Welcome to More Than Mindfulness with Lifehousefit.com. I’m Becky Moller, and I’m so excited to be able to offer you this free weekly content. We’ve been running our in-person fitness, mindfulness and meditation studio in Salem, UT for about a year now. We’ve got so many tips, tools, and strategies we’d love to share with you to help you live your best life without adding any to-dos to your checklist.
Mindfulness and meditation is more about HOW you live in your body and move through life than adding more tasks to what you do on a day-to-day basis. So…my goal with this weekly content is to deliver something short and sweet that actually alters the way you experience your week and helps you engage with life in the most optimal, healthy, and fulfilling ways.
We’re just getting started, so if you like what you hear and it’s helpful, give us a thumbs up and share us with your friends. If you have questions, send us an email at info@lifehousefit.com. If you want to get these mindfulness tips each week, we’d love to have you opt-in to our mailing list here.
So today I just want to introduce you to mindfulness and meditation, because this might be completely new to some of you. Some of you might think meditation is some weird thing only yoga people do, or that you have to have dreadlocks or not shave your armpits to be into meditation, but I’m here to tell you that meditation and mindfulness is about the simplest, most natural way you can learn to move through life. In fact, I would even say that you are innately wired to move through life in a meditative and mindful way, that you were born with this ability. So, we are just trying to help you relearn something you already know how to do. Something you’ve lost along the way that can bring you back into this beautiful alignment with the very best that is within you.
So, today we are going to use very simple meditation and mindfulness to kind of tap into and bring awareness to the different parts of our identity. Now this is not meant to be comprehensive–certainly there a multitude of ways that we can define ourselves and different aspects of identity. But for our purposes, we are going to focus in on 4 aspects of the Self. These are: mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual.
Now as we move through these, I am going to actually have you use meditation as we go. Why do we use meditation? Because meditation allows us to tap into this deeper self, this Higher wisdom that’s available to us through this meditative state. We find this state by dropping into the body. When I ask you to drop into the body, here’s what that means.
- Close the eyes, soften the gaze.
- Deepen the breath
- Clear the mind–bring the focus into the breath and the experience of the body.
With eyes closed, you might take 3 deep slow breaths, sending the breath all the way down to the space just below your belly button. Try to even out the inhale and the exhale, and to find a pause at the top of the breath, and the bottom of the breath. Allow the breath to clear the mind, to let your total focus simply follow the breath.
See how that feels? One of my favorite things about a mindful approach to meditation is that it’s so simple. It’s so easy! Even ONE conscious breath can be a meditation, can shift the way I am moving through a moment.
So remember this is a PRACTICE–not a destination. We’re building muscle memory, so when we’re faced with a challenge, a difficulty, a stress, we intuitively turn to these simple tools that help us move through whatever we are experiencing in a more skillful, mindful way.
So let’s use this space we’ve created to bring some awareness and curiosity to these different aspects of self. And what I really want you to explore and consider, is:
Which part of you is driving in your life right now?
Mental?
You might consider how much of your day you spend lost in thought? How often are you physically in one place, but in your mind you are somewhere far away? You might even go back to the moment you woke up this morning and try to notice what happened in your mind? Did a whole set of narratives, troubles, worries, and anxieties flood in? Can you turn off your mind when you want to? Are you using your mind in conscious and skillful ways? Or is your mind using you?
Emotional?
If you could name the predominant emotional energy that flows through your life right now, what would it be? Do you feel you understand this emotion? Do you know where it comes from? Do you know what to do with it? How much of your life do you find yourself reacting to strong emotions, rather than wisely responding?
Physical?
You might allow yourself to consider how much your physical sense of self is driving your life right now. Maybe you suffer from chronic pain and feel trapped by it. Perhaps you struggle with body anxiety, stress, and comparison–constantly feeling unsettled about what you look like, how your body feels in your clothes, how your body compares to others. Is your day-to-day existence an ongoing wrestle with appetites or physical urges that pull you into self-defeating behaviors that limit you or cause harm to yourself or others?
Spiritual?
First and foremost, you might allow yourself to explore and consider what your spiritual Self means to you? Do you picture yourself in religious settings? Maybe you are drawing a complete blank. Maybe there is even a sense of rejection, trauma, betrayal, or skepticism at the thought of a spiritual Self.
You might open your mind and expand your idea of spirituality as an essential element of your human experience–even the essence of who you truly are. Perhaps consider the last time you felt deeply connected, at peace, whole, and safe. Maybe you were at a beloved place from your childhood, maybe a beautiful spot in nature. Maybe you were with somebody you loved.
See if you can bring awareness to the space around your heart. Feel a warmth there, a tingling sensation. Sense into your fingertips and toes, feel a sense of aliveness, an energy that lives within you. Recognize this energy as the awareness that lives inside your body. You might even name this aliveness as your spiritual Self: the essence of who you are, beyond thought, beyond emotion, beyond physicality. Recognize this place of peace, this spiritual center, as your home, as your connection to your Highest Self, and to a Higher Power. This is the place within you that organically aligns you with wise action; that intuitively knows your next right step.
How much of your life are you living here?
Okay, so are you ready for your assignment this week? This week, I want you to practice awareness of all these aspects of yourself. I want you to just notice where you like to hang out, which part of you likes to take the wheel and be the driver. No judgment, no stress, just noticing. What’s happening inside of me? Which part is driving me day to day?
And I want you to maybe consider the idea that this spiritual essence is really the part that you want driving. And that finding this part of you, this spiritual center, is really a skillful integration of all your other parts–that each part of you is divinely designed to help you come back to your spiritual home.
The more aware you are of what is happening mentally, emotionally, and physically in each moment…the more capable you are of actually creating the space to let your spiritual center take the lead.
So let’s practice! And as we observe with loving compassion, let’s remember that a mindful pause, even as simple as one conscious breath, can be your most direct pathway back to the most powerful part of your multi-faceted Self.
