It takes considerable effort and commitment to practice mindfulness, and you are well on your way to incorporating mindfulness into your everyday life.
Mindfulness helps us become more aware of our thoughts and emotions, how they interact, and how they can affect our actions. By developing this awareness, we can also recognize the impermanence of our thoughts and emotions, which can help to reduce their intensity.
Mindfulness allows us to step back from our thoughts and emotions, without fighting them and getting stuck in negative spirals. We notice, acknowledge, then consciously decide what we want to do.
And even if/when we get too caught up to remember to step back from negative thoughts or emotions, we don’t get upset with ourselves – we don’t react to our reactivity. Instead, we notice, we learn, and we continue to grow.
Mindfulness empowers us to cultivate the inner strength needed to stay composed and resolute in critical situations, even when faced with danger or grappling with unsettling thoughts and emotions. It fortifies our resilience, preparing us to face life’s challenges head-on.
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SUMMARY AND RECAP
Here’s a quick review of what we’ve learned. This page can serve as an index to bookmark in your browser and quickly reassess lessons and practices whenever you need.
- Explored the concept of responding to our internal experiences, whether pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, with equal interest and non-reactivity (equanimity).
- By cultivating equanimity in our daily lives, we increase our capacity to respond to difficult moments or situations in more skillful or appropriate ways, helping us to feel a greater sense of well-being, resilience and control over our lives.
- Guided Practices: Equanimity Practice
- Daily Practice: Moment of Challenge Practice, Mindful Pause
- Weekly Practice Sheet
CONTINUING YOUR PRACTICE
Depending on the pace you’ve followed, this may be your fourth week of mindfulness practice. Hopefully, you will have seen a difference in your mood and ability to handle intense thoughts and emotions.
Mindfulness courses that have shown to be effective in research studies are typically eight week programs, so we invite you to continue to explore your mindfulness practice. This could look like:
- Repeating the same four week cycle to further solidify your skills, and bring skills learned in later lessons to earlier guided practices.
- Choose your favourite practices to start doing regularly on a daily basis or a few times a week.
- Choose one guided practice per day, as well as one everyday practice, such as mindful walking.
Remember that mindfulness can be brought to any moment or activity – you could choose your own adventure, bringing mindfulness to a new daily activity each week.
NEXT STEPS
Mindfulness is a powerful and versatile tool for managing our thoughts and emotions. However, having other tools at our disposal helps us be even more prepared to handle difficult circumstances.
Check out these HeadsUpGuys Courses, which can help you develop a flexible and versatile range of strategies for effectively managing your mental health across a wide range of situations:
