The Happy Me Project by Matthews Holly;

Author:Matthews, Holly;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

#31

Mindful AF

Do you ever feel that some words come out of nowhere and suddenly you see them dropped into conversation on TV chat shows and in news articles, and you’re just expected to know what they mean? ‘Mindfulness’ feels like one of those words. I mean, don’t get me wrong, as you’re reading this book there’s a good chance you’ve come across the concept of mindfulness before, but I always find it interesting how suddenly something takes hold and becomes the buzz word of the moment.

Yet when things become a bit more mainstream (which in this case is excellent progress), their true meaning can often get watered down, confused and lost. A friend of mine recently told me about the ‘mindfulness room’ that had been created at his workplace. That sounds like a very forward-thinking employer, you may be thinking, but the problem was that nobody knew what the hell mindfulness was and so it was just, well, a room (and an empty one at that!).

Mindfulness can be originally traced back to the East and has roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. In more recent years, it has made its way across to the West and more secular folks have taken its lessons and extracted the religion. When I discuss mindfulness in this chapter I mean the more Western definition, but you can add your own religious take on it too (in the same way you can to all aspects of your life).

To put it simply, mindfulness is the practice of being in the present moment, of being mindful of your surroundings, feelings and the current time. When it’s stripped back like that and put in such simple terms you would be forgiven for thinking, ‘Well we do that without any help, don’t we?’ And the answer would be, sadly, ‘No’.

We spend an inordinate amount of our time living in either the past or the future. Looking longingly back to times we miss or moments we regret, or speeding towards a future self. It is pretty rare that we really stay present in the now.

When I was 20, I went to drama school (I was trying to be taken seriously as an actor, dahling), where I did a mindfulness lesson during which the teacher gave me the book The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle (Namaste Publishing, 1997). This is about how living in the present moment is the path to happiness and enlightenment, whereas living in the past or future gets in the way of genuine happiness.

Twenty-year-old me flicked through this book with the dismissiveness of youth and continued to live heavily in my future self. I was so desperate to get to the next stage of my life that the idea of being in that present moment was abhorrent to me. Having re-read Tolle’s book many times since then, I understand it more deeply now.

I like to think about mindfulness as the practice of checking in with myself, of noticing how I feel in my mind and my body.

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