Mindfulness is an ancient practice that is gaining popularity around the world. To summarise, mindfulness is becoming more and more of a way to stay centred in a busy and rapidly changing world.
Since we are constantly bombarded with information on a daily basis, from our smartphones and other screens, at work, and even in our own minds, cultivating a practice of mindfulness becomes a necessary part of staying sane.
There are many ways to practice mindfulness, from meditating to walking and many other practices in between. In this article, we’ll cover some of the few core lessons we can learn from being mindful, including how to create abundance in your life, purely by being present when doing some of your favourite activities.
Lessons We Can Learn From Being Mindful
1. Staying Present Helps You Cope With Stress
With so much stimulation from both our external and internal worlds, it can be easy to get caught up in anxious thoughts and feel constantly stressed. However, by starting to be mindful of our thoughts, we can start to distance ourselves from them, and realise that we are, in fact, not our thoughts.
For some people, being mindful can mean setting up a daily meditation or yoga practice, where the practitioner becomes aware of the breath with each movement, or while sitting still.
However, for many people finding this time in a day can be quite challenging, and in this way, we can bring mindfulness into everyday activities, like driving, cooking and walking. In this way, you can even be mindful when you work, as mindfulness really is just about being present.
Therefore, if we can stay present, we can learn a lot about ourselves, and not get stuck in habitual patterns of thinking.
2. Mindfulness Helps Cultivate Abundance
If we are mindful and present in each moment, we will start to see the opportunities around us more clearly.
Getting caught up in stress is a normal reaction to many situations that life throws at us. However, when we are stressed it is difficult to find solutions, especially when it comes to stressing about money.
However, as a simple example, being mindful can actually help you to bring more financial abundance into your life. Firstly, this is because being mindful will help you to appreciate everything you do have already. Secondly, being mindful can actually create more opportunities for financial gain, for example, by turning something as simple as watching your favourite sports into an extra stream of income by backing the winner.
Interestingly, being present in online gaming is absolutely critical, as you need to be aware of various factors. In a sports betting scenario, this would mean being aware of ongoing score changes and stats, as well as all of the psychological influences on players and how they play the game.
In fact, being present can help with a range of other endeavours such as sales, where being more present could help you be more aware of your customer’s pain points and help to offer them a better solution to their problems.
3. Mindfulness Can Help Us Help Each Other
How often have you been so caught up in your own busy schedule that you don’t even think about anyone else? This happens and it is completely normal, especially in a world where we’re so often spending time looking down at our phones and not around us.
By being mindful, we can not only help ease our stress or invite more financial abundance into our lives, but can also be more of service to others. In fact, global events often remind us that we are all interconnected, so being present to your own thoughts and feelings can actually help you to make everyone else’s lives around you better too.
For example, being present can help you be more aware of how you behave in your relationships, and addressing issues in those can have a vast influence on you and your family, as well as your friends and surrounding community.
If you stop to take the time to be aware, you will once again be able to see more opportunities for yourself, and more ways that you can improve your life for the better.
As we have covered in the article above, there are many lessons to be learnt from being mindful. Of course, there are many more, but we’ve included three core lessons above, which include being able to destress, be present to more opportunities for financial gain and to better serve yourself, your family and your community by being more in touch with what is going on in and around you.
It is not easy to flick a switch and become mindful overnight, but by just taking the time to be aware of your breath, your thoughts and emotions, even if it is just for a short period of time everyday, you are sure to notice great changes in your life.
In fact you can start right now by taking a step back from whatever you are doing to sit, close your eyes, take a breath and become aware of what you are thinking and feeling, even if it is just for a moment.
