Mindfulness is "all about being able to direct and redirect your attention." I'm sure you've done this before, Tara. It just has a name for it now. All those times in the forest or smoking a cigarette late at night or early in the morning, depending on your perspective.
Mindfulness is a practice of focusing on what is happening right at that second, on only one thing that is going on. Your heartbeat. The sound of the wind in the trees. A song playing through your speakers. The feeling of petting your cat. Pick one. Practice it. It can be the same or different focus each time you do it. It's supposed to last for five minutes, so if you do music, pick a long song.
I was given this worksheet to fill out so we could talk about it at group. Obviously you don't need to do that, but I think mindfulness is the most important thing you could ever learn. After I got more used to it, I started doing it all the time. Once, at theatre after school, there was so much going on and then something with my best friend and I couldn't breathe. I left dinner early to go sit in the costume closet. I thought I was going to have an anxiety attack, but I focused on each breath that I took for a few minutes, and I calmed down.
These are the questions we got:
-What I'm being mindful of:
-What I observed:
-Describe what you observed and what you noticed:
-What I thought about:
-What I felt/what emotions were noticed:
-Did your mind drift to other things?
-If yes, to what?
-Could you bring your mind back to the thing you were being mindful of?
-Did you stay non-judgmental?
-If not, what things did you become judgmental about?
The key of mindfulness is remaining nonjudgmental. No thinking about your self-criticisms, about other people's shortcomings in your life. Your mind may drift, but try to practice bringing it back to whatever you chose to focus on. (Your mind will probably drift a lot. Five minutes feels like a long time when you're centering on only one sense. That's okay. Just practice.)
Hopefully this can be a release for some anxiety, or at least some of the smaller anxiety.
