6 daily mindful activities that will change your day
2 Mar, 2023
6 daily mindful activities that will change your day…
Daily mindful activities are powerful, and they may not be as challenging to implement as we might think.
Mindfulness lives on the other side of hurrying and multitasking. And it has the power to eradicate agitation, judgment or frustration. Within its practice is calm, curiosity, and appreciation for the processes and experiences in our life.
To me, mindfulness wrings out my own mental, and spiritual cloth. It gets rid of the excess that is keeping me from functioning productively. It brings me back to a kind innocence, and allows me to not only deal with what I may need to more effectively, but it also turns things that may have been causing me stress into opportunities for self love, and for genuine interest.
Life is busy, and it has the tendency to sometimes get away from us. But, if we have a few moments of daily mindful activities built into our day, it’ll be easier for us to get the time where we can take these moments to wring out, and refill; to connect and recharge…. So, let’s get some ideas flowing 🙂
1) start every morning with a mindful experience
A daily practice is powerful. And so is the freshness of our thoughts as we awaken to a new day. After a nights sleep, our mind is primed to see things from a mindful standpoint. So why not take advantage of that soft morning openness, and implement a small mindful event into your morning.
You can choose to make an activity that you already normally do mindful. It is just the way you step into the task that will change it from a chore to a mindful practice.
Maybe it’s making your morning tea, maybe it’s those few minutes while you drink your tea or prepare and eat your breakfast, or maybe it’s getting things ready for the day. What the actual event is, is rather irrelevant. It only matters that you give it your full open attention and interest, and that you do it without judgment. It must be noted however, that even with the best intentions, if we have not alloted and made the time available for ourselves to do something without the need to hurry, mindfulness will be a great challenge. So take into consideration the preparation for the time you’ll have available.
2) prepare and eat something nice and fulfilling daily
This meal doesn’t have to be fancy, pricy, or extravagant. It merely needs to be something that you enjoy, and that you can take the time to get ready for yourself for when you’ll need it. Sometimes honestly, the most ‘boring’ meal can be really quite delightful if mindful preparation time was put into getting it ready. Every weekend for my work shift, I make myself the most amazing pb & j.
This meal is certainly nothing fancy, but I take the time to make it just the way I like it with extra jam and peanut butter right to the edges. And just by that virtue of preparing something for myself, it is exactly what I need in the middle of my shift. And it is a mindful experience making and eating it, that I look forward to. In taking the time to prepare what will sustain you, you are wordlessly reminding yourself that you are worth it. And enjoying the small things inevitably multiplies our enjoyment time in our life 🙂
3) acknowledge and cultivate something that you love
It’s easy to get into the ‘survival mode’ of life. We are busy people. So we get done what is absolutely imperative in life, and then when we have any extra time, we turn ourselves off, or even worse, we spend the time we have on something that is actively draining on our already drained selves. It becomes a defeating cycle. And we so deserve a little bit more than survival mode.
So, take some time to think of something that excites you. Or of something that has excited you. Search for a topic or endeavor that you have always wanted to give a bit of your energy to. When you find it, acknowledge it. And then come up with a way to give a little of its energy to yourself.
It could be something that you choose to do everyday, or it could be weekly or monthly. It’s not the time it will take that is important. It’s the energy that having it in your life give you. Maybe it’s an interest in a certain topic. You could get a book on it. Maybe it’s a sport you’ve always been curious about. You could look up recreational teams in your area. Or you could just take some time to learn more about the sport. Being open to and curious about something is powerful. It’s rejeuvenating. And it’s so much fun.
4) take a deep breath – daily mindful activities
No matter how many times i tell myself (and others lol) how powerful and easy it is to take some mindful breaths throughout the day, I always forget (until I remember) that a breath would help me right now! A deep, mindful breath is almost always an option during our days, and it almost always can help us.
So actually schedule some deep breaths into the day. I personally try to add them into the beginning of every break I take, every meal, and every time I get a feeling of frustration or anxiety. A mindful breath is powerful. Whenever you think of it, breathe. And remind your friends too 🙂
5) take time to understand the way you’re feeling
An imperative aspect of mindfulness is that we do not judge, and that we remain curious and kind.
We can sometimes have very complex relationships with our own feelings and emotions. But, it is important to remember that we deserve to have ourselves as our own advocate always. It doesn’t mean that you have to get wrapped up in things in a way that might be unproductive, or unhealthy, but, if you feel something, remember that you deserve to feel it. And that you will likely get through challenges quicker and easier, if you know that you are your own ally.
I truly believe that there is no such thing as ‘overreacting’. There is reacting, and there is overwhelm. And we all have the right to feel things the way that we feel them. A great addition to mindfully experiencing your emotions, is take the time to write down what you are feeling. When we give ourselves this time and personal respect, the likelihood of things excavating into something uncomfortable or out of control just might lessen naturally as well.
6) schedule some quiet time in your daily mindful activities
It seems that we are becoming more and more afraid of silence. But we deserve it, and it can be massively refilling. If we allow ourselves to get past the discomfort that might be related to the fact that silence is not often part of our life, we might just experience the benefits of a simply quiet, and mindful bit of time.
It doesn’t have to be a long time for us to gather some peace from a bit of time without the incessant sounds that almost always seems to be part of our day either. Maybe instead of cooking dinner to a podcast, or having a bath with your favorite music in the background, you could give your ears and mind a little break from that stimulation. We don’t realise how much we are processing so often through our day. It is a kind and powerful thing to just let our mind go freestyle from time to time. There’s a reason we have our greatest ideas in the shower. And mindfully stepping away from all the information that we are processing is part of it.
Conclusion
It’s a good thing to remind yourself how to see the beauty within the mundane. Making some time for mindfulness has the power to do just that. Give it a try and see how it feels. It might just surprise you.
Have a great week,
Lyndsay