Mindfulness is often called moment-to-moment awareness – it helps us to come back to ourselves, calm our emotions, be peaceful, happy and more able to deal with all that daily life throws at us.
Sounds Great! Does Mindfulness appeal to you? Can you see yourself practicing mindfulness everyday to help acheive your goals and reach your potential?
How do you practice mindfulness by the way?
Fran Curry had the unique opportunity to chat to a real expert on the show recently. Jack Black is author of ‘Mindstore – The Classic Personal Development Program’ and travelled to Ireland last month from his native Scotland for a series of workshops on the topic.
Black tells us that ‘being happy, confident and successful in life is not luck but a skill. It needs to be learned, then practiced.
Thirty years ago, Jack Black collapsed at the barbers. He was ‘stressed out of his head’. He came across whats now known as mindfulness – meditation, learning how to slow your brain down and when you do that, you access more creative thinking patterns!
He explains that there are different levels of mindfulness from deep meditation phases to simply stepping back from life for a moment and be aware of what we are doing, how we are feeling and what we are thinking about.
Being positive means that you stand out – and who could cope with that? We like to ‘be like everyone else’ and moan and groan about the usual things – the weather, money, work.
We are all born positive – negetivity is a learned behaviour. Babies and small children believe that they can do whatever they like, that they can achieve anything – they learn to crawl, walk, talk, climb. They want to be astronauts, superman, kings and princesses when they grow up….
Then what happened?
When the alarm goes off in the morning, that jarring sound settles as a deep groan in the pit of our stomach.
Black suggests that we have a positive attitude going to bed – tell yourself that you are looking forward to the day ahead.
On every to-do list at the beginning of every week, there are problems to resolve. If we dont develop the right attitude to that, then life can strangle you!
Here’s where you can choose to step back and focus on the positive aspects of your list. Acknowledge that everyone in the world has problems that they need to resolve every day.
So, who do you admire in the world?
Black acknowledges that they are probably the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, Barrack Obama…
They all share characteristics that we admire and aspire to!
- Positive Attitude
- Bags of Energy!
- They are Futurists! – something in their mind is inspiring then and they can’t wait to get to it!
- They are Whole-Brain thinkers – they are not just left brain logical analysts, but also right-brained, creative, fanciful. – its what gives them that edge!
We have all grown up with the notion that we are here to fulfil some life’s purpose. But in truth, most of us never find out what that is – except to be happy!
All around us, there is an institutional negetivity – big companies closing, Brexit, Crises in healthcare and crime – all causing us anxiety in high daily doses.
To be able to find a resource within ourselves is so important – looking outward is not necessarily going to help us. .
Every day, lets try and take a minute…. breathe ….. and re-boot!
Eva Hartigan
