese Sheedy on May 18, 2014 in Mindful Musings

When we live in our heads we often have conversations about how things ‘should’ be.

We are always striving towards the perfect – the perfect relationship, the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect suburb; being the perfect parent, having the perfect body, perfect, perfect, perfect.

We think that if we strive for perfection or if we are perfect then things will be ok. My relationship will survive, the kids will go well at school, I won’t lose my job.

Striving for perfection narrows our tolerance toward difference. It can mean we don’t cope with change, or anything that doesn’t fit in to our ‘perfect’ world scenario.

We can relentlessly judge others and ourselves. We compare what we have or what we are like to others, even though the comparison may not be accurate.

This persistent striving keeps us on edge, agitated, trying to control things, trying to create how things ‘should’ be, in order to be just ‘right’.

Have you noticed that no longer can we have a ‘good’ day, we are expected to have a ‘great’ day. No longer can we say that we feel good, we need to feel fantastic. Everyone is trying to perpetuate this image of perfection.

Mindfulness encourages us to simply be, to suspend judgment. To watch the world simply as it happens and unfolds before us. Not having to make it any way in particular just accept the way it is, and to also accept ourselves along with it.

We don’t have to close down options because we haven’t predetermined how things ‘should’ be. Mindful acceptance doesn’t mean resignation, it is an acknowledgement that an experience is here, in this moment. However, instead of letting thoughts and wants seize control of your life, mindfulness allows you, simply and compassionately, to observe rather than judge it, attack it, argue with it or try to disprove its validity.

By doing this it allows you to step outside the spiral of disappointment and negativity, giving you far greater control over how you respond to a situation.

This week’s Mindfulness challenge is to embrace the messiness that is life in the moment. Be accepting of the imperfections.

Notice when you are ‘shoulding’ on yourself or on life.

Notice when you feel uncomfortable because things look like they may go a bit different to the ‘plan’ you had in your head.

Be open and up for whatever life brings you, so you can tap into your strengths in return.

Notice when your mind brings up fears that keep you locked in the search for perfection. The fear of not coping. The fear of being rejected by others. The fear of not fitting in. The fear of not being good enough.

When you notice the fear you start to circumvent its power over you because you observe it and you name it. The need to control it will fade.

Give your story a name – “oh that’s my ‘I have to be perfect story’ or that’s my ‘I can’t lose story’ or perhaps it’s the ‘I’m an imposter story’.

Notice it, name it and then get in touch with what is really in front of you – the colour of the sky, the feel of clothes on your skin, your feet connected to the earth, the sounds in your present moment, and continue on with whatever this moment asks of you, not whatever the story in your head is demanding of you.

No need to judge, just be there with yourself and this messy thing we often call life and watch the awesomeness unfold!

Mindful in May

By Therese Sheedy on May 5, 2014 in Mindful Musings

With May upon us, and a change of seasons settling in, it seems to be a good time to reflect our mindfulness strategies we have explored so far this year.

Mindfulness is bringing an awareness to this present moment. A moment we have never come to before nor will we share again. This deliberate attention takes practice as our 21st Century minds are crowded with ideas, thoughts, problems, fantasies, hopes, dreams and pressures.

Just like learning any new task we will have moments when this is easy and moments when it just doesn’t work for us. Mindfulness asks us to bring a non-judgmental approach to our practice. To be gentle on ourselves when our minds go wandering and recognise that our thoughts and emotions are just a passing parade. We don’t need to get hooked into our thoughts or get stuck on any one of them. By tuning into our bodies, our senses and our experiences we learn that we have many sensations and not one needs to be given any more attention than the other. This takes patience and practice!

On our Mindfulness journey we started looking at bringing an awareness to autopilot in our daily lives by noticing when our mind starts to wander while we are performing everyday activities such as showering, brushing teeth, getting dressed, driving etc. and bringing it back to this present moment.

We used three breaths to punctuate the day, when washing hands, waiting for a meeting or an appointment, sitting in traffic, washing dishes. Mindful eating showed us that the first mouthful of a meal is a banquet. We are now noticing habits we had fallen in to and we release ourselves from their burden in habit releasing.

By tuning into touch in our world brings a gentleness to our connections with others.

Becoming aware of how we can create our own suffering by the way we process our world and focus on things that we don’t like, gives us a greater understanding of the power of our minds.

