The Feel of Mindfulness
Hello and Happy Monday! Hopefully your week is off to a good start and you’re feeling positive… However, how many of us anticipate this to be the case after a restful weekend but we still feel drained and unprepared for the work week to start? That is related to today’s topic. Being mindful around our emotions. We’ve been discussing how mindfulness can be used as an anchor to help us calm our minds and focus on the present, so now it’s time to discuss the other use of mindfulness: Understanding our emotions. The more common term for it is introspection. Definition of introspection being: the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes.
This post will be shorter than my others, only because I want to draw your attention to this article on introspection and self-awareness: The Right Way to be Introspective (Yes, There's a Wrong Way)
I contemplated summarizing this article in this post, but it’s only 4 pages long and the entire piece is full of rich and useful information. Here are the highlights: “We can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started… Introspection can cloud and confuse our self-perceptions, unleashing a host of unintended consequences… Asking “why?” in one study appeared to cause the participants to fixate on their problems instead of moving forward…“Why” questions trap us in our past; “what” questions help us create a better future.”
Being mindful of our emotions is an extremely helpful tool in living a life of harmony and mindfulness. Our emotions are guided by our thoughts and impact how we behave and react to in our day to day lives. However, emotions are also difficult to decipher, as we tend to try and go with the first feeling we can think of or first feeling we would associate as appropriate for the situation. Next week, we will dive deeper into this topic, but for now- please click the link above and give the article a read on the correct ways to self-reflect and introspect.
Be well and take care. Enjoy your week and I hope your mindfulness practices are helping make life a bit more peaceful. As always, feel free to leave comments or questions!
-James