Mindfulness
Mindfulness
"Mindfulness is feeling the sun on your skin, feeling the salty tears rolling down your cheeks, feeling a ripple of frustration in your body. Mindfulness is experiencing both joy and misery as and when they occur...directing your friendly awareness to the here and now, at every moment. But mindfulness practice involves some effort and intentionality."
Eline Snel
- Founder of the Academy for Mindful Training in the Netherlands
Mindful is the opposite of mind full. However, mindfulness is not the emptying of the mind, the ability to stop thought, it is in fact a way of allowing thoughts to arrive and be, without instant judgement and over reaction.
Minds can be busy, they can take our thoughts away from the present and send us off to places in the past, the future and into a story all our own. Exhausting? It can be, which is why we need a way of dealing with the busyness of our minds. This is where mindfulness comes in - how we can begin to control our reactions and emotions.
Mindfulness is a method of mental training, training the mind to be in the present moment, to learn to appreciate being right here, right now.
Through mindfulness, we learn to recognise how we are feeling with kind, open curiosity to ourselves. With this awareness we are able to choose how to respond to our emotions. We can learn how to replace reactive responses with more helpful ways of responding. This understanding also allows us to be more compassionate to others and to be grateful for what we have.
Children are uniquely suited to benefit from mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness helps children on a journey to train their minds to have power over their thinking and their emotions. Through enhanced self-understanding and self-acceptance they can become happier, curious, more understanding people. At Mind Happy we believe that introducing children to mindfulness whilst they're still young is important for their well-being in the future. Habits formed early in life will inform behaviours in later life, and with mindfulness, we have the opportunity to give our children the habit of being peaceful, kind and accepting.
Being mindful is simple, but it’s not always easy. Mindfulness is not a relaxation technique, although it can make you feel more relaxed and it is not religious nor a therapy or an instant solution. Mindfulness is simple but it does require practice.
Through fun, practical teaching children begin to develop a basic understanding of how their brains work and that by training their minds they can train their brains to concentrate, to have empathy & kindness, relieve anxiety, improve sleep, reduce aggression, improve well-being & concentration and enhance imagination & creativity.
We all have this ability, it's innate, but we need to work at it. Using our friends the breath and body, we can still the mind and learn to - Pause, Breathe, Smile and Be.
Watch this short film about mindfulness...
How to be Mind Happy
Pause, Breathe, Smile & Be