We decided to become more present in our conversations with others, and release the tension we hold in our bodies.

We are now noticing blue and other colours and also getting in touch with the child inside.

We noticed how our monkey minds time travel re-living the past and pre-living the future. Our world is full of motion and we started to bring our awareness to movement in our bodies and things around us.

Sometimes it’s good to sit in silence and notice the sounds around us. We can encourage silence into our lives by turning off electronic devices, not reading or talking or singing.

Becoming present we can notice transitions in our day, coming from one moment to the next and when we are present we can notice the unusual as well as how water flows around us.

Last week we learnt a cuppa meditation which of course can be adjusted to whenever you stop to drink.

All of these practices continue to bring us to this very moment, the only moment we really have. This practice sets us up to developing a regular meditation practice should we wish to try.

Another thing happening in May is a wonderful project here in Australia called Mindful in May.

By joining this project you can participate in daily meditations for the month of May as well as contribute to raising money for clean water in Ethiopia.

Research shows that daily meditation has great benefits. We can train our wandering mind to be more focussed, calm and centred.

By stopping daily you will gain clarity in your thinking and also become more connected with your environment and with people in your life.

By joining the cause you can become part of a community of like-minded others bringing more kindness, compassion and consciousness into the world.

Mindful Moments has set up a team in the Mindful in May project called “Mindful Moments in May”, if you would like to join us and raise funds for this great cause that would be great. So far we have been practising a body scan meditation.

If you prefer however, you may just want to revisit the mindfulness practices we have been implementing so far, continue to notice your own monkey mind, be gentle on yourself and look forward to our new challenge next week.

Whatever you do, remember to stay present, moment by moment.

Cuppa meditation

By Therese Sheedy on April 27, 2014 in Mindful Musings

What is meditation and why do it?

The Western world is slowly catching up to what the Eastern world has known for thousands of years – meditation does change things.

At one time meditation was for hippies or people with an alternative lifestyle. Nowadays it is easily accessible and has science to back it up.

As adults we spend a lot of time analysing, problem solving, judging life, basically living in our heads. This can cause no end of problems for us, most of all a sense of dis-ease with our daily environment and life.

Because of this busyness we tend to be running on overdrive and we lose enjoyment in daily tasks.

Over the past 16 weeks we have been building our mindfulness skills. Training our minds to be more present and hopefully you are noticing some of the benefits.

This week’s mindfulness challenge is to stop and place your full awareness, to give yourself some time-out, and to tune-in, to what you are actually doing.

Let’s try this with a simple task of making a cuppa – tea, coffee, whatever you drink. It won’t take you too long, but it will make a big difference.

Firstly take your attention to the breath entering your body. Notice the air as it first comes into your nose. Notice breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out.

Already your busy mind will be saying things like – “what are doing this for? you know how to breathe!” or maybe “okay that’s long enough, let’s get on with it”. This may sound silly, but trust me, these words or something similar will happen.

So, back to your breath. Now walk into the kitchen and notice your footsteps on the floor. Notice the movement of your legs getting you toward your cuppa.

As you lift the kettle, notice the feel of it in your hand, the warmth perhaps of the handle. Notice the weight when you pick it up.

As you turn on the tap feel the metal of the tap handle, listen to the water running, notice the change in sounds as the water fills the kettle and then notice the weight of the kettle getting heavier.

Plug the kettle in and listen to the sounds as the motor starts to heat the element and warm the water.

As you take the cup from the cupboard, listen to the sounds, feel the smoothness of the cup in your hand. If you use a spoon, notice how light reflects on the metal and the feel of the metal in your hand.

As you pour the water notice the teabag or coffee change with the heat of the water. If you use milk, bring your attention to opening the fridge and holding the milk in your hands. Then watch the milk pour into the cup and the colour in the cup change.

As you start to drink from the cup, feel its warmth in your hands. As you lift the cup notice how your body reacts with ease to what you want it to do. Feel the warm cup on your lips, the steam on your face.

If you don’t drink a hot drink, use this method with cool water or other liquids.

Taste the liquid one mouthful at a time. Feel it run down the throat.

Of course to do all this you will need to be silent. Resist the urge to talk to others, or use your phone while you wait for the kettle to boil and the tea to draw. Sit with a little bit of silence in this noisy world.

