Looking for ways to quell your anxiety or dissipate depression? Need some simple techniques to deal with other difficult emotions?
Working from her own personal experiences and those of her clients, Barrie has written an incredibly useful guide for implementing mindfulness throughout your day.
Each time I’ve read it, I’ve gained new insights into how I’m interpreting the world and how those stories are keeping me from achieving the outcomes I desire. I’ve come away with new ideas for changes I’m implementing to increase the joy and happiness in my life.
In The Beginning
“The purpose of this book is to give you some tools to win back control of your thoughts and emotions so that you can release anxiety and fear to enjoy a richer, healthier, more conscious life.”
The book begins with some definitions of mindfulness and how it contrasts with the usual mindlessness of our days.
You begin to understand how much of your days are filled with thoughts tied to your interpretations of the past or stories you’re making up about the future.
You see the power of bringing yourself back into the present moment.
“Mindfulness is a practice, not a destination. The journey of daily practice is the destination. As with any practice, the more you work at it, the more proficient you become.”
Barrie acknowledges that you probably don’t live in a cave or monastery so being mindful 24/7 is practically impossible. Everyone gets distracted much of the day. That’s OK. You’re human.
The point of the book is to show you how to sneak a little mindfulness into almost everything you do.
Daily Meditation
Yes, you’re going to hear it again: Daily meditation is pretty darned powerful.
Like many other aspects of a mindfulness practice, you can barely feel the difference each day. You wonder if it’s really worth it. And just when you’re about to give up, something happens in your day and you notice that you handled it differently, with more ease. You felt calmer. That’s your mindfulness and meditation practice paying off.
The book takes you through the basic steps of beginning your own meditation practice. Being realistic, it also acknowledges that your monkey mind will drive you crazy with thoughts of the past and future.
The monkey makes it difficult to sit still for any period of time. You can train that little rogue, just like a dog. Barrie helps with that too.
Visualization
Visualization has been used for decades to enhance performance for top athletes. It’s the process of seeing and feeling all the detailed steps that lead to a desired outcome in your mind before physically acting them out.
This can be applied to any aspect of your life: work, relationships, dealing with illness or stress, artistic endeavors, etc.
Barrie walks you through the specific steps to use visualization to transform negative outcomes into positive ones. This process also relieves your mind of the worry, anxiety or depression about an unknown future by empowering you to create the future you want.
“Visualization is a creative method for being fully present while defining and picturing the future. It is carefully crafted, highly focused daydreaming with specific intent.”
Mindful Fitness
The type of physical activity that’s good for you is the one that you’ll actually do on a regular basis.
So many people associate exercise with a variety of negatives that make it mentally, and therefore physically, difficult to practice. What if you could change your feelings about exercise by changing the way you approach it?
What if exercise were simply another opportunity to practice mindfulness?
“Once you remove judgment, attachments, and fear from the equation, fitness can be something to look forward to rather than an obligation you dread.”
As an expert in developing new habits (check out her book: Sticky Habits and her Sticky Habits course), Barrie shows you the steps to create a new fitness habit that works with your schedule and your needs.
While any activity can be practiced mindfully, she discusses yoga (my favorite), ballet, tai chi and qigong more specifically.
Mindful Journaling
Although there are many ways that technology has made our lives a little better, I’m a firm believer that journaling is not one of them.
For me, writing articles and pieces meant for others is easier on a computer. But when I journal or otherwise process thoughts and emotions for myself, a pen and paper are the only way to go.
Whenever I’ve tried to journal on a computer, my thoughts remain blocked. But the process of physically writing out the words on paper seems to pull the thoughts through my mind, allowing me to see them in a new light. It allows my brain and my heart to work together to move me past the usual loops I get caught in. I gain new insights, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Committing to a practice of daily journaling will help you harness the chattering “monkey mind” and detach from your thoughts and feelings as you release them on to your page.”
There are no right or wrong ways to journal. In the book, Barrie reviews the details of a variety of approaches like:
- Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: Writing three pages of stream of consciousness every morning
- Passion journaling: Throughout your day, notice and write about things that make you feel great
- Gratitude journaling: Every day, write about every little thing you’re grateful for. I’ve filled a few notebooks with this type of journaling. Each day, I challenge myself to list at least ten things I’m grateful for, without repeating anything I’ve written previously. Some days it’s hard to come up with ten. Other days I go on for pages. And I always feel better when I’m done.
- Meditation journaling: Keep notes about what you notice during your meditation practice. It may be difficult to notice how the practice helps unless you notice and record the daily nuances.
Mindfulness Every Day
“How can you be happy now when there’s so much to worry about? How can you be happy, even when you really want to, when you feel so darned tired, overwhelmed and stressed out? There is only one way, and that is to practice presence in everything you do. You don’t need to fix or change anything. Just be present.”
It’s impossible to be mindful all the time. Life gets crazy and things go sideways. There’s too much that you can’t control.
A mindfulness practice sprinkled throughout your day can help to bring you back to your center. It can help you to focus on what’s truly important. It can help you break the attachments you were previously unaware of that created so much pain for you.
Many people won’t start something new because they fear they can’t be perfect at it. I love how Barrie is always gentle, knowing where you’ll drift back into mindlessness and tenderly bringing you back to a more mindful state.
“You’re giving yourself permission to release your grasp on the past and the future, in the unconscious hope you can alter or control them. Now you acknowledge the illusory nature of everything except this moment, which is perfect.”