Living With Intention

The virtues of being Mindful ​

What is a purposeful life?   If you are not living a purposeful life, what kind of life are you living?  Is it accidental, unintentional, or does it seem at times as other forces are influencing what you do on a daily basis?  Do you get to decide how you think, feel, and behave every day or do you feel less in control of who you are in the moments that pass throughout the day?    Are you driving the car or are you letting the car take you where it wants to go?  Sometimes it can seem that the car takes us away and that we somehow magically arrive at our destination as we seemingly detach from the driving experience as we are in the process of driving.  That sounds a bit silly but when you stop to think about this for a second, I bet you can think of several times when maybe you adopted a more passive role in your life and waited for things to happen rather than taking the initiative to make things happen the way you wanted or intended.  

Living a purposeful life starts with being in the moment and being mindful of your thoughts and feelings.  Being in the moment is simply focusing on the here-and-now.  It is sometimes easier to describe mindfulness and being in the moment by first stating what it is not.  Mindfulness is not thinking about what will happen later today, tomorrow, or later this week.  It is not spending hours of the day trolling through social media, texts, and email on your computer or cell phone.  It is not worrying about if something bad will happen,  being in a rush to get to school, splitting your attention among multiple projects, or sitting on the couch while you unconsciously eat a pint of Rocky Road ice cream.   There is a growing movement in the field of mindfulness research that shows that being present and in the moment and being intensely focused and mindful of yourself and your immediate surroundings leads to reduced emotional and psychological distress and a greater sense of well-being.  (Carmody & Beer, 2008; Lau et al.,2006; )  

Being mindful is simply being aware of what is going on in and around you. It's being aware of thoughts and feelings, allowing them to occur, not attaching our judging them, but simply observing and experiencing them, as if you were watching them from the bank of a stream as they float by.    Mindfulness can be a form of meditation.  For thousands of years, meditation has been well documented in its effects of increasing a sense of well being and positive health.

Mindfulness has many practical purposes and has been used globally, in meditative circles, for centuries, if not millennia. Professionally, mindfulness has been utilized for decades in the treatment of anxiety, depression, stress management, PTSD, AD/HD, weight management, and chronic pain management.   Take anxiety for example.   When you worry about something, you are thinking about something you anticipate happening in the future. Some have referred to this as praying for what you don’t want.   You hope it doesn’t happen, but you worry that it might.  If the unpleasant thing does happen, that is unfortunate.  Hopefully you have taken active steps to minimize its effect on you.  If you spend hours or days worrying about it, you have essentially doubled your stress about it.  If it doesn’t and you continue to worry about it, you still have contributed to the stress in your life.  Your thoughts become fixated on the thing you choose to worry about, and you likely miss out on what is happening around you, at that moment  With mindfulness, you  choose what to do with your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  You can continue to fixate and ruminate about these thoughts.  You can try to ignore the thoughts.  Or, you can be mindful of the thoughts and feelings as they occur.  Keep reading for an example of mindfulness meditation.  

I believe that to first start living a purposeful life, one needs to truly be aware of what they value the most.  Many of my clients have told me that what is important to them, among other things, is their health, their career or academic achievements, family, exercise, leisure and recreational time, safety and security, spirituality, meaningful friendships and relationships, and emotional stability.   It is often what we value the most the guides our behavior.  Yet I think many people who aren’t living a purposeful life, often get de-railed or sidetracked from what is important to them.  This may be, in part, due to stress, competing demands, or other distractions that lead us in different directions than we intended.  

There are so many electronic devices, gadgets, and social media outlets that purport to help you get and stay organized, connect with others, and network with the world at large.  I'll be the first to admit that many of these devices and outlets do this very well.  Yet I wonder sometimes if the electronic revolution that keeps rolling on at break-neck speeds is truly enhancing our quality of life.  After all, we spend so much time planning for the future, connecting with others, organizing our busy schedules, and working harder at being successful, I wonder if we are missing what is happening right now, in the present moment, within ourselves.  Are we failing to appreciate the here and now and all the wonderful potential things that happen in the moment.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”  .  

Example of Mindfulness
I was driving home the other evening after a long day of torrential rain.  The clouds in the west were starting to break up just as the sun was setting.  It looked like the sky was on fire as the sun reflected beneath the storm clouds.  There were wonderful hues of orange, lavender, red, pink, yellow, and orange. I had just finished a very busy and rather hectic day in the office and my mind was still racing with the events of the day.  Yet this moment so strongly captured my attention that I had to pull the car over and soak in the moment.  In that moment, it felt good to just be.

At that moment I became intensely focused on the beautiful sight in front of me.  I started to focus simply on my breathing.  I had been listening to some soft music in the car that simply became background noise that I did not let interfere with what quickly evolved into a very mindful experience for me.  I continued to simply focus on my breathing and the visual masterpiece in front of me.  Thoughts of the day passed through my mind.  I did not become disturbed or irritated with this.  I simply and casually observed my thoughts and gradually brought my attention back to my breathing and to the visually stunning colors in front of me.  I continued to remain in this scene for many minutes. As those minutes passed, I noticed the tension in my body, casually observing and noticing while continuing to breath.  I noticed sounds around me.  I did not let them distract me and gradually and effortlessly returned my attention on what and where I wanted to focus.   I began to feel more calm and peaceful in the moment and generally felt a sense of general well being begin to grow within me.   As the sun began to diminish and the sight began to fade, I returned to my surroundings in my car and proceeded to continue my journey  home.   Yet in doing so, I continued to be very focused on what was around me as I resumed my breathing in an uninterrupted way.

This experience reminded me that often enough, the more things we have in our life that purport to improve the quality of our lives, only distract us from being more centered and focused on what is important, ourselves and our overall well-being.  Returning to what is important, and being mindful in the present moment, helped me to reduce background stress, quiet anxiety and stress- filled thinking, and helped me to foster and inner peace that I think is so elusive today in not just my life, but most people’s lives that exist in the very busy and frantic world of today.