As you take this time to tune-in to having a cuppa or drink, your mind will wander, or try to hurry you up. Remember you are the master in charge of your mind, take the time out and enjoy a moment where you have no pressures, no demands, no expectations; just time, to enjoy the serenity of a cuppa, just for yourself. After all don’t you deserve it?!

Waterflow – soothing the agitated mind

By Therese Sheedy on April 21, 2014 in Mindful Musings

Have you ever noticed that water is everywhere? Water is our essence; it is our life force, our connection to plants and animals, to our environment, even to ourselves.

Water keeps us alive and is relevant to everything we do each day.

If you think about water and our planet, you will realize that the same precious water has been cycling through our ecological system for millions of years.

It is amazing how water can conform to the shape of any vessel, and even though it is transparent, it can take on a vast array of colours. In most spiritual traditions water symbolizes purity, clarity and calmness.

Yet in the western world we take water for granted. We waste it by letting taps run without attending to them, or we stand in the shower for ages while our minds go off problem solving, fantasizing, replaying conversations or hurts from the past. We use water for play, even art.

We rarely even think about this amazing life-giving force until there is no water like when we experience drought, or too much water such as floods or snow and ice. Perhaps there is a problem to solve like a leaking roof or a parched throat to soothe.

We are encouraged to drink water for our health and brain development. It helps keep us healthy and our minds clearer. We use it to cleanse our skin from germs and bacteria. We cook with it, clean with it. We wash our clothes, dishes, and cars, even our houses with it.

We know instinctively that water is healing. If our body is harmed we may wash a wound with water to cleanse it. When our minds are harmed or under pressure we may find a pool or pond and watch it, or stand in the shower and notice the therapeutic water run down our body, or soak in a tub to rejuvenate our spirit.

When we start to notice water we can tune in to its movement, its flow. Watching water can soothe an agitated mind.

Jan Chozen Bays suggests that when muddy water is poured into a glass and left to sit undisturbed, the dirt and the water separate. The mud sits in the bottom and the water becomes clear again. When we sit in mindfulness we can let our muddied mind become clearer, we need to resist from continually shaking things up by keeping our minds busy.

This week’s Mindfulness challenge is to notice water in your environment. Watch the fall and flow of water as it leaves the tap and runs into your glass or the sink.

Feel water on your skin. As the seasons are changing, tune in, notice water moving as the snow melts in the northern hemisphere and as the rains start in the southern hemisphere.

You may like to try a water meditation. Fill a bathtub with water, light a candle and gently lay in the soothing water, aware that the water is healing, soothing, restoring. You may even like to express your invitation to the water to help you, soothe your tired body and calm your busy mind. When you have finished give thanks to yourself for taking the opportunity to nourish yourself with water and thank the planet for providing you with this life-giving force.

Be present in your environment and notice where you can see, hear, feel, taste, sense water. In your home, your office, on your journeys around your city. Notice the flow, the sound, the reflection, the movement. Allow your mind to take in the environment here and now, for what it is, without wanting it to be any other way, and just see how water can connect you to other people, to the environment, to millions of years.

Letting go – declutter

By Therese Sheedy on April 14, 2014 in Mindful Musings

One of the things that keep us inert or in other words stuck, is clutter.

We can sit in the hurt, pain or loss of the past, not wanting the current reality to actually be true. This battle with the grief of letting go can often cause us to hold on to personal objects believing that they connect us to that time, that place or that person. Clutter keeps us stuck, in a past we don’t want to let go of because if we let go then the present becomes real!

This is avoidance at its best. Avoiding pain, loss and grief, and fear.

It’s as if an object holds some special power that keeps us connected to what once was or might be.

Sometimes our clutter is future focussed. I may wear or need that; I’ll hold on to it just in case, or one day this will be useful. Holding on to physical objects can help us think we are in control of an unknown future. As if we ‘know’ what is going to happen, or at least we hope what we want will happen.

Clutter can keep us stuck, in hoping for a future that will bring meaning; I can’t miss an opportunity, this is important – because I want it to be like this. After a while we become a slave to the clutter and ineffective in moving it. This is often driven by a fear of making a mistake. Fear of getting things wrong and being judged, both by ourselves and by others.

Notice your thoughts that come with your clutter. Are they linking you to the past? Someone who was important to you who may now be physically gone? Or even how you were in the past? Is your clutter driven by a busy mind and to do something about it seems overwhelming?

When someone dies or leaves us it is easy to hold on to everything. We can keep personal items as if we are holding them closer. We may not want to clean out wardrobes and remove their clothes. We may keep their room exactly how they left it. All of this is trying to send a message to our minds that the present will be just like it was in the past, which of course it isn’t and it can’t be.

Holding on to some things brings honour to the relationship you once had, however holding on to too many things devalues the important treasures of memories. A ring may hold special significance whereas if you keep the ring as well as newspapers, or piles of clothes, furniture you won’t use etc then the ring blends into all those other things and loses significance. Nothing becomes special it all becomes clutter.

Decluttering is not denying the person or the past, it isn’t getting rid of memories that are treasured because those aren’t clutter. Remember the more junk you keep as ‘memories’ the more you undervalue the important pieces of treasure that truly link you to that person, that time, that place.

Of course clutter can lead to hoarding which can create major psychological, social, physical and environmental problems.

By clearing out the clutter we begin to see what is important to us here and now. We can relieve ourselves of the anxiety and the depression that clutter and hoarding can bring.

So what clutter do you need to clean out?

Look at cleaning out the garage or that messy bottom drawer.

Get rid of old technologies. Old bathroom products can go. Clothes that you will never wear.

Tidy up your workspace so your mind can become creative and think clearer about what you need to address here and now. Time efficiency experts often use the approach to handle a piece of paper once. Make a decision about its importance and deal with it then and there. Of course this takes present moment thinking and prioritising to effectively execute this action.

Don’t be afraid to step into the now. Little by little the present will show you how resilient you actually are. In the present your values and strengths can dominate rather than your fears. But you need to be present, here, to see yourself manage and survive.

The pain of the past may always be there, and the fear of the future can be harnessed. We need learn to interact differently with both the past and the future by living in the present. By acknowledging and savouring the good parts and holding on to those special treasures that keep our memories and hopes vibrant and sacred.

Notice the unusual

By Therese Sheedy on April 7, 2014 in Mindful Musings

The other day I was stopped at traffic lights and I noticed a man dressed like a busker, baggy pants, check shirt, he was walking, I thought to cross the road with the pedestrian lights. Then I noticed a woman also dressed a little unusually also crossing at the lights walking toward him.

They stopped in the middle and faced the stopped traffic. The woman had a violin and started playing. The man pulled out three balls from his pocket and started juggling.

When the lights changed, they tipped their invisible hats to the cars and to each other, walked back to their respective sides and the traffic moved on.

I watch, enjoying the performance, grateful that someone had thought to bring a bit of cheer into my life. And then I wondered – how many people in the stopped traffic actually noticed these impromptu entertainers? How many people were either looking at their phones, or too busy in their heads worrying about life, like the traffic, to notice what was right in front of their noses?

The joy in watching this performance was quite incredible. I felt that positive emotion for the rest of the day. I can also feel it now by retelling the story, this is part of savouring.

So what? some might say.

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has spent many years researching the science behind positivity through the experience of positive emotion. She has found that science supports the connection between positive emotions and the presence of safety, satisfaction, success and good health.

She highlights that positivity is a means, not an end. A means to allowing us as humans to, what she refers to as, ‘Broaden and Build’. Fredrickson proposes that negative emotions, either from outside the self or from within, narrow our ideas about possibilities, and positive emotions do the opposite.

Positive emotions can broaden our ideas about what is possible, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts. We then increase the possibility to being creative, to explore and to learn, thus we broaden our minds and our hearts and build our resources to how we interact with our world.

Unfortunately we more than often, go about our daily lives so caught up in our heads, following our mental ‘to do’ lists, that we can miss opportunities to experience positivity, such as the impromptu traffic lights performance.

This week’s mindfulness challenge is to look for the unusual in your environment and notice your response to it. No need to explain to yourself why what is happening is happening, remember that mindfulness is about acceptance – it is the way it is.

The observing mind will pick up unusual connections, actions, sounds, sights and respond with curiosity and interest.

Notice buildings as you move around the city, or on your morning walk look for unusual things in your neighbourhood. Watch children or pets and notice their nuances as they haven’t been socialised into judgment.

Allow yourself the freedom from the prison of your mind to experience the world around you. You might be surprised that something unusual might be just waiting for you to notice and discover it!

I would love to hear what unusual delights you come across, so share it with us. If you can, take a picture to savour the moment, and share it with others.

Stay present, moment by moment!

You’re body is here – now where is your mind?

By Therese Sheedy on March 31, 2014 in Mindful Musings

Does life keep rolling along and some days you wish the world would stop for a while just so that you can catch up?

We often juggle demands from different domains – work, school, family, friends, community, sport. Each of these wanting us to be there, fully aware of what is happening, fully aware of the demands that they need met and fully committed.

Getting out the door in the mornings can be a chore when family demands are great and often charged with emotion.

Coming back home can also be a challenge when we have spent our time focused on others, deadlines, problems or being creative.

How do you successfully stop one area of your life and start another area without one ‘bleeding’ into the other?

Recently I have been reading Adam Fraser’s book The Third Space, where he talks about working with people on getting the small stuff in life right.

We are all happy to put time into the big things in life – planning a holiday, applying for that special job, organising a special occasion. Getting the big things right may take time and energy but they are often easier than getting the day-to-day things right. Things like teaching a child (even a pet) the ‘rules of the house’; organising with your partner who will be responsible for household chores or family duties; getting a family organised for school and then getting yourself through morning peak hour to arrive on time at work.

How do you ‘show up’ mentally for the demands of the day? Transitioning with ease from one demand to the next can be tricky.

This week’s challenge is to notice transition times. What space do you have available to you and then how will you use it?

Look at your drive either to or from work, school, sport or even to care for someone. Decide on two different points in the trip, use a landmark like a specific set of traffic lights or bridge or building. Up to that point allow yourself to think about where you are coming from. Firstly get into either your car or public transport and notice where you are. Notice that you are not at home anymore. Notice the colours, shapes, movement, textures of this new environment. Naturally as minds do, yours will wander. Encourage the wandering to focus back to where you have been (yes I know, mindfulness is about being present but minds don’t always know that!).

Then notice the first predetermined point in the journey. This is the point where you let go of thinking, worrying, replaying the past and get here and now! Stay focused using your senses including your breath. Breathe out. Then take a few slow breaths remembering to breathe out for as long as you can to mark the awareness.

At the next predetermined point , closer to your destination, start to prepare yourself for arriving. Imagine the people, the colours, the environment you are going in to. As you arrive again notice your surroundings, pay attention to how you are moving, what you are holding, the feel of your body in motion.

Coming home one of the transition strategies I use is to get changed out of my work clothes and into my house clothes fairly soon after I get home. My jewellery comes off and so does the day and all its demands. While changing I notice the room I am in, the air around me, touching the clothes, listening to the sounds of my home environment. Without judgment, expectation, I am here and so is my mind.

It is wonderful to consciously complete one activity and consciously start another. Being present in all domains of your life will bring so much more enjoyment and give you a chance to bring your skills, talents, strengths and love.

There is always a moment for you to stop one activity and start another, whether that be moving from one domain into the next, moving from travelling into a domain. The most important thing is to become aware of opportunities for transitions, even micro-transitions to occur.

The Sounds of Silence

By Therese Sheedy on March 24, 2014 in Mindful Musings

How often do you misunderstand something someone has said?
Perhaps you have witnessed someone cutting off a conversation by not letting someone else complete what they were saying? Perhaps you have done that yourself, eager to get your point across rather than listen to the other person finish?

Feeling you are not being heard can be isolating and hurtful in a relationship.

Quite often we can be doing something, like working on our computer or iPad or mobile phone, and think we can also be listening to someone talking to us.

All of our devices that supposedly connect us to the wider world can actually get in the way of us connecting with those around us. Each device brings new sounds for us to attune to and thereby tune out the world we actually live in.

We can be so busy with sound that we can lose our sense and relationship with silence.

We can miss the sounds that actually create and inhabit our world.

Recently I was sitting in a park with a client and we did a Soundscape Meditation. The park was situated close to a busy road which linked the suburbs to the city. There were children playing, birds twittering, planes overhead and trucks and cars moving along the road.

By closing our eyes and just listening, without judgment, just experiencing the many sounds that made up our environment, it created a whole new appreciation for the amazing way our community connects and operates. A connection that we are a part of.

If we don’t experience silence from our own minds as well as our created environment we actually reduce our own brain’s ability to be creative, as the height of brain activity occurs during the tiny pauses in between sounds. But we need to have those pauses.

Children are often brought up in a world full of noise. The sound of television creates a type of ‘white noise’ in the background and some research has shown that this can impact on how children identify sounds. This can affect children’s ability to listen and they can actually have delayed or impaired speech. When they are surrounded by sound all the time, they don’t attune to the voice of their caregivers, this means they don’t learn how to form the sounds of speech because the sounds are all blending into one.

This week’s Mindfulness Challenge has multiple layers.

Find times where you can be without language. Don’t talk, don’t sing, don’t listen to music, don’t read, don’t watch TV or film, enjoy the silence and the space in your mind. It doesn’t need to be for a long time; start with two minutes and work your way up.

Find a time during the day where you listen to your environment. If you can, find a spot where you won’t be interrupted, listen to the sounds of the present moment, without judging them to be either pleasant or unpleasant, wanted or unwanted.

I find I can tune in and hear nature when I least expect it. Perhaps you can immediately hear mechanical sounds like cars, trains, trucks or clocks, and then if you listen more closely, you can hear other sounds like animals, or children or adults.

Listen with your eyes closed and your mind open. Open up to noticing the connections in this amazing world. Notice the spaces in between sounds, the changes of sounds and sounds within sounds, layers upon layers.

When we are tired, stressed, angry, we tend to label sounds as noise and we can become agitated by persistent sounds. Sounds are just sounds, no value, they just are. They are here because we live in this world at this time.

Open your hearing by closing off language, your heart and your brain will welcome the change. Tune into the sounds of silence.

Poetry in Motion

By Therese Sheedy on March 17, 2014 in Mindful Musings

Mindfulness asks us to tune-in and pay attention and yet some of the things that happen everyday go past us unnoticed.

Take movement or motion for example. We often take movement for granted and go about our daily lives not noticing it unless it causes us difficulties like it hurts to move a certain way, or we notice a car moving so we wait to cross the road or perhaps something moves toward us quickly and our reflexes are sparked and we flinch or get out of the way.

Movement requires energy of some kind. Energy in the environment moves plants and trees. The rotation of the earth moves the ocean and our gravitational pull causing the moon to orbit the earth and other movements as a planet.

A mother notices the movement of a child within the womb and as movements change she is aware of the unborn child’s development and growth.

So many things move in our environment: water moves, cars and trains rock and roll, bicycles glide and our bodies move along with them.

Sometimes our energy is low and so our movements are laboured, stiff and difficult. It is times like these that we tend to slow down or even cease our movements.

Movements and energy can be closely connected to our emotional states. When we get the ‘can’t be bothered’ feeling, we can restrict our own movement. We become lethargic and can become housebound or bed-bound. Behaviour activation tells us that if we move even when we don’t feel like it, we will activate our energy source which in turn can impact on changing our emotional states.

This week’s Mindfulness Challenge is to notice and sense movement in your world.

Notice the movement of others. How they move when they walk, step or stand. When someone greets us they may move toward us, nod their head, wink their eye, reach out their hand or put their arms around us. Perhaps you can notice the movement of a child or an animal playing, stretching, scratching, preening.

Notice the movement of objects such as planes banking to turn, washing blowing on the line, flags fluttering, doors opening or closing, machinery operating, balls rolling or falling, even the cursor on a computer monitor.

Movement in the environment can be like poetry in motion – birds flying, trees swaying, frogs hopping, leaves rustling.

Sense your own movement – heart beating, body walking or reaching, hair moving, eyes blinking or turning to focus, breath moving in the body, legs lifting and carrying your body, arms swinging, the sway of your body, getting up from sitting or lying down, tingling sensations moving through your arms, legs, head standing your hairs on end.

Feel the flow of movements as you stretch and then release.

Notice how the mind doesn’t need to get consciously involved for us to move. You may notice that through the movement of our nose we can smell flowers, cooking, the sea.

Perhaps you can even notice the intention to move before it actually happens!

Of course the body moves when we dance or exercise and we can see our muscles flexing and contracting, working to support us. But we move in so many ways – getting up in the morning, getting dressed, eating, preparing food, domestic chores, getting to work, writing – notice the flow of the pen onto the paper. We ask our bodies to do so many complex tasks and don’t even notice it unless there is pain there preventing us from moving.

Watch with curiosity. You may remember the scene in the film American Beauty watching the bag move in the wind. Bring your ‘beginner’s mind’ to noticing movement and see this movement for the first time, without judgment or expectation. After all you have never been in this moment before and never before experienced this movement at this time.

Tune in to the energy that is needed to move us and our environment. Notice how we can harness that energy, how we contribute to that energy. Notice the links between ourselves, the environment and the world around us.

Past, present or future – where do you live?

By Therese Sheedy on March 10, 2014 in Mindful Musings

Cultivating a mindfulness practice can feel like reclaiming your life!

As we take back each moment we find we gain time, as time is no longer lost in the washing machine of thoughts in our minds.

Mindfulness brings us a sense of peace and calm as we resist getting caught up in the ‘monkey mind’ of swinging from past to future, only passing through the present if we touch base with it at all.

So where do you tend to live?

I ask this of my clients and also of my meditation students. I get them to observe where their minds tend to get stuck, ruminate, replay over and over again.

Some people live in the past. As human beings this has been a survival skill, to remember past events. It is what has kept us safe, knowing where danger previously hid.

In our 21st Century minds we no longer need to worry about tigers or wolves in the jungle ready to pounce and eat us. Our past thoughts tend to focus on disappointments, regrets or embarrassments. This can be excruciatingly painful as our focus on the past can keep us locked in certain memories, some ‘good’ that we believe we can never achieve again and so we have sadness, or some past memories which are traumatic or ‘bad’ where we can ruminate over what has caused us pain, harm, shame, grief or devastation.

Past thinking can be heavy, tiring, exhausting and can cause us to be lethargic, unmotivated, disengaged, tearful, depressed. We can lose interest in everyday activities that we previously enjoyed. We can become disconnected with family and friends. We can lose interest in keeping ourselves fit, healthy and energetic. We can develop self destructive behaviours which keep us feeling the shame, grief and harm.

The other side is living in the future, the ever evolving, unpredictable future. This was also a survival skill as we needed to know which watering hole was safe to drink at or where we thought a predator might be hiding. In today’s world vigilance can keep us from walking out in front of traffic, predicting what someone else might do or prevent us from eating rotten food which may give us food poisoning.

However our future thinking is often more about anticipating, fantasizing, musing, worrying. Predicting the future allows us to plan our holiday, what we are going to eat for dinner, a special occasion with family or friends or make that ‘to do’ list that we get so much pleasure out of checking off.

But predicting the future can also be exhausting, nerve-wracking. Questions can spin uncontrollably in our minds – have we covered all the bases for everything to go as planned, is everyone going to be safe, did we get enough food or drink, have we done enough on that proposal or studied enough for that test, what if I get it wrong, what if people don’t like me, what if they laugh at me ……. the list can go on. Worrying can lead to anxiety, creating a sense of dis-ease as we try to control every facet of our busy lives.

Our ‘monkey mind’ as Buddhists refer to it, can swing around in the past or around in the future, or if you are anything like me, it can swing both backwards and forwards!

Remember that happened…. well I won’t let that happen again so next time I will do …. or I never want to feel that way again so I am going to keep my (future) feelings safe …. and so it can go on and on and on.

So this week’s challenge is to notice where are you living or where the monkey is swinging.

Take some time during the day to just notice ‘what am I thinking about – is it something I am replaying from the past? Am I worrying or predicting the future?’ Where is my mind focussed?

Notice as you rise in the morning, in the shower, on your way to work, as you drop your children at school, while you are shopping, driving, sitting on a train, talking with others. There are so many moments in our day where we can just stop, notice where our mind is at, refocus on the here and now and continue with our lives.

If you notice your thoughts are in the present, you may remember a previous blog about ‘creating our own suffering’ are you bringing a non-judgmental approach. So am I here in my head, but I am judging whether I like or dislike what’s happening or how I feel?

Mindfulness – deliberately bringing present moment awareness without judgment.

See if you can train your ‘monkey mind’ to sit in this very moment, even for short moments at a time. Remember Mindfulness is a practice, we practice it over and over.

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